What my favourite poets have to say about death

I am not a great reader of poetry, but there are poets I have studied and taught, and written about in this blog (here for instance) who seem able to use language to reveal profound truths about the world. So it is perhaps natural, as I have struggled to come to terms with the death of my wife, that I should consider what my three favourites, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen, have to say about death. They are my favourites on the basis of their unmatched skill in tapping the richness of the connotations of words, whether through imagery or through alliteration, assonance, rhyme and rhythm, but as I frequently used to explain to students it is impossible to separate style and content and in fact all three explore profound concepts about the nature of existence.

So what of death? Of the three, Owen was no doubt most closely acquainted with the realities of death, but it is remarkable in a sense how little he has to say on the topic. His subject, as he explains in the Preface to his poems is "War, and the Pity of War. The poetry is in the Pity." He is much concerned with the dead, writing with elegiac sadness in Anthem for Doomed Youth for instance of the countless thousands who "die as cattle" and with the process of dying, focusing with brutal clarity in poems such as the Sentry or Dulce et Decorum Est on its painful realities.

However it seems that death itself is too vast a concept for someone as thoughtful and perceptive as Owen to attempt to define or even evoke. When he does tackle the subject he seems always to tail off into questions and inconclusiveness and even unfinished sentences. In Asleep, after wondering what has happened to the soldier in death he concludes, "Who knows? Who hopes? Who troubles? Let it pass!" and the questioning at the end of Futility is profounder still: "O what made fatuous sunbeams toil/To break earth's sleep at all?"

In Strange Meeting Owen does tackle the subject head-on with a dreamlike evocation of a conversation in some strange pre-Christian vision of hell with a soldier whom he has killed. Yet here too he comes to no conclusions and ends on an unfinished line: "let us sleep now...". Perhaps Owen was more concerned with the horrors of life than the unknowable mysteries of death. In Spring Offensive, having described the many ways in which soldiers die, his thoughts in the end are with "The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,/ ... And crawling slowly back, have by degrees /Regained cool peaceful air in wonder"- namely the survivors- and again he ends with a question: "Why speak they not of comrades that went under?" Here, in asking the question he is perhaps answering it too: what in the end is there to say about death?

Owen ends Exposure with a description of the burial party retrieving the frozen corpses from no-mans-land. Here the half-rhyme of "eyes" and "ice", and the forcing together of the incongruous connotations of those two words combine with the rhythmic uncertainty of the short last line to leave a powerful statement of the inability of Owen to answer his own question:
The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
But nothing happens."

As a devout Catholic, Gerard Manley Hopkins would be expected to have more answers on the subject of death than Wilfred Owen who, despite having initially wanted to become a priest does appear to have lost his faith over the course of the War. In most of Hopkins' poems though, death is not a subject he chooses to tackle. In his great poems like God's Grandeur and Hurrahing in Harvest he is so caught up in the magnificence and beauty of the world around him that death is far from his thoughts. However he had darker times too. In his Sonnets of Desolation Hopkins goes perhaps further than anything else I have read in exploring the darkness of despair and fear. His outcry in No worst, there is none is terrifying to anyone who recognises the experience he describes:
"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there."

On the face of it, though, his subject in these sonnets is the fear not of death but of loss of faith. Indeed he ends "No worst, there is none" with what he calls "a comfort serves in a whirlwind," namely that: "All life death does end and each day dies with sleep." Yet I cannot believe that those lines should be taken entirely at face value. Though he claims to see death as a "comfort" I challenge anyone to feel comforted by that last line. And to pursue his cliff image further, when clinging to the face of a precipitous cliff it is death one fears, not loss of faith. It is perhaps impertinent to psychoanalyse Hopkins but it seems to me that, despite what he might overtly say, his crisis of faith in the Sonnets of Desolation was brought about by his inability to find any comfort in the idea of death.

So what of Keats? Like Owen, Keats was acquainted with death He had nursed his mother and his brother Tom through the lingering "white death" of tuberculosis, only to succumb to the disease himself. However like Hopkins, much of his poetry appears inspired by excitement and joy. Some of this, as with Hopkins, is joy in the beauty of nature but Keats also experiences something like exhilaration in the experience of literature itself. He states that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know," and nowhere is this clearer than in On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, where he describes the experience of coming across a new translation:
"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
and for much of his writing Keats loses himself in magnificent explorations of ancient myths and the creation of worlds of the imagination.

Of course the knowledge of death is always there, and there is a wistfulness in much of Keats' greatest poetry, whether in the mention of the "Gathering swallows [that] twitter in the skies" at the end of Ode to Autumn or the beautifully evocative description of Madeleine's candle in Eve of St Agnes: "Out went the taper as she hurried in;/Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died." Sometimes the idea of death is closer to the surface. Ode on a Grecian Urn, from which the "Beauty is truth" quotation comes, is ostensibly a poem celebrating the eternal constancy of great art, but there is an acute awareness of human mortality too, in lines such as "a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,/A burning forehead, and a parching tongue," and though the poem concludes (of the urn) that "When old age shall this generation waste,/Thou shalt remain," Keats seems at least as concerned with the death of those of us who see the object now as with the object's own eternal life. As a work of art it is described as "Cold Pastoral," and Keats says of the town pictured on on its reverse "thy streets for evermore/Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell/Why thou art desolate, can e'er return."

There are some poems though in which Keats explicitly addresses the idea of death and his feelings about it. The best known of these is perhaps Ode to a Nightingale, which is full of references to death. He remembers Tom's deaths in the line "Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies" and in describing the flowers amongst which he lies consciously evokes their funereal significance: "I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,/Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,/But, in embalmed darkness...". He even admits that he has "been half in love with easeful Death." Yet there is a real ambivalence here too. The eponymous nightingale "was not born for death," and in the end the echo of the funeral service returns but its "plaintive anthem fades/ Past the near meadows, over the still stream,/Up the hill-side," losing itself in the returning awareness of the reality and beauty of the poet's actual surroundings. Keats ends the poem with a sense of questioning that echoes Owen: "Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?"

Another Keats poem, Ode on Melancholy is not so much about death itself as about his feelings on the subject, and for me it is one of his most remarkable. The first stanza, even more than the beginning of Nightingale, contemplates suicide and has many of the same references to the dark glamours of the idea. However the stanza begins "No, no," and Keats emphatically rejects suicide as an option, but for a fascinating reason. The problem, he feels, is that "shade to shade will come too drowsily,/And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul," and it is precisely that "wakeful anguish" that the poem goes on to celebrate. He describes melancholy in as graphic and moving a way as I have ever come across, rooting it in a series of profoundly physical experiences:
"But when the melancholy fit shall fall
  Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
  And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,  
  Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
    Or on the wealth of globed peonies;"
and concludes that Melancholy (whom he personifies as a mythical goddess) is in the end inseparably close to Beauty, Joy, Pleasure and even Delight. He counsels sufferers to embrace Melancholy in the fullness of its physical force with a truly sensual image, saying of Melancholy's shrine that it is "seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue/ Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine."

So Owen, it seems, holds off any conclusive statement about death because the topic is too overwhelmingly rooted in the horror of the life he saw around him. Hopkins was perhaps too frightened, not so much of death itself as of the fact that he feared death, despite his faith. Keats saw death in everything around him and sought to come to an accommodation with it, relishing even the overwhelming physicality of melancholy.

So what of Shakespeare (well, you didn't think I'd write a blog entry like this without mentioning Shakespeare, did you)? Shakespeare certainly does not shy away from the topic, with large numbers of onstage deaths in many of his plays (10 in King Lear alone, plus the blinding of Gloucester). There are also a number of great speeches about death, so surely it ought to be possible to sum up Shakespeare's feelings on the subject.

Well, no. For a start, many of those great speeches turn out not actually to be about death. Macbeth's great "Tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy is more about the futility of life than about death. It is prompted by Macbeth hearing about the death of his wife, but all he has to say on that subject is, "She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word." Antony's famous "Friends, Romans, countrymen," speech in Julius Caesar, for all its powerful evocation of Caesar's death, is in essence a piece of demagogic rabble-rousing and nothing to do with death at all.

So what of Mark Anthony's dying speech then? On the face of it this is a much more straightforward peroration on the nature of death:
"The miserable change now at my end
Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts
In feeding them with those my former fortunes
Wherein I lived, the greatest prince o' the world,
The noblest; and do now not basely die,
Not cowardly put off my helmet to
My countryman,—a Roman by a Roman
Valiantly vanquish'd. Now my spirit is going;
I can no more."
but on closer examination the speech is much more about Anthony's anxieties about how he will be remembered. This is the character, after all, who a few scenes previously had confessed that "I am Anthony, yet cannot hold this visible shape," and at the moment of his death he makes a last desperate attempt to reassert his sense of who he is.

King Lear, despite the nihilistic greatness of the line "Never, never, never, never, never." faces death by attempting to deny its existence. He dies holding Cordelia in his arms, and though his daughter is clearly dead he asks for her collar to be loosened. His last words are " Do you see this? Look on her! look! her lips! /Look there, look there!" and as Macbeth faces his own certain death it is the question of bravery in battle that seems to concern him more than anything else: "Lay on, Macduff,/And damned be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'"

As in so many areas, it is Hamlet that has the most interesting things to say about death. In fact it would seem reasonable to suggest that his famous "To be or not to be" speech can be taken as Shakespeare's definitive pronouncement about death. The speech is full of grandly resonant statements about "The undiscover'd country from whose bourn/No traveller returns," contrasting "The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to" with the "sleep" and the "quietus" that is death, though wondering also "what dreams may come" in that "sleep of death."

The speech is a great one, needless to say, and summarises a lot of how we cogitate over the nature of death. However it should not be forgotten that this speech comes near the start of the play, and part of the brilliance of Shakespeare is that his characters always grow and develop, so nothing from the start of any play should be seen as a character's (let alone the author's) definitive statement on the subject. At the start of the play, Hamlet is quite distanced from death. There is no suggestion that he has ever witnessed it himself, and though he is moved by his father's death it seems that it is the rather outré and Gothic descriptions from his father's ghost that get through to him. He is a student, and clearly given to grand philosophical statements. Almost his first speech is to emphasise just how much more authentic and important his grief is than anyone else's:
"Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.'
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe."
To misquote Hamlet himself, "the gentleman doth protest too much methinks ."

Over the course of the play though, Hamlet is forced to confront death, whether of those he has killed, of his fiancee Ophelia, of his mother or of himself. So one can presume that by the end of the play so thoughtful and eloquent a character must surely have something significant to say about death: something more profound and meaningful even than his "To be, or not to be" speech. There is a strong sense also that Shakespeare used Hamlet to voice ideas and thoughts that were in essence his own, so by the end of the play maybe we can hear what Shakespeare actually had to say about death.

So what are Hamlet's last words? How does he (and through him Shakespeare) sum up humankind's attitude to death? Well, we have to wait until (in an echo of Antony) he has ensured that Horatio will protect his reputation once he has gone. We also have to wait until he has, rather bizarrely, pronounced Fortinbras as his successor, but finally comes Hamlet's great statement:

"The rest is silence."

This scepter'd isle

It has been a funny few weeks for Britain's international reputation. We have had Vladimir Putin calling Britain "a little island no-one listens to," Jose Manuel Barroso wondering aloud if "UKIP ... will be the first force in British elections" and the UN special rapporteur Raquel Rolnik saying (of the effect of the withdrawal of the spare room subsidy) "I was very shocked to hear how people really feel abused in their human rights by this decision." As if that wasn't enough, following Grant Schapps' extraordinarily petulant response to Ms Rolnik's report she listed all of the other countries (Croatia, Algeria, Maldives, Argentina, United States, Israel, Rwanda, Palestine, Kazakhstan and Indonesia) with which she is working on housing before stating that in none of these did she experience the same level of hostility and aggressiveness from the government.

So why the chorus of international voices attacking and belittling the UK, and does it matter? Well, to answer the first question, the government is clearly of the view that these attacks are demonstrable evidence that Johnny Foreigner simply doesn't know what he (or still worse, in the case of "that Brazilian woman", she) is talking about.

Which attitude of course reveals the other reason. You see the inner circle of the Tory government has developed its own new and unique approach to government that appears thus far to work domestically but does not go down too well overseas. By "inner circle" I mean the small group of Eton/Bullingdon Cameroninas (with little Mikey Gove trying to outdo everyone else in a desperate attempt to be included) who have taken high-handed arrogant bullying to previously unseen heights.

Their approach to government is simple:

• First, come up with an idea. This should on no account derive from academic research of any kind but should have been dreamt up in a claret-fuelled evening at the Club (10 Downing Street). 
• Second, announce its implementation. There is no need to worry at this stage about any of the tedious details of how (or indeed why) it is to be implemented. It is your idea, and so therefore by definition good.
• Third, in the event of any criticism of the idea (especially from academics, human rights campaigners, foreigners or Liberal Democrats) resort to vicious ad hominem attacks to question said weirdos' right to criticise ANYTHING.
• Fourth, have a quick word with the tabloids to ensure that they continue such attacks ad nauseam for several days.
• Fifth, make fun of Ed Milliband.

The fifth stage is not strictly essential, but is enjoyable.

It's about attack not just being the best form of defence, but the best form of government too. The favoured tools in this approach are of course the despicable (but conveniently deniable) Twitter accounts like @ToryEducation and @ToryTreasury, but the approach is pretty widespread across all platforms. Try Googling "Gove attacks" and you will see what I mean. I gave up looking after the first five pages of results. The folder that the Prime Minister takes to the dispatch box for PMQs used traditionally to contain pages of facts and statistics to be used to defend the government's record: nowadays it seems to consist solely of oneliners about Ed Milliband.

Now, as I said, this approach seems unaccountably to be working so far domestically. Like the school bullies the Cameronians are, no-one seems keen to stand up to them. But as with school bullies in the real world, once they leave the school gates they begin to look frankly pathetic. Dismissing a UN special rapporteur as "that Brazilian woman" (or "loony Brazilian leftie", as one Tory MP put it), lecturing the international community about their failure to act on Syria or telling any academic who criticises their policies that they are "misguided" (or worse) is not likely to impress the international community. It's not that I think I will ever agree with Vladimir Putin on anything of substance, but he probably put into words what a lot of people in the international community are beginning to think: Britain is becoming a small island that no-one listens to.

And so to the second part of the question: does it matter?

Not a jot, is what I think. It's high time that Britain suffered some international humiliation and learned an appropriate level of international humility. This country has long boasted of "punching above its weight" diplomatically speaking and of "having a place at the top table." The trouble is that punching above your weight is a sure means of getting badly hurt, and the top table is never the most relaxing or pleasant place to sit at a formal dinner. It was punching above our weight militarily and clinging to our place at the top table that got us into Iraq and Afghanistan. It was attempting the same in the financial world that made us the epicentre of the financial crises of the last decade. So if the childishly arrogant, schoolyard bully behaviour of the Cameronians loses us that place and forces us into an appropriately lower weight division, then three cheers from me.

Shakespeare was a great writer and coined phrases that resonate down the centuries, but he cannot be held responsible for misreadings of his work. The fabled quotation from Richard II from which this post takes its title lingers deep down in many people's consciousness and has I think been one of the sources for the abiding belief that that place at the top table is ours by right:

"This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself       

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,     

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England."

But as so often with Shakespeare, people take the speech out of context, and even forget that this is one of Shakespeare's characters speaking, rather than Shakespeare himself. The flavour of the speech in context is both nostalgic and bitter. John of Gaunt is close to death, and is bemoaning the disappearance of a Britain that was great at some time in the past. He goes on to say that the country "Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,/Like to a tenement or pelting farm."

So even back then, half a millennium ago, Shakespeare was commenting on the way we try to hark back to a Great Britain of the past. So maybe finally it is time to give it up. Let's stop pretending. The Cameronians are doing their best to make Britain the laughing stock of the world and good luck to them. The wine might not be as good when you leave the top table but the company is better.

The language of war

One of the abiding mysteries of the ongoing Syrian chemical weapons issue is why it is that the US and UK governments apparently got so exercised over the deaths of a few hundred victims of an apparent chemical gas attack in Damascus that Cameron and Obama were prepared to risk (and in Cameron's case suffer) political humiliation by threatening military intervention. What made those few hundred deaths so different from the estimated 100,000 that preceded them?

I cannot pretend to have an answer to that question but it is interesting to look at the issue at the level of language (it is what this blog is supposed to be about after all). The most obvious phenomenon of course is the use of extreme language to describe the attacks: "horror", "moral obscenity", "outrage" etc. but that sort of thing is hardly surprising, and much of this language was used post hoc in an attempt to whip up international outrage to justify intervention.

What I think is more interesting is the language that we have all quite naturally come to use to differentiate chemical or biological weapons from the nice friendly high explosive kind. The former are, for instance, described as "weapons of mass destruction," despite the fact that their main attraction to unscrupulous dictators is that they actually cause very little destruction indeed, simply removing the inconvenient people from a landscape that is otherwise left untouched. Explosive weapons, by contrast, are universally defined as "conventional," and therefore presumably uncontentious and socially acceptable, if perhaps a tad passé for the really hip military commander.

What is more, while the use of chemical weapons is usually described as "indiscriminate", the use of conventional weapons (particularly when carried by the maybe-not-that-conventional-really drones) is generally "clinical," "focussed," or even "surgical." This carries through to the nouns used. The use of chemical weapons is almost invariably described as an "attack", whilst the use of explosives (when carried by drones, cruise missiles or laser-targeted bombs) is usually a "strike."

On the face of it, these two words look similar, but in fact the difference between them is profound. As I have argued in a number of earlier posts about poetry (here or here for instance) it is the connotations of words that give them their power and the connotations of "attack" and "strike" are quite different. "Attack" has a fairly straightforward set of connotations in both its verb and its noun form. An attack can be violent, unprovoked, vicious, frenzied or bitter. However you look at it, the word has connotations of an animalistic loss of control and the suspension of careful judgment and even of morality.

"Strike" is much more nuanced. For a start, its verb form is now seen as archaic and is rarely used to mean anything close to "attack" (when did you last strike someone?) Oddly, it does seem to have survived in the almost unconnected sense of "striking a pose." In its noun form it has a slightly wider range of meanings than  "attack", with some straying well away from the sense of violence. One could argue that a labour strike is almost the antithesis of violence as it involves the suspension of physical activity.

It is also interesting to look at what adjectives can pair with the noun form of "strike." A strike can be preemptive and decisive, as well as the previously mentioned attributes, "clinical," "surgical" and "focussed." What is clear is that the attributes of "strike" and "attack" cannot be interchanged easily. An attack cannot be clinical any more than a strike can be frenzied, or even vicious. The word "strike," it seems, carries with it connotations of careful, analytical precision that are a world away from the connotations of the word "attack."

So there you go. Chemical weapons evoke "horror" and "moral outrage" because their use involves an "attack." Explosive weapons on the other hand are "conventional" and therefore by implication morally acceptable, and their use takes the form not of an "attack" but of a much more rational and carefully thought through "strike."

I am sure that was of enormous comfort to the untold thousands killed by explosive weapons, not just in Syria but in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Yemen and wherever else.

The mystery of the Tory party's continuing (relative) lack of unpopularity.

It is a truism (but no less true for that) that the mainstream UK political parties are now so indistinguishable ideologically that all that sets them apart is a certain flavour, mostly derived from historical associations, and the perception of their level of (in)competence. This phenomenon of ideological convergence has been blamed on a lack of political nerve and/or commitment to any sort of vision but it could as easily (and more charitably) be considered as an outcome of the workings of democracy in the modern age. Politicians (one could argue) have evolved from patrician leaders of the common herd to representatives of the broadly-held views of the populace they serve. Which may or may not be a bad thing- given that any Prime Minister is highly unlikely to share precisely my (or your) set of beliefs and principles, is it better that he or she drives through their own firmly held vision, even in the face of public disquiet, or that they shift and turn with every new opinion poll or focus group, catering to the lowest common denominator of public opinion? In other words, which is worse: a Thatcher or a Cameron?

However, interesting as that question is, it is not the central point of this entry. Let us take as a given the truism with which I started this post. Surely then, the current coalition government (and in particular the Tory party) should be at the very rock bottom of public opinion and Labour should be riding high, electorally speaking, faute de mieux, if for no other reason. Because if what sets political parties apart is a perception of their level of competence then surely, SURELY, public perception of the current government should be as low as it is possible to get. Or lower.

Forget for a moment any opinions on the morality, fairness or consistency of their policies and just look at the degree of competence with which they have been and are being delivered. And look away, because it is not an edifying sight. Pick any area of government you want really:

• The economy? Well, there's the omnishambles budget; the recession that was deeper and longer and the recovery slower and weaker than any in history; the constant downward revisions of projected growth; the utter failure to meet targets for reducing the deficit. Shall I go on?
• Education? Don't get me started about the fiascos around curriculum and exams. Over breakfast Gove chucks out a mad policy idea, saying it'll be implemented by Christmas and by teatime he has withdrawn it. No, look instead at the core responsibility of a Secretary of State for Education: ensuring adequate numbers of school places. No need to look at the reason (the wrongheaded, ideological commitment to untried, disruptive and wasteful Free Schools), the fact is that Gove has failed massively in this core area of competence.
• Health? Again, forget any opinions on the ideological rightness or otherwise of the government's 'reforms' and look at competence. Even getting rid of the shambolically incompetent and out-of-touch Lansley hasn't improved that: after the disaster of the 111 implementation Jeremy Hunt now seems happy to announce that A and E departments will be unable to cope this winter.
• Welfare? Ian Duncan Smith. Universal Credit. Need I say more?
• Foreign policy (e.g. Syria)? How could anyone describe as anything but mind-bogglingly incompetent David Cameron's actions over the Syria vote? Having allegedly needled Obama for weeks to put his foot down over Syria, Cameron then decides to 'make a stand' over chemical weapons just as weapons inspectors are about to start their inspection. He recalls parliament with no clear explanation as to why suddenly everything has to be done in such a rush, and duly loses a key vote that makes the UK a laughing-stock, then proceeds to lecture other countries on the need for them to take action.
• Even immigration for God's sake! The area over which the Tories have obsessed for decades and, one would imagine, the area they care most about getting right. Except that, despite implementing a number of policies and tactics in the face of opposition from big business, education institutions and civil rights campaigners, they seem to have had little effect on rates of immigration, and don't even seem to have a clear idea of what those rates are.

So there you go. Surely no government in the history of bad governments could have cocked up so thoroughly and so consistently in such a diverse range of areas. So why do the Tories not appear to be facing electoral humiliation on a scale undreamt of in modern times (the Lib-Dems probably are, but that's another story)? The only possible answer I can come up with is to do with the nature of anger.

Anger is a powerful and paradoxical emotion. It is inextricably linked with its (apparent) near-opposite emotion, fear. The two have almost identical physical manifestations, caused by adrenaline, which is commonly known (in recognition of this fact) as the fight-or-flight hormone. Perhaps even more that fear though, anger can overwhelm the person experiencing it, suspending normal judgment and morality with its 'rush of blood to the head.' In fiction this phenomenon has often been explored, most neatly and simply perhaps in the Incredible Hulk, but we will all have seen it in real life too. Interestingly even the suspension of normal judgment seems to have a physical manifestation: as a head teacher I could always tell when anger had overwhelmed a student because their eyes seemed to glaze over. It was as if their normal perception had been suspended. Even the way they tended to described it showed that- the commonest of course being the sense of having 'lost it.'

So what has this got to do with the fact that the popularity of the Tories does not seem to have nosedived despite their serial incompetence? Well, for their vote to collapse the public would have to place their trust elsewhere and that is where the problem arises. Lib-Dems? Don't be silly. UKIP? Come on, we're talking serious candidates for government here. So why not Labour?

Well, that's the point. You see it seems that the public are still angry with Labour, even after all these years. They are angry with Labour over Iraq, immigration and the economy it seems. Whether they (the general public) believe that the Tories would have been less warmongering (or less keen to impress the Yanks) over Iraq, less willing to bow to pressure from businesses to allow cheap labour to flood into the country, or more willing to rein in the casino banks and the unsustainable credit bubble that led to the economic crash is neither here nor there. It was Labour in power when all these things happened, so it is Labour we are angry with, it seems.

But that was all years ago, wasn't it? Isn't it time to forgive and forget? Yes, Ed Milliband looks like something from Aardman animations and Labour periodically tries to outdo even the Tories in illiberal and populist policies, but surely they can't be any worse that the shower we've got at the moment, can they?

Well you see, to imagine that that is how the general public is thinking at present would be to misunderstand one of the strange quirks of the way anger works. You see, a person's anger is always at its bitterest, most self-righteous and longest lasting when they know, deep down, that they are in the wrong. We have all seen it in people we know, I am sure. The more honest of us will have recognised it in ourselves. And we certainly know that, as Jane Austen put it, "Angry people are not always wise."

So how is this relevant to public attitudes towards the Labour party? Well it seems to me that almost everything the public is angriest with Labour has its roots in the opinions, attitudes and desires of that same public. Iraq? Yes, there were some who spoke out against the war at the time, but there were plenty others who harked back to the 'glory' of that other recent bloody adventure, the Falklands. And then watched the 'shock and awe' of the missile strikes on their brand new flatscreen TVs as if this was a level in Call of Duty they hadn't reached yet. The economy? So, how many of the general public fulminated against the cheap and readily-available credit, the stratospheric rises in the value of their houses and the general perception that the UK was leading the world in financial wizardry? Even immigration- people may have grumbled and bitched about all the 'foreigners' but how many complained about the economic boom fuelled by the rock-bottom wages and high skill levels of those same 'foreigners.' And how many refused to employ highly qualified, careful and polite Polish builders for half the cost (cash in hand) of their surly UK equivalents?

So, we reaped the benefit of Labour policies and enjoyed the good times while they lasted. And it's not just the Tories who wouldn't have done it any differently. The general public wouldn't have WANTED it any different. The Bank of England and Government are supposed to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going, but can you imagine what would have happened if the Labour government had tried?

So really, when the general public turned in anger on Labour that anger was fuelled by the fact of their own culpbability in everything that Labour got wrong. And, as a I said, that is the sort of anger that is the hardest to let go of and that leads to the most irrational behaviour.

Like failing to turn on the Tories and blame them for their own incompetence, for instance.