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.

Michael Gove- Lord of the gnats

So, according to Michael Gove, William Golding's Lord of the Flies is “considered appropriate for primary children in the best schools,” and schools that get students to study it for GCSE are "pitching expectations so low it is no surprise that reform-minded teachers want change." Leaving aside for now the fact that this is just the latest salvo in his campaign to denigrate the vast majority of schools for which he is responsible let us examine the specifics of the charge.

The first point to make is that if they really are getting students to study Lord of the Flies at Primary level then I really worry about Mr Gove's "best schools." To reduce such a powerful and contemporarily relevant classic of modern literature to a primary school reader would demonstrate a singular lack of understanding, either of the text itself or of the nature of children, because there is simply no way that primary age children could relate to the deeper central messages of the book.

Certainly they could understand it. Like a lot of great literature Lord of the Flies is written with a beautiful simplicity of syntax and vocabulary. No doubt primary age students (particularly those in boarding schools) could relate to its theme of bullying, and perhaps too to the notion of an apparent idyll slowly descending into a dark and terrifying hell. Maybe they would recognise (or be told about) the religious symbolism, with Simon an allegory for the crucified Christ. Maybe too they would see the parody of Coral Island (though I hope to God they wouldn't have had the original forced on them), but I would imagine the teachers in some of the "best" schools would skim over the bitter attack on public-school arrogance that lies at the heart of that parody.

However even if they did notice all these aspects, without in doing so having the book die for them as a story, I think it virtually impossible that primary-age students would understand or could relate to Lord of the Flies' fundamental message. Because it is a text with genuine relevance to our times, and one that such as Mr Gove really should read more closely.

In essence, Lord of the Flies is about the dreadful, corrosive effect of fear on the fundamentals of decent society. Because in the novel, as in Western society since September 2001, it is the fear of the Beast rather than the Beast itself that leads to the breakdown of the central co-operative values of society. As in today's real world that fear leads to increased militarisation (with Jack's hunters transforming themselves into an army), to the destruction of long-treasured values of intellectual debate and free speech (symbolised in the novel by Piggy's glasses and the conch) and to the demonisation of outsiders (Simon is killed because he is not recognised as "one of them" and Ralph and Piggy once ostracised are hunted down like animals). It even leads to today's gruesome fascination with beheading as the ultimate symbol of brutality ("They've sharpened a stick at both ends.")

The horror that sparked all this off- the decaying corpse of the airman- is real, but it was never really the threat to the boys' safety and happiness on the island that they let it become. It was their fear of it, and of the unknown, that led to the terrible spiral of violence, fear and more violence. It was their fear that brutalised them and drowned out all voices of reason and moderation. It was their fear that turned routine prejudice (against Piggy, the grammar-school oik) into murderous hatred and threatened in the end to destroy them all.

The end of the novel, when the British Navy arrives on the island, is generally read as implying that the naval officer simply does not understand the hell into which these boys have descended, demonstrating a lack of imagination comparable with that of the esteemed Mr Gove ("'Fun and games,' said the officer"). That is indeed the dominant reading of the end, but I think there is another way of looking at it too. What marks the naval officer at the end out from the boys is not that he is adult, or that he is in the Navy. What matters is that he has not been caught up in the dark madness the boys' fear created on the island. In his eyes the heinous monsters become again the troupe of frightened, grubby little children that in reality they were all along. 

For me, what the book is saying (and how the hell primary-age students are supposed to relate to this God alone knows) is that we need more people like the naval officer in the world. We need people who will step back from the fear and the bombast and the warmongering rhetoric and see things as they really are. 

Fanatic terrorists prepared to carry out appalling acts of brutality are (as they have always been) few in number and lacking any sort of widespread support. Being made aware of their activities is as shocking as encountering the decaying, fly-covered corpse of an airman suspended in a tree. Fanatic terrorists (of whatever motivation- these have changed often over the years) are our contemporary world's Beasts. But it is not until we allow our own fundamental values to be corroded by fear of the Beast that it can really harm us. When we destroy the conch and smash Piggy's glasses, when we paint our faces and chant "Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!", when we (not they) "sharpen a stick at both ends," then we have lost. And when, as at the end of the novel, we weep "for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy," we need more people who, like the officer, "was moved and a little embarrassed  He turned away to give them time to pull themselves together; and waited, allowing his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance."

What we don't need is more people like Michael Gove, who think Lord of the Flies is nothing more than an adventure story for primary kids.

Is the world going to hell in a handcart?

I suppose I've slightly missed the boat on this one, the latest outbreak of such commentary being at the time of the Mayan-apocalypse-that-wasn't, but that wasn't the first nor will it be the last. No doubt, as I write someone somewhere is fulminating about the imminent demise of all that is good and true and the inexorable decline in standards of morality/ethics/good citizenship. And people have been saying much the same for centuries, if not millennia.  I have no doubt that when the first homo habilis invented the first flint axe someone in his or her tribe pretty soon started going on about how modern technology was ruining the world.

Typically (though not universally) it is the middle-aged, middle-class, relatively affluent and politically conservative who are most likely to claim that the world is going to hell in a handcart and it is not hard to see why. Mostly, such people will have done pretty damn well out of the status quo and will be nervous about any change whatever. Also, they will probably be beginning to sense an imminent diminution in their personal authority and influence in the world and that is not a prospect they would relish. From being (in their own heads at least) the (potential if not actual) Masters of the Universe they envisage a time when they are the old guard, marginalised, impoverished and emasculated and swept aside by the impatient next generation. Or shuffled off into secure accommodation, anyway.

However as I have said it is not universally such as these who bemoan the direction of travel of humankind, in whatever era they find themselves. There are also the more high-minded doomsayers, who see nothing but menace in the relentless pursuit of progress by their fellow humans. These are the people who have railed in their day against climate change, deforestation, nuclear weapons, the rise of fascism, the growth of empire, slavery, barbarism... There are no doubt more as you go further back in time.

Not that there is anything whatever wrong in railing against such iniquities- far from it. These things are and were iniquitous, and have arisen from the darker side of human nature. Yet what is striking when you look back is to what extent each new manifestation of man's (potential for) inhumanity is, at the time, seen as uniquely and devastatingly terrible. It is as if we forget how far we have progressed as a species: yes, the prospect of climate change is appalling, but it is only 50 years since the world was on the very brink of utter and complete annihilation in a US/USSR nuclear war. Yes, the way America treats detainees in Guantanamo Bay or carries out extra-judicial murders with drone strikes is appalling, but it hardly compares with Hitler's treatment of the Jews or the gypsies.

These are general points, that could apply to any time or place. However since I am now of the generation typically most prone to evoking the (rather odd) handcart image it is worth reflecting a little on the specifics of here and now. These are odd times in the UK. After the decades of relative affluence built on cheap Chinese labour and cheaper (but in the end utterly unaffordable) credit from the banks the nation seems to have descended into a despond of self-hatred and masochistic self-denial. We are a nation stumbling in the cold light of dawn into the bottle-strewn carnage of the post-party kitchen, wondering how the hell we're going to get the red wine stain out of the carpet in the front room. And our government is like some judgmental doctor, shaking his head over our liver-function tests and telling us we've been overdoing it for years and we only have ourselves to blame.

Of course the government has another agenda. It is not our health they care about, but their own narrow ideology. To take the area I know most about- education- Michael Gove has gone full steam ahead undermining public confidence in every element of the system he is presiding over. "It's all total and complete shit," he has effectively said, and the British people, broken and humiliated and self-pitying, have just nodded weakly in agreement. Who cares if international comparators do not actually make the case Gove presents? Who cares if the England and Wales exams system is actually far better regarded overseas than it is here? Gove wants it all swept away so he can rebuild an education system that was outmoded, divisive and unfit for purpose in the 1950s. And we are in danger of letting him.

All of which sounds as if I am saying that, in education at least, the world is going to hell in a handcart. And yes, maybe I do think that English education is in danger of heading at least some of the way along that road by that conveyance.

But the point I want to make is a more general one. Yes there are those who, for their own political or selfish reasons want to return the world to some dimly remembered better times, but there are those too whose opinions I otherwise admire, who equally bemoan some or all of the way human society has been or is progressing. People are becoming more selfish, they feel, or more prone to violence and wickedness. They are caught up in virtual digital worlds and have lost the ability to engage with others. They have become obsessed with money and technology and forgotten what is good and true in the world. And they are prepared to gamble the future of the environment for the price of a bit of feel-good economic growth.

The implication being, of course, that we weren't like that. Back in the day people looked out for each other more, the argument goes. We were more politically motivated. We cared about our neighbours. We didn't go on gap yahs, we travelled the world independently, worked for VSO, really cared about the places we went to. And we dreamed of better things (or if we didn't then our parents did). We thought that one day peace and love would prevail. We imagined that one day the world could be as one.

Only it's all bollocks of course. Although we didn't realise it at the time we were the over-privileged children of the post-War boom. We didn't need to worry about work, because of course there were jobs if you wanted them. We took free university education as an absolute given, and with it the freedom to disappear far, far up our own back passages, fuelled by a range of recreational drugs and funded by the ruthless exploitation of third world labour. In retrospect it is astonishing how much of youth culture back then was geared at introspection and self-centeredness. And yes, many of us may have gone on CND marches or union demos but how much of that was ever really that much more than public theatre? We believed in "them and us" and the corollary of that is that whatever "we" do it will not (cannot) influence what "they" think. And yes, some of us may have gifted our tremendous wisdom to benighted African villagers, but how much of that was really just as patronising and backward-looking as 19th Century missionary work?

And actually, the notion that things generally are worse now than they were then simply does not stand up to scrutiny. So we looked after our neighbours, did we? Well, it depends how you define "neighbours." Can you imagine a sign in a B&B window today saying "No dogs, no blacks, no gypsies"? And today's youth are feral, are they? Perhaps anyone over 50 with a genuine ability to recall their own childhood might like to compare their behaviour with that of today's youth. Personally, I remember: submitting a lonely old man to mental torture by climbing over his fence to steal from his garden; knowing that a boy in my year was carrying a sharpened screwdriver and was likely to use it on other boys; hearing of boys playing "chicken" with a train; and seeing an armed gang of youths from another school at our school gates one lunchtime (they had iron bars, motorcycle chains and broken bottles, as well, no doubt, as concealed knives).

None of these incidents made the news, not because they were concealed or hushed up, but because they were not seen as newsworthy  Boys will be boys, it was generally accepted. Meaning that boys will fight, bully, extort money, carry weapons, intimidate and humiliate those weaker than themselves, utter racist, sexist and homophobic abuse. And that was all fine, it seems, and we have allowed such notions the warm, cosy glow of nostalgia.

But it is not like that any more. Incidents of appalling behaviour still take place of course, but they emphatically make the news these days. And it is not just because of the prurience of the news media- partly at least it is because society now sees a far greater range of behaviour as socially unacceptable. Boys (and girls) will not always be all of the things society used to assume they could not prevent them from becoming. Surely that is a giant step forwards, not hellwards.

And in fact, far from becoming more self-centered I genuinely believe that the direction of travel is the opposite one. Certainly there is still hedonism and the pursuit of instant gratification but even that seems to me to be becoming more inter-personal rather than intra-personal. The drugs of choice of earlier generations were acid and marijuana- both tending to enhance the disappearing-up-your-own-arse tendency. Today's youths are more likely to seek to obliterate themselves in the company of others, and it as much being seen to be off your face that is the draw as the insights into the nature of one's own back passage.

Perhaps the clearest measure of how the world has changed though is around the use of technology. There was a time, certainly, when technology threatened something akin to the downfall of human society. As young people became enclosed in their little worlds of Walkmans and Gameboys and sat hunched through the early hours in front of the PCs in their bedrooms it seemed that maybe human interaction would be on the decline, with fatal consequences (ready the handcart. Hell, here we come).

Except of course it hasn't ended up like that at all. Those who embrace technology today are becoming socialised in ways that are developing with dizzying rapidity. Governments have had their polished carapaces of secrecy and privilege stripped away and vast numbers can no longer be tortured and killed in far away countries without anyone so much as noticing. And certainly, a lot of what is on the internet is exploitative of women, or motivated by hatred, or objectifying of sexual relations, or frivolous and pointless. But then again, a lot more of it isn't any of these things. And slowly we are beginning to discriminate and to learn. And the way we can now share opinions and knowledge and creativity and watchfulness is astonishingly powerful.

Yes, the world faces huge problems but when has it not? Yes, Hell is there, and the handcart is ready and waiting, as it has been since the dawn of time. But maybe we really are beginning to face up to some of our responsibility as the dominant species on this planet. We are overusing resources and gambling with ecologies and allowing injustice and oppression to continue, but when have we not? The difference is that maybe for the first time we are beginning to force such concepts onto our collective consciousness.

And just maybe we are even going to find ways to address them.

Compassion in nursing

There have been a number of distressing news stories recently that have called into question public trust in nursing as a caring and compassionate profession. Partly of course this is just one of the Tories' more despicable tactics in their quest to undermine this nation's faith in its National Health Service, and a tactic that some of the tabloids seem more than happy to assist with. It appears that the sight of a large state-run enterprise doing something as important as protecting the nation's health with such success and such overwhelming public support brings out the inherently destructive nastiness of the neo-cons this side of the Atlantic too.

No doubt there is some basis in truth for such stories of medical staff, including nurses, treating vulnerable patients with neither compassion nor dignity. In any organisation as vast as the NHS there are bound to be some whose motivations are twisted, or whom bitterness, despair and the intolerable stresses of their work have transformed into monsters. And given the nature of their work, if even tiny numbers of nurses are or become monsters, then the power they have over the safety, comfort and indeed life of patients at their most vulnerable is frightening.

However for these stories to gain the currency they have there has, I believe, to be more to it than either Tory tabloid vindictiveness or the despicable behaviour of a tiny minority. Is there then something about what nursing has become that allows the general public to believe that nurses are less compassionate, less caring, than they used to be?

I have recently spent a considerable amount of time in hospitals with my wife, culminating in a few days in the Hyper-Acute Stroke Unit where she died. Sitting at her bedside I had a great deal of time to study the nurses and doctors who cared for her and, while I was immensely impressed with the way they did so, I began also to think about how their role has changed over recent years.

The most obvious change is in the very high degree of professionalism, medical expertise and efficiency required of nurses in today's hospitals. Even something as simple as changing a dressing has become a meticulously thought through and elaborately choreographed procedure that ensures that at no point will anything that is to come into contact with the patient's skin touch anything that is not sterile. Maintaining fluid balance is no longer simply a question of periodically checking up whether the patient has passed urine. In patients on close monitoring every millilitre of fluid in or out is recorded and if a patient has gone more than a specified time without passing urine then a nurse will use a small single-purpose ultrasound scanner to measure the contents of their bladder, considering catheterisation if that quantity exceeds a certain preset threshold. Every aspect of the patient's condition is recorded and cross-checked, with doctors paying as much attention to the nursing notes as to their own, and even something as simple as putting up a bag of saline bound around with procedures and safety checks to ensure that no patient receives the wrong interventions.

And of course everything, but everything, is entered into a variety of databases, both physical and electronic. Nurses have to spend a considerable proportion of their time entering, cross-checking and retrieving data. Of course there are those in the swivel-eyed nether reaches of the Tory party who would point to that very fact as prima facie evidence of the schlerotically bureaucratic nature of the NHS, but the nurses can hardly be blamed for their need to record everything. And neither in fact should the NHS itself. Not only do meticulous records help prevent the sort of appalling accidents in treatment that make for one branch of the anti-NHS tabloid stories (War Hero Has Wrong Leg Amputated!), they are also the only sure protection against the rapacious hordes of injury lawyers who haunt the daytime TV schedules. Even in the midst of the appalling horror of witnessing my wife's sudden death I could not help but notice the nervousness of the medical staff on the ward. Was I going to be the one who blighted all of their futures with a long-drawn-out and bitter battle to establish fault? And the meticulous recording of every detail of treatment is the only protection against malicious accusations of malpractice.

Yet even these additional pressures on nurses today are not, I believe, the central issue in their changing relationship with the patients they treat, and those patients' relatives and friends. Busy as they were, the nurses caring for my wife did so with good humour, compassion and genuine humanity. Whilst the procedures they carried out were such as at one time might have been more associated with doctors they carried them out in such a way that my wife was accorded respect, dignity and even affection. And yet, as I watched them, I began to see some of the ways in which the transformation of nursing from a vocation to a highly-skilled profession could be seen by some as inimical with the image of the compassionate, caring nurse.

Perhaps the clearest example of what I am talking about is the issue of post-thrombolytic monitoring. Thrombolysis (from the Greek- 'thrombos' = a clot and 'lysis' = destruction) is what is popularly known as clot-busting. If caught early enough, many of the effects of an ischemic stroke can be lessened by administering thrombolytic drugs, which dissolve every blood clot in the body, including the one which is depriving part of the brain of its blood supply. This is of course a procedure with considerable risk, not least of which is what is called a hemorrhagic transformation, where the blood clot on the brain is replaced by a brain bleed. To guard against this, nurses have to monitor any thrombolysed patient very closely for 24 hours. And this monitoring is not simply a question of blood pressure, temperature and the rest. The nurses actually have to carry out neurological tests every hour ("Raise your right arm for me. And your left. Now make a fist. Push my arm away. Now pull it towards you..." and on, and on, as the exhausted patient stares beseechingly into their eyes, willing them to stop, to let them sleep.)

This monitoring is clearly absolutely vital and a major factor in the successful treatment of strokes that not long ago would have resulted in death or very severe disability. Yet, on the face of it at least, such monitoring is the very opposite of compassionate. Everyone, especially nurses on a Hyper-Acute Stroke Unit, knows that stroke causes exhaustion. Twice I have been with my wife in the aftermath of a stroke and I can tell you that exhaustion is too pallid and commonplace a term to describe what she went through. In the old days, I am sure, compassionate nurses would see a stroke patient so washed-out, so drained with the simple task of taking a sip of water that they would let them sleep for a while. "I'll come back later," they would have said. "She looks exhausted." And now what do they do? At 3 a.m they come to that same exhausted patient's bed, call to them incessantly until the patient drags themselves from the depths of their desperately sought-for sleep and make them do what my wife called those bloody stupid neurological tests. And then again at 4 a.m. And 5...

Surely that can't be compassionate, a part us must inevitably feel as we witness such nursing. Don't you see how tired she is? Just leave her alone, why can't you?

I didn't say it of course, because they were doing exactly the right thing. What sort of compassion would allow a nurse to leave a patient sleeping while unnoticed in the depths of their brain a hemorrhagic transformation was spreading its dark tide of destruction? The old-fashioned "compassionate" style of nursing that engaged with the patient rather than their medical condition might feel more human and soft-focussed and personal, but I know which I would prefer if it was me who was acutely ill and in imminent danger.

And so in fact I have emerged from this terrible experience with a new-found admiration for the functioning of the NHS at the sharp end, and for the professionalism, expertise and (yes) compassion of so many nurses. As the ones in closest contact with the patients dependent on their care it cannot be easy for nurses to carry out procedures that they know to be painful, uncomfortable, or even distressing to a patient at their most frightened and vulnerable. And yet they do so, efficiently  professionally and, in the most part, with real humanity because at the root the nursing profession is, more than ever, solidly founded on a basis of true compassion.