A Reading Of The Unaccompanied, A Poem By Simon Armitage

Wandering slowly back after dark one night

above a river, toward a suspension bridge,

a sound concerns him that might be a tune

or might not: noise drifting in, trailing off.

 

Then concerns him again, now clearly a song

pulsing out from the opposite bank, being sung

by chorusing men, all pewter-haired or bald,

in the function suite of a shabby hotel.

Above their heads a conductor’s hand

draws and casts the notes with a white wand.

 

Songs about mills and mines and a great war,

about mermaid brides and solid gold hills,

songs from broken hymnbooks and cheesy films.

 

Then his father’s voice rising out of that choir,

and his father’s father’s voice, and voices

of fathers before, concerning him only,

arcing through charged air and spanning the gorge.

He steps over the cliff edge and walks across.

—————

I wrote this to someone: 

 I think though that from this back and forth I may be able to put this poem together without getting into all its subtleties, meanings and means.  “Wandering,” as I’d noted, suggests his aimlessness. But he’s wandering “slowly back,” which qualifies his lack of direction. 

Back suggests he’s got something in mind. He’s slowly moving back to the place he came from. He hears sounds that increasingly concern him, in both senses of concern. They’re inside his head. 

They start off vaguely and then grow in focused clarity. In what he hears with his inward ear are seemingly images and fragments of memories from his life; they are specific and concrete. 

The clarity of what he inwardly hears intensifies when he hears his father’s and forefathers’ voices, as they rise for him above all else and fill the air and span the divide between whom and what he was and  whom and what he now is, that very distance suggested by the “gorge.” 

Are they singing to him, speaking to him; has the music ended? We don’t know. But we can infer they’re beckoning to him as they concern only him, the culmination and resolution of all the concern running through the poem. 

Now, what was somewhat aimless wandering has become decisive movement, captured by the direct active verbs of the last line, “steps over” and “walks across.” 

He walks over the suspension bridge towards what before he had walked over it away from—towards home, it seems most likely, the voices of his progenitors bringing him to some sense of himself and taking him home. He transports himself.