From Alphabet to Zombie-like

Prince Albert and Queen Victoria instructing their children; a political alphabet frames the image. Coloured lithograph by H.B. (John Doyle), 1843. (Wellcome Images)

By MICHAEL CAINES

Zombie-like? Let me explain. In case you're not familiar with it, we started running a TLS Poem of the Week several years ago, when the late Mick Imlah was poetry editor. Mick's early choices, laconically prefaced with some apposite remarks, included Philip Larkin's "Aubade" and Stevie Smith's "Pretty". More recent examples of verses first published in the paper, now selected by Andrew McCulloch for an online revival, include "Re-reading Jane" by Anne Stevenson, "Holbein" by Geoffrey Hill and John Hartley Williams's take on "Le Bateau ivre". These weekly poems have come to reflect a world of possibilities, it seems to me – of the literary imagination from A to Z. . . .

Rimbaud's poem, 100 lines and 800 words long, must be one of the grandest selections yet; by contrast, one of the shortest must be "Alphabet" by the Scottish poet Norman Cameron. As far as I know, it's the only poem by Cameron to be published – and posthumously at that – in the TLS, a "slim" piece of work that appeared in April 1964, after his literary executor discovered it among his papers. It could stand as a minimalist comment on the whole body of Cameron's work, as well as a pushing of the art of the alphabet poem to its ne plus ultra (or maybe its reductio ad absurdum):

Alphabet

After
Beauty
Cometh
Death.
Ev'ry
Flower
Gay
Hath
Its
Joyful
Kingdom
Lost –
Monarch
None
Obey.
Pleading
Queens
Reluctant
Shall
Tumble
Unto
Viewless
Ways,
eXiles
Yearning
Zombie-like . . .

Cameron's piling-up of A on B on C and so on, one word per line, strikes McCulloch as a modest sign of a "delight in the lapidary and the ludic" (see this brief account for another way of setting the poem out, as if this son of the Presbytery were George Herbert taking a break from his exercises in visual conceit). A characteristic verbal vanitas, it offers in its most concise form the same lesson in futility imparted in slightly wordier Cameron lyrics such as "The Unfinished Race", "The Disused Temple" and "Fight with a Water-Spirit". Is there a "touch of clumsiness" at the end, however, as Peter Scupham suspected – is that a further, deliberate "jest"?

Would-be poets could certainly gauge their own versatility in the same way, especially in the narrow straits of X and Z. A could stand for Always or Anyone. X might be better-off as the clinical X-ray or false-sounding Xylophone, depending on which corner the writer had by then painted themselves into. Perhaps it's a little harder than it looks. Could you make a self-representative statement out of the bare bones of the alphabet in the Cameron style?

It is not a game for everyone, I suppose. Yet the alphabet poem, or "abecedarius", has proved its tenacity over the years, and has been treated as something more than just a trivial pursuit by some. (The prize for most trivial yet recondite use of the alphabet perhaps goes to Trollope, for a joke in the opening chapter of Barchester Towers that even its modern editor describes as "heavy-handed": Trollope gives a cameo to two doctors, Sir Lamda Mewnew and Sir Omicron Pie, their names being allusions to five consecutive letters in the ancient Greek alphabet.)

It is a form of acrostic with biblical roots: God declares himself to be "Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last" in the Book of Revelation; Psalm 119 literalizes this by devoting a verse to each Hebrew letter. Chaucer apparently pulled off the same pious trick in English, with an "ABC" that runs from "Almighty and all-merciable Queen" to "Zachary you calleth the open well". Modern variations include Alice Oswald's "Tree Ghosts" ("in which each letter commemorates a cut-down tree") in Woods Etc; An English Alphabet by the Dutchman Pierre Kemp (of which you can read the only two pages I've read here), Robert Pinsky's equally terse "ABC"; the more expansive sequence of short books by Ron Silliman, (begun in 1979 and completed in 2004 and each devoted to a separate letter); and Pinsky's "Alphabet of My Dead" (from a schoolmate called Harry Antonucci to Zagreus, "ancient god of the past").

At a less elaborate level, Cameron seems to have been playing a wry game with an established pedagogical mode when he diverted himself by making up his own "Alphabet". Numberless children will have heard one abecedarius or another over the years, whether it was by Edward Lear ("A tumbled down, and hurt his Arm, against a bit wood. / B said, 'My Boy, O! do not cry' it cannot do you good!'" and so forth) or the American lyricists Buddy Kaye and Fred Wise ("A, you're adorable / B, you're so beautiful . . ."). See also the "royal alphabet" pictured above.

In 1925, a poet who features in next week's TLS, W. H. Davies, published a Poet's Alphabet ("A is for Artist" to "Z for Zany") that at times reaches for a haunting simplicity of tone not unrelated to Cameron's:

Q for Question

The man who tell she has seen a ghost,
He either lies, was drunk or full of fears;
But if by chance a ghost should come my way,
This is my question, ready for his ears –
"What lies beyond this life I lead to-day?"

One night I dreamt I met a spirit man,
But when I told that ghost what I would know,
He laughed "Ha, ha! I knew what you would say;
And that's the question I am asking now –
'What lies beyond this life to-day!'"

The right word for such acrostic verses may be "ludicrous", as derived from the Latin for "play" but was only blessed with a sense of the ridiculous in the late eighteenth century. It seems that doesn't make ABC poems irredeemably trivial, though. On the contrary: perhaps they serve to warn poets that the attempt to sound profound in verse can sometimes keel fatally towards absurdity. Better to embrace the absurdity, maybe, as Norman Cameron did, than vainly hope it can be altogether avoided.