The Journeyman - Commentary

I found myself re-reading this poem the other day and started reflecting again on my father and his impact on my life. In parallel, I have been reading "The Poet's Companion - A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry" by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux in which the authors point out that we all have a wealth of material to write about, much of which will be of universal relevance. Love, loss, pain, sorrow, insecurity, fear, illness are experienced by us all and ideally a poet should look towards writing in such a way that the poet's message will resonate in the reader. Such is my hope with "The Journeyman" despite its intensely personal perspective.

I hope it's not seen as arrogant or presumptuous to carry out an analysis of my own poem but I've got a lot out of this process. Some of the imagery emerged intuitively or perhaps its origins became lost so I hoped a close reading would shed a little more light on the seeds of the poem. I loved uncovering the possible/probably meaning behind the use of the colon after 'dice' and it has given me a glimpse into the wordcraft and subconscious creativity of a poet.

The poem about my father began as an idea soon after his death, but it was another ten years before I finished the piece. Perhaps the emotions had been too raw or perhaps I was growing more confident about expressing myself in poetry. It was probably both of these. The style of the poem is fairly free and traditionalists may grumble at the absence of regular verse lengths and rhyming line endings. But to me this is not essential in a poem. What I strive for is a distillation of ideas, a comfortable rhythm, a degree of ambiguity, an overloading of word meanings, and the music of internal rhyme and alliteration.

When developing the poem, which was without a title for many years, I became aware of some of those qualities emerging in my verse and although a more talented and experienced poet could have expressed the concepts more eloquently and subtly, he was my dad and this is my poem and I'm still proud of it.

The story behind the poem began when my father, a heavy smoker and drinker, had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and needed urgent treatment. This was the latest in a string of health problems that had afflicted Dad in the last few years of his life. He had been successfully treated for prostate cancer a few years before but this was a lot more serious and he was likely to lose most of his esophagus. The surgeon proposed a new and somewhat untested technique to deal with the advanced cancer that involved drastic thoracic surgery. In his state of fear and worry, Dad felt he had little choice but to go with this new treatment. And perhaps he was right.

He went in for surgery a few days later. That night Jacqui, my sister, phoned me to say that his heart had failed in theatre and although the surgery had been performed and he had been resuscitated, he had failed to regain consciousness. Over the next few days, his condition deteriorated and we decided it was best for me to fly out to South Africa to spend some time with him in what might be the last few days of his life.

I see you lying there

Hot hands blazing.

Walking into the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital in Umhlanga Rocks was a shock. Dad's face was bloated with drugs, and he was covered in tubes, drips and drains. Dad had always had hot hands but they seemed excessively so as if perhaps he had a fever. But most scary of all was the rhythmic hiss of the ventilator that was helping keep him alive.

You who once breathed for me

Are now breathed for.

It was devastating to see him lying there, helpless, his body pumping out heat. This was the father who had patiently sat with me when childhood asthma took hold and seemed to be squeezing the life out of me. Dad would calm me down with his gentle voice and help me to breathe using progressive relaxation, gradually freeing me from asthma's terrifying grip. In the 1960s, asthma care was not as advanced as it is now and my life would have been transformed by an inhaler. But Dad was the next best thing. Now, a machine wheezed for him and I could do nothing to help.

Procedure unproven, he took your chances

And rolled the dice:

Snake eyes.

At some point in writing the poem I began a two-strand thread where the three-line italisised verses have an almost parenthetical function. Both Jacqui and I had been unhappy with the surgeon's gung-ho approach to Dad's treatment, i.e. 'he took your chances', a twist on the more usual expression. The roll of the dice results in a double-one, snake-eyes, bad luck. Completely accidentally, I am reluctant to confess, I recognised that the colon that follows 'dice' clearly represents the snake-eyes. Coincidental, sub-conscious or simply a double-six of luck?

But no-one has

Seen your eyes,

In contrast to the surgeon's impersonal manner, the ward staff were respectful, kind and caring when dealing with Dad. Yet I found it upsetting that they had never known him, listened to his jokes, heard his laughter, experienced his love. It is at times like this you want to show them a video clip, a photo, a recording of him speaking. This is my Dad.

ICU with angels at your side

And the call of the dove

Lost for now in life's rhythmic rasp.

The acronym is not particularly sophisticated word play but by now we could see that Dad was dying. The call of the dove is a reference to Dad's black sense of humour. He would often joke about the undertakers, Doves, and of being 'box fruit' one day. And it was Doves that finally took him away though he ended up being more casket dust than box fruit. The rhythmic rasp is of course the chilling sound of the ventilator and the phrase itself has a pleasing, if sombre, alliterative rhythm of its own.

Are you trapped unmoving,

Hearing my every murmured word?

Talking to someone who's in a coma is necessarily one-sided. One doesn't even know whether they are hearing anything you say or are aware that you are there. The nursing staff seemed convinced that a degree of awareness is often there but I couldn't decide whether or not this was wishful thinking. Nevertheless, I would often sit with Dad and chat about old times as if we were reminiscing. Which perhaps we were. The murmured word is onomatopoeic and also adds an internal rhyme to the line.

The table is laid for lunch,

The sun is shining;

The phone is ringing.

On Dad's last day, we knew his end was near. It was a sunny day in early November and we were laying the table for lunch when the call came that we should come to the hospital as soon as possible. Mum then started to dither, understandably reluctant to face the inevitable, and it seemed to take forever to get her to the car. By the time we completed the short trip, Dad had gone. I remember the worried faces of the medical staff as we approached Dad's body as if we might suddenly turn and blame them for his death. Both Jacqui and I spent some time alone with him while Mum sat in a daze just outside the ICU. An eternal comfort to me is that our last words to each other over the phone before he went into surgery were: I love you.

By this stage, the non-italisised verses are getting shorter as Dad approaches death. This trend takes it to its logical two-line conclusion:

He takes your coin.

Tails you lose.

The final verse refers again to the expensive gamble that failed. But it also alludes to Charon, the ferryman who carries the souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron. A coin to pay Charon for passage was sometimes placed in the mouth of the dead.

It was perhaps this imagery that led to the title 'The Journeyman' though there are other interpretations.

Dad's death was devastating as I lost a father, a mentor and a friend. But his thoughts and philosophy still live on in both Jacqui and me. His sense of fairness, his belief in our responsibility within society, his bawdy and often dark sense of humour continue through his children and I try to accept it with good grace when I see myself slowly turning into my father, embracing the good bits and trying not to let his flaws add to my own.

My father was a highly intelligent, complex, and private man with his own set of demons and disappointments - just like the rest of us. Wherever he is or isn't now, he lives on in his children, grand-children, photos, audio recordings, verse and of course, memorabilia and memories.