The poet laureate Simon Armitage has joined hundreds of other poets on Write Out Loud and on other social media in writing about the coronavirus pandemic. In ‘Lockdown’, a poem published today in The Guardian, which also happens to be World Poetry Day, Armitage moves from the outbreak of bubonic plague in the Derbyshire village of Eyam in the 17th century, when a bale of cloth from London brought fleas carrying the plague to the Derbyshire village, to the epic poem Meghadūta by the Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa.

Armitage said that “as the lockdown became more apparent and it felt like the restrictions were closing in, the plague in Eyam became more and more resonant”.

The poem refers to Eyam’s boundary stone, which contained holes that the quarantined villagers would put their money in to pay for provisions from outside, and then fill with vinegar in the hope it would cleanse the coins. It also touches on the doomed romance between a girl who lived in Eyam and a boy outside the village who talked to her from a distance, until she stopped coming. The poem was also influenced by a scene in Meghadūta in which an exile sends reassuring words to his wife in the Himalayas via a passing cloud.

Armitage added that he believed there was a message to be learned “about taking things easy and being patient and trusting the Earth and maybe having to come through this slightly slower, and wiser, at the other end – given that one thing that’s accelerated the problem is our hectic lives and our proximities and the frantic ways we go about things”.

 

 

LOCKDOWN

by Simon Armitage

 

And I couldn’t escape the waking dream

of infected fleas

 

in the warp and weft of soggy cloth

by the tailor’s hearth

 

in ye olde Eyam.

Then couldn’t un-see

 

the Boundary Stone,

that cock-eyed dice with its six dark holes,

 

thimbles brimming with vinegar wine

purging the plagued coins.

 

Which brought to mind the sorry story

of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,

 

star-crossed lovers on either side

of the quarantine line

 

whose wordless courtship spanned the river

till she came no longer.

 

But slept again,

and dreamt this time

 

of the exiled yaksha sending word

to his lost wife on a passing cloud,

 

a cloud that followed an earthly map

of camel trails and cattle tracks,

 

streams like necklaces,

fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants,

 

embroidered bedspreads

of meadows and hedges,

 

bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks,

waterfalls, creeks,

 

the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes

and the glistening lotus flower after rain,

 

the air

hypnotically see-through, rare,

 

the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow

but necessarily so.

 

Also published today in the Guardian is an account by the young award-wining poet Mary Jean Chen of growing up in Hong Kong during the Sars epidemic of 2003. In the article she says: "I knew Sars was serious because of how my father, a rheumatologist, reacted to the news early on during the crisis. I remember him leaving for work in an N95 mask and returning home with the outline of the mask imprinted on his cheek, as my mother quickly stripped his suit off at the door for cleaning. One day, my father came home uncharacteristically quiet. He told us that a friend and colleague who had been working on the frontline in a local hospital had lost his life to Sars. In the weeks after, I developed a habit of feverishly washing my hands.

"As an only child, I turned to books for some sorely needed comfort. Soon after, I declared to my parents that I wanted to be a writer. My father replied: 'As a doctor, you can cure one person at a time; as a writer, you can heal a whole society.' As we mark World Poetry Day this year, I can’t help but recall this conversation and wonder whether poetry can offer some unique form of solace as we attempt to weather the current storm together, yet apart."

 

 

Background: It's goodbye to poetry out loud for a while - and hello to online initiatives