Expect the expected

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863 - 1944)

A terrible shadow drew nearer -  a shadow 

that seemed as if torn from universal Night.   

                   —Dame Edith Sitwell, 

                    The Queens and the Hive (1962)

They say “expect the unexpected” but common sense tells us to “expect the expected”; there is some hope in the unexpected, it remains unknown, but we have a good idea of what the expected might be. Isn't it just common sense to expect the expected?

The other night, reading the Oxford Book of English Verse (1939), edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch,  I thought this is about as good as it gets for a poet. If you can have just one page in a future edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse you've got it made, you have been and will be  remembered, you have dodged obscurity, your work will be remembered. The irony of this is that the editor of this famous anthology, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, has been more or less forgotten; indeed, Quiller-Couch's website intends to salvage him from obscurity. The truth is, for all of us, that with time there will be no one still alive who will remember us, or remember what (if anything) we accomplished, and it will be as though we never existed. Expect the expected.

Oh, how we struggle against time. Time cracks the whip and we jump and ask, “is that high enough, I can jump higher?” Old age is torture, it includes declining health, physical and mental exhaustion, arthritic pain, dentures and dementia, loneliness and regret, and the loss of all of one’s friends and family, we are stripped naked and chastised; the worst is saved for last when we are weak, crippled, and incontinent, and least able to deal with it. 

D.H. Lawrence wrote about the "bitch goddess" success, about the desire for material riches and fame that drives most people; they want the magic dust of being wealthy and famous sprinkled on them but without doing anything to deserve it, they want to be a somebody, even if being a somebody doesn't last long. But this magic dust bestowing fame and success is still dust, to be sprinkled down by the gods, or perhaps from Mount Parnassus. Poets should remember that the Muses don't care about your fame, prizes, literary awards, honorary degrees, prestigious presses, or who you knew, they are preoccupied with transience, that nothing lasts forever, and if it is the desire for fame driving your poetry, hanging out in bars at 2 a.m., schmoozing and boozing, it will still come to nothing but dust. And this applies to everybody; Transience, thy name is Everyman's Fate; Shelley knew this, it is the message of "Ozymandias", his most famous poem. I say to you poets, you are dead while still alive; blow the dust off the paper on which you have written your poem, the poem is already dust, the paper is dust, and then the poet is dust.