Richard Price was born in 1966 and grew up in Scotland. He was educated at Napier College, Edinburgh and at Strathclyde University, Glasgow. In the 1990s he became a leading figure in the Informationist movement in Scottish poetry and has published a dozen books of poetry since his debut in 1993. He is Head of Contemporary British Collections at the British Library, in London.
Wordsworth’s Moon
To accompany the publication of Richard Price’s collection Moon for Sale (Jan, 2017) the poet reflects on the ‘moon poem’ by Wordsworth which has a particular resonance for him:'TIS eight o'clock, -- a clear March night,
The moon is up,-- the sky is blue,
The owlet, in the moonlight air,
Shouts from nobody knows where;
He lengthens out his lonely shout,
Halloo! halloo! a long halloo!
The opening lines of Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy” hint at the world of reversals which will soon take place in this remarkable ballad. The owl is awake, this clear evening is the owl’s fresh morning.
While many creatures, humans especially, might be saying Goodnight in their several languages, this feathered hunter is greeting the world with a Halloo. It is not hearty – it is a “lonely shout”. In so being it is a foil to the theme of love, of actively caring for those we love, that is absolutely key to this poem. “The Idiot Boy” is one of the earliest and to me still one of the best narratives about those who have been born with severe neurological disabilities. It is also a poem about their families and the wider society around them.
The moon is referred to in the poem from the off – “The moon is up – the sky is blue” - and then at least eighteen further times across the 450 lines plus of this long poem. It becomes a central but silent witness to the world of the Quixotic anti-hero, Johnny.
Johnny, in the rough usage of the day, is an ‘idiot-boy’; I guess ‘simple’ would be another word for his condition, though Wordsworth notes various complex dimensions which belie that word. In today’s parlance, Johnny has severe educational needs. In his sunny sensibility and in his reduced capabilities, he reminds me very much of my daughter Katie, though he is blessed with language and she is not.
The plot soon unfolds. Johnny’s mother Betty Foy, who is in her late fifties, lives with Johnny in a home some distance from the nearest village. No man is in evidence. When their frail immediate neighbour Susan Gale takes a turn for the worse Betty feels she has to stay with her neighbour to nurse her. She sends Johnny off on their pony to fetch the village Doctor. I find her pride in his mastery of the pony, and in her own achievement raising him, so moving:
And while the Mother, at the door,
Stands fixed, her face with joy o'erflows,
Proud of herself, and proud of him,
She sees him in his travelling trim,
How quietly her Johnny goes.
Johnny does not return, however. With psychological realism, Wordsworth portrays Betty as being at first angry with him and then, as time goes on, very worried for him. She decides she just has to leave Susan to try to see what has happened. Perhaps, she imagines, Johnny has come to grief trying to pursue the moon’s reflection:
And while she crossed the bridge, there came
A thought with which her heart is sore--
Johnny perhaps his horse forsook,
To hunt the moon within the brook,
And never will be heard of more.
This is a verse reminiscent of the legend of the village of Gotham, at the time of King John. In that tale, to avoid the King’s threatened interference in their lives the villagers pretend to be ‘simple’ and, among other outlandish activities, fish for the moon in the local pond. Informed of this strange behaviour -- and, curiously, incurious -- the King duly declines to visit and Gotham’s way of life is saved.
But Johnny is no fraud – as we know in these dark days if the disabled are not taken to be ‘low hanging fruit’ for cuts, then they are taken to be fakes; either way, they must suffer punitive measures for their mere state of existence. Government judges, often rightly, that wider society will not come to help the disabled on principle (though are more susceptible to sentimentalised advertising campaigns which, more than laudable in themselves, make it more difficult to apportion funds fairly and to those in greatest need, and may even eat away at the idea of universal care).
Betty Foy reaches the village doctor who will not deign to open the door to her when she learns she is concerned about Johnny. “He’s not so wise as some folks be,” she tells him, meaning that Johnny may run into all kinds of danger without realising it. To the doctor, Johnny’s severe lack of intelligence is the very reason he won’t help: in his eyes he is just not worth saving:
"The devil take his wisdom!" said
The Doctor, looking somewhat grim,
"What, Woman! should I know of him?"
And, grumbling, he went back to bed!
The doctor’s response typifies to my mind the attitudes that allowed state-sponsored mass euthanasia years later in the heart of Europe. The industrial-scale murder of the mentally disabled was the test case for the Nazis and their ambitions for other groups of society: when introduced n 1939 it was expedited by many doctors and insufficiently opposed by wider society. Its ‘success’ – a quarter of a million people were murdered in this way – opened the door to further atrocities greater in scale, some of which are generally better known today.
Betty Foy will have to rescue her son herself. Finally –and it is of course all in the telling - she does. There he is, oblivious, right next to the powerful unsettling waterfall, in full moonlight:
Who's yon, that, near the waterfall,
Which thunders down with headlong force,
Beneath the moon, yet shining fair,
As careless as if nothing were,
Sits upright on a feeding horse?
To cap it, Susan Gale has recovered, helped by her impetus to get out and help find Johnny and Betty Foy: to care for another, in all its senses and however that caring is made to be, is in itself a mark of health. Susan finds the Foys and all is well.
This is an unusually upbeat story given the topic and another reason why it is such a remarkable work, and so early on. It bears the date of 1798! Later on in fiction, in Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) for example, any character with genetically determined educational problems is unlikely to survive the story without cruelty or death. Another socially-constructed parallel is found in Hollywood films, where wholly able black characters are very likely to suffer a similar fate, seldom making it alive to the end of the movie. Such characters are seen as subsidiary to the main action – at best victims – yet Johnny, it turns out, is not only the focus of this ballad, he is the hub of the tiny community that he, his mother and their friend Susan have made.
His mother, joyful in finding him (“joy” is another word used frequently in this story), asks him even so, What was he doing all these longs hours? He says very little – perhaps in this case he preserves that sacred silence of the near-mute because it is one of the few things that can be kept for oneself, the natural if not legal right of any individual to say nothing. Instead, he returns to the reversal that opened the poem, of night-time seeming like the day, of the moon seeming like the sun. Does he know the poetry of what he says? Wordsworth rightly declines to tell us:
Now Johnny all night long had heard
The owls in tuneful concert strive;
No doubt too he the moon had seen;
For in the moonlight he had been
From eight o'clock till five.
And thus, to Betty's question, he
Made answer, like a traveller bold,
(His very words I give to you,)
"The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,
And the sun did shine so cold!"
--Thus answered Johnny in his glory,
And that was all his travel's story,
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Richard Price’s Moon for Sale is his fifth Carcanet collection and can be found here. It follows the award-winning Small World (2012).
