Читать книгу A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 26

The title of the text points to an everyday figure and, indeed, the subject matter is a visit to an eye doctor to be fitted for new lenses. The poem is divided into two unequal sections: one of 21 lines presents the ophthalmologist's room, work, and accouterments; a second of 11 lines presents the (presumably female) speaker's response to his ministrations. However, the poem renders the quotidian sinister by its emphasis on the power of the eye doctor, his intrusiveness (“his gentle fingers / That play around my head more intimately / Than most men’s should do” [ll. 5–7]), the shadowy ambience of his room (as opposed to the “greening” [l. 29] of the world beyond), the odd attractiveness of his instruments, and the seeming impossibility of exit at the end. Indeed, the whole visit is overlaid with mythic overtones—the devilish suggestion (he shows her “All the kingdoms”—compare Matthew 4.8 and Luke 4.5), and also the way in which the underground capture of the speaker reflects the myth of Hades and Proserpina (the speaker's inability to return from the shadows to a green world is telling).

This sinister and mythological transformation of the everyday is embodied in highly accessible verse. It is free verse without rhyme, with only local sound effects, in no fixed form, and with no fixed line length. There is little enjambment; a line is usually a complete sense unit. It is a poem—at a certain level—passing itself off as a piece of everyday speech. The language is neither unduly formal nor informal, but of an educated neutrality. The language, too, is mostly literal, although it does become nonliteral at times, for example, lines 16–21, line 26, and the powerful concluding lines 31 and 32, in which the doctor/devil/lord of the underworld reveals his lures, “The honey of his systems underground.” The everyday visit, in its relatively everyday language, in its accessible verse, is transmogrified into the minacious and improper.