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An appreciation of Herman van den Bergh's ‘Hier is de stille jongen’
Hier is de stille jongen.
Let op hier is de stille jongen
die geen woorden heeft om te vertellen
wat er gaande is in zijn brein.
Tot op 't kale been van zijn schedel
hebben de scholen hem afgestript
de zang de muziek en de droom
die met de mensen van gister gingen.
In hun plaats heeft hij slogans en hits
harde kleine haat lichte kleine vlaggen
en een hondepenning dat men weet wie hij was
wanneer Morgen ontploft in zijn gezicht.
Waarom zouden ze hem woorden geven
een glimlach een droom een kompas
en de laatste glans van de sterren
of alleen maar een reden tot sterven?
*
*
The quiet boy.
Observe! here is the boy who's quiet
one who has no words with which to tell us
what is going on in his brain.
Right to the callow bone of his skull
the schools have stripped from him
the song the music and the dream
that used to go with yesterday's people.
In their place he has slogans and hits
hardboiled petty hate pennyweight toy colours
an identity disk so we'll know who he was
when Tomorrow's exploded in his face.
Why indeed should they furnish him words then
a smile and a dream - a compass
and the stars in splendour of parting
or no more than a reason for dying?
In modern literature it sometimes seems hard to make a clear distinction between what is poetic prose and what is irregular blank verse. A Dylan Thomas may write prose that has much of the rhythm and cadence of poetry, while on the other hand some modern poets seem to spurn the conventions which, however lightly they may be observed, help turn certain ordered arrangements of words into what is recognisably verse. This is not meant, of course, to imply that poetry depends on the observance of certain conventions, or that it can be defined merely in terms of word-arrangement, but rather to show that in approaching and appraising modern poems it may be necessary to be more cautious and to take less for granted than in the case of older and more traditional works. Modern poets have discarded many traditional forms, imagery they feel to be outworn, symbolism no longer readily or generally understood, poetic diction no longer fresh. No new body of poetic forms seems as yet to have made itself very apparent; at least it is far easier to point out where and
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in what way a particular modern poem is untraditional than to attempt a definition of the new forms poets may be shaping for themselves. A modern poem must therefore stand by itself, and is only to be judged, as far as its form is concerned, in its own terms; there may be little else to which to refer. The appraisal of a modern poem can often mean a new beginning in the work of critical appreciation, a return to fundamentals. The reader must also be willing to take upon himself the task of definition - even, perhaps, the definition of poetry itself.
In considering the form of Herman van den Bergh's ‘Hier is de stille jongen’ it is necessary, as well as worthwhile, to pay some regard to those qualities which make this composition a poem, for it is a rugged and irregular work and seems at first to lack many of the outward aspects of poetry. But a poet may use his materials rough-hewn and unrefined and his work may be none the worse for being left thus unpolished; at least it will not want for strength. There can be no doubt but that the listener recognises ‘De stille jongen’ as a poem at a first hearing, and the ear is a sure guide in these matters, trained from the nursery and not to be gainsaid. Yet further reading of the poem and closer examination of some instances of this poet's craft show that it is harder than might at first be thought to pick out those features of the writing which may unhesitatingly be defined as exclusively poetic, and not shared with thoughtful, carefully-wrought prose.
There are here a number of features which strike ear or eye as poetic. There is in the second stanza the personification of ‘Morgen’. In the last line of the first stanza there is the use of the form ‘gister’ which echoes faintly those compounds formed on the word ‘yester’ in English verse. There is, too, the juxtaposition of the sonorous closing lines of the first stanza with the harsh stridencies of the second. There is the unusual word-order of the line,
wanneer Morgen ontploft in zijn gezicht.
These are features which are common enough in poetry but they do also occur in Dutch prose; it need hardly be said that they are not sufficient of themselves to define this work as a poem. Is it then a question of rhythm?
It is by no means easy to detect the underlying metrical pattern of ‘De stille jongen’. Yet in reading the poem thoughtfully aloud the reader is compelled to make certain pauses; it is not the punctuation which causes him to do this, for it hardly exists. These pauses give the work its shape, and justify the poet's ending of his lines at certain points, for although the lines vary in length according to no easily discernible pattern, nowhere is the reader tempted to let his voice flow on into the cadences of prose: if he did, sense would be lost and effect ruined. There is an inner rhythm which cannot be ignored, even if it cannot be seen to spring from any imposed metrical scheme. It moulds the work into poetry, and makes necessary its formal arrangement into lines.
Can the arrangement of the poem into stanzas also be justified? Does closer scrutiny reveal purpose in this seemingly haphazard cutting of the poem in three? The line already quoted:
wanneer Morgen ontploft in zijn gezicht.
calls attention to itself both by its unusual word-order and by its lumbering syncopation. It seems to blunder against the prevailing rhythm of the poem - a fact which in itself argues the existence of a rhythmical pattern in ‘De stille jongen’. This rhythmical principle must surely be the ancient and familiar four- | |
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beat line; we know it from the nursery up. This particular line closes the second stanza and has the same number of syllables as the final lines of the first and third stanzas:
die met de mensen van gister gingen
wanneer Morgen ontploft in zijn gezicht
and
of alleen maar een reden tot sterven.
In so far as there is any value in ascribing greater or lesser importance to lines of a poem considered in isolation, these three are important to the sense of the work and carry a certain weight. They are lines which have the undoubted ring of poetry and they round off each stage or section of the poem. The first of the three stages in this progression is represented by the closing four lines of the first stanza, i.e. all that follows the full-stop. The three lines preceding this pause are, surely, no more than the introduction of the theme, and an amplification of the subject as announced in the title - if amplification is the right word to use of language which is telescoped and reduced to the barest minimum required for sense. It can be seen, therefore, that the poet has made his pauses in just those places where sense and stress demand them, and that the stanza-arrangement is not arbitrary, and intended to make the piece conform to some preconceived formal pattern, but functional and springing solely from the needs of the poem.
Poetry is many things but not least is it an expression of thought and feeling where the emotive powers of words and the evocative working of imagery and symbolism are employed, rather than the persuasive powers of reasoned argument. The poet is not bound or burdened by the need to explain, and his writing is therefore concentrated and not expansive like prose. ‘De stille jongen’ shows such concentration. Much that is of importance is said and still more is implied, deep feeling is fittingly expressed and answering emotion is aroused in the reader, all within the short compass of fifteen lines. This could never be done in prose - not, at least, in prose written in language as modern and seemingly everyday as Herman van den Bergh's.
Perhaps the form of this poem can best be characterised with the help of a simple comparison. Drystone walls are a common sight on our English moors. To the untrained tourist's eye they may seem to be no more than a piling up of uneven stones in the crude semblance of a wall. There is certainly no symmetry in them in any prim suburban sense, yet they have a natural balance and harmony of their own and are well-fitted for their purpose. They are strong and lasting. Sheep run along them, hikers rest or picnic on them, in the winter frosts crack and snowdrifts cover them, but still they endure. They are not rough arrangements of stones, but rough stones - left undressed and unworked except for the slightest careful chipping here and there - skilfully arranged. So it is with ‘De stille jongen’. Van den Bergh has taken his thoughts and feelings on surly, inarticulate youth, ‘teddy-boys’, ‘nozems’, ‘Halbstarken’ - he has not troubled himself with a popular label, and arranged them with little polishing and little regard for outward symmetry. But the thoughts and feelings are those of a poet and the arrangement is that of a craftsman. Among other generations of poets, such unpolished, unvarnished materials would have been treated as notes on a theme. There would have been further processing, refinement and selection. The protest itself would have been worked upon until could be presented strictly as a single theme, followed
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by neatly-rhymed elaboration, in short a sonnet, or perhaps an epigram would have been wrought. In this way concentration and much exquisite poetry was achieved, fierce emotions were ‘recollected in tranquillity’. There is protest enough in Wordsworth's, ‘The world is too much with us’, but the manner of its expression is very different from ‘De stille jongen’. But it is surely a difference of degree, there must always be some balance in poetry between emotion and expression, otherwise there can be no poetry, and the poet's art lies chiefly in holding this balance. The point at which the balance is held will vary between individuals as well as between generations - which makes comparison of one poet with another fascinating, rewarding, and almost impossible. Many modern architects, and all the builders of drystone walls, let their chosen materials speak for themselves, and this has been Van den Bergh's method. His protest gains thereby in urgency and directness, and his language in terseness and vividness. He has, moreover, achieved a concentration which rivals that of the sonnet without the use of a ready-made form. The form and the rhythm of ‘De stille jongen’ seem to be inward and natural, not outward and contrived, and they spring from the same source - the poet's thought.
The language of this poem seems very simple, almost bald, yet the work must be read over and over again if all its implications are to be understood. Van den Bergh, like any poet worthy of the name, uses words as much for their associative power as for their definable meaning. A single note, if struck truly by the poet, awakens endless answering harmonies in the minds of those who hear it; the language of poetry depends for its full effect on delicately related undertones and overtones. It is most often the ‘simple’ words which have the greatest power to evoke associations, pleasant or unpleasant. A poet may use such a term as ‘mother’ confident that each of his readers will bring his own richly personal associations to this homely word; the word will mean something different for each individual, yet at the same time remain universally valid. The concept itself is simple in that it is within a child's grasp, the implications, however, are infinitely varied and complex. The language of ‘De stille jongen’ should perhaps not be described as bald after all. Its words ring, have reverberations and overtones, they never fall flat. ‘Stark’ may be a better description of language where so few adjectives appear. There are in fact just five of these, ‘klein’ being used twice. Weightless words have been kept to a minimum by telescoping and the avoidance of needless conjunctions. Most of the finite verbs are fairly colourless. The language being thus constructed, most weight must fall on the nouns. It would be an exaggeration, within the bounds of so short a poem, to call this effect monolithic, but the verse undoubtedly owes much of its foursquare quality to the unusual prominence given the nouns.
Some of these nouns are concrete, and conjure up vividly concrete images: ‘been’, ‘brein’, and ‘schedel’ are intensely, almost obtrusively physical, and have very much the same effect as their English equivalents - they do not carry any associations of the warmth of human personality. ‘Schedel’ of course has its own particularly sinister overtones; it is a symbol of personified death and a token of what once was, but can no longer be a human being. Other nouns which require a kind of lingering stress because of the qualities of their vowels - ‘droom’, ‘glimlach’, ‘muziek’, and ‘zang’, are abstract in sense and haunting in sound. They express those qualities which, so long as they are universally honoured and preserved, distinguish men from beasts and provide the means whereby human beings can continue to recognise each
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other as fellows: if these qualities are stripped away, only a death's head is left. ‘Kompas’ is concrete, but its meaning, ‘a device by which to steer’ is extended here to imply a standard of conduct, a code of ethics, and perhaps also an ideal purpose for living, some destination to which to journey.
Among the adjectives, ‘harde kleine’ and ‘lichte kleine’ seem to be used mainly to build up the rhythm of a kind of derisory incantation: ‘hard’ and ‘licht’ have numberless possible implications, like ‘hard’ and ‘light’ in English, but the particular combination, ‘harde kleine haat’ has very definite associations - viciousness, pettiness and meanness, all in one. ‘Kaal’ has perhaps subtler overtones than the English ‘bald’, its meaning extending to ‘bare’, ‘bleak’, ‘unfledged’, ‘callow’, and so on, each of these in turn arousing its own particular set of associations.
The word ‘afgestript’ has much of the same feeling as the English ‘stripped’. The expression ‘strip tobacco’ may be borne in mind, which refers to tobacco leaves from which stem and midrib have been removed, in other words, leaves that are no longer recognisable as such.
The scrutiny of individual words is not sufficient of itself for a just appraisal of the language of a poem, but ‘De stille jongen’ shows within its shorts compass such intricate interaction of thought and feeling, of form and rhythm, of sound and sense and symbol, that a few threads of the pattern must here and there be picked out to illuminate the work of criticism. The weave, however, is very close, and the would-be unraveller runs some risk of being left with no more than a handful of insignificant unravelled strands. One of the striking features of this pattern is the contrast which the poet makes between the ‘physical’ group of words, and the ‘spiritual’ group in the first stanza: they contrast in sound, the former group being narrow, sharp and almost piercing, the latter far deeper and more resonant; they contrast in sense and in emotional texture. After the near-romantic closing two lines of the first stanza:
de zang de muziek en de droom
die met de mensen van gister gingen,
comes the strident, syncopated second stanza, where the poet seems to have borrowed the off-beat rhythms of the generation he attacks. This stanza is full of dissonance, a clatter and a clash of consonants and the kind of alliteration, ‘harde... haat’, ‘kleine... kleine’, ‘weet wie hij was’ that belongs less to poetry than to doggerel, cant, street-rhymes, popular songs and the like. The use of the loanwords ‘hits’ and ‘slogans’ is quite deliberate. One is as Germanic and harshly consonantal as the native words used for similar effect in the poem; the other is dark and Celtic, properly at home in neither English or Dutch. Both produce a sort of verbal indigestion which is exactly the effect Van den Bergh wishes to achieve.
‘Harde kleine haat lichte kleine vlaggen’ is as derisory as the chanting of street-children, and as monotonous as commercialised ‘pop’ tunes. Derision is continued in ‘hondepenning’. When the petty hatreds and spurious partizanship implied in the previous lines are over, all that will be left to distinguish one inarticulate youth from another will be not the toy banners, not the refining qualities of music, poetry, imagination, ‘die met de mensen van gister gingen’ but just an identification disk, what the American Call a dog-tag. Finally in this magnificently invective stanza comes the sombre, thumping bass of:
wanneer Morgen ontploft in zijn gezicht.
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This is a poem of protest and pessimism. It is a protest against the schools which, according to Van den Bergh, are so busy teaching that which can be defined and limited at the expense of that which can set the imagination aflame and extend the range of experience of the human spirit, that they are in fact depriving the young of the very qualities necessary to make them human. The poet is saying, with all the poetic power at his command, what many thoughtful though less vocal people are thinking and feeling - that we can only neglect the humanities at the cost of our essential human qualities. For this is in every sense a modern poem, and as a poet Van den Bergh must find words with which to clothe the thoughts and feelings of his contemporaries whose spokesman he is, and in so doing give them not only utterance, but form and intelligibility and universality. This he has done. It is a pessimistic poem in that the poet sees all too clearly how the spiritual void in young people is being filled with political or nationalistic or commercial sloganising, which represents a deliberate degrading of the human soul: cheap music and cheaper theories are carefully peddled to those left half-baked in the schools' mad race to put their own particular old-boys on the moon. He sees, too, that revelation ‘Morgen’ as it is called here, may only come in apocalyptic manner, since man, technically triumphant yet spiritually moronic, having rendered himself inhuman may well render himself extinct. The poem is also pessimistic in that Van den Bergh realises the dilemma of the teacher, the artist and of all whose concern is, or should be, with the life of the spirit. Their dilemma is that if man possesses self-destructive power, the probability is that he will indeed destroy himself, since in the past he has shown little inclination to stop short at using his ever-growing powers for evil ends. If this is so, why bother to attempt to inculcate spiritual values?
Or if the attempt is to be made, on what authority is teaching to be based?
The poem ends thus on a pessimistic, questioning note. Yet in its few lines it achieves a great deal, finding fit words for our thoughts and feelings, and what is perhaps most important, extending them. Judged on these grounds, and on the merits of its construction, rhythm and diction already discussed it is a poem of great worth.
Bath.
Raymond Kaye. |
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