Sunday 25 October 2015

The Genius of an Onion



Craig Raine's early and still famous poem 'The Onion, Memory' (1978) draws the force of its comparison between the vegetable and the mental process not on account of shared layering (though it might have done), but via tears:
Outside the trees are bending over backwards
to please the wind: the shining sword
grass flattens on its belly.
The white-thorn's frillies offer no resistance.
In the fridge, a heart-shaped jelly
strives to keep a sense of balance.

I slice up the onions. You sew up a dress.
This is the quiet echo—flesh—
white muscle on white muscle,
intimately folded skin,
finished with a satin rustle.
One button only to undo, sewn up with shabby thread.
It is the onion, memory,
that makes me cry.
Might Raine have picked this up from Coleridge? Or have I merely reached that level of scholarly immersion in my author where I start to see him everywhere? Swap Rainean pathos for mockery, and step back to the Great Room of the London Philosophical Society, 16th December 1811, where Coleridge is lecturing on Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was often spoken of as a Child of Nature, and many had been his imitators, who attempted to copy real incidents; and some of them had not even genius enough to copy nature, but still they produced a sort of phenomenon of modern times neither tragic nor comic, nor tragicomic, but the Sentimental. This sort of writing consists in taking some very affecting incidents, which in its highest excellence only aspired to the genius of an onion,—the power of drawing tears; and in which the author, acting like a ventriloquist, distributes his own insipidity.
Layers. Layers everywhere.

2 comments:

  1. As Anthony Burgess wrote: "Then, instead of expensive mouthwash, he had breathed on Hogg-Enderby, bafflingly (for no banquet would serve, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions. ‘Onions,’ said Hogg."

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    1. My first-half-of-2015 Burgess nerdery enables me to be the pedant here: I think you mean '...she had breathed ...'

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