Niall O'Sullivan – Poet

I might have never finished my degree in Fine Art ( live the cliché!) all those years back, but I’ve got that bit closer to being exhibited by the Tate than my fellow ponces. That’s right, yours truly has written the Poem of the Month on the Tate’s magazine website.

The poem is based on Gordale Scar by James Ward, which is currently hanging in the Sublime in Crisis room of the Tate Britain. The painting is a romantic landscape in the tradition of the Sublime. It would be very convenient for me to outline what the Sublime is, yet, as a two day symposium at the Tate that I attended came to prove, it is incredibly difficult to pin down. Many sublime paintings concentrate on disasters or Biblical catastrophes such as the Deluge, humans and animals are often depicted as tiny insectlike organisms engulfed by natural conditions that portray a level of sentience and malevolence. But many Sublime works seem to capture the same feeling without resorting to the portrayal of catastrophe, Gordale Scar is one of them. The landscape itself can be found in Yorkshire, but Ward exaggerated and distorted the scale for the painting, and replaced the sheep and goats that wee grazing there with cattle and deer.

I was going to include a quote by Nietzsche, but found it a little pretentious. The quote is the famous “if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” While I think that the quote helps you to understand what the poem is saying, I think it was right to leave it out. So, for all those too lazy to click the links above
here’s the poem and the painting.

GORDALE SCAR

It is not true that the gaze travels outwards,
over the heraldic beasts, between the limestone
hulks, skimming the stream where the last
surviving glints of light twinkle, onward
into the numb dark where minds are not welcome.

It is the scar itself and John Bull’s eye
that funnel into you, breach the iris,
pummel the retina, flume through the optic nerve
to ambush the cortex, seize synapses to find –
the flags packed up, the fortress long deserted.