Roy Fuller: Elephants, Ants, Doves

801 — an elephant in Gaul! 
They speak about the stagnant Middle Ages, 
Of Islam cutting off the Middle Sea,

And yet the monster enterprisingly
Shuffled from Indian jungle to the Rhône.
Puzzling to tell one’s place in history.

What lies before us now — a ‘dark age’ or
An all too necessary rebirth? A worse
Election looms because of man’s new power

To liquidate not merely heretics
And enemies of state but life itself:
Life only geared to nature’s cataclysms —

These ants that put their winged friends on their feet,
Like aircraft handlers, and those pigeons which,
From mutual nibbling at the exiguous face

And thrusting a bill far down the other’s throat,
Take their respective postures in a sketchy
Rehearsal for prolonging pigeon life.

Social and private failure and success —
How like the human! But without its guilt
And its articulate recrimination.

Yes, I would sacrifice mankind if that
Could save the six-legged and the avian.
Though who’s to say the formic city less

Unjust than ours, and that the dove, evolved,
Wouldn’t impose tyrannical modes of love?
Let’s pension off the soldiers, see what comes.


From From the Joke Shop (1975). Fuller once had a very high reputation, in, I think, the 1950s and 60s. This doesn't tell us why. It's inert poetry with inert linguistic and intellectual rhythms. It raises the question, not "What was he thinking?" but "Why was he thinking?" The thinking killed off any poetry. Auden, who may be the model, could do this sort of thing better.