Passion, by Kathleen Raine - Stanza 3

Hi everyone!

Let's begin by looking at the stanza itself:

   The language I knew best, my human speech

   Forsook my fingers, and out of reach

   Were Homer's ghosts, the savage conches of the beach.

Now, Mr. Sir says that the reference to the conches should bring to our minds the sounds that a conch makes: a sort of moaning wail, a bit how you'd imagine a ghost would sound if it were shouting.

That's a nice atmosphere to consider, and is probably the best analysis I've read during my research, but I have a slightly more in-depth theory.

"Homer" was a poet of ancient Greece, mostly famous these days for having written The Odyssey and The Iliad.  This article describes how Homer depicts ghosts having several functions:

• Individual ghosts could haunt the living until they were 'put to rest' by some action or another.
• Most ghosts seemed to wander aimlessly, complaining and mourning that they were no longer alive.
• However, they were also thought to provide useful and/or interesting knowledge to a hero in some struggle.

Therefore, one translation could simply be that the speaker voice in Passion is unable to get ahold of their love-interest by any means, whether through:

• physical / material / scientific means (i.e., can't reach love interest by using the phone), or
• spiritual / mystical / intangible methods (perhaps she's silently appealing to the supernatural realm, asking for ghosts to either haunt the loved one or give advice to the speaker, but the supernatural isn't listening).

That's one theory.  My favourite involved a bit more research:

It turns out that a more modern poet by the name of Derek Walcott wrote his own poems based on Homer's famous works.  He used characters from Homer's epics (including Homer himself!- Walcott calls him "Omeros"), in order to link the histories and struggles outlined in Homer's ballads with the histories and struggles in the worlds that Walcott created.
Here's where this starts to become relevant to our poem: Both Homer and Walcott seem to have centered many character struggles around potential love-interests and the unjust reasons / prejudices that kept them apart.  Sound familiar?  :)

I found an article (incredibly dense, don't bother reading it - the important bit is below) that mentions the stanza from Walcott's work that would act as a bridge from Passion to Homer's writings.  The verse goes:

   I said, "Omeros,"
   And O was the conch-shell's invocation, mer was
   both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,
   os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes
   and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore.
   Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves, and the washes
   that echoed from a cave-mouth when the tide has
   ebbed.

The key lines that link us here are Passion's "savage conches" and the "conch-shell's invocation" from Omeros.

(This link will take you to an outline-version of Walcott's Omeros.)

The Shmoop notes tell us that Omeros begins his day's work with the "conch's moan."

Translation:  All of this seems to indicate that Raine may be attempting to do what Walcott did, except she's trying to bridge the worlds and works of both Walcott and Homer to the agonizing loss of love found in her own poem, Passion.
Given the common problems explored by the other two authors, the loss being discussed in Passion is possibly due to the narrator being part of a love-triangle and eventually losing the war over the love-interest.

That's quite arrogant of Raine, don't you think?
At first glance, to link your own problems and misery to the epic masterpieces of literary giants such as Walcott and Homer would seem presumptuous at the very least.  Still, it gives us an idea as to the hyperbolic emotional lengths the speaker voice is willing to go to in order to place their pain on a scale of equal footing to match the legendary love-triangles in Greek mythology.  And certainly it is at this line in Passion that the focus of the poem shifts from earthly to heavenly / celestial.


YET ANOTHER POSSIBILITY: (Here is another analysis which yielded some interesting thoughts, yet as with all research, take it with a grain of salt and match it up against the existing evidence.  After that, you decide what the best conclusion is!)


- T. Marcus