My Reflections On The Poem 'Lockdown' Written By The Poet Laureate Of England Sir Simon Armitage.

 ☆ Introduction to Simon Armitage :

Simon Armitage was born in Marsden, a village in West Yorkshire, England. He earned a BA from Portsmouth University in geography, and an MS in social work from Manchester University, where he studied the impact of televised violence on young offenders. He worked as a probation officer for six years before focusing on poetry. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and in 2017 he was appointed Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. He was named UK Poet Laureate in 2019. The recipient of numerous honors and awards, Armitage was named the Millennium Poet in 1999, a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature in 2004, and a Commander of the British Empire in 2010. In 2014 he was awarded the Cholmondeley Award.

Known for his deadpan delivery, Armitage’s formally assured, often darkly comic poetry is influenced by the work of Ted Hughes, W.H. Auden, and Philip Larkin. As a reviewer for the PoetryArchive.org observed, “With his acute eye for modern life, Armitage is an updated version of Wordsworth’s ‘man talking to men.’”

Armitage has also performed as a member of the band The Scaremongers. His poetry is often influenced by music, a connection he pursues in his nonfiction book Gig (2008). His nonfiction book Walking Home (2012), an account of his journey along the Pennine Way, was a Sunday Times Bestseller and was short-listed for the 2012 Portico Prize. His follow-up book, Walking Away (2015), was also a Sunday Times Bestseller.

Armitage has taught at the University of Leeds, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Princeton University, and Manchester Metropolitan University. His Oxford lectures are available online in the University of Oxford podcast series Poetry with Simon Armitage. He lives in West Yorkshire.

• Awards Conferred :

Armitage has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes, an Eric Gregory Award, a major Lannan Award, a Cholmondeley Award, the Spoken Word Award (Gold), the Ivor Novello Award for song-writing, BBC Radio Best Speech Programme, Television Society Award for Documentary and Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. He won the 2017 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation and was awarded the 2018 Queens Gold Medal for Poetry.

• Works by Armitage :

Armitage is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems (2020); Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (2019); The Unaccompanied (2017); Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989–2014 (2014); Seeing Stars (2010); Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid (2006); The Shout: Selected Poems (2005), which was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Kid (1992), which won the Forward Prize; and his first collection, Zoom! (1989), a Poetry Society Book Choice. Several of his collections have also been short-listed for the Whitbread Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He has won an Eric Gregory Award and a Lannan Award, and was chosen as a Sunday Times Author of the Year. His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Night (2007) from Middle English was selected as a Book of the Year by both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. His other translations from medieval English include The Death of King Arthur (2011), which was awarded the Poetry Society Choice Hay Medal for Poetry, and Pearl (2016).

Armitage has also published fiction, including the novels The White Stuff (2004) and Little Green Man (2001), and the memoir All Points North (1998), which was chosen as a Yorkshire Post Book of the Year. He has written extensively for radio, television, film, and theater, including the libretto for the opera The Assassin Tree (2006), the play Mister Heracles (2000), based on Euripedes’s The Madness of Heracles, and the film Xanadu (1992). His radio play Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster (2011) was short-listed for the Ted Hughes Award as well as adapted for stage and screen. He co-authored Moon Country (1996) with Glyn Maxwell, which retraced the 1936 travels of W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice in Iceland. He co-edited, with Robert Crawford, The Penguin Anthology of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945 (1998), and edited Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems (1999).

☆ The Poem : Lockdown :

Lockdown

And I couldn’t escape the waking dream

of infected fleas 

in the warp and weft of soggy cloth

by the tailor’s hearth 

in ye olde Eyam.

Then couldn’t un-see 

the Boundary Stone,

that cock-eyed dice with its six dark holes, 

thimbles brimming with vinegar wine

purging the plagued coins. 

Which brought to mind the sorry story

of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre, 

star-crossed lovers on either side

of the quarantine line 

whose wordless courtship spanned the river

till she came no longer. 

But slept again,

and dreamt this time 

of the exiled yaksha sending word

to his lost wife on a passing cloud, 

a cloud that followed an earthly map 

of camel trails and cattle tracks, 

streams like necklaces,

fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants, 

embroidered bedspreads

of meadows and hedges, 

bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks,

waterfalls, creeks, 

the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes

and the glistening lotus flower after rain, 

the air

hypnotically see-through, rare, 

the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow

but necessarily so. 

- Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage has written a poem to address the coronavirus and a lockdown that is slowly being implemented across the UK, saying that the art form can be consoling in times of crisis because it “asks us just to focus, and think, and be contemplative”.

The poet laureate’s new poem, Lockdown, moves from the outbreak of bubonic plague in Eyam in the 17th century, when a bale of cloth from London brought fleas carrying the plague to the Derbyshire village, to the epic poem Meghadūta by the Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa.

His poem references Eyam’s boundary stone, which contained holes that the quarantined villagers would put their money in to pay for provisions from outside, and then fill with vinegar in the hope it would cleanse the coins. It also touches on the doomed romance between a girl who lived in Eyam and a boy outside the village who talked to her from a distance, until she stopped coming.

The poem was also influenced by a scene in Meghadūta in which an exile sends reassuring words to his wife in the Himalayas via a passing cloud.

“The cloud is convinced to take the message because the yaksha, which I think is sort of an attendant spirit to a god of wealth, tells him what amazing landscapes and scenery he’s going to pass across. I thought it was a kind of hopeful, romantic gesture,” said Armitage.

☆ My Impression of Understanding the Poem 'Lockdown' :

Before I express the jaunt I was going through while reading the poem 'Lockdown' penned by the Poet Laureate of England - Simon Armitage, I would like to thank my revered faculties who made me familiar with this poem.

While reading the poem, I was able to connect myself to that of the "star-crossed lovers" Rowland and  Emmott as their separation seemed to me of mine - not from beloved one - but from the very beloved college friends and revered teachers.

So, the poem as we all know is all about the lockdown reluctantly imposed due to Corona Pandemic right? If to say superficially, then Yes; but if you just identify the deeper observations of the poet than the answer will be No. Yes, the poem written on the sole topic covers the whole area of humans' sufferings that we all have gone through during the eerie time of lockdown.

☆ The Background of The Poem :

This poem is a dream sequence set in two geographical locations : one is of the Western part of the earth - England especially of Eyam region whereas another is of the Eastern part - India, ranging towards northern realm of the country.

The first part of the poem deals with the western idea of love between Rowland Torre and Emmott Syddall and the condition of Eyam region during the spread of plague disease.

And the latter part deals with the exotic imagery of Indian scenarios which are  artistically depicted by the poet. Such as of the peafowls, elephants, meadows, etc.

☆ The poem Written by Me on the Topic of Lockdown :

Actually, alike Sir Armitage I have also  penned a poem regarding Corona Pandemic condition and the effects of lockdown on the day-to-day life. I had written this poem when I was in my second year of under graduation. The title of the poem is "मुश्किल घङी में" (In the Perturbing Times). The poem is written in Hindi language and in Devanagari script.

मुश्किल घड़ी में.....

मत घबराओ ऐ मानव

इन मुश्किलो के अंधेरे से,

डटे रहो तुम अपने पथ पर

भले पाँव बंधे हो जंजीरों से ... ( १ )

हर एक सिपाही खड़ा हुआ है

अपना देश बचाने को,

बिखरी हुई आज़ादी को

फिर से वापस लाने को।...(२)

वक़्त का पहिया चलता है;

जीवन ने कैसा मोड़ लिया !

इस हँसते-खेलते जीवन को

बस चंद दिनों में तोड़ दिया।... (३)

कुछ खास हुआ इन महीनों में

आकाश का मंडल स्पष्ट हुआ,

यंत्रो के कर्कश पहियों का

यह शोर थमा, कुछ कम भी हुआ।... (४)

कितना भी लड़लो अंधेरे से

हाथ न कुछ भी आएगा,

बस छोटा दिप जला दो तुम

अँधकार यू ही मिट जाएगा।... (५)

रात हुई है जीवन में,

कल सुख का सूरज छाएगा;

बस सब्र करो तुम ऐ मानव,

कोई दिव्य संदेशा लाएगा।... (६)

- नीरव अमरेलीया

☆ Conclusion :

After eulogizing the poetic power that can depict a dead alive and enliven the grave, we are supposed to ponder the lives of the poor surrounded around us and at least we can do something that can make their standards of life better than before. With hope...Thank you all!

▪︎ (Word Count : 1443)