When I was in Year 10, I was punished for some trivial misdemeanour the precise nature of which I have long since forgotten, by having to write out Byron’s poem ‘The Ocean’ twenty times.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain
Man marks the earth with ruin; his control/Stops with the shore …
I’m not bothering to check those lines as I type them but I bet they’re right, because if there’s one lonely virtue to be had from copying a poem twenty times it is that it becomes cauterised into some part of your brain and neither age nor vicissitude nor shock nor carelessness nor a concerted act of will can ever obscure or compromise it.
Byron’s salute to the briny, brought back to me yet again while walking this morning on the beach, is of course not the only rhyme stuck irremovably in the labyrinths of my subconscious. Far from it. We all have these abruptly resurfacing images, tunes, memories and references. Mine happen often to be poems or quotations or brief lines that pop up unannounced and unsummoned because I have spent a great deal of my working and casual life involved in some way or another with the written word.
For example, Treasurer Joe Hockey’s musings on the difference between the poor, who don’t drive very far – ‘O scathful harme, condition of povertie’ (Chaucer) – and the rich, who are ‘lifters’, had me invaded mentally by Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’: ‘Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns/Amid the rustle of his planted hills/Life overflows without ambitious pains.’ Without pain and with cigars and feet up on desks and smirks of self-congratulation. Surely!
Every now and then, however, these otherwise random intrusions into one’s mental and imaginative world take on a kind of unwanted or certainly unorganised coherence; a theme emerges despite your efforts to concentrate on something quite different.
So, suddenly, towards the end of last year, I found myself recalling fragments of that scene (Act 4, scene iii) in Macbeth where Macduff and Malcolm (!) bemoan Scotland’s descent into disorder. Their ‘poor country … weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash/Is added to her wounds’. Their long discussion is about leadership and, among Macbeth’s other shortcomings, his dangerous unpredictability. Yet to make a move, to oppose and attempt to overthrow him, is a fearful proposition fraught with imponderable ramifications and possibilities.
And so, vaguely pestered by these hauntings, I arrived along with the rest of the nation, at Australia Day. Our head of State, the Governor-General, abandoned his country’s special day to mourn in Saudi Arabia – a place of public beheadings, ritual stonings and discrimination against women. For his part, the Prime Minister produced his own coup de théatre, which, for just a moment, transported me to yet another world of the imagination familiar because of its unhinged refusal to accept the realities and mundanities of everyday life.
‘In a village of La Mancha [lived a gentleman] … age bordering on fifty … of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured, a very early riser and a great sportsman … [one day] he hit upon the strangest notion that ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honour as for the service of his country, that he should make a Knight …’
Well, that’s all I could remember until I looked it up, but you’ll readily see how such an image should have assembled itself in even less fevered brains than mine when, on the morning of Australia Day, our Prime Minister metaphorically strapped on his ‘doublet of fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to match for holidays’ and, like Don Quixote of La Mancha with his demented commitment to chivalric romance, transported us back to another age, long past, and created a new Knight for our land.
It was a grand moment, awkwardly dwarfing other honours bestowed that same day. Like the hero of La Mancha, our new Knight will be required – in common with all his dubbed colleagues – to engage in ‘righteous warfare’ because on the horizon the huge, looming silhouettes of the windmill army await only a sharp zephyr to set their sails flailing. As he charges the stolid monsters – against the advice of his loyal, bemused acolyte, Sancho Panza, and in honour of his equally uncomprehending beloved, Dulcinea – Don Quixote proclaims, using language eerily predictive of Prime Minister Abbott’s three hundred years later, ‘It is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.’
So – we have the Knight of the Ready Gaffe. And now step forward: Sancho Pyne, or Sancho Hockey, or Sancho Brandis or Sancho Morrison. And Dulcinea Bishop. Then again, perhaps we should chuck the lot of them, heavy armour and all, into ‘the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea’ (Matthew Arnold).
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer.