Christmas Connections: Part 12 of 12

It is indeed twelve drummers drumming. It should be a dozen drummers drumming, actually, for that provides alliteration indeed. And 'a dozen' scans well with the 'eleven' of the previous stanza.

Why drummers, and what drumming is it? Or as Auden put it, "O what is that sound which so thrills the ear / Down in the valley drumming, drumming? / Only the scarlet soldiers, dear, / The soldiers coming."

For the drum is, of course, a symbol of war and confusion to the enemy. It is percussive, and it ends the feast. And then the real business of the new year can begin.

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"On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me a dozen drummers drumming."

Audibility

In 1937, W H Auden wrote his Letter to Lord Byron, an odd and playful piece of doggerel addressed to one of the most mercurial talents of English literature. In that longish poem, he says:

The Higher Mind’s outgrowing the Barbarian,
  It’s hardly thought hygienic now to kiss;
The world is surely turning vegetarian;
  And as it grows too sensitive for this,
  It won’t be long before we find there is
A Society of Everybody’s Aunts
For the Prevention of Cruelty to Plants.

In a place along the Dover coast, what really happened was that the Barbarians outgrew (or at least temporarily outmanoeuvred) the Higher Mind, which unfortunately consisted of those interested in supplying a proper education. However, there were indeed Aunts, except that they were carnivorous and interested only in preventing cruelty to their own plants. And yes, there were also plants. They sat glumly in the common room and then at the end of the day folded themselves up and went off to report to the Chief Barbarian.

I have always found Auden a wonder. He was a master at mocking the totalitarian state, but he also feared that it would come to pass in his lifetime. In times past, I often felt like his Unknown Citizen, of whom he wrote:

And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

The voice of Wystan Hugh Auden continues to resonate with us because, like George Orwell, he cared a lot for humanity, and was willing to share his words on the topic with his fellow humans.

Selective Agriculture

The interesting thing about my new lease of life is that I get to choose the crops I cultivate, and earn quite a bit more with these boutique crops. The reason that I can charge more is that I genuinely feel I am putting specific personal effort into each of these plantings, and the quality shows.

In the past, I occasionally felt like a rice farmer. In the faraway days of my youth, we used to sing this song, which I think is possible Filipino in origin:

Planting rice is never fun,
Bent from morn till set of sun:
Cannot stand and cannot sit,
Cannot rest a little bit.

Of course, being naughty little primary school boys, we used to modify the line to take into account the possible discharge of natural fertiliser and other things like that. But the key point about feeling like a rice farmer is that in rice farming, you more or less have a huge acreage with what seems like little control over quality because it is such hard work and you have little time for reflection over individual stalks or plots.

In some ways, my previous life reminds me also of Auden's infamous poem, Roman Wall Blues. In that poem, he constructs simple doggerel which bears a huge burden of existential angst, much as any soldier on duty in a distant and inimical place must feel. It's not that I am ungrateful for comrades and shared striving and the wonderful manifold fruits of our labours over the years; I am quite happy to remember all those times.

The similarity lies in the feeling that there never seemed to be an end in sight. You just served tour after tour for years until you were invalided out, invalidated out, or otherwise reduced in validity. And at the end of it, like the Roman on Hadrian's Wall, you would like down on the turf in some more summery clime and look up at heaven's eye with your own single eye.

Currently though, I feel I have caught my second wind. Like the great detective Sherlock Holmes, a retirement to bee-keeping on the Sussex Downs is only the beginning of another story. This time, it is one that is largely off the books and into the mists of legend.