Philip Harvey
Accordion Music, by Les Murray
A backstrapped family Bible that consoles virtue and sin,
for it opens top and bottom, and harps both out and in:
it shuffles a deep pack of cards, flirts an inverted fan
and stretches to a shelf of books about the pain of man.
It can play the sob in Jesus!, the cavernous baastards
note,
it can wheedle you for cigarettes or drop a breathy
quote:
it can conjure Paris up, or home, unclench a chinstrap
jaw
but it never sang for a nob’s baton, or lured the boys to
war.
Underneath the lone streetlight outside a crossroads hall
where bullocks pass and dead girls waltz and mental gum
trees fall
two brothers play their plough-rein days and long gone
spoon-licked nights.
The fiddle stitching through this quilt lifts up in
singing flights,
the other’s mourning, meaning tune goes arching up and
down
as life undulates like a heavy snake through the rocked
accordion.
On first reading the poem is a straightforward
celebration of the aerophone instrument known as the accordion, or more
colloquially still, the squeezebox. The instrument’s physical appearance is
described in best Martian-style (see blog on the Anglo-Saxon Riddle), its
sounds are recorded in close detail, and its social memories carefully
collected. It has the characteristics of a typical Murray riddle poem, in fact,
with only title and final word giving the reader an unequivocal answer to the
poem’s contents.
Reading the poem again we notice that there is a second
main subject, which is interchangeable with the first. What starts out as an
analogy in the opening line, the fact that an accordion can look like a large
family Bible being opened and closed, becomes itself a subject, even the main
subject of the poem. It is a poem about the Bible. Unless we are in any doubt
about this, we have only to attend to some of the lines. For indeed the Bible
“stretches to a shelf of books about the pain of man.” It “never sang for a
nob’s baton, or lured the boys to war”. The music of the accordion “consoles
virtue and sin”, but so also does the Word of the Bible. Some phrases are
overt: “It can play the sob in Jesus!” Others carry their own references but
more subtly. For example, that the Bible “harps both out and in” instantly
conjures an image of the Psalmist, for anyone who cares to notice this
possibility. That “life undulates like a heavy snake” comes as no surprise to
readers of the early chapters of Genesis. The physical appearance of the Bible
is used as an analogy for the accordion, but equally the accordion and all its
works are an analogy for the Bible.
For this reason the poem is not only catholic (small-c)
in its appreciation of the diverse beauty of Scripture, its power to proclaim
and reveal, the poem is also seriously anti-fundamentalist. Line by line we
notice how the poet gives different definitions of Scripture, all of them at
odds with the view that Bible is any one person’s possession or exists as a set
of open-and-shut explanations about existence. That it is a family Bible, one
of those cumbersome numbers beloved of the Victorians, tells us that the Bible
is about family, it is about us, all of us in it together, the good, the bad
and the (against all odds) unbelievably holy. The Bible does indeed shuffle “a
deep pack of cards”, that we can be playing with deep into the night. It is not
too proud to beg, as we are told when “it can wheedle you for cigarettes”, and
we are never in doubt who live with Scripture familiarly, that it can “drop a
breathy quote.” That sort of late night jazz is around every corner of
Scripture and shows up with amazing phrasing at Pentecost.
There is yet another level of meaning in this poem and
the clue is in the metre. The poet actually writes the poem in the jaunty
pentameters beloved of the Australian bush poets, and more particularly Andrew
‘Banjo’ Paterson. This prosodic and musical homage takes on new meanings when
we move from a world of Paris and war (i.e. 1914-1918) to a similarly lost
world of “a crossroads hall where bullocks pass and dead girls waltz,” the
passing world of bush life before the 1960s. It is the lost world of the poet’s
childhood, the world of his parents. It is the accordion that both mourns and
honours that time of memory. By juxtaposing the half-rhyme words “mourning,
meaning” the poet deftly indicates that the mourning is the meaning. It is a
tonal contrast in the music itself. Les Murray’s father played the violin, so
it is easy to say that the fiddler in this poem can be his father (if you
wish), lifting the tune of loss played by the accordionist. These two simple
things, the accordion and the Bible, offer up enough meaning for those who love
life, its patterns and beauty, and must endure what life brings them, including
pain and loss.
This is the eleventh in a series of essays about the book in
poetry, first released at this site.
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