Unearthing the Beauty of John Burnside’s ‘History’

Earlier today I found out that my favourite poet died. I’m not usually one to religiously follow writers’ lives, so I actually found out five months after it happened. I’m also not usually one to grow particularly attached to the figures who I know only intangibly through a screen or their printed work, so I really didn’t think it would affect me in the way it did. However, I saw the words ‘John Burnside‘ and ‘death’ and, in a rather pathetic manner, almost cried. (Heavy emphasis on the almost…) 

Upon hearing this and recovering from a display of the overtired and oversensitive, I reread the first work of his I ever encountered - his poem ‘History,’ which I studied at A Level. I had prayed for it to be my exam piece, and maybe with the assistance of an extensive crystal collection and quite incessant manifestation, it came up. I remember being sat in my college hall and smiling to myself (a very rare moment during exam season I can tell you now). Thanks to Burnside, I passed that exam and, at the risk of sounding moderately deranged, actually enjoyed the process of sitting it. Again, a very rare occurrence.

I’m not going to sit here and analyse it in that kind of depth now. To be honest, I probably couldn’t remember half of what I wrote back then. But what I do remember is that it is one of the most beautiful, poignant and well-written poems I have ever beheld. It speaks of the impermanence and unpredictability of life, constantly moving between that which is transcendent (philosophy, worldly influence and corruption) to that which is immanent (the physical world right in front of you). Drawing on the image of a toddler playing in the sand after the effects of 9/11, Burnside writes of the innocence of childhood amongst a much more corrupt and immoral world. 

Infused into a description of a beach he visits with his son, are contemplative moments tied to the anxiety of adulthood. It is a poem I often come back to and have found to resonate more and more with as I move further from my own childhood into my twenties. My favourite lines have always been in the second half of the poem: 

‘Sometimes I am dizzy with the fear

of losing everything […]

we trade so much to know the virtual

we scarcely register the drift and tug

of other bodies

                     scarcely apprehend

the moment as it happens’

— ‘History,’ John Burnside, 2001

I think this kind of reflective, personal and intimate poetry is something we perhaps take for granted. When I discovered Burnside had died, I naturally turned back to these lines and now find them even more poignant. Through his writing, he has left an insight into his own living thoughts and anxieties that we never would have witnessed had it not been for the freedom of poetry. In the hopes of not sounding too pretentious, I recently read Shelley’s unfinished essay, ‘In Defence of Poetry’ (in defence of me… it was entirely for my course.) In it, Shelley demonstrates an appreciation for poetry as a means of ‘making beautiful that which is distorted.’ He suggests that all well-crafted poetry has the ability to ground both poet and reader; that it exists as an art form that remains both personal yet deeply political too. I think John Burnside had the ability to create just that.