Stay

1

Baby of mine descending
from the nurse’s arms
into your mother’s like
a heron approaching its nest

2

and unpacking its legs
baby born to a creeping
autumn hungry for dark
you kick your heels in the gap

3

of light where dawn and dusk
rub backs in the trough
of winter and son of mine
silently mouth your name

4

with fluttering tongue
after so long in the pulsing
tunnel all walls
are theatre curtains parting

5

between one breast and the next
you defy with a fallen-
limp fist the single
bedroom that is the world

6

and here is the tree whose shadow
passing over the bed
will trace like a blind man’s
hand your features and here

7

a single tear of milk
lining your cheek until
when I look away it is
only to reenter

8

the moment from the echoing
shell of its promise and will
it stay now you child are
the lamp and you are the genie

David Wheatley’s new collection, Child Ballad, recalls the name and work of Francis James Child, the American editor of the 10-volume series The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, more often known as The Child Ballads. Sometimes playfully, as in the title poem, and always inventively, Wheatley’s poems move sinuously through idiomatic and historical time. The Dublin-born author manoeuvres between Scots and English over an “Irish subsoil” which, as he writes in his Carcanet blog, “lies beneath many of these poems.” He explains in the same article, “In calling my book Child Ballad I have consciously grafted poems about two young children on to the ghost of the ballad tradition in a spirit of time travel, moving between present and past with merry promiscuity.”

The title has a further dimension, that of the chivalric rank, “Childe” or “Child”, which, derived from the Old English “Cild”, means “young lord”. In the Middle Ages, it designated a nobleman’s son who had not yet “won his spurs”. Apparently “childe” is still used in the Doric dialect spoken in the north-east of Scotland, Wheatley’s current hunting ground.

Publishing his sixth collection, he has surely won his literary spurs, but perhaps no writer ever entirely outgrows a sense of apprenticeship and its striving excitement, especially when, at whatever stage in life and achievement, they are exploring a new topography and psychic-scape, as in Child Ballad. And, in this week’s poem, Stay, there’s an actual newborn child to lead the parent on his bright-eyed way.

Welcoming the birth of a first son, Stay’s sternly numbered stanzas bring the human infant and non-human creatures together, and combine the present-ness of the new arrival with a tentative and dim-lit sense of magical journeying. The season, autumn, is both “creeping” and “hungry”, the “dawn and dusk” imagined as two animals, “rub[bing] backs in the trough / of winter”. The elements may be rough beasts but they’re barely threatening: now, however, as winter is foreseen, the addressee is no longer “baby of mine” or “baby” but the more assertively masculine “son of mine”.

A keenly observed physical being, the child is compared to “a heron approaching its nest” which (after a stanza-pause) is “unpacking its legs”; then, as hunger stirs, it seems to open its mouth to shape its name “with fluttering tongue”. A gently amused and slightly mysterious glimpse of the world from the child’s vantage point finds “all walls / are theatre curtains parting // between one breast and the next”.

The child’s movements may be intermittently vigorous, though the phrase “kick[ing] its heels” might simply imply a casual boredom, and the defiance in stanza five is executed as languidly as possible “with a fallen- / limp fist…”. While the numbered stanzas appear to want to put the brakes on easy fluidity, the syntax often ignores the opportunity for a rift or pause. Yet the structure inevitably slows the poem down, letting the reader imagine or relive the physical caution of new parenthood, the careful tread and tentative, even tremulous, handling.

In stanza six the tree whose shadow will cross the child’s bed might suggest an image of the crucifixion, a trope typical of the nativity lullaby genre, in which Christ’s death haunts the moment of birth. Yet in a poem and a collection where the natural world is a constant participant, I think perhaps the tree is primarily just a tree, the shadow just a shadow: the blind man’s hand moves delicately, asserting a relationship of differently seeing creatures. Grief’s symbol is here a sign of contentment, “a single tear of milk” accidentally leaving its mark on the child’s face.

As the poem concludes, the earlier mystery recurs and heightens, as if it were the speaker’s turn to travel some perceptual birth canal, “to reenter // the moment from the echoing / shell of its promise”. In an enthralled gasp, the syntax breaks between question and assertion: “and will / it stay now you child are / the lamp and you are the genie.” The line-ending “will” heightens the sense of the word as a noun. The magical copula-doubled statement (“you child are / the lamp and you are the genie”) is more than dream-filled wishing: it is fiercely determined. We realise now that the title itself is both a command and a plea: it expresses a longing for both the child and the “moment” of vision the poem celebrates to “stay”.