George MacBeth, who died prematurely of motor neurone disease in 1992, was a prolific poet, novelist, children's writer, anthologist and ambassador for poetry.
Working-class and Oxford-educated, shaped by postwar and anti-Movement influences, a stylish and often experimental formalist, he was undoubtedly a poet of his time, but also ahead of it. His birds and beasts may not be subjected to such fierce psychic projection as those of his contemporary, Ted Hughes, but they are realised with sympathetic verbal energy, and a nice interplay of mannerism, metaphysics and muscularity.
This week's poem, The God of Love, is written as an eye-witness account, almost in defiance of the quoted epigraph. "I found them," the narrator declares authoritatively of the herd of musk-oxen, as if reporting on a field trip. After the crisp, distant precision of the initial scene-setting, the threat to the oxen is registered on the reader's skin in a little shiver as we're shown the wolves with their "ears flattened against the wind". This movement is intensified by the next stanza's dramatic "whirlpool of wolves".
The poem's dominant religious symbol is prefigured early on in the image of the "ark of horn". The ark is static, enshrining the sacred, and itself sacred. This is its tragedy.
At first, the moving "fragment of bone and muscle" seems more abstract than animal. It will turn out to be a shorthand description of one of the oxen, whose violent movement is economically conveyed by that powerful verb, "plunged". The poet is careful to signal the distinction between the two opposing forces, and references to the "herd" or the "pack" tell us which animal regiment is engaging with which.
Against the animals' circling movement is set the upward flight of the owl. Her aerial view is accompanied by maternal understanding. A more forceful contrast is drawn between the "iron collar of death" that the oxen instinctively but disastrously employ and the young calf's need for "a softer womb" – a grassy safe-haven that seems to morph into death itself. The oxen are literally bone-headed: their guardianship of the calf has become a compulsive, futile ritual.
The image of the dead creature with its horns buried in the ice is an unanticipated, perfectly placed shock. It has an archaic quality, suggesting the sacrificed god himself, whose death sets in train the sacrifice of the whole herd. The narrative seems like a pencil sketch, in that we see living movement and shape, but not the colour of blood or the glisten of guts. It is somehow elegantly done despite the disruptive effect of caesuras and enjambment as MacBeth stretches his sentences over lines and stanza-breaks in unpredictable sweeps and lunges.
The stanzas themselves seem like supple collars, encirclings formed by the extensive first and fifth lines. While their shape is quite unlike that of George Herbert's poem The Collar, that poem's cry, "Call in thy death's-head there", surely re-echoes in The God of Love. The repeating pattern of lines of different lengths and degree of indentation also suggests Herbert's verse forms.
MacBeth's language is beautifully melodic: the stanzas unfold like operatic arias, becoming more florid and complex in thought as the poem develops. There's never any doubt that the unfolding action will be a tragic one, and the last line underlines this starkly. The social critique might inculpate religion, perhaps, and even love – but more profoundly it is a demonstration against defensive masculinist values, and warns that the iron collars of blockade and invasion can never nourish the future. I suggested it was an "animal" poem, but it's really no more an animal poem than Derek Mahon's A Disused Shed in Co Wexford is a mushroom poem. Like the latter, it is a great political parable for desperate times.
• The God of Love appears in George MacBeth's Selected Poems, published by Enitharmon Press, by whose kind permission it is reproduced here.
The God of Love
The musk-ox is accustomed to near-Arctic conditions. When danger threatens, these beasts cluster together to form a defensive wall, or a "porcupine", with the calves in the middle.
– Dr Wolfgang Engelhart
I found them between far hills, by a frozen lake.
On a patch of bare ground. They were grouped
In a solid ring, like an ark of horn. And around
Them circled, slowly closing in,
Their tongues lolling, their ears flattened against the wind,
A whirlpool of wolves. As I breathed, one fragment of bone and
Muscle detached itself from the mass and
Plunged. The pad of the pack slackened, as if
A brooch had been loosened. But when the bull
Returned to the herd, the revolving collar was tighter. And only
The windward owl, uplifted on white wings
In the glass of air, alert for her young,
Soared high enough to look into the cleared centre
And grasp the cause. To the slow brain
Of each beast by the frozen lake what lay in the cradle of their crowned
Heads of horn was a sort of god-head. Its brows
Nudged when the arc was formed. Its need
Was a delicate womb away from the iron collar
Of death, a cave in the ring of horn
Their encircling flesh had backed with fur. That the collar of death
Was the bone of their own skulls: that a softer womb
Would open between far hills in a plunge
Of bunched muscles: and that their immortal calf lay
Dead on the snow with its horns dug into
The ice for grass: they neither saw nor felt. And yet if
That hill of fur could split and run – like a river
Of ice in thaw, like a broken grave –
It would crack across the icy crust of withdrawn
Sustenance and the rigid circle
Of death be shivered: the fed herd would entail its under-fur
On the swell of a soft hill and the future be sown
On grass, I thought. But the herd fell
By the bank of the lake on the plain, and the pack closed,
And the ice remained. And I saw that the god
In their ark of horn was a god of love, who made them die.
