About 'Myson Midas'

Even to me, this is a curious poem. I can discuss it, but I doubt if I could ever explain it. I wouldn’t want to: a poem is an experience, not an equation to be worked out. Like Newtonian physics the surface is orderly with cause and effect, but beneath the narrative flow is a much more complex set of associations and references. It’s as if the poem has a subconscious, or a quantum level, where things become less predictable, even chaotic. The origins or the poem lie in my own direct experience, but I wouldn’t own up to being any of the characters actually featured there! Personal experience is re-deployed in the poem and intimacy with the reader established through first-person narration.

A few years ago we moved house to a small cottage in a small village. All English houses need some form of heating and this house had been modernised to include a central heating system driven by a gas boiler. The name of the (alliterating) boiler was Myson (the name of the manufacturer) Midas (the mythical Greek king). In the myth, Midas was granted one wish by the god Dionysus and he asked that everything he touched should turn to gold. Excitement at the gift gave way to realisation that he would starve since even his food turned into precious but inedible metal. Midas begged Dionysus for release from his gift and was directed to bathe in the river Pactolus where his powers left him, but also left the river rich in gold deposits. The moral of the tale lies in the valuation of what really matters, in cherishing proper desires and in the correct use of power.

So, the manufacturer had given the boiler a grandiose name. Through the linguistic magic of nomenclature everything it touched would be transformed: ice would melt under its touch, water would be heated, the cold dispelled. It had the reputation of being the most complex and difficult boiler ever designed; the best and the worst of machines, with numerous electronic sensors, twin pumps, and a dependency on fine differences in electrical resistance. It was both extraordinary and vulnerable: a technological marvel, a temperamental household god.

In the middle of a northern English winter the boiler broke down. We ordered a gas engineer who blanched on seeing the machine: it was notorious amongst gas repairmen. Nothing he did seemed to work; everything the boiler touched turned to cold water. Then, like a fabled sage or prophet, an engineer was traced who had worked under the boiler’s original designer. Here was a man who might, perhaps, understand the complexities of the machine. To our amazement he strode into the house with confidence, greeting the boiler with a benign, even affectionate smile of recognition.

Before the engineer had finished work and restored the boiler to working order, I had begun to toy with the first drafts of the poem. I opted for a regular stanzaic form, so that the poem looks orderly on the page – in fact, roughly the shape of the boiler itself. But the line-endings are sprung and the stanzas don’t correspond to the closure of line endings. The eye has to leap across a space to connect. Like the boiler, I wanted the poem to be a little tricky to operate at first encounter. The poem doesn’t rhyme, but it has an underlying, if intermittent iambic beat. The rhythmical movement is underpinned by alliterative patterns that create forward momentum.

The poem is written in plain language, though it’s peppered with technical terms: sensors, wiring looms, resistances, pilot flame, gaskets. The words themselves have solidity and presence and many of them, like the pilot flame, are nuanced with other, richer meanings. Despite the material origins of the poem I’ve tried to give it a magical and a wryly humorous quality, a kind of narrative ambivalence. And this poem is a story – or parable – of a kind.

The poem begins with references to the boiler’s timing mechanism, which is a kind of clock. Time is at the heart of any story and this machine had to measure the day’s hours in order to heat the house. The drowned persons are immersed sleepers and the gun to raise them is borrowed from Mark Twain’s account of dredging the Mississippi in Huckleberry Finn. The turning of the mechanism is both mechanically exact and mysterious.

When the boiler goes wrong it is seen as exhibiting a kind of personality: an attention-seeking prima-donna, a temperamental specialist, a household god to be soothed before it will deliver grace. The fourth stanza has a direct quote from the gas engineer and forms the heart of the poem: Intermittent faults are hard to find. What should be scientific and rational becomes mysterious and unpredictable. The engineer’s interventions are mysterious, too. He is, literally and metaphorically, working in the dark. Like a blind man his tapping at the stuck valve seems to be a coded message or cry for help. There is the sense that only faith and vision drive him on. Later, he is seen as an angelic visitation sent to restore the faith of others.

The boiler refuses to co-operate and becomes the centre of the narrator’s imagination. What does it do when the house is empty? How does it live, how behave? The engineer’s ministrations seem ritualistic – even his swearing has the rhythmical beat of a poem – and when the pilot flame eventually ignites it seems like the flame which signifies the presence of the consecrated host in the tabernacle. Something has been restored, something is present.

The poem contains a turn in the penultimate stanza (rather like a sonnet) when it moves into the present tense. There’s the implication of a relationship in the poem, which returns at the end to the idea of immersion in sleep – and by extension sleeping together and sexual intimacy: We lie awake, the narrator says. It’s as if the intermittent faults and failings of the boiler echo or mirror the way a relationship struggles to find hope and fulfilment. But something has changed; something might be learned or retained through the restoration of the flame. The ending of the poem is deliberately indefinite, with the couple touching their fingertips in the rising heat that has been half-blindly restored. Like mad King Midas, perhaps they can find what really matters in their lives.

Read more ... Writers who have inspired me