On Hearing Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra

Instinct with the division of labour peals

The sonorous and manufactured brass:

The lonely instrument and player caught

And transcended by the mass.

At such art in our time one cannot help

But think with love and terror of the double

Man, and the puzzling dumb notation under

Floors of the future's rubble.

ROY FULLER

The King of Swords

Will you follow me light, into the dark?

Will you clothe the walls

in your sun-steeped pelt

oh creature of gold, will you follow?

Secure the door, remove your shoes

ignore the dissonant score

that etches your bones

and the blood-specked notes in the clouds.

I could master time for you;

preserve your bloom in a jar.

I could leech the day from you

as easy as turning a key.

See, my castle weeps for you!

Will you follow me love, will you follow?

HELEN IVORY

Bartók

It wasn't a style as such, the way they wore

their hats and waistcoats, laboured through the mud

or gathered at the inn. Hard to make a score

of what they sang, the odd shriek and thud,

that nasal whine, the raw polyphony

of their existence. You had to record it all

on the latest equipment, pay them good money

for performing, listen to them call

the devil into the heart of the authentic,

his melancholy to the tongue's rough edge.

It can't have been easy to shift their strangely frantic

strings into the concert hall. It was knowledge

but not as we knew it, nor was it desired.

It screeched and snapped like bullets freshly fired.

Music was war. It was the sound of guns

wheeled into position and the cry of men

in ditches. Music was prophetic. Once

it lodged in the ear the worst would surely happen.

Those women were the wind howling. Rain

was rapid rifles. Concert halls were wrecked,

the century blown wide open. The troop train

would never arrive, and nothing would connect.

The barbarians were always at the gate,

but they were us and now we had burst in

to what we had forgotten. We were late:

our villages were bodies and burned skin.

A voice emerged. It was the voice we shared.