Sailing away on a sea of poetry

A talented young rapper spoke of love and loss and summoned Blake and Shelley to mind on the long, slow journey to China

I WAS in the Yukon last Saturday night to hear Kate Tempest, a poet from London, performing with her band, Sound of Rum. She’s 24, and has red hair and she’s not tall.

I used to think that rappers were just cliches of masculinity in motion; assaulting the world with humourless doggerel, vibrating with anger, and underclass attitude. But on Saturday night, Kate Tempest proved herself to be a much more sophisticated beast. Her words flowed, and her sense of rhythm was rapid, and her jeans and top were all that a fashion conscious rapper might aspire to; but far from being a cliche, her body language was vulnerable and self-revealing; wrenching emotions from so deep inside herself that her torso sometimes flexed in spasms, as if she was in pain.

And her lyrics were full of love, and wounds revealed, and passion for lost lovers. She had a controlled wildness and flow of poetic language that reminded me of Shakespeare’s soliloquies. The clarity of her vowels, the tyranny of her intelligence and the delicious lightness of the F word on her English tongue made me long to talk with her.

After the gig I joined her for a brandy and I mentioned that I was going to China in a few days. "I'll be performing in Gare St Lazare's production of Moby Dicknext weekend in Shanghai," I declared.

I was trying to impress her, and I regretted the words the moment they were uttered.

What I really wanted to say was that she made me feel like reading Blake and Coleridge and Shelley again, out loud, because her performance was, in a sense, a reinvention of Romantic poetry. I wanted to tell her that I could hear in her husky English vowels, such poetic feeling as might have inspired Shakespeare to pen passionate lines for Ophelia, or Juliet.

The following day I kept thinking about her, and watching her on You Tube, and the more I watched her, the more I liked her English voice, and the torrent of emotion that seemed to be a link with Shakespeare’s world.

It was Remembrance Sunday too, a time when old men are inclined to recall their youth, and what their fathers told them about all those trenches far away, where even poets perished for the sake of nothing much.

Last week I stood in a schoolhouse near Delvin, built 200 years ago, as an old man showed me his father’s war medals.

“He was gassed in the trench,” the old man said. “For years afterwards, he suffered severe nose bleeds. One day when I was five, he fell in the yard, and other men ran to him, and there was blood everywhere. They were plugging his nose in an attempt to stop the bleeding; it was like a scene from a battle. They took him to Mullingar Hospital, where he died.”

“Was it a big funeral?” I wondered.

“I don’t know,” he said, “because they never told me he had died. In those days people thought it was better not to tell children anything.” A few weeks afterwards, the little boy was in the yard, with his mother, as she was hanging clothes on the line, and out of the blue the boy said: “Mammy, why do you never wash daddy’s shirts anymore?” She broke down in tears, and told him that his father was dead, and that she was sorry for having kept it a secret from him.

On Tuesday evening, I started out for China. On the train to Dublin a man from Colloony admired my leather suitcase. "I took the Princess Maudto Hollyhead one time," he said. "You'd rarely see a suitcase back then. People would carry all their personal belongings in an overcoat; and the overcoat was rolled into a ball and tied up with the belt, or bits of string. It wasn't easy," he said, "crossing in a boat with 400 cattle below deck; the smell that came up through them floorboards was hard to endure."

I woke on Wednesday morning in an Airport Hotel; the long journey to China still ahead of me, but I was still thinking of the Princess Maud– a steamer that saw action at Dunkirk, and on the beaches of Normandy, and ended her days carrying cattle to Holyhead. A vessel that had no stabilisers, which was unbearable, on a rough sea, for the poor Irish, on their way to London, without even a verse of Shelley or Coleridge on their unlettered tongues.