Lockdown by Simon Armitage

 Pictorial Journey of a Pandemic Poem 'Lockdown'

          Hello readers, this blog is in response to the Sunday Reading activity on A poem Lockdown by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad sir, the Department of English, MKBU. In this blog I am going to share my experiences of Lockdown with the reference of this poem.

          The poem "Lockdown" is written by Simon Armitage, the poet Laureate of England.

Simon Armitage, in full Simon Robert Armitage, is a British poet, playwright, and novelist whose poetry is attuned to modern life and vernacular language and has been regarded as both accessible and revelatory. His works were widely anthologized and have been broadly popular. In 2019 Armitage became poet laureate of Great Britain.

The poem "Lockdown" was first published in The Guardian on 21 March 2020. It is a response to the coronavirus pandemic, and references the Derbyshire "plague village" of Eyam, which self-isolated in 1665 to limit the spread of the Great Plague of London, and the Sanskrit poem "Meghadūta" by Kālidāsa, in which a cloud carries a message from an exile to his distant wife. 

Lockdown by Simon Armitage

And I couldn’t escape the waking dream

of infected fleas

in the warp and weft of soggy cloth

by the tailor’s hearth in ye olde Eyam.

Then couldn’t un-see

the Boundary Stone,

that cock-eyed dice with its six dark holes,

thimbles brimming with vinegar wine

purging the plagued coins.

Which brought to mind the sorry story

of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,

star-crossed lovers on either side

of the quarantine line

whose wordless courtship spanned the river

till she came no longer.

But slept again,

and dreamt this time

of the exiled yaksha sending word

to his lost wife on a passing cloud,

a cloud that followed an earthly map

of camel trails and cattle tracks,

streams like necklaces,

fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants,

embroidered bedspreads

of meadows and hedges,

bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks,

waterfalls, creeks,

the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes

and the glistening lotus flower after rain,

the air

hypnotically see-through, rare,

the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow

but necessarily so.

Click here to read further about the poem

The poem is about two dreams, and hence the poem can be divided into two parts. 

1. The great plague of London 

2. Travel to the time of Kalidas's Meghaduta - The cloud messenger.

              In the beginning, the poet depicts a hallucinating dream sequence of 1665-66  Plague Stricken village Eyam. Here he depicts a street in London. The line, 

Then couldn’t un-see the Boundary Stone,

          In this portion, there is a presentation of how people used to manage things. The boundary was set by a stone and people had to put coins in wine in hole of stone. During pandemic time we were at our home, not going outside. Each and every village or city had made boundaries. We were sanitizing our hands so we could prevent Covid from spreading.

Which brought to mind the sorry story

of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,

star-crossed lovers on either side

of the quarantine line

whose wordless courtship spanned the river

till she came no longer.

           We can relate these lines with the situation where people prevent meeting each other or where marriages were stopped by couples to stop dissemination of the virus.

       The second portion is about an exotic dream wherein the dreamer travels back in time to Kalidas's Meghdut- the cloud messenger. The reference is from an Indian Sanskrit literature. It describes how a yaksa (or nature spirit), who had been banished by his master to a remote region for a year, asked a cloud to take a message of love to his wife.

      During Covid Pandemic, many people were away from their family and couldn't meet them still it not get into the control. There were deep pain or grief for all of them. 

What is your first reaction to this poem? Are you able to connect your Lockdown experience with this poem?

     When I first went through this poem, the picture of that time of my village was going in series with my eyes. I was imagining each and every image or incident which I had seen with my bare eyes. The presentation of the village Eyam laid me into the deep memories of my village. Though it is not near to the cities, we were also getting Covid Cases. I am memorizing the day when the first case of Covid came to my village. We all were in fear or in worry and amazement. Everything stopped. Each and every street set boundaries, it was not even open for other people out of the street. Many of my relatives passed away due to Covid. Whenever we started Television, we were getting the death ratio and were threatened by it. But as time passed it became as normal as fever and cold.

"Which brought to mind the sorry story

of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,

star-crossed lovers on either side

of the quarantine line."

                I want to connect this line for my educational journey. Because of Lockdown, we were not able to go to the college. That time technology helped us a lot, but can we ever forget the charm of classroom study And discussion? No, not at all. There was a king boundary between me and my college life.

If you are Chinese or African, would you be happy with the concluding message which the speaker is deriving or interpreting from this poem?

            If I would be Chinese or an African I would be happy with contruding message of the poem. This poem is not about a particular religion or particular race but it deals with the whole world in general and that is the real charm of literature to think about the whole world. Here we can connect two other literary works which spread the same message.

• The ballad of East and West by Rudyard Kipling
• 'Where the mind is without fear and the head is hold high'. - Gitanjali 35 - by Rabindranath Tagore

       Though the incidents which are presented in the poem are of England and India, the poem specs about the general condition of the world during the Corona Pandemic. 

        In a nutshell, we can say that the poem presents the dire condition of the world during the Corona crisis but by the examples of the Great plague and Meghaduta. The poet Simon Armitage is presenting here a true image of the world.

     At last I would like to Thank Baradsir for giving us this task and by this we all get a space to recollect those days and relate it with many literary works and past incidents.

Thanks for visiting...