Today, the twenty-sixth of February,
I, halfway to the minute through
The only life I want to know,
Intend to end this rather dreary
Joke of an autobiography.
Facing the prospect of turning 35, having successfully fought off an attack by the flu, Barker sat down to compose “True Confession” as a poetic autobiography stimulated by boredom. The long poem touches upon his birth in Essex thirty-four years earlier with directness, but if the rest is truly autobiographical, then it is a mystery or puzzle to be solved. The verse filled with allusions, poetic devices, dense imagery and obsessive sexuality reaches a crescendo which has taken the poet from the date of commencing composition in October, 1947 to the date which opens part 7. That date is his birthday and by all reasonable estimations of intent, the 1948 observation would have been his last. But what sounds like something from a suicide note turns out to be merely the end of the poem: the poet would go on to celebrate a birthday in 1990.
You rave like any soapbox grabber,
Evil is simply this, my friend
A good we do not understand.
Often only the bottom two lines of this excerpt are quoted, taken out of context and appearing to be just a simple declaration when the actual meaning is, like the entire poem, much more complex. This long poem is, in fact, a debate about good and evil a man and an angel who has much in common with Mephistopheles. The subject of the debate is not that there is good and evil in the world, but that—as with the man’s name—goodness and sin are intertwined and inextricable.
Laugh, my comedians, who may not laugh again—Soon, soon,
Soon Jeremiah Job will be walking among men.
In response to the Munich Conference at which British Prime Minister (and other European leaders) sacrificed a small parcel of land in exchange for preventing war that would devastate them all, Barker wrote “Seven Munich Elegies.” These are not biographical poems, but apocalyptic, investing the profound disappointment in the appeasement of Hitler by Europe with the expectation that the ravages to come would be Biblical in scope. “Elegy Number 1” is especially Biblical as the poem abandons precise structure and moves swiftly from one vision to another as if replicating the lone voice in the wilderness whose warnings are dismissed as mere madness.
Good God, grant, that in reviewing
My past life, I may remember
Everything I did worth doing
Seemed rather wicked in pursuing
Not to be confused with “True Confessions” written at the halfway point of the poet’s life, “The True Confessions of George Barker” is a two-volume commitment to the idea that the unexamined life is not worth pursuing. It is now the 1960’s and what was labeled an autobiographical joke composed out of boredom has become a raging excoriation of God, the devil and himself. But, as this excerpt reveals, all that rage is not presented without humor.
