The Rat
by Don Paterson (Landing Light, Faber)

A young man wrote a poem about a rat.
It was the best poem ever written about a rat.
To read it was to ask the rat to perch
on the arm of your chair until you turned the page.
So we wrote to him, but heard nothing; we called,
and called again; then finally we sailed
to the island where he kept the only shop
and rapped his door until he opened up.

We took away his poems. Our hands shook
with excitement. We read them on lightboxes,
under great lamps. They were not much good.
So then we offered what advice we could
on his tropes and turns, his metrical comportment,
on the wedding of the word to the event,
and suggested that he might read this or that.
We said Now: write us more poems like The Rat.

All we got was cheek from him. Then silence.
We gave up on him. Him with his green arrogance
and ingratitude and his one lucky strike.
But today I read The Rat again. Its reek
announced it; then I saw its pisshole stare;
line by line it strained into the air.
Then it hissed. For all the craft and clever-clever
you did not write me, fool. Nor will you ever.

This is a poem about a poem that brings a rat into the room, complete with its stench and “pisshole stare”. It is also about the arrogance of a young man possessed of accidental talent which, despite being unschooled and uninformed, produced the rat poem. His untutored arrogance contrasts with the arrogance of the speaker, which has been acquired through the sharpening of his intellectual eye. The speaker believes that he can see what is good or bad in a literary sense, and feels absolute confidence in any judgment he makes in delivering praise or criticism.

Perhaps the advice that the young man needed was not to watch how he wedded a word to an event, or what to do about his “metrical comportment”, but was to remember what it was about the rat that made him write a poem that captured the very stink of it, so that it crawled off the page.

The “one lucky strike” that the young man is accused of was born of a moment in which he must have seen the rat so clearly that it was seared into his consciousness. Perhaps there was nothing else that had ever affected him the way the rat did, in which case no amount of intelligent application of poetic mechanics would recreate such a connection. Strength of feeling and the emotional response to a subject cannot be conveyed by clever use of poetic devices alone; those elements themselves must be manifest in the basic use of language.

The learned individuals whom comprise the “we” of the poem believe that they have discovered a wellspring of talent that can be honed and shaped. They cannot understand why the writer of the poem about the rat doesn’t leap at the chance to respond to their enthusiastic inquiries, because surely the creator of such a work would want to build upon it? He is young, lives a small life on a small island and owns the only shop, which tells us that he is isolated from the more literary and commercial world. But perhaps he has all he needs, and the writing of his poetry is for him alone. Because he does not seek accolades it puzzles those who do.

The learned ones, having searched him out, are disappointed by his other work. His poems are “not much good” which, however, doesn’t mean to say that they are bad. So advice is given, even though it has not been sought, as if tools are being handed over that might facilitate more stunning poems, such as the one about the rat. But the poem was not written with tools that can be found in a literary education; the poem was written with the basic tools that the poet was born with, the simple, linguistic tools that are connected to his emotional core and visual reference library, and which he used skilfully enough to bring the rat to life.

Despite the literary experience of our learned speaker, he acknowledges the rat poem will remain unmatched by anything he might write himself. The rat has clambered up out of the page and told him so. Sometimes it is not the sum of your knowledge, but the way in which you use it that counts.

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