A
badly played electric organ (probably a desperate attempt by a parent to amuse
a stir crazy child) wafted into the bathroom and started me thinking. It was the tune that was being played that
interested me, “Greensleeves” – not a particularly remarkable tune, but it seemed
slightly odd to hear something so associated with my home country here in
Castelldefels.
Of course, it is just a
well-known tune, and something that electric organs could have pre-programmed
inside them, but the ‘arrangement’ if it could be called that that accompanied
the inexpertly played melody was anything but traditional or indeed
pleasant.
My mind drifted to Henry VIII,
the golden prince who became the monster king and the belief that he wrote the
tune. I knew that many experts have called
such an attribution into question, but Henry VIII was the first thing I thought
of when I heard the tune.
The belief
that Henry wrote the tune is one of those bits of knowledge that you want to be
true, like the equestrian statues: if the horse has all four legs on the ground
the rider died in his bed; one foot up he died of wounds; two feet in the air
and he (it’s usually a he isn’t it?) died in battle. Not true, but you want it to be true. At least I do.
Anyway I played around with the idea of “Greensleeves”
and Henry having written it for Ann Boleyn when he was trying to bed her, and
linked it in my mind with the statistics that we are daily assailed by. I have seen more graphs of deaths and
infection for individual countries and comparing countries than I think is
healthy. They all look frightening and
if they don’t we assume they are lies!
“Greensleeves”! may not have been written
by Henry VIII, and not for Ann Boleyn, but Ann Boleyn lived and died, she was
executed by a single stroke of an imported French executioner’s sword. That was real and true.
The poem uses ideas of presentation and
truth, it responds to the games that we play with evidence, but it ends with
the reality of mortality, “And blood.”!
I know what I believe
Choose your axes; choose
your scale;
the colours,
thickness of your lines,
and you can show
just what you want
and always claim
that it is fact.
Mere figures are
too bare, too bald –
you need a
narrative to link the scraps
and make them fit for
taking in.
Machine-like and anaemic
sound,
incongruous, but
quite distinct,
from way beyond
the pine trees’ gloom,
and through the
bathroom window’s dust
to me, and unmistakably,
“Greensleeves”
picked out,
unsteady, note by note,
above insistent
electronic bass;
bastardized indeed,
but still
a quintessential
Englishness,
exotically, beside
the Med.
The randy, monstrous,
Tudor king
eying Wilshire’s
daughter Ann,
a maid of honour to
his queen,
tried to woo her
with this song
the story
goes.
Fake News!
The style and evidence
suggest
a later, and another
reign.
But, tradition has
it so,
and that, for most,
is quite enough
without the inconvenient
truth
to spoil that
which we have been told.
A fairy tale?
Well, all of us
like fairy tales.
Perhaps.
But, there was
a straightened neck;
an executioner’s sharp
sword,
and a beheading at
the end.
And blood.
