The Yearner
I stacked three pillows, made sure
my head was heavy with bills, wine, yesterday’s
deadline, and I slept hard, tight
as cement on my left arm. The needles came.
At dawn, I dragged it
like a salmon from under my body.
A part of me is dead. Now
I can shake my own hand,
meet myself again for the first time.
How my fingers feel to one another, strangers,
for a tingling moment, I am another.
Promise? This time will be different.
It's rare for me to find a poem that is all at once so intimate and yet relatable at the same time and yet this is a magic trick that Rachel Long seems to be capable of pulling off at any time she chooses. This week's poem is the yearner by Rachel Long and as you can hear it's incredibly striking. It comes from her debut collection My Darling from the Lions 1 and is one of the hosts of poems that grants an intimate look at the life of the poet and the experiences that led to the creation of her poetry.
As I was reading my darling from the lions, I was struck by the length and breadth of a perspective that I was completely unfamiliar with myself. The Collection is split in three separate parts: the first being open, the second being A Lineage of Wigs.The third and final part being dolls. In each part I was introduced to a world that was very new to me in certain aspects. One that is written about with such honesty and candour that you feel you have been present to some part of the events in it by the end of the collection.
The first part open is a recounting of the various relationships, some platonic, some romantic, some sexual that Long has experienced throughout her life. These accounts are so vivid that they’ve earned Long a reputation for her ability to immerse her readers in a poems subject. Various critics have highlighted this as a true skill Long possesses here is an excerpt from poets.org:
Through deft and vivid storytelling, Long wastes no time in immersing readers into her world. She consistently invites us into moments so intimate you almost feel like you’ve stumbled into a room you shouldn’t be in, and yet her sharp wit and wise insight reassures us that we have permission to stick around.2
The second section, A Lineage of Wigs, is a metaphorical title referring to her mother's hair. Part two examines Long’s thoughts and events around family and culture.. Long's mother is from Sierra Leone3and in this second section she looks at how the culture her mother brought with her to Britain has influenced her life and her poetry. Long’s poems are at once based deeply in reality, reflecting some grim and harsh realities of the life of immigrants and other ethnicities in Britain, whilst at the same time weaving in and out of mythological structures and capturing the reader with their fable-like quality. Long has spoken at length about this dual quality and is quoted in an Alice Hiller interview saying:
‘’So many of her stories of growing up are holey snippets. The older I get, the more I realise they might actually be some kind of fiction or poetry. If you question something in one of my mother’s ‘origin stories’, she gets almost confused, or contradictory very quickly. The stories become murky, vague, abstract.’’ (Hiller,2021)
The third section dolls draws on Long’s struggles to build identity as a mixed-race woman in Britain. It is at times an incredible juggling act between what society has demanded of her and what she expects of herself. This tension is l explored through the perfect analogy of a Barbie doll or a set of Barbie dolls as she examines the way in which she used those toys as a child to construct narratives around race and identity, often with harmful results: Each section was completely illuminating in its own way for me.Long has an astounding talent for conjuring empathy in her reader, writing in language that travels directly to the centre of your brain and heart. You come away from moments described by Long as though you've witnessed them first hand or in some kind of strange surrogate form.For me Rachel Long strikes a wonderful balance of intimacy and inclusion, on which is exemplified perfectly in The Yearner.
We can start with the title, the yearner in question is the speaker, who’s struggling with a severe bout of existentialism. There is a familiarity for us in this existential problem.. Stress is an emotion we are forced to wrestle with on a daily basis more and more. This stress is presently heightened with global pandemics, looming recessions and ever creeping inflation. The yearning of the title, to give it an exact quality, is for some kind of reset, If not a reset, then at least a release..
The poem is taken from the first section Open, and is filled with the poets' reflections on love and regret. As with much of the collection there are certain hints at myth, with it occasionally dipping into a fable-like imagery. For example, in the first half of the poem, as we encounter the Yearner they they are setting up a ritual of some sort:
I stacked three pillows, made sure
my head was heavy with bills, wine, yesterday’s
deadline, and I slept hard, tight
as cement on my left arm. The needles came.
At dawn, I dragged it
like a salmon from under my body.
There are steps that must be completed, things that must be made ready for this yearning to be resolved effectively.
Stacking the pillows is like setting a cairn at the top of a mountain or making sure the altar is exactly right for a ceremony. These ironclad preparations come in forms that are recognisable to anyone reading them. In that list of bills wine,yesterday's deadlines is a catalogue of the responsibilities we all have to carry in modern Life. It is instantly relatable; wine can be a signifier that the workday is finally at an end, deadlines seem a constantly shifting goal post and, sadly, we all have bills that always seem due. In the language Long uses, there seems to be some kind of attempt for control made. Phrases like 'made sure'' make us feel that craving for certainty from the speaker. That need for control is reinforced in the image of the dead arm. The speaker says, I slept covered and tight as if it was intentional. We feel a great sense of vulnerability as we picture a self-protecting ball, braced against the events of the day in their sleep. It's also unusual to think of someone giving themselves a dead arm purposefully. Normally, a dead arm would be an accident and something we have no intention of doing. Here however, it’s the primary focus of our speaker.
The value and effort of this entire ritual is reinforced in the final two lines of this first half. That action of dragging something evokes imagery of effort and difficulty. This notion of effort is reinforced again by the line like a salmon. It brings to mind associations with hunting. We feel the yearner has been in search of this for quite some time, it has required the patience of fishing after all and finally they have caught their prize. Even this simple line has connections to folklore. The difficulty of hunting and catching salmon is well documented in mythologies from Irish to Norse, with the fish being highly sought after and prized.4
Whilst the overarching hope of the yearner seems to be a numbing of sorts, there is an unmistakable element of self-punishment mixed through this first section. The speaker compares the weight of their body to cement, the notion of crushing the thing underneath it, her left arm, is quite dark. This is built upon in the borderline sinister line the needles came. This bespoke ritual of unknown reason is not undertaken lightly. There is a heavy cost.
All the elements of this first section combine to create a paradox of sorts. an action of pure will; made sure, dragged dictated by unmoving draining factors; heavy, hard, tight, cement. When I read these first few lines I found myself completely in the headspace of the speaker. Long creates an almost literal weight for the reader to bear as we come to understand the speaker's emotional exhaustion.
That steep price is worth paying as, in the second part the strange ritual is complete and we can see the reason behind it:
A part of me is dead. Now
I can shake my own hand,
meet myself again for the first time.
How my fingers feel to one another, strangers, for a tingling moment, I am another. Promise? This time will be different.
Those first words are striking and reinforce that self-punishment rhetoric that we were introduced to in the first half. There is a self-mutilation that has taken place, something removed. We'd be forgiven for seeing this as some kind of tragic event; a grim and somber moment.
Long,however, knows exactly how to make sure the reader continues, perseveres in a sense, by using enjambment, a poetic technique where the meaning 'runs over' or 'steps over' from one poetic line to the next. As Edward Hirsch wrote it:
[enjambment] creates a dialectical motion of hesitation and flow. The lineation bids the reader to pause at the end of each line even as the syntax pulls the reader forward. This creates a sensation of hovering expectation.5
By finishing the line with Now, Long guarantees the reader will continue, borne by a sense of curiosity. With the use of enjambment here we finally understand what the speaker hoped to achieve in their ritual:
I can shake my own hand,
meet myself again for the first time.
When I read these lines I was immediately struck by their similarity to the philosophical concept of tabula rasa. An old philosophical notion that the human mind when it is born is a blank slate. Long's lines here are most relevant to John Locke's interpretation, which stated:
"Let us suppose the mind to be, ... void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? When has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience."6
To me, the yearner of the poem is seeking that blank slate state and makes it clear in the previous lines. If experience is the key, does our speaker want to get rid of all of theirs?
When looking at the collection my darling from the lion it is clear that this is a culmination of Long’s experiences, not all of them positive
Long herself has been very clear on the presence of shame and guilt within the collection . Here she is discussing it with Dr. Kim Moore:
but i think i think the book deals with a lot of shame
uh and or um i haven't got enough shame for writing half of the things that i
have in this book or i've got too much shame and i needed for somewhere for it to go um
i would just say like write the poems that you want to and need to write and don't
worry about how they're going to be received because if you worry about that before
you've written it then they won't get written and once they're in a book you can hide
it from the people that you're most ashamed of reading it
maybe that's amazing advice basically write them and then worry about it later 7
That want of an escape from shame and guilt is given weight by the subsequent lines; How my fingers feel to one another, strangers, for a tingling moment, I am another.
These turn from observation to a kind of statement: I am another.
Enjambment is used once again to swiftly move from one meaning to the next, a true poetic translation of for one tingling moment.
The yearning then, and thus the purpose of the ritual is finally defined: the speaker craves not being themselves at that moment.
The final line, for me, is heartbreaking:
Promise? This time will be different.
There is no enjambment this time. The line stands alone. When I read it a wave of regret washed from it. Abruptly, the poem has shifted from the speaker delivering a kind of soliloquy to a short, sharp, almost desperate dialogue with themselves.
That single question mark leaps from the page and plants a litany of other questions in my mind. Has the speaker been so disappointed before? How many times has this promise been made and is there any hope of it actually being different this time.
That single question mark completely undermines the final sentence: I promise this time it will be different.
The yearning of the poem is for something that isn't their own experience. This yearner will give anything for another chance, their blank slate.
Long's entire debut collection is filled with these kinds of intimate poems that seem to seep into your skin as you read them. Sometimes they left me feeling as though I knew the speaker as an old friend and other times it felt as though I'd seen things I shouldn't have.
It is a testament to Long's writing that any reader can instantly recognise it. It is a poem that translates the weight of that overwhelm directly into the reader's body to the point we feel it's necessary to lie down with the speaker and attempt the ritual ourselves.
What did you think of the poem, I’d like to point out, as always, that this is my interpretation and as such very much up for debate. If you enjoyed this episode or know someone who might please consider sharing it with them directly or leaving me a review wherever you listen. This week's episode was written by me with music by Maarten Schellekens and is used under creative commons licence.
Long, Rachel. My Darling from the Lions. Picador, 2021.
Rachel Long.” Poetry Archive. Arts Council England, March 5, 2022. https://poetryarchive.org/poet/rachel-long/.
Hiller, Alice. “ How the Body Holds': Rachel Long Talks to Alice Hiller about the Power of 'Girl-Speak' and Art as Transfiguration in 'My Darling from the Lions'.” alice hiller. -, April 21, 2021. https://alicehiller.info/2021/02/16/what-is-ever-easy-to-write-im-interested-in-what-gets-lost-in-memory-wh ere-it-goes-how-the-body-holds-rachel-long-talks-to-alice-hiller-about-the-power-of/.
4 Meyer, Kuno "The Boyish Exploits of Finn", Ériu. Royal Irish Academy..,, pp. 185–186. 1904 12
Hirsch, Edward. “Enjambment.” Essay. In The Essential Poet's Glossary, 95. Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2017. PDF
Locke, John. [1689] 1996. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.i, edited by K. P. Winkler. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
7 Moore, Kim, and Rachel Long. “Forward Meet the Poet - Rachel Long.” YouTube. Forward Arts Foundation, December 1, 2020.
https://youtu.be/pEke1Z2tp0k