Abstract
In ‘Gorgo and Beau’, the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan’s adaptation of an eclogue, two human body cells converse on their nature, function and origin. Gorgo, a cancer cell, insists on the separation of the mental and the physical, while Beau, a normal cell, rather timidly suggests that cancer may sometimes have non-physical causes: there must be, he says,
self-suppressions, inhibitions,
Guilts black or bleak or blistering, promises unkept,
Hatreds unspoken, festering coils
With their fangs and toxins destabilising
Cells that are as open to emotion as to disease.
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Notes and References
Edwin Morgan, A Book of Lives (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007), p. 62.
Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 3.
In W. B. Yeats’s ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’, his eclogic elegy for Major Robert Gregory, the Shepherd says, ‘I am looking for strayed sheep; / Something has troubled me and in my trouble / I let them stray. I thought of rhyme alone, / For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble’ (W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 142).
Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 14.
Sharon Olds, The Father [1992] (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), p. 2.
Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Shocken Books, 1985), p. 57.
David Kennedy, Elegy (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 86.
Harold Schweizer, Suffering and the Remedy of Art (New York: State University of New York, 1997), p. 173.
Melissa F. Zeiger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 174.
James T. Patterson, The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 151.
Barbara Clow, ‘Who’s Afraid of Susan Sontag? or, the Myths and Metaphors of Cancer Reconsidered’, Social History of Medicine, vol. 14, no. 2 (2001), pp. 293–312, at p. 297.
Anne Sexton, The Collected Poems (New York: Mariner, 1981), p. 38.
Sexton, letter to W. D. Snodgrass (18 November 1959), Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, ed. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (New York: Mariner Books, 2004), p. 91.
Paul Muldoon, The Annals of Chile (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), p. 39.
Muldoon, ‘Between Ireland and Montevideo’, quoted in Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 176.
John Masefield, Spunyarn: Sea Poetry and Prose, ed. Philip W. Errington (London: Penguin, 2011), p. 24. Masefield’s first voyage as a teenager was to Chile.
Paul Muldoon, Poems1968–1998 (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 193.
Michael Longley, Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 30.
Michael Ignatieff, ‘The Nightmare from Which We Are Trying to Awake’, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Holt, 1997), pp. 164–90, at p. 168.
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© 2015 Iain Twiddy
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Twiddy, I. (2015). Parental Cancer: The Functions of Repression. In: Cancer Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362001_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362001_3
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