Rhyme & reason
Rhyme and reason go well together. ‘The Missing Shade of Blue’ draws me in with its opening words: ‘There’s one particular shade of blue / you’ve never seen’. A note tells us that ‘One particular shade of blue’ is ‘David Hume’s own phrase’, while the epigraph places the relevant source (A Treatise of Human Nature) in 1739. The poet explains that Hume ‘claimed you could restore / the missing shade of blue by pure / thought’ and wonders in his concluding lines:
Maybe this is what thought’s for,
to make or find
a colour you’ve not seen before
inside your mind.
‘Pure thought’ is itself such an entrancing thought, and I love the poem’s gentle rhymes. Everything about this poem seems right.
‘The Prince and the Cobbler’ sounds like the title of a fable. However, this poem looks back at and considers John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. I like the way the poem moves: the sharp contrast between the first two stanzas, the way the third takes us back to the moment at the beginning, and how the strong end rhyme keeps on going, slipping from one stanza into the next. The poem begins with a cobbler, ready to cobble, surrounded by his tools. The middle stanza keeps us wondering:
But things are not as simple as they look.
Somehow a prince’s soul and consciousness
has found a cobbler’s body to possess.
This person surely is a prince, his mind
a slate already chalked-on by the kind
of life no cobbler ever even dreamt.
Meanwhile, ‘The Ship of Theseus’ considers Plutarch’s question about the repaired vessel: ‘When all components had been replaced, / was it the same ship?’ This makes me wonder at what point the ship loses its soul. Answers are found in the Octagon of the Bath Assembly Rooms, where disappointment turns to enlightenment:
Disappointment makes me answer no —
the material is material.
In the Octagon, though,
design strikes me as vital
Illumination comes in the poem’s final lines as the light floods in, bringing the image I’m still seeing in my mind.