Poem of the week: Selling His Soul by Sophie Hannah

Selling His Soul

When someone says they have a poet’s soul
You can imagine laughing in their face –
A sensible reaction on the whole
But he convinced me that it was the case
And that his poet’s soul was out of place
What with his body selling advertising space.

The easy explanation sprang to mind –
Was he pretentious, arrogant, insane,
Or was it possible he’d been assigned
Just what he said, and that his poet’s brain,
Like a Laguna in the left-hand lane,
Found itself trapped on unfamiliar terrain?

Even if there was just a one-in-five
Chance of it being true, I’d take the bet;
The souls of advertising salesmen thrive
In many of the poets I have met,
And if I’m right to think I won’t forget
His soul, he’s passed the best test anyone could set.

His life was going to change. He felt inspired,
He said, and vanished from my line of sight.
I didn’t follow him. I have admired
The way Lagunas fly past on the right
While slower cars can only watch their flight,
Stuck in a ten mile tailback, every foggy night.

Light verse isn’t a term much heard these days. As a genre, it has lost out to performance poetry, perhaps through being associated with verse for the page. Certainly, it often builds its argument through complicated formal structures. But these set forms also work well orally, as they were designed to.

Light verse combines elegance on the page with immediacy when performed. It can score a quick satirical point, or render a complex argument memorable. But it’s not in the business of shouting slogans or making jokes listeners have already heard and want to hear again – which demandingness may be its downfall. A contributing factor is the inability of some poetry commentators to distinguish between formal conservatism and political Conservatism. Perhaps you can’t expect an anarchist to write a sestina. But why shouldn’t socialism express its ideals in clever, rather than cliched, rhymes?

Sophie Hannah’s work is always a pleasure to read and hear. Many of her poems explore the cross-purposes that divide, and cruelly connect, men and women. The psychological complexities testify to her additional career as a novelist. Such poems never seem agenda-driven, and rarely involve a black-or-white argument or conclude with a simple victory. Feelings often seem intense, irrational and outside the control the poem’s forms appear to underwrite.

Selling His Soul is a typically unsettling love poem. It was first published in Hannah’s 1996 collection, Hotels like Houses (you can read the title poem of that collection here), and is reprinted in Marrying the Ugly Millionaire, a new and collected edition of her poems that shows the consistency of her achievement over two decades and her undiminished capacity to enlighten and entertain.

The protagonist whose soul we’re invited to contemplate is immediately unappealing, and the reader may reasonably hope he’ll be seen off quickly with some fine, scathing words. Demolition is suggested in the form of a question: “Was he pretentious, arrogant, insane …?” But, instead of delivering a final blast of feminine common sense, Hannah’s speaker weighs up, or pretends to weigh up, the pros and cons, and, surprisingly, moves to concede his point: “… was it possible he’d been assigned / Just what he said …” The reader is implicitly chastised.

Poets can have the souls of advertising men, so why shouldn’t advertising men have the souls of poets? The poem persuades us that such disjunctions between inner and outer identity exist and, furthermore, that some significant meaning adheres to the term soul. However, the speaker’s declared romantic involvement with her subject might cause us to question how logical her logic may really be. This narrator is not necessarily reliable, despite efforts at logic, and finally presents no evidence, beyond personal appreciation, in Mr Adman’s favour.

The rhyme scheme is unusual and tellingly unbalanced. The B rhyme is predominant in each stanza: A B A B B B. Five of the six lines are in iambic pentameter, but the last line of each stanza is an Alexandrine, a metre memorably castigated by Alexander Pope in the Essay on Criticism.

In the rhythmical structure of Selling His Soul, the pace-slowing effect is useful: it creates a meditative space. Additionally, the combination of pentameter and hexameter seems to reflect the Laguna metaphor, and emphasise the contrast of the slow, clogged progress in the left-hand lane with the swiftness achieved when overtaking “on the right” at the end of the poem.

The cynical reader may be tempted to add “Good riddance.” But the car metaphor revisited evokes sympathy with the speaker, generous in defeat, but, emotionally “Stuck in a ten mile tailback, every foggy night.” What could be a more effective and thoroughly contemporary symbol for the impasse of unrequited love? Only the title hints at revenge: perhaps, after all, the poem has sold the adman’s soul to its readers?