Deconstructing ‘The Dying King’ by Matthew M. C Smith

Deconstructing ‘The Dying King’

The Welsh writer Matthew M. C Smith discusses a poem published by Anti-Heroin Chic that will feature in his second poetry collection. 


Poets are often reluctant to discuss their poems in any detail. Critical dissection, poring over the anatomy of their work, can be anathema to protecting the mysteries of the craft. Since time immemorial, the powers of the poetic imagination have been romanticized. This reflects the protectiveness writers have over their work and also has the effect of reinforcing the elevated position of poet to that of visionary or seer in society. Poems are still, to an extent, holy ground.

Homer, Hesiod, Sappho and other classical writers of the ancient world, invoked goddesses and muse-figures to provide divine literary inspiration and in the Welsh medieval text, The Mabinogion, the drops of poetic inspiration tasted by Gwion from Cerridwen’s cauldron come from an unknown, bubbling recipe. Wordsworth described lyric poetry as the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ (1798) and Emily Bronte described the ‘hovering visions’ and ‘glories’ (1846) in her poem about the imagination. Robert Graves suggested that in his truest poems, he was channeling an ancient White Goddess from matriarchal societies (1948), also seen in Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s work. In a similar romantic vein to these poets, Wallace Stevens described the poet as ‘the priest of the invisible’ (1957) and celebrated the powers of the imagination in poetry and as a force in nature.

There is a radically alternative perspective to this glorification of the poetic imagination and the idea of poem as sacred object; the pragmatist’s view, where the process of writing a poem can be seen as more arbitrary, where language and meanings are a human activity, assembled without divine inspiration, where poems remain fluid in meaning and open to interpretation. From this view, the poem is not a sacred artifact and poets cannot control the plethora of meanings to be drawn from their work. This view is in tune with a more modern sensibility – the idea of ‘the death of the author’ (Roland Barthes, 1967) and reader-response theory, which focuses on how texts are received. Julia Kristeva (1986) described literary texts as being made up of a ‘“mosaic of citations’”, usefully reminding us of how literary forms are not original s but are always intertextual, drawn from a myriad of influences. Readers, reviewers, academics, can enlighten a poet about their own work and suggest links with traditions, genres and movements and be educated with feedback on the various tools and techniques they employ.

Personally, as a poet, I feel that part of the writing process is sacred and has a purity all its own. My own poetic process often involves seeing the shapes of poems, their words and lines, as they emerge in my mind like photos surfacing from the waters of a dark room. Images and phrases materialize and I work them out on paper, developing ideas. Poems are extremely malleable but eventually reach a state I consider as ‘finished’; when there is a sense of completeness or exhaustion sets in! I also try automatic writing, which is a freewheeling style but, even then, start with an idea or phrase. There is a spirit of romanticism in this and it seems as if words pour out, molten. In reality, away from the creative process I’m somewhere between romantic and pragmatist. I love chopping up my work and experimenting. I am not precious about editorial suggestion and am open to feedback and change. However, an editor described one of my poems as ‘sacred’ so I’m going to discuss it, here.

This is the sacrilegious activity of dissecting one of my poems, spilling its secrets, and I’d welcome any more insightful comments. I’ve chosen ‘Dying King’, a poem that was published with Anti-Heroin Chic magazine in their ‘Grief’ issue of 2019. This is one of the most personal poems I’ve written and I actually find it hard to read. The poem is about the death of my father, Michael, in 2012, and every time I read it, I get emotional. I’m going close to the bone on this one and it probably should carry some kind of emotional warning. Bear with me.

The poem is an attempt to dignify the death of my father but not shirk the horror of what he went through. He is the ‘Dying King’ of the poem’s title, with this mythic language consciously used as it resonates with anthropologists/ mythographers, such as James Frazer, Jane Harrison and Joseph Campbell. Counterbalancing this mytheme is the visceral, harrowing detail of him being on a morphine driver in an utterly depleted state. At the end of his life at the age of 62, he went to a hospice in Swansea, and must have lost at least 50% of his body weight after chemotherapy and cancer. 

The first line shifts from the immediacy of the present simple tense - being at his bedside - to repetition with the addition of the adverb ‘always’ to give the added idea of being with him in spirit in the infinite:

          I am with you. I am always with you.

As he deteriorated, my father’s skin became ‘paper-thin’ and nurses found it very hard to put in canula needles because of collapsed veins (I’ve written a prose piece about this recently). I wanted to highlight how emaciated he was through a lean, spare form of poetry.

This was a difficult creative decision to make, not least because this is relatively recent and my family are still very wounded by his passing. Is this opening those wounds again I have asked myself? The imagery in the poem is incredibly disturbing for me, as I describe ‘balsa bones’, ‘famine’s faultlines’, his ‘lucent husk’ and his ‘twilight mask’. My reason for choosing visceral language is because I don’t want to forget how bad things were and what he went through. I restore humanity to the poem by bringing tender memories. As a young child, I experienced night-terrors and would go to seek sanctuary in my parents’ bed. I remember sleeping under his arm in the darkness and feeling instant safety – this links with the later reference to us being of the same skin in darkness. The savage irony of staying with my father at the hospice, night after night, looking after him on the fold-down bed next to his, still cuts to the core.

There are several desperate points in the poem that are, again, highly personal and without any affectation, one of them being the utter despair of ‘How did it come to this?’ I find it very hard to read this section of the poem and not get emotional. At this point, the memories are painful and crushing disbelief is conveyed. This leads to perhaps the most horrifying section, where I attempt to evoke the terror of pain without morphine. I brought in a line from another poem (an unpublished modern take on part of The Mabinogion, which sits in a draw somewhere at home) - ‘the sibilant hiss of the underworld’ – to evoke the darkness and the evil of cancer, which looms in the ‘gaping maw of night’. This night is the Welsh underworld, Annwn, that features in another poem I’ve written, ‘Henrhyd Falls’:

          Morphine dulls your silent ward. It keeps you 
          from fires in the fields, 

          from the sibilant hiss of the underworld,
          the gaping maw of night. 

In the last lines of the poem, I retreat from horror and represent the physical bond my father and I had then, and now, across worlds. 

          We are skin, my dark  
          follows your dark.

From another scrap of paper in my drawer at home, I brought in the last line, the refrain:

          Above tides, I feel winds of unconquerable spirit. 
          I stand at the edge, choking with loss. 

I wanted to finish the poem by shifting away from the scene of death and far away in a place surrounded by the elements. The last lines suggest choking grief and loss but there is a hint of hope that his spirit is somewhere in the winds around the clifftops, which are, in my mind, somewhere on the coast of Gower (my mind pictures a cliff promontory – somewhere like Pennard Cliffs). Freedom came to him but at ultimate cost. He is in words, memories, feelings and spirit now. 

The poem has been altered, cut, rearranged and edited hundreds of times over two years. It was obsessively changed until I saw the call from Anti-Heroin Chic, which acted as a catalyst to completion. The short stanzas that were cut and cut create hesitation and pause in the poem and alliteration, internal rhyme and assonance are used to draw attention to the words and create a heightened, dark, otherworldly atmosphere. Finally, I asked two writers, Laura Wainwright and Ankh Spice, to look over it and made some of their suggested changes. This is one of the most important stages as fresh, expert eyes will notice a typo or question a word, suggest an alteration or deletion, which will  almost always improve and sharpen a piece.

I’ve written a number of poems about my father and something Alun Lewis wrote is never far from my mind. The Welsh war poet described his poetry as containing ‘what survives of the beloved’. I follow what Lewis said and write poems about people I love. I will continue to commemorate my father from time to time. I pray that his indomitable spirit will live on in my writing and in his legacy of family. Thank you to James Diaz for publishing this poem in Anti-Heroin Chic and letting it out into the world.
RIP: Michael CAF Smith


Dying King 

I am with you. I am always with you. 

You pulse with the click of the drive. 
The dying king.  

I press your paper-thin 
shroud of skin, as thumbs curl  

over balsa bones, ridges royal. 
My eyes probe famine’s faultlines,

scan this lucent husk, 
your twilight mask. 

Under your arm, 
now thin, translucent, I once slept, 
 
sheltered from terrors in the night.  
Now, I keep watch. 

How did it come
to this?

Morphine dulls your silent ward. It keeps you 
from fires in the fields, 

from the sibilant hiss of the underworld,
the gaping maw of night. 

We are skin, my dark  
follows your dark.
*
Above tides, I feel winds of unconquerable spirit. 
I stand at the edge, choking with loss. 




Matthew M.C. Smith is a Welsh poet from Swansea. He is published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Icefloe Press, Seventh Quarry, BrokenSpine, Re-side, Back Story, Other Terrain and Wellington Street Review. He studied a PhD on Robert Graves and Wales and Celticism and is the editor of Black Bough Poetry. Twitter: @MatthewMCSmith @BlackBoughpoems  FB: @MattMCSmith ‘BlackBoughpoetry’
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