John Press spent his working life as a cultural ambassador for the British Council. This role is visible, perhaps, in his poetry and critical writing, which seems concerned to promote the fullest possible understanding between poet and audience. It is also evident in his editorial and critical work, which included British Council Writers and Their Work introductions to Andrew Marvell (1958), Robert Herrick (1961), Louis MacNeice (1965) and John Betjeman (1974).
“Design”, published in the TLS in 1961, might recall another poet, the W. H. Auden of “Musée des Beaux Arts”. The difference is that, where Auden invokes Brueghel’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” to make the point that we turn away from disaster to our own affairs, Press’s poem is about the way the artist is able to turn pain and suffering into a thing of beauty. The quiet opening gives no warning of the horror to come: the grammatical subject is not the suffering Christ (who is never named) but the painter, “sketching the vacant faces of the crowds”. Even the soldiers are mentioned before their victim. The working artist is further foregrounded by the way the poet half-buries the dreadful martyrdom in a subordinate clause, through which we hurry to the main verb – which is again about the painter: “His task being not to change but to record / The design of the world where cruelty and fear / Intersect, and flesh is nailed to the cross, / He observes …”. The pattern is repeated in the last five lines. It is entirely fitting that a poem about design foregrounds the artist. But the poet balances the demands of compassion and artistic distance in a way that reassures us he is no unfeeling monster. “Compassionate, yet apart”, it is the artist’s job, as it is the poet’s, to arrange what he sees so that it makes an impression on us we will not forget. The unsettling final rhyme – “bloodied tangles” and “scalene triangles” – is sufficiently arresting to do exactly that.
Design
Compassionate, yet apart, the painter stands,
Sketching the vacant faces of the crowds,
The docile efficiency of the soldiers who hammer
Regulation nails into outstretched hands.
His task being not to change but to record
The design of the world where cruelty and fear
Intersect, and flesh is nailed to the cross,
He observes how the huddling women’s sombre cloaks
Set off the glitter of a thrusting spear,
How a curving helmet and an uplifted sword
Counterpoise a chariot wheel’s diagonal spokes;
And, glancing upwards, where a figure is skewered,
The limbs contorted, etchings of pain on the face,
A crown of thorns twisted in bloodied tangles,
He notes how, in austere geometrical grace,
A pattern emerges of scalene triangles.
JOHN PRESS (1961)