Listen! Something marvellous happened in the middle of the night when noisy folk had shut up and gone to bed. The Old English poet in The Dream of the Rood has to tell you about it. Fabulous and gleaming, then smeared with blood and sweat, the Cross on which Christ was crucified is appearing to him, one way then another, steadily but in flashes. It continues to stand steadfast, continues alternately to shine with glory or drip with gore, while telling the poet how it grew up: its innocent tree-childhood, one among many in the wood; being singled out, cut down, and carried away by the men who turned it into an instrument of torture; being put in the position of killing the young hero stretched on it dreadfully, desirously embracing him though it killed. The flashes troubled me. They reminded me of what my father suffered: obsessive images of harm occurring to his family, images of himself doing that harm. In my late teens, at university, I found ways to write about the poem that left out affect. But things on pages continued to move.

Before you enter the deep bath, roofed with a canopy of stars, you have begun to feel a change. Bodies in motion and leaping flame are reflected in polished metal, showing or casting shadows on the glitter moss of mosaic. They seem to metamorphose. Creature, you feel part of creation as process. So, at least, my friend Mike – theologian, classicist, puppeteer and trained clown – explained to me how Christian baptism in the ancient world perhaps partook of a sensibility not alien to earlier men afraid of being turned into deer, women desperate to become trees, and in-between genders blowing like windflowers. Dying to the old life and entering the new was a break, but not a discontinuity. I think this is what Mike said. The immersion in movement, openness to being moved, troubled me.

Mike and I are working with a dancer. The dancer creates a score in two parts, displayed on two walls in the studio. One charts and lists wounds from the Iliad, with helpful diagrams of human anatomy. Another cues us into gesture. Mike and I stand in the corner, looking from wall to wall, before stepping out onto the black floor. As part of the rehearsal process, one of us reads portions of Emily Wilson’s Iliad translation aloud, over and over. The other two move. This is discombobulating for me, despite my previous experiments in immersive theatre. Surely you don’t do that to Homer? Certainly not with a fluffy seal puppet among the props… Reading Great Literature contemporary-leisure-style can assume the privilege of stillness. You sit with the text, and its difficulty (emotional, linguistic, other). You turn it as you contemplate it as a surface of words; you notice areas of brightness for you, highlight them further, focus more closely, take some distance, reckon with the strange. You are the still (small) point that contains the words’ (immense) turning world. It does not matter if you are in bed with the book, or if you have left the book, or screen, behind, to walk or roll with the text in memory, waiting on bleachers or in hospital or in a queue in the late-night shop; nonetheless, you become, and benefit from, the stillness around the text or textual fragment. ‘Walking poetry’ workshops, or taking a poem outdoors, need not at all disturb the relationship between reader and text. You are in charge, becoming the fortress-husk in which the poem germinates. You are not necessarily open to change. This is not so if you are a body in motion in a procession, yourself image and acted-upon.

I do wonder if dismissal of some poetry (like my beloved Martin Carter’s) as ‘political’ comes from the fear of being amongst, the fear of being changed, the distrust of speech that can pass from mouth to mouth; the valorization of silent reading as golden, reading aloud as common coin, chanting as some kind of emotional scam. Yet… who says that a poem about being alone in nature at sunset feeling heterosexually in love is political? Nobody; yet that lyrical, uncontroversial, able-bodied, very likely masculine poetic persona is not behaving as many safety-conscious ciswomen would, and almost certainly not in a war zone. I would argue that there is no more political poem than the one where the speaker is enjoying peace. The margins of such a poem are a charge sheet at the rest of the world’s expense, even if the text embodies a beauty or serenity that everyone deserves. It is acceptable to envisage classical wounds in a university setting. Homer, like Shakespeare, is permissible. People who would put down political poetry will make the face they make when something good is happening in the culture. They will not be moved.

Martin Carter opens ‘Black Friday 1962’:

were some who ran one way.
were some who ran another way.
were some who did not run at all.
were some who will not run again.
and I was with them all […]

Reading, I notice physical changes in myself, and personal upset. I can imagine the people in those streets, closely, looking like my neighbours that I grew up with, lit by a similar phase of sunlight. Is it because the context is ‘relatable’, Caribbean – even though I have never been to Guyana? Is it because the words not only describe movement, and disrupt grammar, but themselves have a quality of being in motion, phrase passing to phrase like something in the streets (a pamphlet or a ragged banner or a bandage or a quick breath), barely passing between the event of dispersal and violence, and the event of the poem? There seems hardly a pause for the poet to have collected words and formed them in his imagination. Yet… he did, not without art.

The poet of The Dream of the Rood uses a triple technique to induce us to hear (or read) feelingly: the flashing of alternate images, each distinct, an overlay in memory but never a palimpsest; a life story, where the Rood reassures us that it has emotional agency despite being literally displaced, fixed and bound; and the as-if-natural intertwining of heroic imagery (culturally familiar to his audience) with Christian religious language (comparatively foreign). It strikes me that, while this triple technique draws on the visual, its effectiveness arises from how it ‘messes with’ our relation to time. The religious event happens (continues happening) over three days and also in time eternal; the tree’s lifespan is of uncertain years, but certainly years rather than days; the flashing images hit the mind at midnight and keep flashing.

Carter can be dismissed as political, not lyrical; the Old English poet can be pigeonholed as devotional; more important for me, as a practitioner of the craft and also as a human creature, is how both texts move; they are in motion, and they are moving. Looking at a crucifix on the wall, it would be a mistake to see the serenity and beauty of a yogi, or an Apollonian athlete, at full and birdlike stretch. It is essential to look with eyes of time. The image is not static but agonizing. The core strains as gravity pulls the body earthwards; every muscle is working against the fall and against bondage; the nerves are in overdrive. We have forgotten, as readers who like good things happening in the culture, to look with the eyes of time; whether at the poem, always politically on the page, or at the child under rubble, heir to a lineage, seeded with long life.