Enter Without so Much as Knocking

Despite being a poet, and advertising myself as such, it’s been a long time since I’ve shared any poetry here - and I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about it in one of these posts. I think it’s high time I changed that, so I want to talk a bit about my favourite poet and my favourite poem.

So, to begin, let’s do things a little differently. Let’s set the scene. It’s 2011 and I’m not yet sixteen, sitting in my English Literature class (the least surprising class I could possibly have taken). We’re about to start our unit on poetry and I’m not excited for it. I have always found poetry boring at best and pretentious at worst - more interested in being flowery and purple than in expressing what they want to say. I definitely never would have expected to unironically be writing poetry of my own in only a few years time.

Frost’s works contributed to improving my perceptions of the artform, admittedly. However, it was Bruce Dawe that enraptured me. I very quickly went from being uninterested in poetry to being a very active participant in discussion and debate, deconstructing the meaning behind each stanza. Something about the way Dawe wrote and the imagery he used captured me like nothing else in the medium had and I was eager to delve into his writing and break it apart… granted I probably took a little too much joy in finding ways to relate everything back to the concept of mortality. Mortality certainly is a big part of Dawe’s work, but it’s a little unfair and reductive to always bring it back to that.

Anyway, with that picture painted, I want to talk about Bruce Dawe and why he changed my mind about poetry. For those who don’t know, Bruce Dawe was an Australian poet active from the 50s into the early 2000s and is probably one of the most acclaimed and honoured poets my country has ever produced.

Unlike a lot of poetry I have experienced - definitely unlike most of what I had experienced as a teenager sitting in English Lit - Dawe’s works never felt overly romanticised. His language never felt flowery just for the sake of being flowery. That isn’t to say he lacked artistry or imagery - he had that in spades. But the language he used was never pointlessly meandering or so wrapped up in the idea of complexity that it lost its meaning in the process. He painted vivid pictures of the world as he saw it, both beautiful and unflattering. His poems feel honest in a way others often don’t, and never feel lacking in something meaningful to say.

A lot of that could be felt in the topics Dawe chose to write about as well. He talked a lot about Australian culture - especially modern culture. He talked about the cultural and material interests of everyday people and used those as a lens to discuss complicated, deep and poignant topics - consumerism, environmentalism, disenfranchisement, oppression, and war. All topics that I find are important to me in one way or another.

Which brings me to Enter Without So Much as Knocking, which can be found in his collection Sometimes Gladness. Enter Without So Much as Knocking describes the life of a boy from his birth to his untimely, accidental death. It’s a poem with clipped, sharp and short language that emphasizes the speed at which time passes this individual by. It also makes a constant point of describing things in very commercialised language and in relation to various products or services.

Essentially, Enter Without so Much as Knocking paints a very bleak picture of a consumerist society. The subject of the poem lives a life that feels empty and sterile - hollow and devoid of meaning. Everything in it - everything and everyone he knows and everything he is or experiences - is all about image. There is a facade of value and depth that stalks the subject even into death where his corpse is dressed up to resemble the living.

It’s a little odd that this poem in particular strikes me so much in a way. I am in no way anti-consumerist. I take a great deal of joy in the possessions and culture I have access to. However, it’s not the elements of consumerist commentary that speak to me. It’s the emptiness. It’s the speed. It’s the idea of someone’s life passing them by, being over without them ever doing anything they could find true meaning or value in.

I don’t believe that life has meaning by default. But I do believe that we can find our own meaning in it. That’s something that has always been important to me. A lot of my life could really be summed up by the idea of searching for things to do that I personally find that meaning and value in. Few things disquiet me more than the idea of dying one day and having achieved nothing or wasted my time. I think that’s probably a part of why I started thinking about this poem more often again after I got sick and had to completely alter my expectations and plans for my life. Granted that was nearly ten years ago now. It’s certainly a big part of why I feel compelled to create, to tell stories and write poems. I find a lot of that personal meaning in making art. 

I think it says a lot about the power of Dawe’s work that it has stuck with me so strongly for fourteen years and that it has impacted me so deeply at several different points in my life. Unlike the beginning of our poetry unit back in my high school years, I may be picky about it, but I have a lot of respect for the art of poetry these days. I even became a poet myself. A lot of that can probably be attributed to Bruce Dawe - and specifically to Enter Without so Much as Knocking.