HellWard Canto 1: ‘Hospital’: Extract from the Epic Poem by James Sale

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HellWard Canto 1: Hospital

—lines 1-92

It had to be—that long descent began:
About me images, one century
That started, stuttered, showed how poor is man

In all things except his savagery.
My grandfather’s face, first in that stale line,
Who missed the trenches through admin’s mystery;

Was sent instead to fight in Palestine,
While friends he’d known all died in No-Man’s-Land.
How lucky, then, for him; for me a sign:

Despite the misery, unintended, unplanned
That characterised the fools who sought to build
A better world—progress—to make a stand,

As it were; as if politics could field
A force sufficient to overcome gods
Whose power, agencies were not like to yield

To mortal die, its throes and sadder odds.
Or, as if science, too, could weight outcomes—
Build Babels better far than Nimrod did.

Yet for all that building, they built one tomb
Called planet Earth—polluted, warmed and dying,
Neglecting the while to study, exhume

The corpse of what the century was frying.
That long descent began. I saw myself as heir;
I saw myself for poetry is scrying—

Calliope come to me now, be here,
For I must tell how I came to that wild place
Where death is our doctrine, and twin despair.

For all this, know—each human hides that face
Divine, which is our task, within our will,
To reveal at last, if so by God’s grace,

That Love that Dante saw created hell,
And by His goodness covered Earth with stars,
So many, no mind could count them, they fill

The cosmos, yet hang so near us, yet far;
Our destiny, one day, perhaps, to cross
Over to where mortality can’t mar,

Cast shadows, that prolong and deepen loss.
Calliope come now to me, epic queen:
Without inspiration, writing is dross;

Enable me to see what’s not been seen
Before, but rise heroic to this quest
And find the Grail: what does this century mean?

And in so doing also find true rest—
The ninth heaven where Dante found himself,
Surprised and speechless, all light and all blest,

All one, yet being not somebody else:
Himself full-on, even as one snowflake
In dawn’s deep drift, unique whilst still engulfed.

Calliope, Apollo’s daughter, make
Me prophesy: you know what’s to be,
You know the golden god and how he breaks

The proud. I came myself near history,
Despite a false summer then broken out,
Collapsing quite incomprehensibly.

Something medics came to see in my gut,
Something small, some shadow, should not be there,
But they’d remove—a snip—at most a cut

And I’d be well; there my life would be clear.
I waited hospitalised without sun,
No moon either, nothing natural, dear—

Gone without trace, as I went down, down, down:
One held my hand as anaesthetics did
Their graft—what was to do would soon be done;

And that malignancy within, well hid,
That choked, snake-like, intestinal flesh,
Would be revealed at last and I’d be rid

Of cancer’s bloated presence and its wish:
Destruction absolute, assured, aligned—
Refusing life, wanting in death to mesh

With me, an apt image of evil’s mind,
Small gains to build one vaulting emptiness,
At last undo what so much love designed.

What much love designed? And too was blessed?
Such sacredness I scarce can speak of—how
Before God now I tremble, quake, am less –

His glory. I saw it, as dying, slow,
Gutted of guts and lying on the bed,
Out of my body, sight soared to space, so

Effortlessly, and there I saw, ahead,
One giant finger turning candyfloss.
Wondering what—? I willed myself and sped

To see. There, close-up, I saw not chaos,
But its just opposite: not sugar wound
Around a finger, for which some child might fuss,

But a star formed in deep space, without sound,
No fanfare, tranquil; and the index bent,
One flick, it revelled forward on its round.

How could such power be—the whole cosmos rent
Into parts and each part on its own work,
And better still, each atom purposeful, sent

Whilst far below on a bed, injured, hurt,
Powerless to do evil, much less good,
I lay helpless, fit soon to be but dirt?

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Poet’s Note

The original edition of HellWard had no explanatory notes to help the reader; but StairWell did, and these were widely welcomed. As one American reader said, paraphrasing, ‘I get the sense of what is being said, but I love being able to follow up on some obscurity—to me—that the poet then explicates.’ In these circumstances, then, it seemed advisable to add Notes to the HellWard edition. So, the new HellWard Revisited is doing precisely that. The new edition is also in hardback, contains new original artwork by Judy Warbey, a new cover, has been corrected and so on. It was released on 10-31-24: Halloween! Here, then, is the very opening of the epic and the notes as they are found in the new edition. For more information on this go to: https://englishcantos.home.blog/letters-from-hell/.

l. 5. My grandfather’s face. On the maternal side, Joseph St John Santry (1898–1976). He fought in Palestine during World War I, thus missing the trenches in France and ‘No-Man’s-Land’.
l. 16. mortal die. The double sense of dying, and ‘die’ as singular of dice.
l. 25. Calliope. The leader of the Nine Muses, goddess of epic poetry, and daughter of Apollo.
ll. 28–9. each human hides that face / Divine. An allusion to Milton (Paradise Lost, Book III, l. 44) and Blake (‘The Tyger’).
l. 31. That Love that Dante saw created hell. The burden of Dante’s Inferno, and The Divine Comedy more broadly, which this work aspires to emulate.
l. 42. And find the Grail. Writing this epic poem is like questing for the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend. It is a religious enterprise as much as an artistic one.
l. 45. Surprised and speechless. As Dante found, the paradox of achieving the vision is to find oneself—the poet finds himself—speechless, because words fail. In the final canto of Paradiso, Dante wrote: ‘At this point power failed high fantasy…’ (Par. XXXIII.142, trans. Mark Musa).
l. 56. a snip. The poet-pilgrim was told that the tests seemed to reveal nothing more than a small shadow in his small intestine, which a ‘snip’ would remove. Coming out of the first five-hour operation, he learnt that he had two malignant sarcomas, known as ‘fibromatoses’. One was the size of a grapefruit, the other an avocado.
l. 61. One held my hand. He shall always be grateful to the surgeon, Chrissie Laban, who was a stalwart in helping his recovery.
l. 75. I saw it. After two major operations, he was on Nil By Mouth for 29 days and had lost nearly five stone in weight; at this point, he had an out of the body experience and God ‘touched’ him.

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James Sale has had over 50 books published, most recently, “Mapping Motivation for Top Performing Teams” (Routledge, 2021). He has been nominated by The Hong Kong Review for the 2022 Pushcart Prize for poetry, has won first prize in The Society of Classical Poets 2017 annual competition, and performed in New York in 2019. He is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. His most recent poetry collection is “StairWell.” For more information about the author, and about his Dante project, visit https://englishcantos.home.blog. To subscribe to his brief, free and monthly poetry newsletter, contact him at [email protected]