Robert Yeo (b. 1940)
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Wall
Written by Robert Yeo
Dated 26 Apr 2020
This poem was first drafted in August 1966.
The annotations, transcribed, would look like this:
The final poem, also called “Wall”, was first published in Coming Home, Baby (1971) and subsequently in Leaving Home, Mother: Selected Poems (1999) and in The Best of Robert Yeo (2012). Here it is:
Wall
I was walled by a decency
I wished I knew how to ram
Breach the castled past to follow
Belated drives into worldly man.But ram? Virtue left me
A lamb, green,
Vacantly aware of the world’s arms
Not daring her salvation or sin.I was taught her voice was insidious.
Whispers of wickedness degraded
The original strain floating over the rim.
I thrilled and shuddered as it faded.Bright holes that I scratched, unseen,
Revealed how much my circumference of sky
Was mocked by the infinity of those
Who more freely moved outside the chimney of my eye.I had waited long enough.
Dreaming, scratching and thinking apart
It is time to mount
Then quietly leap with heart.
When I was compiling material together for Leaving Home, Mother: Selected Poems in 1999, I realised that I had to do a kind of summing-up of my work, to decide at that stage of my writing which poems were worth publishing or not. I was 39, and as Michael Wilding, Professor Emeritus in the University of Sydney, pointed out in the introduction of the book, I was in “mid-career”.
I decided to include “Wall” in Leaving Home, Mother. Its position as the last poem in first section of the book is significant because the section includes many poems I had written before I left for London in September 1966. They are poems that belong to the first phase of my poetry writing, which culminated in the longish poem “Moon Madness” in 1964. This poem, “Wall”, was written in 1965, revised in January 1966 but not published till much later in 1971.
In comparing the two versions of the poem, it will be seen that in the first stanza, I kept the image of the wall as a symbol of decency that encloses the protagonist, from which he must escape to discover how wicked the world is. In the first line of the draft, I abandoned the simile of “like a child” and went straight to the wall symbol.
Many poets feel (and I am one of them) that the simile is one of the weakest forms of imagery because it is the easiest to use: it announces itself by the word “like”. A metaphor is stronger—it comes suddenly, and in the first stanza of the final poem, I use the metaphor “castled” to augment the image of the “wall”, suggesting that the protagonist is an adolescent prisoner dreaming of his past as a protected residence.
Both poems retain the idea of “drives”, a Freudian word loaded with sexual connotations. Following his drives, the protagonist will become “worldly”, a word that has two meanings, the first to mean wise and the second to refer to the wider world outside the wall/castle. I think it is a richer image than the word “future” in the fourth line of the draft poem.
Stanza 2 in both poems engage with the violent image of “ram” and the personification of “Virtue” in the draft, the question is posed in an awkward way: “But ram with what?”
The second line in the final poem is better because it introduces the image of the lamb and implies that if the protagonist is a lamb, he is too young to be able to “ram” anything. The religious connotations of the lamb further enriches the allusion, and seems to me more effective than the obvious, almost literal statement of “Virtue… left me a virgin”.
The third stanza in the draft poem refers to time as is, in the present tense: “I was taught the voice is insidious.” In the final poem, I changed it to the past tense: “I was taught the voice was insidious.” This is a definite improvement as it indicates clearly a break with the past into the present, and supports the notion that the he in the poem wants to leap out to the present.
One more consequential revision must be noted. It is in fact a rejection of something written. In my notebook of the draft poem, the lines beginning “Yet I felt furtive, scared…” and ending with “link by link, now” were written on the opposite page of my notebook—
—indicating that I wanted to extend the stanza. But I didn’t, which was just as well, as the rejected lines do not add to the wall imagery. Also rejected were the lines, “Reason frozed my resolution. / O Virtue’s conspirator / If I don’t break you, link by link, now”. It is a rejection I can justify as I generally do not like personifications of abstract ideas because, like similes, they come too easily as poetic devices.
The revisions so far enabled me to move, in the final poem, into stanzas 4 and 5 without too many alterations, except for the important one in line 1 of the fifth stanza, “I had waited long enough”. The protagonist, the speaker in the poem, expresses a determination to ditch the past by using the past tense (“was”) and this allows him to switch emphatically to the present tense: “It is time to mount / And quietly leap with the heart.”
Looking back now, this poem signifies to me the end of the pre-London phase of my writing. There was a lot of me in the poem. The protagonist announced a firm resolve to junk his angst-laden youthful baggage (I was 26 then and probably in belated adolescence) and embrace a future that was more sexually and politically aware. The mention of “scratching” twice is a self-directed and self-critical reference to a repressed individual that needed liberation. London provided it, demonstrating how autobiographical the poem is. It is no accident that it is positioned on page 26, near the middle of my 48-page collection Coming Home, Baby.
It is a poem not anthologised before, and is therefore not a favourite with my readers, but Cynthia Peterson noticed it when she reviewed Leaving Home, Mother in the Malaysian newspaper The Sun on 10 Sep, 1999. The title was “Striving to Leap over Walls”, and the subtitle was “Robert Yeo writes of being somewhat suffocated by the known and the familiar.” She began her review by writing: “A line from Robert Yeo’s Wall echoes and reechoes in my mind.
I was walled in by a decency
I wished I knew how to ram…
For me it encapsulates the pervasive theme of scaling ‘walls’ in many senses of the word in his anthology Leaving Home, Mother.”
