The 1895 Flashlight Society

Written back in 1971, but still pertinent today.

I’ve founded a club for our frustrated poets

Whose thoughts and ideas are not too well read,

Whose visions are flashes that light up the mind

For the instant they rattle along in your head.

They write in the garrets of cobweb-filled houses

Sit wearily passing a pen through a page,

And see by the light of those same dying flashes

That bring on the visions of transported mediums,

Calling up Spirits that quarrel and rage.

 

The Flashlight Society meets in the cellar

And sparkles in silence away through the night,

They dress in the style of the turn of the century,

Try to evoke all the sense and the style of the gentry

Who faltered and fell in the fight.

Who fell in the onslaught of motor cars rolling,

Who dropped at the sight of an aircraft in flight,

Who gave up their poetry reading and literature,

Sadly relinquished their art, and their culture

Was lost as they finally dropped out of sight.

 

For soon was the world to be filled with mechanics

Who fiddled with paintwork and gleaming machines,

Who, rapt in the art of their growing technology

Surging ahead in the pride of invention were

Losing the art of enjoying their dreams.

For all they could read were the newspaper funnies

And technical journals with pictures to suit,

With radio newscasts to keep them informed of the

Latest events that they could not refute.

 

Poets were swallowed in industry’s labour

To sweat out the poetry nobody penned,

But still were a few of them, scribbled in silence

In hopes that the sickness would finally mend.

On through their sons and the sons of their sons

They have waited forever to speak of their plight,

The Flashlight Society’s weaving its dreams

On a tapestry woven of letters and light.

 

Sometimes I sit in the cobwebs and dust

And I read and I drift on the muse of a line,

Watching creations of pen-bitten visions

Like artistic artifacts swelling and growing

In beauty and charm that will always be mine.

Poe would be proud of the Flashlight Society

Striving to bring out their dreams to the fore,

Let a man read of it, let a man need of it,

Welcome he is at Society’s door.

 

Tell me the story of Benjamin’s glory

Who fought at the battle of Eljamin Flood,

Read me the way that the brave Euphidores

Had gained him a wife who was covered in blood.

Tell me of Turquoise and Marble and Miracles,

Honour in dying and Victory’s joy,

Stir me within with the tales of the brave

And the head of a foe, or a child with a toy.

 

Let me forget that I live in the seventies

Hustle and bustle and tension and pace,

Let me remember the best that our fathers

As children would read of the best of the race.

Patriotism is dead for the present

But poetry brings it all back with a rush,

When the Society breaks through the bottleneck

Holding their visions in permanent check,

Maybe we’ll see all the jaded in line

For the dreams that will take them away from the crush.

For dream weavers soon will be highly demanded,

A queue for a dream of a minute or so,

While songs are repeating their time-hardened melodies,

Saddened and soulful and sickening parodies,

Poetry takes them in tow.

 

Sound is the sound of a woman in labour

But noise is the noise of the damned,

Industry’s noises are drowning the sounds

Of the man and his love for the land.

But while we are rushing toward the abyss

Of the lost and a terrible war,

And slavery then for the few that survive

In the visions the prophets saw,

The Flashlight Society’s work will survive

On the damp of a mouldy shelf,

‘Til one day we’re able to throw off the chains

Of a civilization that’s lost in its aims

And the heir to the fortune in paper and verse

Will then add to the visions himself.

 

David Lewis Paget