When first reading Drunken Sailor I was very glad to come across ‘Last Court’, the poem in which the wise voice of John Montague salutes the great Henrik Ibsen, citing his definition of poetry as a court of judgement upon the soul. And then Montague constructs through the three acts of ‘Last Court’ a drama that is as deep and defiant as any of the Norwegian’s strange and haunted later plays with their implacable patriarchs — men like the thieving genius, John Gabriel Borkman, or The Master Builder himself, Solness, still constructing architectural marvels to dazzle and dwarf his younger rivals, silencing the critics of the parish, sentencing the lot of us with the verdict of guilty.
Montague imbues the poem with intimate revelations, ‘glass / of burnished Black Bush whiskey’, ‘face … fissured as chalk, suddenly old’. He creates two whole competing characters sharing the landscape of life history that makes them brothers in their souls as much as they are brothers of bone and blood and flesh. Yet bone, blood and flesh make profound connections — mirror images of each other, yes, but it is the concave and convex distortions of those images that touch me most. The voices are authentic by reason of their difference — the poem has a genuine capacity to defy expectations, to upstage and unsettle. The denial of the body’s resurrection coming from that stern mouth is devastating, brutal as an act of fratricide.
But then the whole of ‘Last Court’ is one great series of devastations. In its admirably succinct biographies of generations passing it is a record of a family that from its origins sets out to disappoint itself. That is a realism I absolutely admire. I believe completely in its crisis — the choice of tact as opposed to courage. I’ve lived with that. So have we all. Out of his grief Montague fashions a lament for his brother which is one of his most honest love songs. ‘Last Court’ is a wonderful poem.