quiet americans pains are too earnest’^69 )is patience, discretion, hesitation, slowness. This is figured
in ‘The Numbers’ as a retreat into the locality of place, the tentative adjustment to
whereweare:
The whole thing it is, the difficult
matter: to shrink the confines
down. To signals, so that I come
back to this, we are
small|in the rain,
open or without it,
the light in de-
light, as with pleasure amongst not merely
the word, one amongst them; but the
skin over the points, of the bone.
That’swherewehaveit&should
diminish: I am no
more, than custom.^70The difficulty consists, after so much folly, in coming back to ourselves: in
recognizing that we are ‘small|in the rain’ (as if the rain could shrink us); in
recognizing that we are, among the multitudes of the earth, just ‘one amongst
them’. At which point, ‘I am no|more ’—or as the feint in the line suggests, it
could almost seem so. The whole process is figured, as so often in Prynne’s poetry,
as Wordsworthian adjustment to the local weather: ‘Only watch the weather|as the
sky does change,|or the seasons in|quick-slip succession.’ Here politics is about
getting inside our own skins (‘the|folds of our intimate surface’), not measuring
others by them. ‘The politics, therefore, is for one man,|a question of skin, that he
ask|of his national point no more, in|this instance, than brevity.’ The repetition
of that phrase ‘no more’ is typical of Prynne’s quiet style, but it is in fact a
clarion call and vibrates with the moral-political energy of the book as a whole, its
brilliant, sometime comical evocation of another kind of Englishness, which might
be essentially, temperamentally, anti-imperial: hesitancy, discretion, slowness. This
is particularly clear in the final poem, ‘Gold Ring’: ‘Competitive|expansion’ isn’t
always necessary because ‘We can eat|slowly’. Which brings us to the significance
of the book’s title, its reversion to the small, to the scraps, to the kitchen. ‘Have|you
had enough? Do have a little more?|It’s very good but, no, perhaps I won’t.’^71
(^69) Prynne, ‘The Numbers’, ibid. 11. (^70) Ibid. 10.
(^71) Prynne, ‘A Gold Ring Called Reluctance’, 21.