Let's Rock It Up!

Literature and Rock

Reading the anthology, we’ve found this poem written by Brian Patten in 1967; "Little Johnny's Final Letter", in which there are themes in common with one of The Beatles’ songs:”She's leaving home”.

Brian Patten

Born in Liverpool in 1946, Brian Patten has been one of the most precocious of recent British poets. He made his literary debut in 1962, when he was only sixteen.  Patten's poetry is closely tied with his native city and to its cultural vicissitudes. At the opening of the1960's, when he and the other Liverpool poets were just beginning to make their voices felt on the poetic scene, Liverpool was also witnessing the debut of a group of other young men: the Beatles. Four or five years older than Patten, these unknown young men would soon make of the old port on the Mersey the heart of one of the major cultural movements of our century: pop music. Brian  Patten  is a typical pop poet. In fact, his poems have many elements in common with the songs of the Beatles. A concern for the problems of the young, whose world is generally seen as pure and idealistic, and is mostly opposed to the hypocritical world of the adult. An indication towards  the romantic, the fabulous, the nostalgic, the sentimental. A general atmosphere of dream and a softly melodious and plaintive tone. One of Beatles' songs " She's Leaving Home" has a lot of similar features to Patten's masterpiece. Patten’s poetry is not infallible. It has two serious shortcomings: it is facile, shallow and inaccurate, and it is too sentimental. 

Little Johnny’s Final Letter

In this poem- in the form of a letter-a fictitious boy (Little Johnny) writes to his mother to inform her that he has left home. “I’ve decided to stay alive” he says in line 5. By this he means that he wants to stay not only physically but also spiritually alive, by refusing the grey bourgeois existence his mother wishes him to lead. Paradoxically, just when he is more alive than ever, he is treated as if he were dead! In another part of the poem (line 12) Johnny says he is “giving priority to obscurity”, meaning inconspicuousness i.e. the antithesis of success, again a typical bourgeois myth.

TEXT:

Mother,

            I won’t be home this evening, so don’t worry; don’t hurry to report me missing.

            Don’t drain the canals to find me,

            I’ve decided to stay alive, don’t

            Search the woods, I am not hiding

            Simply gone to get myself classified.

            Don’t leave my shreddies out.

            I’ve done with security.

            Don’t circulate my photograph to society

            I have disguised myself as a man

            And am giving priority to obscurity.

            It suits me fine:

            I have taken off my short trousers

            And put on long ones, and

            Now am going out into the city, so

            Don’t worry; don’t hurry  to report me missing.

            I have rented a room without any curtains

           And sit behind the windows growing cold

           Heard your plea on the radio this morning,

           You sounded sad and strangely old…

                                   GUIDE TO THE POEM: Little Johnny’s Final Letter

1)Life, adult responsibilities will now assess Johnny’s real value as a man. Note how the passive structure of the sentence “(I’ve) gone to get myself classified” ironically suggests the passive dependence on parents, typical of children.

2)Curtains are symbol of bourgeois respectability. Sitting behind a window till one grows cold is a transgression of typical maternal advice (“Put your coat on, or you’ll catch cold!”).

3)Johnny’s mother is always referred to in the negative imperative, a mood which appears more frequently than any other mood employed in the poem. Such a high number of prohibitions reinforces the paradoxical meaning (this time it is the mother who is given orders) of the poem: the intolerance of maternal prohibitions and orders. But also, it seems to express a vague desire not to completely do away with the mother/son relationship altogether, but just to invert it.

4)The division into two verses does point to a change in the mood of the poem. In the second verse Little Johnny no longer sounds so awfully sure about his revolutionary decision. Its lines are permeated with homesickness and  a sense of solitude very different from the elation of the first verse: the new house is cold and with no curtains – so not a  real home after all – the mother’s voice has become sad and old. Perhaps – as the dots suggest – Little Johnny might be back home soon.

5)The poem is in free verse. Its lines are very different in their syllabic length, and not organized into a regular pattern of feet. Rhyme appears only occasionally. All of which doesn’t mean of course that the poem does not have a rhythm of its own.

By  Giò Semplice and his group