You're living your life wrong and only my analysis of this poem can save you

This place, ain't no such thing as civilised. It is man, so in love with greed that he has forgotten himself and found only appetites”

-         Red Dead Redemption II

Apologies for leading into my blog with a pretentious quote. In my defence, it was not translated from a Babylonian proverb or a black-and-white Akira Kurosawa film. It came from a video game – so we’re immediately dealing with low-brow stuff here.

This rambling introduction is actually rather fitting, as the poem that I shall dissect was not written by a Renaissance polymath, but a true-blue ocker – whose other works include “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever”, and who mockingly described himself as a “subhuman redneck” (though this was really a dig at intellectual elitists). In reality, the man was complex, witty and verbose – Australia’s “bush-bard”.

And he wrote mostly about the bush, but the poem in question – An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow – talks about Sydney, where he studied and lived during the 1960s. This was a rapidly-growing city, economic hive, industrial powerhouse: all that jazz.

Could it be that all this would lead to a disconnection from our human nature and emotion, I hear you ask? That's a pretty odd question, bro - let's see.

MODERN LIFE

The poem starts by name-checking a number of Sydney institutions: Repin’s was a chain of ‘coffee inns’, Lorenzinis a wine bar, Tattersalls was a social club, and the Greek Club a restaurant; all of them hangouts of Sydney’s downtown social milieu during the ‘60s.  

A Repin’s Coffee Inn on Market Street, Sydney – sometime in the mid-20^th century

When word spreads that a man is crying in Martin Place, the “centrepiece of corporate Australia” [Sydney Morning Herald] of Sydney, the masses crowd around to see what’s happening:

The use of both caesurae (the full stops and commas in the middle of lines) and enjambment creates the image of stop-start traffic – which reflects the city-wide response to the man’s weeping with the “traffic in George Street… banked up” as well as being synonymous with the ‘rat-race’ in any big city.

The repetition of “they can’t stop him” and “no one can stop him” tells us that they have tried, and failed, as though a single man weeping poses an existential threat to Sydney, this hive of economic tomfoolery. This perception is enhanced by the way in which the man captures the attention of the legions of men and women who “come hurrying”, as though some huge disaster is occurring and ensnaring our simian morbid curiosity:

But why does a lone man crying have such a powerful draw?

It’s sacrilege! This is the business district – 50-storey concrete and glass phalluses (phalli?) built as offerings to the divine dollar; where competitiveness, industry and absolute ruthlessness are virtues, and where empathy is a hindrance. The expression of emotion (save for drug-addled decadence and aggression) is unheard of – and, God forbid, this man’s tears don’t result in economic productivity!

MASCULINITY

Those ‘virtues’ that I just talked about with reference to the corporate world could very well be used to describe the traditional doctrine of masculinity, especially when the poem was written in the mid-20^th century. That’s no coincidence: 90% of Fortune 500 companies (and 91% of ASX 300 companies) have male CEOs, and that’s today. One would imagine the sixties weren’t much better…

The places that the speaker mentions in the first stanza are characterised as male-dominated (“at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers” and “men… leave the Greek Club). It’s not a stretch to assume the majority of “Stock Exchange scribblers” are men too, given the time:

            Sydney stock exchange, 1961

This all lends itself to an understanding of downtown Sydney as a testosterone-fuelled corpo-Mecca.

The police are referred to metonymically as “uniforms”, and their actions – they “tried to seize” the crying man - tie the competitive, laborious image of conventional masculinity with physicality, and even violence. Unfortunately, this especially atrocious aspect of toxic masculinity was, and is, pervasive.

But Murray constructs this image of masculinity to knock it down. Crying, in the canon of traditional masculinity, is embarrassing and sinful. Yet the man who weeps “does not cover it” suggesting he does not feel guilty for flying in the face of societal convention. Nor does he “beat his breast” which would play into the clichéd image of violent male expression. Despite this, the persona tells us, he “weeps… like a man”. Note the choice of words there – if you’ve ever been told to (or heard the phrase) ‘take it like a man’ you’ll know it means to respond to something without emotion. Murray’s crying man flips this idea on its head – his character cries like a man, neither concealing nor “declaim[ing] it”, and does so with dignity.

THE POWER OF TEARS

The man’s undisguised, public display of emotion – whether intentionally or not – rejects (highly interlinked) values of the modern, urban world as well as traditional masculinity.

As the crowd gathers, some ridicule him (“Ridiculous, says a man near me”) affirming how deeply entrenched certain attitudes towards emotion are in the modern world, especially for men.

But the majority are moved - “the fiercest manhood… amongst us / trembles with unexpected judgements of peace”, diametrically opposing the almost violent tendencies assigned to traditional ‘manhood’.

Even the police who had at first been tasked with removing the man feel themselves “longing for tears as children for a rainbow”.

The purpose of this simile is twofold. The man’s crying is like a rainbow: it is a short, ordinary, natural occurrence, it has no economic or productive value, and yet it inspires awe.

Secondly, the reference to childhood implies that these entrenched values of being laborious, unemotional, apathetic… all of that – is learned. This idea is expanded upon in the sixth stanza, where “only the smallest children” come and “sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons”. These creatures reflect innocence – they haven’t been corrupted by the modern societal constructs of consumerism, vanity, or traditional masculinity.

RELIGION

Now let’s bring religion into the discussion, because that’s never gone wrong.

The man who cries is a pretty evident allusion to Jesus – who also famously wept, and who also attracted large crowds of “believers”. The structure of the poem also leans into this, beginning in third person but transitioning to an intimate first-person chronical that’s almost like a New Testament parable.

Biblically, J.H.C weeps over the fate of the city of Jerusalem, which was destined to ruin as it had rejected his love. Perhaps this ties into the man’s rejection of industry, and presents the idea that the modern capitalist focus upon money as the only thing of worth will lead to dire societal consequences, even ruin.

Not to say Les Murray was prophetic, but…

The biblical allusion contributes to the poems’ meaning in another significant way. Jesus’ weeping (not for Jerusalem, for some other guy called Lazarus this time) demonstrated that he was true man with real bodily function. In that sense, when the man cries “like a man” in the poem he is doing something quintessentially and symbolically human. Firstly, because men are human, it’s ok to cry – or to put it more eloquently; the poem challenges the idea that emotional expression is a sign of weakness for men, and frames it instead not only as a natural form of human expression, but as an assertion of strength (especially in a modern society where clichéd ‘manliness’ is ever-present).

The other important thing to note is that, though “some will say… a halo / or force stood around him”, the speaker flatly denies that the man is messianic or divine – “there is no such thing”. This, and the fact that the man essentially flees the scene “evading believers” implies that the man has no prophetic holiness. Instead, he is an ordinary person – just as a rainbow – doing an incredibly ordinary thing, who has been assigned extraordinary significance by a modern society that has itself lost touch with its own humanity.  

WHAT ON EARTH WAS THE POINT OF THIS WHOLE EXERCISE?

(Because ‘what have we learnt?’ isn’t real enough)

I’m sure most of us, at some point, are guilty of adhering to the tenets of capitalist workaholism or perhaps blokey masculinity. Say you are a student – you want good grades, perhaps to go to university and probably to get a good job. I’m not going to suggest you should grow out your hair, move to a commune in the hinterlands and experiment with a catalogue of mind-altering substances (though you are more than welcome to do so). Annoyingly, the world is not so black-and-white – unless America is involved, they are always the good guys. Apologies for the brief digression.  

Through his crying man, Les Murray subverts interlinked modern and traditional masculine views towards emotional expression. In doing so, he encourages us to forget, every now and then, the obsession with money and laboriousness, and whether others think we’re being ‘unmanly’ (or maybe we think they think that – like the consonance?) – to see if we have the capacity to be true to ourselves.

Cheers, Les.

Word Count - 1489

Jed Stanley is a literary critic and blogger with a Masters in Advanced B.S and no picture, as he wrote this 2 minutes before the deadline.