Lockdown by Simon Armitage

 Lockdown: A poem about coronavirus outbreak

Simon Armitage has written a poem to address the coronavirus and a lockdown that is slowly being implemented across the world, saying that the art form can be consoling in times of crisis because it “asks us just to focus, and think, and be contemplative”.

“And I couldn’t escape the waking dream

of infected fleas”

The Great Plague of London, 1665

The first half of the poem deals with the dream of the poet which describes the condition of Eyam, Derbyshire village which was suffered a lot because of the pandemic Great Plague of London in the year 1665. At that time villages were separated by the boundary stone. Which contained holes that the quarantined villagers would put their money in to pay for provisions from outside, and then fill with vinegar in the hope it would cleanse the coins. The stone also touches the story of a doomed romance between a girl who lived in Eyam and a boy outside the village who talked to her from a distance, until she stopped coming.

 But slept again,

and dreamt this time

Of the exiled yaksha sending word

to his lost wife on a passing cloud,

The second half of the poem is influenced by a scene from a Sanskrit poem Meghaduta by Kalidas. In which an exiled Yaksha convinced a cloud to take the message to his lost wife.

The seat of his exile is the mountain Ramgiri, and upon the poem, he is supposed to have passed a period of eight months in solitary seclusion. The poem opens at the commencement of the rainy season when heavy clouds are gathering in the south, and proceeding in a northerly course, or the resident of the Yaksha. To one of these, the demigod addresses himself and desires the cloud to waft his sorrows to a beloved and regretted wife. For this purpose he first describes the route which the messenger is to pursue; and this gives the Poet and opportunity of alluding to the principal mountains, rivers, temples and many other amazing landscapes and scenery he is going to pass across. Those are to be met with on the road from Ramgiri to Ujjain, and thence nearly due north, to the Himalaya or snowy mountains. The fabulous mountain and the city  Alka, which are supposed to be in the central part of the snowy range are next described and we then come to the personal description of the Yaksha's wife. The Cloud is next instructed on how to express the feelings and situation of the exile and he is then dismissed from the presence of the Deity, and the Poem of Kalidas.