Rage To Order: A Close Reading of Simon Armitage’s
“Five Eleven Ninety Nine”
by Phillip Crymble
© 2002, Phillip Crymble

Simon Armitage’s “Five Eleven Ninety Nine” is a meticulously structured poem, so to move around its twenty pages trying to illuminate recurring aspects of theme, obsession or cultural failure would be disorienting and entirely contrary to the experience of discovery. It is a poem, instead, that begs to be tackled consecutively. Armitage’s design is so careful, so perfectly controlled (every line of the 128 verse quatrains is exactly ten syllables in length) that it is hardly an accident that the first five stanzas represent an index or lens through which the remainder of the poem should necessarily be viewed. The very title of the poem introduces us to what will become an almost overwhelming obsession with numerology, naming and measurement. Of course, the source of Western Culture’s fascination with numbers can be traced back to the Old Testament, most prominently, perhaps, in the construction of the Ark. As for naming, we cannot help but look to the book of Genesis, for it was Adam’s task to catalogue the world his God created. At the heart of this complicated poem is a decided focus on the decline of British Culture combined with an exploration of the two opposing biblical myths of Creation and Armageddon. And in the process, various conventional belief systems and the rituals surrounding them are painstakingly examined in an effort to understand our need to believe, and the engines that drive it.

In the first line we are introduced to what will be a copious list of “the makings of the fire to end all fires” (36). This phrasing is reminiscent of ‘the war to end all wars’, a term attributed to World War I, a war that still lives in the collective British Mind as the apocalyptic conflagration of the 20th century. So in this way, then, the concept of Armageddon is introduced as a defining element of the bonfire. But immediately, we are taken back through the ages to the first and central combustible element of the millennial fire: cane. Among the most rudimentary of building materials, cane conjures up images of ancient cultures, and in particular, biblical cultures. As kindling, the cane is responsible for feeding the fire and fostering larger destruction, yet, as an element of the poem’s central paradox, it can also be seen to represent the genesis of building or construction. Pushing this paradox further still is the silver birch, “dragged … like a plough/from twenty fields away” (36). The birch plays into pagan mythology, and in particular, that of the Celts. In the Celtic calendar, the birch comes first and is seen as a symbol of renewal. That it is likened to a plough suggests that the agricultural legacy of Britain is being offered up to the fire, and its removal from ‘twenty fields away’ plays into the poem’s obsession with numerology.
The fire’s architectural support structure is listed under the general heading of ‘Timber’. The base meaning of the word timber is build, but it can also be attributed to a particular house or building, and more interesting still, a sea-going vessel. The fire, then, can be seen as an architectural construction, and the list of ‘scrap wood’ that goes into it, namely, “planking,/purlins, sleepers, pelmets, casements, railings” (36) seem very carefully chosen to draw attention to the fact that this fire is like a house or ship. Even those with the most rudimentary understanding of modern psychology would know enough to equate the rooms and compartments, attics and cellars of a house with the human mind at large. But in many ways, this fire represents a sort of collective, cultural mind, a mind that the poet constructs outwardly and fills to bursting with every feasible aspect of Western belief and understanding.
To begin with, there are domestic items : a fold-away bed, three piano legs, a Lazy-Susan, a table-top, a toilet seat and a garden bench. But perhaps the most symbolically powerful domestic presence here is a mantelpiece, the ornamental wood structure that frames the family fire and is often considered the heart of the household. No small irony, then, that it is now to be consumed by the fire it once helped contain. The “tea chest - empty” and the “sight-screen stolen from the cricket field” (36) are both mainstays of British Culture, so it is entirely appropriate that they should be thrown to the flames. Interesting, though, that they are described, respectively, as ‘empty’ and ‘stolen’. The suggestion seems to be that their value is already depleted. Then there are items that are charged with more sweeping cultural significance. The “eight foot length of four-by-two” (36) suggests the legacy of precision building, of measurement and numerology. The ‘hod’ also plays in, as it is a means of carrying cement and a tool a brick-layer would use in construction.

The ‘pew’ has very obvious religious implications, and, significantly, in its definition, carries the added subtlety of being perhaps a podium from which a sermon might be delivered, perhaps a seat or bench from which the congregation would listen to a sermon. Building out of this further, we are told that “two-thirds of a triptych” (36) is also to be sacrificed. And while we can see this as symbolic of art in the Western Tradition, the fact that there are only two panels suggests the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed, particularly as it is followed by “a Moses basket” (36). This juxtaposition is very clever, and even more so, as it works to introduce the concept of a mythic or deified infant figure, a figure that will play prominently in the rest of the poem. And in fact, on the very next line, the list continues with “half a stable door” (36), an item that, by association, conjures up the Christ-child in his manger.
The remaining items are also symbolic. There are the “pair of ladders” and “one stilt” (36), both of which can be seen as a false means of elevation, and that the stilt is singular suggests our means of achieving the pretence of elevation is already broken or incomplete. Next we have “the best part of a boat” (36), which speaks directly to the Ark myth from the Old Testament, but also ties into the British Ship-Building Industry which had been so prominent for centuries until its recent decline. Up until the twentieth century, Britain was arguably the mightiest nation on the planet, its reputation as such owing entirely to a dominance of the seas both in terms of trade and military power. To achieve power as an island nation, Britain was forced to develop a naval culture. How telling, then, that ‘the best part’ of it should be abandoned to the flames of Armitage’s fire. Last on the list is a wheel, which, next to creating and containing fire itself, is widely acknowledged as humanity’s crowning achievement. That the wheel is from a wagon gives it historical and even mythical import. And the suggestion that the most significant tool we have ever fashioned should be consumed by a fire of our own creation is portentous indeed.

The act of divination by which the fire site is discovered carries with it a suggestion of the supernatural, the pagan, the prophetic. Its root word “divine” also implies the idea of deity in a more comprehensive, and in some cases, more particularized manner, especially in Western Culture, where we think of the Judeo-Christian God as pre-eminent. The ‘centre-pole’ or principal support structure for the fire is ‘planted’ and ‘potted’, verbs that tie in with the agricultural tradition. They also work to suggest that the pole is a living thing, something that needs proper care and nourishment. And that the pole is held in place by ‘baling wire’ continues the metaphor. But the verb of the greatest significance associated with the raising of the centre-pole is ‘hoist’.

Our primary association with ‘hoist’ is naval. Armitage encourages us, then, to see the pole as the main sail or primary mast of a ship, and this association is made more emphatic when we are told that the pole is “held tight with guy-ropes, hawsers” (36). Aside from implicating Guy Fawkes and his Gunpowder Plot into the equation, the guy-ropes (ropes used on ships to steady things) and hawsers (large ropes or cables used for anchoring through the hawse of a ship) drive home the fact that, among other things, this millennial fire is being likened to a ship, a ship, it would seem, of tremendous mythic significance.
The ‘centre-pole’, in many ways, can be seen as the spine or primary skeletal underpinning of the bonfire. It has enormous significance in its own right, and stands as a veritable monolith or beacon, a structure invested with a kind of portentous agency:

and for a week it has to stand alone,
stand for itself, a mark, a line of sight,
a stripe against the sky. Steeple, needle,
spindle casting half a mile of shadow

at dusk, at dawn another half-mile more.
Held down, held firm, but not to climb or scale;
strung, stayed, but with an element of play-
in wind the top nods inches either way. (37)

That the pole is initially likened to a “steeple” immediately invests the site with a very real religious significance, but it seems more reminiscent of the ‘contemporary cathedral’, the architectural marvel of technology we know today as the skyscraper. The fact that ‘in wind the top nods inches either way’ encourages us to read it as such, and the implication that the very symbol of our heightened technological understanding should sit at the center of the millennial conflagration is alarming indeed, particularly in light of the recent terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center towers. We are then told that the pole is a “thing to surround, build around, or simply/the solid opposite of a chimney” (37), tying it back into the idea of a house, but a sort of negative house, a house with a chimney that consumes itself in fire and is solid rather than hollow-yet another aspect of the poem’s central paradox of creation and destruction.

We are also encouraged to see the pole as emblematic of a sort of negative Mecca, a holy ground where “figures who visit the site” come after checking “the yards and feet and inches of their lives/for something safe to sacrifice” (37). The suggestion is of a kind of pagan ritualism, and once again our cultural fascination with precise measurement is invoked. And this fascination becomes increasingly evident as the list of sacrifices is reeled off. There is “a furlong of carpet” (a nod to more archaic systems of measurement), a kid that “comes a mile and a third, uphill, to tip/a hundredweight of paper”, and the tyre that weighs “half a ton” (37-38). But more important than simple measurement is the specificity of the things themselves that are brought for burning. People arrive “with a box/and set it down like a child’s coffin”, the boy with the hundredweight of paper brings it in “a pram”, and the man who brings a sack of low-grade coal “lugs it, wears it draped around his neck/like a dead foal” (37-38). Here we see the mythical infant/Christ-child allusions in full force. The infant redeemer is given over to the fire in sacrifice.
In the next sequence, the naval motif is revisited in full:

litter brought from somewhere else to right here
by hurricane or twister, washed ashore and beached
by long shore drift and gale force winds
and a hard night of high seas. Flotsam. Dreck. (38)

It is here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the poem, that the idea of Britain’s decline as a maritime nation is addressed, with the flotsam, or floating wreckage, given over to the fire as an emblem of
naval failure. Interesting how immediately after this disclosure the fire begins to be stacked, and at ‘the eleventh hour’ no less. It is the recognition, then, of specific cultural/industrial failure on Britain’s part that provides the trigger to “build up and out/from slats and rafters through to joists and beams” (38), to create the house of the mind, the house of fire. And as the fire goes through various stages of development, it is seen, consecutively, as : “cairn”, “wigwam”, “dome”, “pyramid”, “bell” and “cone” (39). All of the architectural progress of recorded civilization is taken into account as the mythic structure evolves, yet it retains the memory of what had come before it, so in essence, our entire architectural legacy is present in the finished construction.

When Armitage lists the ‘features’ of the structure it can be seen to contain elements inherent not only to a house, but also a church or ship. The catalogue begins with “priest-holes” (concealed rooms in churches where Roman Catholic priests would take refuge during times of persecution) and “alcoves”. The “doors”, “passageways” and “box-rooms” are more generic, but the fact that “paper steeped in paraffin” and “blankets doused in oil” are “stowed … within its walls” brings the nautical motif to bear again (39). The structure, then, is a powder-keg of Western cultural values and belief systems all fused together awaiting the single match necessary to begin the conflagration.
Once ignited, the fire itself comes to stand for a brand new system in its own right, one that simultaneously consumes itself as it “spreads its word … chatters its own name/through a stook of canes” (40). And like conventional belief systems, it is “a rumour handed down, passed round and shared” (40). We are next introduced to the catalogue of sounds the fire makes as it burns, a list, like subsequent lists, and like the fire itself, that exhausts itself, simply runs out of things to say. And the people who are warmed by this self-consuming system are sustained by it only in part:

Lit from the front, the faces we wear
are masks, and bare hands hang down from their cuffs
like lamps. Heat to our hearts, but we each feel

the bite of frost from the nape of the neck
to the heels, a cold current through the spine …
…………………………………………………………

A lending of heat and light to the air
but splinters of ice in our hands and hair. (41)

The suggestion seems to be that the fury with which the fire burns is localized and mis-directed, a suggestion emphasized by the fact that “A small girl/paddles in the puddle of her own boots,/melted to her feet” (42).

The next sequence of action takes place “an hour later” with “the fire deep-seated,/up to speed, at full tilt” (42). In essence then, as a system of belief, it has reached its zenith. What happens at this point is remarkable, and telling indeed:

A man with an oar
comes forward from the crowd with a bauble
or a silver orb on its outstretched blade -

a cooking apple cased in baking foil -
which he expertly lays at the white heart
of the flames. ‘For eating, later,’ he says … (42)

The oar here is emblematic of the British people and their sea-faring tradition. The apple, a symbol we cannot help but attribute to ‘the fall of man’, and a symbol that sits at the foundation of our Western belief system, is given over to the new system as an offering or sacrifice. Interesting, too, that it should first be described as ‘a bauble’ (a child’s toy, that makes us think of the infant redeemer) and then ‘a silver orb’ (part of the accouterment of kings, suggesting Christ again as a spiritual sovereign, and also waning British royalty). That the apple is placed directly at “the white heart/of the flames” (42) indicates it will also play a foundational role in the new system. And in case there should be any mistaking the matter, we are told in direct speech that it is “For eating later” (42).

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