How I felt about The Full Indian Rope Trick

The first poem I'm going to hold my hands up and say I don't exactly know everything about it, but I love it, is The Full Indian Rope Trick by Colette Bryce. I do this to encourage people to admit not knowing sometimes is OK. I want to lead by example that if you don't get it all or don't feel clever enough to talk about a poem, it doesn't matter. If you get something from a poem read poems. The feeling you get from a good poem is valid, whether it matches what a text book says or not. I've never read anything about what academics say about this poem. For the aim of admitting not knowing I didn't want to. It seems a bit shoddy to try and encourage more people to read poetry if we feel we need to then read articles to explain it. We don't. Just read it, recommend it, don't always know much more than what it does for you. It's a good start.

I love The Full Indian Rope Trick, but the poem feels a bold and scary choice to talk about. The poem won the National Poetry Competition and was later voted most popular winner of the prize in 20 years of winners. It is a well known poem. It is a beloved poem and it is excellent. There will no doubt be many scholars who know every answer to this poem. Then there's me. I'm going to say I love it, but it is still mysterious to me.

The first lines of the poem are : ' There was no secret

murmured down through a long line

of elect; no dark fakir'

This seems apt to me in the act of talking about poetry. Poetry itself seems perhaps to some that we should know secrets of how to approach it. If we don't, if we weren't born to a long line of poetry readers, how do we know where to start?

I like the beginning of the poem admitting the poet or character in the poem doesn't know secrets. 'The Full Indian Rope Trick' seems to be about this old magic trick. All the parts are there, the rope, the setting, the feat and up and away. As a reader I felt right there, but still, after reading the poem many times, I've wondered what exactly is the full indian rope trick a metaphor for? I talked about this once with a poet who felt it was about disappearing. Maybe it is. I still wasn't sure, it seems more triumphand to me than that, an ascencion in a way. There is the sense of leaving something behind yes, it seems to lie in the line-

the slack weight of a rope

coiled in a crate, a braid

eighteen summers long,

Perhaps the rope climber is eighteen years old, letting go of an eighteen year an old belief or grudge, but I don't know for sure.

The lines, 'Goodbye, thin air, first try,' give me this feeling of the climber of the rope letting old failures go. 'Goodbye, Goodbye', this feels like elation. For me, the poem is much more than the act of disappearing, which is comething I wouldn't equate with the triumphant feeling of the poem. This rope is 'caught by the sky, then 'me, young, (is) up and away.'

The line: No proof,

no footage,

but I did it'

leaves me with a feeling of wanting to cheer, like someone in the crowd watching a show. Yes! She did it, regardless of who saw or what they may think.

It feels the rope climber has left something behind, let go, and ascended to a new level somehow. The inclusion of 'Guidhall Square', walls, bells' may be in reference to mourners, grief, memorium. 'Walls, bells' seem to indicate a church- is the rope climber experiencing freedom from church and state? Is this poem a healing? Perhaps. But I don't feel I know exactly who the narrator is, how exactly, what exactly is being let go of, who or why, I'm not a hundred percent sure. Yet, even not knowing, the poem gives me a good feeling as a reader. I want to punch the air and shout 'Too right!' This feeling of a huge personal triumph in the piece rings out clear.

The magic of the poem, for me, comes in a way in not always knowing. Just as a magician does not reveal his secrets, the poet does not reveal exactly what the trick was for them, who they are, everything it meant or how this trick was done. Would I love this poem as much if I knew exactly? Maybe it would be less of a trick.

The beauty, of course, is the poem itself became a full Indian rope trick- it won. 'I did it...'The last lines may refer to the act of being a poet itself and so much more. There has been pain and loss. It's been hard. Whatever I know or don't know matters less than the sense that whether the rope climber appears to have disappeared, they've been through something private with no footage, no cheers. Yet it mattered. The narrator is still here and strong.The reader feels alive.

And what would I tell them

given the chance?

It was painful; it took years.

I'm my own witness,

guardian of the fact

that I'm still here.

http://poetrysociety.org.uk/content/competitions/npc/npc03/