The Instrument - Analysis

Two poetries: the small, safe one and the vast, unnamed one

Les Murray’s central claim is blunt and oddly consoling: the kind of poetry that gets politely called poetry is a minority taste, but poetry as a force is everywhere. The opening question, Who reads poetry?, answers itself through exclusions—Not our intellectuals, Not lovers, not examinees, Not poor schoolkids—until the category of reader shrinks to a self-enclosed sect: lovers of poetry. Yet the poem refuses to end in elitism. Instead it pivots to a second, larger meaning of poetry: a feral, continent-spanning language that still rules / the continents precisely because it goes unrecognized as poetry.

The poem’s argument keeps doubling back on itself: it criticizes would-be controllers of poetry, then admits poetry’s real power isn’t in the controlled space of books at all. By the end, poetry becomes less a genre than a condition you can’t escape: Being outside all poetry is an unreachable void.

The comic cruelty of the readership list

The early exclusions sound like a rant, but they’re carefully chosen to expose different kinds of misuse. Intellectuals want to control it: their reading is managerial. Lovers (in the romantic sense) and the combative skim for bouquets / and magic trump cards, turning poems into ammunition or gifts. Examinees read under coercion, and schoolkids are pictured in the most bodily, humiliating way—furtively farting—as institutions immunize them against poems. The insult is doing moral work: it says the classroom can turn poetry into a vaccine, a small dose that produces resistance rather than intimacy.

Even the supposed true readers are treated without reverence. Murray shrinks them to a statistic—may total a million people / on the whole planet—then punctures that with a ludicrous comparison: Fewer than the players of skat. It’s a joke with a sting. Poetry’s prestige is out of proportion to its audience, and the poem wants us to face that mismatch without melodrama.

The “never-murderous skim” and the book as tranquil surface

When Murray describes what poetry-lovers actually like, the tone turns unexpectedly gentle: their delight is a never-murderous skim, distilled and suspended in rapt / calm on the surface of paper. That phrasing both praises and confines the literary poem. Never-murderous makes book-poetry sound ethically superior—harmless, non-coercive, a refuge from propaganda and violence. But skim and surface also imply a thinness: a kind of aesthetic hovering. The poem is calm because it has been separated from something heavier that it was once integral to.

This is the first key tension: the poem values the peace of art, yet suspects that peace might be a loss of power. The calm page is real pleasure, but it is also a historical narrowing, poetry reduced to a boutique practice coaxed to the café or district library for a bifocal reading—a phrase that makes poetry feel like something you need special lenses to see.

The turn: feral poetry that must not be named

The poem’s hinge comes with The rest of poetry. Here Murray asserts that what we call poetry is only one corner of a much larger phenomenon that now rules only under a gag order: on condition now / that its true name’s never spoken. He offers substitute names—constructs, feral poetry—and defines it paradoxically as the opposite but also the secret of the rational. In other words, modern life pretends to run on reason, but it is secretly driven by incantations: phrases that recruit belief, identity, obedience, glamour.

The proof arrives as a list of words that people “read” everywhere: Porsche, lift-off, Gaia, Cool, patriarchy. The list is brilliantly mixed—advertising, technology, environmental myth, social currency, political analysis—showing how many tribes and institutions rely on compressed, rhythmically charged terms. Murray’s point isn’t that these words are false; it’s that they work like stanzas: they condense worlds, summon feelings, and organize crowds. That’s why everybody reads them: generals and crime-lords share this literacy with schoolkids and debaters.

Words that want bodies: the demand for obedience

Once poetry is widened into slogan, brand, and sacred concept, its danger returns. Among the feral stanzas are those that demand your flesh / to embody themselves. This is one of the poem’s starkest lines: it makes ideology physical. The “stanza” isn’t merely persuasive; it wants your body as its instrument—your labor, your vote, your war, your shame. That puts pressure on the earlier phrase never-murderous skim: literary poetry is peaceful partly because it lacks the bodily enforcement that feral poetry can command.

And yet Murray does not simply condemn feral poetry. He admits it is inevitable, even constitutive: Being outside all poetry would be a void. The contradiction sharpens: poetry is both the medium of coercion and the only medium we have. The question becomes not whether we will live inside poetry, but which poetry will carry us.

Challenging question: is “completed art” a kind of escape hatch?

Murray claims that Only completed art / free of obedience to its time can pirouette you through the larger poems you are in. But what does it mean to be free of one’s time when the poem itself names its time’s keywords—Gaia, patriarchy—and even invokes national political history? Is the freedom he wants an actual independence, or a different kind of dependence: obedience to the demands of making, rather than to the demands of a party, market, or moral fashion?

Why write: the bodily trance and the moral bargain

The final third shifts from cultural diagnosis to personal motive: Why write poetry? The answers are comic and intimate—weird unemployment, painless headaches—but also physiological: inspiration as a jolt that runs down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment. Murray insists on the strangeness of composition: after the trance, you do adjustments, aligning facets in a verb. That image treats a verb like a cut gem, something you rotate until it catches the right light, and it makes craft feel like recovery from possession.

Then comes a moral claim disguised as a casual aside: writing lets you avoid a particular kind of social climb—not needing to rise / and betray the poor. Here poetry becomes an ethics of livelihood: it offers a way to be serious without becoming predatory. Even the desire for recognition is purified into a non-devouring fame, fame that doesn’t eat others to grow. Against the feral stanzas that demand flesh, this is a small utopian counter-model: language that doesn’t require victims.

Politics as a rare echo: the secret ballot and “deflation”

Murray allows that politics rarely resembles this kind of art, then singles out a startling example: the Australian colonists’ adoption of the secret ballot, a device in which deflation could hide. The word deflation matters—it suggests puncturing bombast, refusing the theatrical pressure of crowds. The ballot’s secrecy shields the individual from feral poetry’s public chants. Yet the poem won’t let the reader rest in patriotic pride; it asks whether this was moral cowardice’s one shining world victory. The paradox is sharp: hiding your conviction can be both cowardly and a defense against mass coercion, a way to prevent the “stanzas” of revolution from marching bodies into mass-grave Revolutions.

The jagged phrase So axe-edged, so lictor-y tastes like a verbal grimace, connecting state power to execution and Roman authority. It’s another reminder that public language loves sharpness and spectacle—and that sharpness cuts.

Dream-rhythm awake: the gift and the burden

The poem ends by returning to the body, but now as an index of vocation: Breathing in dream-rhythm when awake is evidence of the gift. Poetry is not just something you read; it is a metronome that rewires perception. The final line—Being tragic with a book on your head—lands as both satire and prophecy. It mocks the pretensions of literary culture (the ludicrous image of staged seriousness), while also hinting that the writer’s tragedy is real: to carry a book is to carry a vulnerability, a visibility, a target.

In the end, Murray isn’t begging for more readers. He is insisting that reading is already happening, everywhere, in keywords and slogans and names—and that the task of the poet is to make an art strong enough to pirouette through those larger poems without becoming their instrument.