Song by George Szirtes
For Helen Suzman
Nothing happens until something does.
Everything remains just as it was
And all you hear is the distant buzz
Of nothing happening until something does.
A lot of small hands in a monstrous hall
can make the air vibrate
and even shake the wall;
a voice can break a plate
or glass, and one pale feather tip
the balance on a sinking ship.
It’s the very same tune that has been sung
time and again by those
whose heavy fate has hung
on the weight that they oppose,
the weight by which are crushed
the broken voices of the hushed.
But give certain people a place to stand
a lever, a fulcrum, a weight,
however small the hand
the object however great,
it is possible to prove
that even Earth may be made to move.
Nothing happens until something does,
and hands, however small,
fill the air so the buzz
of the broken fills the hall
as levers and fulcrums shift
and the heart, like a weight, begins to lift.
Nothing happens until something does.
Everything remains just as it was
And all you can hear is the distant buzz
Of nothing happening. Then something does.
Resource: https://poetryprof.com/song/
Things to consider whilst crafting the structure of your essay:
● Szirtes use of symbolism through sound to convey a sense of oppression
● Szirtes use of metaphorical language to create a tone of hope revealing the strength of
Suzman
● Szirtes use of structural choices of repetition and abstract language to build tension in the
poem.
George Szirtes pays tribute to a determined and courageous spirit.
Song is preceded by a dedication: For Helen Suzman and the poem was written in 2007,
the year in which Suzman turned ninety years old. The poem is both celebration of this
incredible lady’s life and achievements, and tribute to her never-say-die spirit of
determination. Knowing a little about the circumstances of Suzman’s story illuminates
the themes of the poem nicely, bringing clarity to what might otherwise be quite abstract
images. Suzman was a white South African anti-apartheid activist. A member of the
Progressive Party, she was for many years the only elected voice opposing the ruling
National Party in South Africa’s parliament, so her resistance against the pro-apartheid
government was lonely and fraught with intimidation, animosity, and hostility. Although
she was white and represented a majority white neighbourhood, nevertheless Suzman
considered herself a voice for “all those people who have no vote and no Member of
Parliament.” Her tireless pursuit of justice saw her twice nominated for the Nobel Peace
prize and won her the respect and friendship of Nelson Mandela:
Given the particulars of Helen Suzman’s story, you may be surprised how accessible and
straightforward today’s poem actually is. You don’t need to know much about Suzman’s
history to appreciate the uplifting emotion of Szirtes’ writing. Song doesn’t include
specific details of Suzman’s political career or fight against apartheid,
preferring symbolic images which cross cultural and political boundaries. Szirtes treats
Helen Suzman as an inspirational figure, a person of exceptional integrity and bravery
who spoke out against unfairness and injustice, the metaphorical fulcrum around which
the efforts of those who follow her are multiplied. Readers are inspired by her example,
and it’s implied that we can contribute to positive change when direct address places us
inside the poem too: all you hear… When we read everything remains just as it was,
what that ‘everything’ refers to remains undefined, letting the reader project their own
idea of ‘injustice’ onto the poem. Similarly, nothing happens suggests a general sense of
‘status quo’, business as normal in an unfair and unjust world. Such abstract
diction risks making bad writing – but Szirtes pulls it off splendidly to make his poem
unabashedly emotional, uplifting, and celebratory. There ‘s a constant feeling of
reclaiming victory against all odds, created through the juxtaposition of opposing ideas,
whether through straightforward contrasting diction or more subtle opposing
images: nothing vs something, small vs great, the tiny lightness of a feather positioned
on the huge prow of a sinking ship, small hands in a monstrous hall, the downwards force
of a heavy weight opposed when that weight begins to lift. It’s no accident that the poem
begins with the words Nothing happens and ends with the line: Then something does. The
transition from nothing to something, repeated to become the poem’s clarion call,
implies that positive change is inevitable when brave individuals (like Helen Suzman)
have the courage to speak up and act against the world’s oppressions.
The shift away from injustice and despair towards hope can be traced through the poem’s
very form. As stated by the title, the poem is a Song, so rhythm and rhyme combine to
create an uplifting effect when the poem is read aloud. The first lines of verse three pay
homage to the unifying role of protest songs of various kinds in civil rights movements
throughout history, including anti-apartheid: It’s the very same tune that has been sung
time and again. To begin with, the rhythm of the poem is hard to pin down as the first
verse involves various combinations of feet (a foot is a measure of poetry containing
some combination of unstressed and stressed syllables). Falling measures begin on a
stressed beat, like the first word of the poem: Nō-thing. By contrast, rising measures end
on a stressed beat: the most common measure in English poetry – the iamb – is made of
two syllables arranged unstressed-stressed. After the more complicated patterns of the
first verse, the poem settles into a predominantly rising rhythm so whether lines are
three or four beats long, they always end on a stressed beat. Rising rhythms, when
repeated often enough, have an inherently uplifting and triumphant feel which perfectly
suits the message of determination overcoming oppression and injustice. Every time the
poem threatens to ‘fall’ under the weight of oppression, Szirtes relieves that pressure by
ending lines on a ‘rising’ note. So too does the poem rhyme in an uplifting way: all four
lines in the first (and last verse) rhyme AAAA: does, was, buzz and does again. Longer
verses of six lines follow the rhyme scheme ABABAA, so each verse ends in a
triumphant rhyming couplet that celebrates the victory of hope over despair. Some
verses even contain internal rhymes: make/shake/break in verse two and fate/weight in
verse three gives the poem a rousing intensity – read out loud, the poem certainly has the
power to move and inspire.
As a celebratory poem, Szirtes always seeks to tip the balance towards hope and
positivity; even the structure of the poem suggests the triumph of fairness over injustice.
The bleakest part of the poem is undoubtedly the third verse, which imagines oppression
as a symbolic weight that presses down upon people unbearably. Verse three exerts an
almost tactile downwards force through diction: hung, heavy, weight (repeated for
emphasis), crushed, broken, and hushed. Sound is pressed into service
through alliteration: aspirant is made with the H sound, audible in the line whose heavy
fate has hung as if a huge pressure is bearing down on a person’s chest, suffocating and
stifling. Onomatopoeia completes the effect: both hushed and crushed contain
the sibilant sound of breath being driven from the body.
The images of crushed and broken voices (symbolic of people’s crushed hopes, dreams
and lives) are testimony to the destructive power of oppressive systems. Yet even here,
with the poem at its lowest point, Szirtes doesn’t lose sight of his key message: the
word oppose stands out to remind us that we should keep fighting no matter how dark
things might seem. And the subsequent verses (on which more later) provide a
counteracting force that resists the weight of oppression. Szirtes promises that, when
resistance is applied in the right way, even the Earth may be made to move. He breaks us
down in the third verse so he can build us back up again afterwards and the effect is quite
inspirational.
The vibrations of many small hands working together transforms the distant buzz into a
potent symbol of collective action and protest.
Szirtes wrote Song in the imagist tradition, whereby symbols and figurative
images stand in for abstract concepts, in this case oppression, despair, hope and triumphover-adversity. In the first verse, the reader is introduced to an auditory motif (a motif is
a symbol that reoccurs throughout a text) of a quiet-but-insistent buzz. Initially associated
with the phrase nothing happening, the low-pitched, distant buzzing belies this idea as it
sounds like actually something is happening – yes, it’s far-away for now, but it feels like
it’s gathering energy and coming closer line by line. As an onomatopoeia, the
word buzz contains the sibilant sound of its own meaning, the double letter Z combing
with frequent uses of the letter S in the first verse (remains just as it was prominently
clusters several sibilant S sounds) to recreate a resonant, vibration of the poem’s
baseline. It’s almost impossible to hear the word buzz without thinking of bees working
together in a hive, a very pleasing image that, intended side-effect or not, brings to life
Szirtes’ hopeful message; you may feel your actions are small and insignificant, but when
people join their efforts together, the results can be formidable – even Earth-shattering.
While it begins as a distant sound, through repetition and rhyme (with the
words does and was) the ZZ sound intensifies and by the end of the poem it dominates
your ear, becoming the auditory motif of cooperation and collective protest. In the fifth
verse, Szirtes reveals the sound is made by downtrodden people fighting back against
oppressive forces, reasserting the validity of the voices that had previously been silenced
(hushed). The buzz of the broken, no longer distant but so loud now it fills the hall, is one
of the most powerful sounds/ideas of the poem, suggesting that we should never give up;
even when things are at their most desperate, we can think back to Szirtes’ poem (or
Michael Jackson, if you prefer) and find a way to make that change.
Actually, the distant buzz was an aspect of protest and resistance long before this line.
The elusive sound is given a physical dimension in the second verse, which depicts a lot
of small hands in a monstrous hall, a deliberately vague image of oppression surrounding
people and enveloping them in darkness. The way such a mundane word as hall is joined
to such a threatening word as monstrous is oxymoronic (an oxymoron is the technique
of pairing unexpected words); I envision this hall as a huge, dark cave, fanged with low
hanging stalactites, or maybe a cathedral adorned with hideous, grinning gargoyles. You
should let your imagination run riot here too – the scarier the better. Whatever you
envisage, the hall is a metaphor for an oppressive system, trapping people inside using
fear as a method of control. Raising one’s own small hand in protest might seem
hopeless… but what happens when everyone in the hall combines their efforts into
collective action? The result is a powerful tremor that can make the air vibrate and even
shake the wall (the word vibrate builds nicely on that distant buzzing sound, bringing the
moment of victory over injustice closer and closer). By substituting hands for people,
Szirtes is making makes use of a special type of metaphor called synecdoche, by which a
part of something (or someone) is used to represent its whole. Throughout the
poem hands represent the act of protest as more and more people join Helen in speaking
up and acting against injustice and oppression in any number of ways; clenched fists
ready to fight, casting a vote, holding up a banner, holding hands in solidarity, and so on.
At one point, people crushed by the weight of oppression are described through
another synecdoche as broken voices, an image of silencing that implies the use of
violence in suppressing dissenting opinions. Near the end of the poem, in verse five,
Szirtes uses more synecdoche when the power of protest wins out and the heart… begins
to lift. In this example, the heart is both synecdoche and symbol representing the
emotional core of people. Like a weight the heart can feel heavy – but it can also soar
when injustice is opposed and even defeated.
Through synecdoche, whereby a part of something stands for its whole, Szirtes celebrates
Helen Suzman’s voice when she stood alone against an entire pro-apartheid government.
As well as illustrating the power of collective action, Szirtes suggests that individual
actions have value in and of themselves; a single action, if applied with ingenuity and
intention, can have unexpectedly powerful consequences. For many long years, Suzman
was the only elected member of the Progressive Party, the only one with a mandated
platform to speak up against the great perversion of justice that was the apartheid system.
Therefore, verse two provides two further images-cum-symbols revealing the worth of
seemingly tiny actions. Through synecdoche again, Szirtes celebrates the power of
Suzman’s voice, the part of her that relentlessly spoke up against injustice, even when she
stood alone against an entire government; we are reminded that, pitched right, a voice can
break a glass or plate. While forces of injustice might seem strong, this image suggests
they are inherently fragile, like playground bullies all tough on the outside, but secretly
weak and cowardly, shattering when exposed to a single, keen voice. Finally, anyone
who’s seen that movie trope where a car overhangs a cliff, teetering precariously, before
a bird lands on the bonnet sending it plunging over the edge will recognise what the
image of one pale feather (its whiteness corresponding to Helen’s skin colour) settling on
the prow of a sinking ship is trying to convey. Like the straw that breaks the camel’s
back, the feather is an obvious enough metaphor for Suzman and how her relentless
campaigning against the apartheid system was a significant factor in its eventual and
inevitable failure.
Archimedes mathematical principles are alluded to in the fourth and fifth verse, when
against the odds, apartheid is toppled by Suzman and her allies, working together to shift
a seemingly impossible weight.
The poem depicts oppression as a universal evil – and history’s champions of justice
(certain people) come in many guises. The fourth verse presents a new allusion to Greek
mathematician Archimedes, who famously said, “give me a place to stand, and a lever
long enough, and I will move the world.” An allusion is a reference to something
(usually literary, historical, classical, or mythical) outside the text that is not explained –
it’s up to the reader to recognise the terms of an allusion. In this case, the words lever,
fulcrum, a place to stand and the Earth can be made to move all echo Archimedes’ wellknown proclamation. Where he was discussing the use of physical tools to multiply the
effect of physical effort, Szirtes interprets his words more figuratively to suggest how
embracing a certain mindset, or taking up a smart position, can help us overcome
obstacles no matter how imposing they might seem. As Archimedes was a mathematical
genius, so the language of this verse is correspondingly mathematical, logical even,
forming a tonal contrast that relieves the doom and gloom of the preceding verse by
finding an ingenious way to beat the odds and lever that crushing weight away. Notice
how aspirant is used again in line three, however small the hand, to imply the mighty
effort of a single individual standing in opposition to oppression and injustice. Where
verse three took us to the poem’s lowest point, verse four ends on an uplifting and
celebrant note created by more alliteration, this time a powerful P in possible
to prove and a euphoric, euphonic (the combination of soft
consonants with assonance is called euphony) M-A combination: may be made to move.
By recreating Archimedes’ principle in poetic form, Szirtes sends a hopeful message: no
problem is impossible to overcome if one applies a combination of determination
(personified by Suzman) and ingenuity (represented by Archimedes) to its solution.
Finally, a word on repetition, which is arguably the poem’s most important poetic
device. Written as a tribute to protest songs, and as a song of celebration, we would
expect this poem to repeat lines and even whole verses (a song’s chorus or refrain). But
in this poem, repetition does more than create musicality; it carries the message of
‘never give up, never stop fighting’. In the uplifting fifth verse, repetition is put to
rousing effect when all the elements we’ve seen in the poem before (hands, voices,
downtrodden, broken people, lever and fulcrum) combine to overcome the oppressive
forces that bore down so relentlessly. The message that we should never give up even
when things seem hopeless is carried most effectively in this part of the poem as slowlybut-surely, levers and fulcrums shift and the heart, like a weight, begins to lift. All that’s
left is for Szirtes to cycle back to the start of his poem, which we read again with the
knowledge that that distant buzz is going to manifest to such powerful effect. He gives us
an almost word-for-word repetition of the first verse as the last – almost, except for one
tiny difference: a full stop is placed in the middle of the final line: Of nothing happening.
Then something does. Throughout, Szirtes has argued the necessity of action in face of
oppression, the outspoken voice or raising of a single hand that can shift the weight of
injustice towards something more fair and equitable. The full stop in the final line
represents that single tiny action. A deliberate break in the middle of a line of poetry is
called caesura, and here it has an emphatic effect on the words that follow, stressing the
transformation of nothing to something. Therefore, the poem’s refrain carries both of
Szirtes’ key messages: never give in to despair and small actions can make a big
difference.