Poem 484

From The Nightdress … as mentioned earlier bodily effluvium is inextricably a part of the story of Constance Kent and family and of Victorian culture at large … blood semen shit … when Constance (and in all probability William) murdered three year old Saville on a moonlit night they shoved his body down the vault of an outside privy used by servants … from this I invented the character of the Nightsoil Man the labourer who goes round clearing these long drops of waste … stinking to high heaven he sings this song to the young Constance and William … he’s an insinuating character, overly intimate, verging on lewd, and becomes merged in Constance’s mind with the spectre of death, especially once she has lost all faith in God and taken on the theories of Charles Darwin which logically imply there is no life after death beyond rot and ordure and consequently concepts of sin and virtue are also irrelevant …

… the song comments too on the class system and separation and ignorance between the Victorian classes … I enjoyed expressing this ‘view from the bottom’ perspective and the subversive ‘shit philosophy’ of this unsettling trickster character who observes the affectations of the ruling class with equal parts derision and amusement …

… the first draft was written in a favourite restaurant in the town of Tigaki on the Greek island of Kos on an evening when Michele didn’t feel well enough to join me – I can remember scribbling in my notebook all through my solo dinner and chuckling at my own jokes as more and more lines came to me … do people still use ‘business’ in this sense (ie. my mum saying ‘there’s a cat doing his business in the garden’)? …

( I love the wordplay in this eg. the double meaning of bubble and squeak, rhyme of bubble/shovel, the endless eating/shitting cycle in round and round it goes, the change of rhythm and line length in the middle-eight, reference to coprolite (fossilised dinosaur shit) … and bringing off a pretty intricate rhyme scheme with what I think is a high level of skill … )

The Nightsoil Man

I'm a man who mines by night
mysterious and out of sight 
unearthing delicious beauties 
then before the morning lark 
with my laden dripping cart 
making off with the precious booty

And then my fine brown bounty 
is spread over five counties 
sprouting riches from the stony ground 
cabbages turnips and leek 
to make you bubble and squeak 
which I'll shovel next week on my round

and round and round it goes ...

Shake my hand I'm the nightsoil man 
let a spot of honest toil 
rub off on you 
the name's Bill Boyle the nightsoil man 
I'm privy to things you do
in pit or pan 
your business is my business too

Taking the nightsoil point of view we're all just a fancy tube 
worms eating and excreting our passage through the dark 
but who's to say worm cast might not be the one thing to last 
in some distant future as your sole enduring mark 
when a freakish species so evolved it needs no bodily holes 
excavates this pit - you may sniff but it's possible 
and finding it deep immured delicately frees one of your turds 
and proudly frames it as a fascinating fossil

Shake my hand I'm the nightsoil man
let a spot of honest toil 
rub off on you 
the name's Bill Boyle the nightsoil man 
I've seen everything you do 
spit in my hand 
your business is my business too

No not to be a royal 
would I give up the nightsoil 
it's good solid honest toil 
and the one career I suit 
plus I trust my clientele 
will blast me a fond farewell 
when the humble mortal coil 
of yours truly Billy Boyle 
a connoisseur of low-hanging fruit 
is shovelled in the pit at last 
they'll drop their flags to half-arse 
and fire a forty-bum salute

Shit on the hand of the nightsoil man 
a craftsman an artisan 
quick to pick up after you
no need to be coy the nightsoil man
knows what you've done what you'll do 
I understand 
your business is my business too

your business is my business