Peter Daniels' "Happy and Fortunate"

"Happy and Fortunate" is a 13 page poem from "Old Men" (Salt, 2024) by Peter Daniels. It was shortlisted in the Wigtown Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize 2022, and published in issue 30 of Long Poem Magazine. The poem doesn't have a section of its own in the book - it's somewhere in the middle of the final "Honorable Acts" section. This context helps with interpreting the poem. On the back cover it says -

• He recasts the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into a sequence exploring confusion and sanity in a relationship.
• He wryly observes the dignity of age’s indignities and, in a brilliant sequence on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, how dotage can seem sane and balanced. (Gregory Woods)

The poem's title is a quote from the Cervantes book. I've not read the book (actually Cervantes wrote 2 books a decade or so apart) so I'm not going to attempt anything very thorough here - I suspect I'm missing many allusions. I know that old Don Quixote, who has intense ideas about the right way to live and who consequently misinterprets his perceptions, sets out on sallies accompanied by the cynical realist, Sancho Panza. The episodic book's themes include Imagination vs Reality; Stories vs Life; Aging vs Wisdom - which all align well with the poetry book's themes. As Cervantes' book progresses, the 2 characters become more like each other. Quixote begins by thinking that the strange things he sees have been transformed by enchanters. At the end he accepts that the fantasies are internal. He dies sane.

The poem's in 9 sections and is mostly in couplets.

• "The Ballet"
  

  A ballet based in the book was performed in London not so long ago. The beginning of this section is

  Out on stage with the scenery and chorus it's his moment, his life as a dance

  Later, "This visor is warped, this lance useless" - the visor could refer to vision, the lance may be Freudian. Then "He has to be rescued, or the story/ can't end. It's no way of life, the heroic" we're told, "no grants from the higher powers ... The audience is online only, and the videos are streaming into the void", "Nothing can be done. There's only being.// One day the sad man on the stage will have no story left./ We all put on our masks and waltz around the scenery".

  A single ballet dancer becomes a collective waltz. Without art, audience and applause, life is empty. Time for action.

• "The sally forth"

  This section starts with a quote from Cervantes - "Most happy and fortunate were the days when the bold knight Don Quixote of La Mancha sallied forth into the world". We leave the artificial world of the stage, the world of audience and performer. Now "every moment [will be] a triumph of freedom". Already Sancho Panza is thinking ahead - "He's coming home safely now, held in careful hands ... Recovery from his expedition may be painful ... This is the story. This is the way of life,/ a hope to rescue, and a thorough storming of the fortress". The section ends with a mini-section -

  Horses happen more than unhappening unicorns Does that make the happening horse matter more?

  "unicorn" might have an LGBTQ+ meaning here - Don Quixote rides a horse and Panza a donkey. More significantly, reality/imagination is being assessed - is "real" better?

• "Mistakes"

  In this section the 2 characters/tendencies are as far apart as they'll ever be - the 2 lines of each couplet provide direct contrasts between the 2 protagonists as they try things out - "Don Quixote with a drone helicopter,/ Sancho Panza with a badly drawn bird.", Don Quixote makes the party sizzle,/ Sancho Panza is too fond of sausages"

• "A prayer"

  This section is in triplets, with new objectives being stated and old ideas being reinterpreted -

  • "O commitment! O recovery from disillusion!/ What mistakes have I been made to enjoy!"
  • "O soul of a ballerina, of a perfect move across/ a notional stage!"
  • "O begin in me!"
• "Tell your story"

  The initial quote is "'Boy, boy,' said Don Quixote in a loud voice, 'tell your story in a straight line ... one must have proofs and more proof'". Then "The pudding has to be something he can taste: it's the reason for eating, or his tongue thinks so". But still "A shakeup is needed". The ending is "Making a hash of his life has left the story hanging./ The proof of your sanity is in telling it straight". There's an allusion to Dickinson's "tell it slant", a suggestion that imagination needs a basis in reality - Coleridge's Fancy/Imagination distinction.

• "Up and down"
  

  It starts with "Up is yes, and the answer to a good many questions" then mentions gin, tonic and three enchanters, then "Descend to the bottom for a transformational dream./ Forget your way back, there's more of the maze than you think"

  The maze is a device used by Cervantes to organise various narratives.

• "Alphabet"

  Daniels rarely resorts to wordplay. In this section we descend to the bottom (letter-level) of language with several pangrams: some single-lined, some 2-lined - e.g. "Don Quixote kicks a high jive in a lumpy borrowed fez", "Don Quixote believes in magic,/ Sancho Panza in works of joy". The mini-section at the end is

  The horses are each other's whisperer: their fear is acknowledged but it keeps down in a corner of the field by itself

  Gone are the unicorns. Instead, society's outsiders help each other - maybe a self-help group.

• "The Struggle"

  So after setting new objectives, after the attempts to use narrative (to construct a story from a wandering life), after sex, mind-altering stimulation and language/intellectualising, there are doubts. "Don Quixote is opening a new front in the struggle,/ facing new ways to experience depression and stress" ... "'Is your journey really necessary?' people ask". Has it all been a waste of time?

• "Honourable acts"

  The poem has followed a standard quest trajectory. Now we reach the final phase - the return home. "Don Quixote has paid his way in honourable acts/ and now he has left the enchanted castle keep." The ending is

  disenchant the deluded, stop them being ridiculous! But ridiculousness is necessary. They may fail to survive outside this empty box of tricks Often I muse on Don Quixote and his hope, his faith, his charity. I no longer laugh at Sancho Panza

The final "I" (which is also the first mention of "I") is a fusion of Quixote and Panza. Don feels he's earned a happier life, and is ready to face reality. Quixote's socially acceptable features are listed (which are also core Christian virtues), his eccentricities excused. Panza's characteristics gain more respect. Old men should be given (should give themselves) the freedom to be a bit silly, to explore.

Cervantes' book begins with "In a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall, there lived, not very long ago, one of those gentlemen with a lance in the lance-rack, an ancient shield, a skinny old horse, and a fast greyhound." At the end of this poem, though the horse is just as old, the mind is still fast, and the ancient skills collected over a lifetime have survived a challenge to prove their worth.

But I wonder also whether the poem partly charts the development of a writing style, letting more irrational elements in. Quixote's chivalry books were destroyed by friends/relatives who thought the books had made him mad. Grants were withdrawn. The horse-whisperers in the corner of the field might be a clique of writers who are no longer in need of audience adulation, or of a box of tricks, of books describing poetry techniques. What's wrong with being a freelancer?