Poem for Roy Batty

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2013. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2013 was David Robinson.

Editor’s comment:

Does this poem work even if you have never seen Rutger Hauer, as replicant Roy Batty, deliver his ‘Tears in the Rain’ soliloquy – surely one of the best in cinema – in Blade Runner? Not perhaps as strongly – though it would still support a reading of how everyday life contains so many reminders of loss or hope, whether rainwater trickling into a city drain or a hint of blue sky in rainclouds. The last two lines contain the core of the poem, and have a power all of their own: that a reminder of another’s death diminishes us, heartbeat by weakened heartbeat.

Author’s note:

More than thirty years on, Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner remains one of my favourite movies. I love its noirish, neon-rainy atmosphere; its inspired choice of artfully-decaying urban locations; its distinctively-80s-yet-timeless musical score by Vangelis.

My favourite thing about Blade Runner, though, is the character of Roy Batty, played with chilly aplomb by Dutch actor Rutger Hauer. Batty is a human-looking android, escaped from offworld slavery, whom the film’s hero must kill (or ‘retire’, as the euphemism goes.) Paradoxically, through Batty’s struggles with his own mortality, a non-human machine actually comes to embody Everyman.