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Sunday, August 08, 2004

THE STORMS OF C# MINOR AND THE CALMS OF C



"One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality," wrote Orwell in "Why I Write." One of the most beautifully and strategically reticent of poets, Donald Justice, has died.

Poetry, he wrote in one of his poems, is "most beautiful in its erasures." Like Thom Gunn [see UD, 4/28/04], who admired him, Justice understood that classical restraint rather than romantic excess, calm rather than hysteria, courage rather than self-pity, precisely controlled language rather than sloppy feeling, made the best sort of art, the best sort of reassurance. "The poet," wrote another of his admirers, "sums up with dignity, with serene and contemplative courage a world which is simply not surging with Romantic connections."

Rather than produce the verbiage of the uneffacing narcissist in search of self-recognitions, Justice produced calm, concise, exactly observed, excitingly beautiful renditions of the truth of the world [UD quoted from his poem about suicide in an earlier post: 3/27/04]. He was particularly good, like Philip Larkin, at evoking a sense of emptiness:


Absences

It's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.
There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,
Like the memory of scales descending the white keys
Of a childhood piano - outside the window, palms!
And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,
Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.

Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,
Like the memory of a white dress cast down ...
So much has fallen.
And I, who have listened for a step
All afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away,
Already in memory. And the terrible scales descending
On the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers abounding.


Justice was a serious pianist, a man knowledgeable about music, and his lyrical intelligence informs the impeccable style and content of his poetry, all of which finds in art itself a complex saving balance. Justice recalls himself, a young piano student, attacking the keyboard with confidence,


Only to lose my place, or forget the key,
And almost doubt the very metronome
(Outside the traffic, the laborers going home),
And still to bear on across Chopin or Brahms,
Stupid and wild with love equally for the storms
Of C# minor and the calms of C.