Here are a few words about the just-named Literature Nobel recipient, Tomas Transtromer.

Two ideas about human beings recur in his poetry:

One, we are mentally and physically fragile beings, for whom existence itself is an immense, constant struggle. Just surviving in the world – the obdurate, difficult, indifferent world – is an incredible struggle. Periodically, we lose ourselves. Our very identities – so contingent, so frail – actually vanish, and in those long moments of not even knowing who we are and where we are, we discover our true underlying condition, our non-being (our being-toward-death, if you like) amid the baffles and brazens of personality. A certain discipline toward, a certain respect for, reality involves accepting, and thinking about those amnesiac moments as they disclose metaphysical truths, not just about our defensive, patched-up social being, but about the nothingness that preceded, and will succeed, us.

The Name is one among many Transtromer poems that make the point. I found it quoted here, in a review essay by Bill Coyle.

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In an unpublished essay titled Come as You Are, Eve Sedgwick quotes the following passage – strikingly similar to the Transtromer poem – from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. She remarks that its description of amnesia “filled me with a comical sense of recognition.”

Imagine a person who suddenly wakes up in a hospital after a road accident to find she is suffering from total amnesia. Outwardly, everything is intact: she has the same face and form, her senses and mind are there, but she doesn’t have any idea or any trace of a memory of who she really is. In exactly the same way, we cannot remember our true identity, our original nature. Frantically, and in real dread, we cast around and improvise another identity, one we clutch onto with all the desperation of someone falling continually into an abyss. This false and ignorantly assumed identity is “ego.”

So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing us and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. In Tibetan ego is called dak dzin, which means “grasping at a self.” . . . . The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fear. (116-17)

It’s a more radical idea than Transtromer’s, which at least has us returning – amid the indifferent grinding on of the nearby car lights – to a sense of I – I – I. And of course for the Buddhist this sense of self-loss isn’t “hell” — it’s simply the reality that “the self does not inherently exist.” For Buddhists, the choice isn’t between feeling you’ve been reduced to a panicky animal – “a cat in a sack” – and feeling fully and comfortably affirmed as a rosy rounded ego. But despite these differences, both writers evoke the basic fact of our shaky, constantly-needing-to-be-elaborated, selfhood…

The second idea predominant in Transtromer’s work is related to the first one. Contingent and slippery we may be, but one capacious and reliable thing we do have is interiority. Our consciousness, our memory, our imagination, enables our movement – such as it is – through the world. A cultivation of those vast inner spaces which are all ours can make existence easier. Here’s part of “Romanesque Arches”:

and inside each of them vault opened behind vault endlessly.

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Here’s another evocation of our precious vaults.

The Indoors is Endless

It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven
hoists his death-mask and sails off.

The gentle downward slope gets steeper
and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.

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Heavy breathing, staggering, rowing against the current: There’s the first idea, the immense difficulty of life — all aspects of life. But then, imagining a long-dead relative imagining him, the poet says that “all the surface action turns inwards… the future opens” to the present. Erik – the long-dead relative – uses his vast vault of imagination (“the indoors is endless”) to see the living poet walking today around Washington DC, where life isn’t difficult – where “only / every second column bears weight.”

Yet even here, in the white weightless contemporary city, “the dream of the poor turns to ash,” and the same abyss that threatens Erik, with his “bullet through the soul,” threatens his descendant.

Dylan’s the front-runner for the literature Nobel at the moment.

… David Kosofsky — she’s writing a eulogy for him, and wants to quote some things – UD discovers a poem she forgot she wrote.

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SONATA FOR UNPLAYED PIANOS

That put even the spinnets to sleep,
Those thin inoffensive standup numbers,
Happy to do vaudeville or other light patter –
Anything to keep
From tonal slumber.
Chopsticks, for that matter.

… into being,” writes Elaine Scarry in Beauty and Being Just.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, Spring and Fall, keeps doing that – spinning off songs and films inspired by it, more than a century after it was written.

Not copies. Scarry didn’t mean exact copies. Aesthetic ripples, echoes.

As in the just-released film, Margaret, which features “an English class recitation of [this] stirring and enigmatic Victorian poem addressed to a young girl of that name.” Spring and Fall is a very morbid poem, and the film has a morbid theme — a kind of coming of age via coming to grips with death theme — that fits the Hopkins poem nicely. When you’re young, you cry over dead things in a babyish visceral way, but you don’t really understand death yet. You’re a kind of mindless sentimentalist, a kitsch-meister. When you’re older, you get it – you understand precisely what death is, and why you’re crying over it. It’s the same fact of death generating the same grief when you’re eight and when you’re eighty, but you have to get significantly past eight to realize this, to feel the reality of death. Apparently the film Margaret is all about the main character’s passage from innocence to experience in this regard.

Hopkins takes this process of death-realization one step further at the very end of the poem:

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Our profoundest death-haunting is of course our intimation of our own mortality, so a third phase in this eerie maturation involves a movement somewhat away from despair over other people’s annihilation and toward anticipatory pity for ourselves — toward a sense of our own fragility, our implication in the common fate. The slightly wobbly, slow, vulnerable, meditative, confiding, whispery setting of the Hopkins lines that Natalie Merchant wrote and performed – with a simple melancholy guitar along for the ride – seems to UD quite a good capture of the poem. Here’s the poem.

Spring and Fall

So, you’re crying because the leaves are falling, and all the golden colors are vanishing. Fine. Cry. Your pure emotions make you feel for everything. You feel as much for one dead leaf as you do for human beings, which is pretty strange, but goes to your indiscriminate, innocent, open, heart, unacquainted with the night.

Once you’ve gotten your share of human suffering and death, massive piles of leaves will leave you unmoved. Maturation means losing cosmic, undifferentiated feeling, and directing things like grief where they belong: toward the people you love and lose. Weeping isn’t just acting out now, a visceral reaction to random loss-tableaux; now you will weep and know why.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t yet realize your grief, that you think of your tears as exclusively about the leaves. You’re young. Enjoy it while you can. But even though you can’t articulate the truer, later grief, you probably, even now, intuit it. Probably even now some ghostly soulful understanding in you guesses what underlies childish tears: Grief for all of blighted humankind.

And even more deeply underlying: Grief for your own blightedness.

… MacArthur recipient, writes a hell of a poem. Look at her elaborate rhyme scheme here. Quite something.

Sublunary

Mid-sentence, we remembered the eclipse,
Arguing home through our scant patch of park
Still warm with barrel wine, when none too soon
We checked the hour by glancing at the moon,
Unphased at first by that old ruined marble
Looming like a monument over the hill,
So brimmed with light it seemed about to spill,

In the penumbra of a tree. At last
We rose and strolled at a reflective pace
Past the taverna crammed with light and smoke
And people drinking, laughing at a joke,
Unaware that anything had passed
Outside in the night where we delayed
Sheltering in the shadow we had made.

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Source: Poetry (June 2008).
Reprinted here.

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So… it’s a narrative, describing a couple walking home from a dinner out (they had wine; maybe they’re a little tipsy), under the moon … The poem’s title, the word sublunary, refers to anything that occurs on earth, beneath the moon … anything earth-bound, really, as opposed to heavenly. In John Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, the speaker rather disdainfully refers to “dull sublunary lovers” whose love isn’t true love because it lacks the transcendent quality of the speaker’s. So to be sublunary is not only to be resident on the earth; it can also imply that you are a little dull, grubby, material, stuck in the thinginess of things … incapable of reaching the heights of passion and clarity.

And indeed this couple, arguing, hot with wine, unprettily earthbound in a scant patch of park, feels sublunary enough.

They suddenly remember there’s a lunar eclipse tonight, and they look up at the moon, which is so far as “unphased” as they.

The poet means unfazed – undisturbed, calm – but she packs the phases of the moon into the word unfazed and comes up with this remarkable neologism. The moon hasn’t eclipsed; and the couple hasn’t changed from its sublunary dullness.

In the eventual darkening of the moon the couple sees their own darkness, their daily confused sublunary struggle (we are here as on a darkling plain, as another moony poem has it). Their disturbance at this sudden perception is mirrored in the disturbance the eclipse generates in the world around them: dogs bark, confused and disbelieving birds and crickets complain. The world is out of sorts; in the absence of the moon there’s not even the understanding of oneself as sublunary, not even the stability derived from a sense of one’s place in the universe.

And then the moon was gone, and in its place,
A dim red planet hung just out of reach,
As real as a bitter orange or ripened peach

In the penumbra of a tree.

The cold hard clarity of the moon – shedding at least some light on our lives, and offering at least an icon of transcendence toward which to aspire – now gives way to the bitter reality of our hopeless and confused embroilment on the earth, our

old chaos of the sun,
Or … old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free…

Ah love! Let us be true to one another! says Arnold, and so says Stallings; the oblivious world of the taverna misses this eclipse of all light, but, having ourselves seen it, we of course cling to one another:

we delayed
Sheltering in the shadow we had made.

It’s like the end of another poem set in Greece – James Merrill’s Santorini: Stopping the Leak. At the end of his walk, the speaker finds himself ready for a “tavern in the shade,” a place to shelter from the too-harsh sunlight and moonlight of an untranscendent world.

The only thing that can “eclipse” the pain of our all-too-humanness is love ((Reaching for each other’s fingertips)); the only true sheltering shade from this harshness is the shade we create for ourselves, together.

And that tour de force of a rhyme scheme, with its sly unexpected recurrences – eclipse only eventually finding fingertips, marble, long-since forgotten by the reader, returning as warble? It conveys both our continued (modest) mastery of a world we might be tempted to give up on as an object of understanding; and in its snaky sneaky gorgeousness it helps accustom us, in any case, to the penumbra.

… it’s time to look at a chilled-to-perfection poem. Auden’s Brussels in Winter puts you inside how it feels when the world switches on what Stephen Dedalus, in Portrait, calls the refrigerating apparatus. What the poet describes is already (to him) an unknown world – the city of Brussels – and when this world freezes over, its mystery hardens into absolute darkness. In Brussels in Winter, each charter’d street evaporates, and the desperately lost poet desperately seeks his bearings. Or any bearings.

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Brussels in Winter

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

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Look at how much poetry Auden packs in, how much implication, mood, and philosophy he cooks up in his few abbreviated rhymed lines… Look at his vanful of similes and metaphors as they speed by your eyes…

But slow it down. Take it little by little. See how a poem does what a poem can do.

Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.

There’s an unclarity of agency here. Who is wandering? Not its formula escapes me; its formula escapes you. The poem is written in an insinuating second-person, in which the poet assumes that the condition of existential lostness and self-alienation he’s about to evoke is certainly not his own alone, but is shared by his reader. He assumes that however grounded you may feel at this or that moment, you easily understand – because you’ve experienced it – the eerie dépaysement that occurs when you lose the formula of existence, the certainty that constitutes your life on earth as a thing, an object of familiarity and recognition.

As for style: cold streets/old string has the assonance, balance, and the near-rhymey feel that make that odd transition – from streets to tangled string – feel plausible. The linguistic proximity suggests a conceptual kinship.

The stopped flow of the fountains has an abrupt feel to it, instantly (along with the poet’s insinuating you) locating you alongside the poet in the same suddenly arrested cityscape.

And here’s another unclarity: Its. Its formula escapes you. It has lost. We don’t yet know to what it refers, which keeps us in the same confusion as the poet. Gradually it becomes clear that it is Brussels, the city.

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

Only if you’re trapped in some operatic theater of despair can you keep your bearings here. Frozen into place, you take your background part in a chorus of human misery. The reader hears the plaintive calls of the chorus throughout this stanza, with all its long O‘s and A‘s. It sings.

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

How odd the world is; and to carry that oddness the poet finds odd figures. City apartments look like sudden outcroppings of the natural world – the world of bearings, groundings… Of course the desperate poet sees them in this way, as distant objects of desire – rich ridges, glowing farms. Warm things, glowing with the fire of their unstoppable being, their autonomous radiance as living, meaning-rich things-in-themselves.

And now the poet picks up a bit of language as it passes him on the street. French? Dutch? His effort to recapture his lost sense of existing has him grasping onto it as definitive in significance, if only he can understand it. But it drives on.

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

Again the poet’s desperation finds the very history of humanity in the expression of a random face… a face also quickly lost in the old, hungry, and humbled winter crowd.

A look contains the history of man, and a body – any random streetwalker’s body – is the embodiment of the shivering city itself. This body carries the frozen city’s pathos, its wispy uncertain half-thereness; and, in the way of humanity, the poet, suffering horribly from his estrangement, comforts himself with the thought that through the streetwalker’s body he can rather cheaply purchase at least a momentary sense of possessing an otherwise tangled and elusive reality.

… UD prepares for her first day of teaching.

With power restored to Garrett Park, Les UDs left their hotel yesterday afternoon. They spent the early evening hours raking leaves and dragging limbs off the lawn.

The fox was at the top of UD‘s half acre exploring a mass of branches that fell across the open green near the deer and mourning dove encampments. Moving the branches will take some doing, and UD‘s not ready for the task.

The task of thought – dark, poetic thought – is like the elegant wary predatory movement of a fox… Now here, now here, and now here in the dark head, thought like a nocturnal animal’s body feels out what’s hidden there amid vast silent clearings. This twig, that leaf. The poetic body comes about its own business, brings sly hot perception to its own cold mental darkness, and the poem – like the dark snow under the fox’s paw – is printed.

… Day.

UD offers this poem, composed of Antrel Rolle’s comments about his friend Nevin Shapiro.

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WHAT’S TRUE AND WHAT’S NOT TRUE

To me it doesn’t matter
What’s true and what’s not true.

…died.

His great poem, The Graveyard by the Sea, is a long stroll through mortality, a mental narrative that begins in an attitude of post-human calm, and then gradually returns to the agon of ongoing existence.

The poet is walking through a cemetery that overlooks the sea. He begins with an epigraph from Pindar, reminding him to “make what you can of the possible.”

Here are some excerpts (I’ve just given a link up there to the entire poem. Here’s another translation.), with a bit of commentary.

The sea, the sea, the recommencing yet!
O recompense, in long abstraction set
Over the gods’ own calm, to gaze and gaze.

The poet begins by feeling the vast sense of calm anyone would feel perched above quiet waves, beneath a quiet blue sky, and adjacent to silent white tombstones and mausoleums. Yet the sea itself is a principle of infinite movement – recommencing yet – always beginning anew – and the poet must know that he gazes at it not as a god but as a man whose own movement through the world will end.

… what a peace we fancy here below!
Over a blue abyss the noon at pause
– Pure products, then, of an eternal cause
Time’s all a shimmer, and to dream’s to know.

The poet still fancies himself a god, one among many pure products in an eternal noontime pause.

O silence, mine! … and structure in the soul
With domes of gold, tile over tile… you, Roof!

The silence is not merely the world’s; it is the poet’s. He continues to align himself with the architecture of eternity (structure in the soul).

I scale pure heights and grow at home here …

I could get used to this place, to this sense of immunity from my own humanity.

But now the poet smells perishable fruit from nearby trees, and

I sniff in this my drift – to ash in air.
Soul’s worn away…

I’ll burn to nothingness under this same hot sun; my very life is a process of erosion.

On mansions of the dead my shadow trails
With many a lesson in its meager length.

Yes, this is my reality. I’m a meager body with a meager shadow, pretending the world is my mansion.

My true location is

Between the nothing and the pure event.
I on the edge of grandeur hang and hark:
The reservoir reverberant, surly, dark
– Threats of erosion in the echo sent.

Here is where I live – after the nothingness that prevailed before my birth, and before the realm of the eternal into which I will eventually be absorbed. I struggle to write from this place, always just on the edge of grandeur, always stuck in the realm of relative inexpressivity. I throw my words into the reverberating ocean, but what comes back is precisely a reminder of my transience.

Yet there’s something therapeutic about this stark encounter with death and infinity:

Once here, the future yawns, an empty stare.
The curt cicada grates the bone-dry air.
All’s burnt away, undone, in sky refined
To some astringent essence. Wide debris –
Life, with its wild addiction not to be!
Here bitterness is sweet, and clear the mind.

What a line – life with its wild addiction not to be… Exclaimed as the poet surveys the immensity of death strewn all about him. As if we can’t wait to go, as if the very pleasure and even obsession of our lives is to achieve the end of our lives. A bitter thought but clarifying, like this essential scene.

Yet while we live, we alone can give voice to the earth and its mysteries. And so we are not negligible; we are in fact indispensable:

Impeccable head, tiara without flaw,
See I’m the secret change astir in you.

… The fears you move – I hold them, I alone.
Repentance, doubt, compulsion, moods I’ve known
Show as your noble diamond’s only blur.

Still, dead is dead, and it’s no good pretending that

When you’re a mist, your singing lips can live…
Away! The world’s in flight! My flesh a sieve.
Days of the holy hankering finish too.

A few more stanzas of wry and melancholy meditation on our fate (“Shovels of earth sent packing to your beds.”) follow; and then there’s a dramatic transition:

Off with those poses of a thoughtful dunce!
Revel in wind; it quickens! Drink and thrive!
A coolness breathing from the open sea
Restores – O vigor of salt! – my soul for me!
Plunge in the surf! Come springing out, alive!

… The freshening wind! Let’s live, or try to! Look,
The vast air ruffles, and claps shut my book;
Reckless, the surf goes geysering on the rocks.
Sun-spangled pages, dazzled, blow away!
Shatter in a jubilant spray
This quiet roof…

No more writing, reading, pondering; time rather to put bittersweet astringency behind me and take up my life, just as it is, once again.

… are staggering.

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Poets like dust – the brief, lovely word itself, and the image. Dust conveys our dissolution into insubstantiality at death. Dust to dust.

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Take Dust, by Rupert Brooke:

When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world’s delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night;

And faint in that amazing glow,
Until the darkness close above;
And they will know—poor fools, they’ll know!—
One moment, what it is to love.

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It’s a simple, three-part argument about the way love transcends death.

1.) When we two lovers are almost dead – immobile, each of us alone in our bed, barely breathing, but still thinking – our spirits will be released to fly about like dust to all the places we spent time in when we were living.

2.) Eventually we’ll zoom in on one place in particular – the place of our ultimate rendezvous, our final merging, with one another.

3.) This will be an enclosed garden, safe from the wind that we’ve been riding to get here, and it will be sunset in the garden. A pair of young lovers will be there, and they will witness our strange and amazing passage from earth-bound dying lovers to heavenly eternal lovers. The “shattering ecstasy” of our passion for one another will be a brief but intense lesson to those lesser, sublunary lovers as to what true love is.

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Fleetwood Mac.

It’s everywhere. So many of the stories that present themselves to the general world, and to university-minded UD, are, lately, all about SEX.

Like the ongoing tale my friend Philip calls “the profs and pros scandal.”

But there are so many others… And so I thought we might take a look at a sex poem. A poem that wants to share some thoughts about sex.

Here we go, stanza by stanza.

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Unnatural Selections: A Meditation upon Witnessing a Bullfrog Fucking a Rock

by Jim Dodge

Amalgam of electric jelly,
constellated neural knots
in the briny binary soup,
as surely as stimulus prods response
brains are made to choose.

[Starts with a physical description of the human brain, center of understanding and volition, starry glory of that most divinely advanced animal, the human, who can use it to choose. To act intelligently.]

And through a major error in pattern recognition
or a significant cognitive fault,
the bullfrogs brain has selected
a two-pound rock
as the object of his rampant affection,
a rock (to my admittedly mammalian eye)
that neither resembles
nor even vaguely suggests
the female of his species.

[Pity the cerebrally underdeveloped frog, whose brain has chosen poorly.]

He does seem to be enjoying himself
in a blunted sort of way,
but since the rock so obviously remains unmoved
one suspects it’s not the blending of sweet oblivions
that fuels his persistence,
but a serious kink in a feedback loop–
or perhaps just kinkiness in general.
The less compassionate might even call him
the quintessentially insensitive male.

[More on that last thing here. Plus, there’s no knowing what floats your boat, and it’s not my place to judge… What’s sneaking in here is a sense that the frog may not be so different from us. Us being men.]

Assuming a pan-species gender bond
and a common fret,
I advise my amphibious pal,
“Hey, I don’t think she’s playing hard to get.
That’s the literal case you’re up against, Jack–
true story, buddy; stone fact.
And I’d be fraternally remiss if I didn’t share
my deep and eminently reasonable doubt
that she’ll be worn down
however long and spectacular the ardor.”

[We’re both guys; lemme tell you. I know what it’s like to pursue a woman and come up against frigidity or rigidity or whatever. I know the difference between a cockteaser and rockteaser. Give it up.]

Ignoring my counsel
as completely as he has my presence,
the bullfrog continues his fruitless assault
with that brain-locked commitment to folly
which invariably accompanies
dumb, bug-eyed lust.

[With “dumb, bug-eyed lust,” our John Donneian metaphor sheds its clothing and steps forth as a naked truth about frog and man. Under the influence of lust, the high mammalian and low amphibian brain are equally dumb.]

But, in fairness,
whose brain hasn’t shorted out in a slosh of hormones
or, igniting like a shattered jug of gas,
fireballed into a howling maelstrom
where a rock indeed might seem a port?

[Grenouille, c’est moi. Although I think he’s still claiming only men are this dumb.]

One can only conclude
that such impelling concupiscence
serves as a species’ life-insurance,
sort of a procreative override
of any decision requiring thought,
thought being notoriously prey to thinking,
and the more one thinks about thinking
the thinkier it gets.

[An argument from evolution here. If we (men?) weren’t like this, the human species would have died out, since the bigger your brain gets, the more you think, and the more you think, the less you act. Sexually. All the out-of-control-sexually guys we’ve been reading about lately are hopelessly caught in procreative override.]

Therefore, though the brain is made to choose,
its very existence ultimately depends
on the generative supremacy of brainless desire–
for with all respect to Monsieur Descartes
you am before you can think you are.
Dirt-drive compulsions riding powerful desires
render any choice moot, along with
reason, morality, taste, manners,
and all those other jars of glitter
we pour on the sticky and raw.

[You wouldn’t even get a brain – you wouldn’t even be born – if the human world weren’t full of mindlessly horny men humping anything. The rest of it – reason, etc. – is icing on the horn.]

The hard truth is we never chose to choose:
not the brains we use to pick
between competing explanations for our sexual mess
nor these hearts we’ve burdened with our blunders
in the name of love.
Do whatever we decide we will,
the choice isn’t free;
we live at the mercy of more pressing needs.

[The turgid truth is that we’re always between a rock and a hard place, always at the mercy of evolutionary drives. We can put on little Freud suits and come up with “explanations for our sexual mess,” but it’s nature-driven hormones.]

Thus, urges urgently surging,
we mount a few rocks by mistake.
A bit more embarrassing than most of our foolishness, true–
but so what?
The power of the imperative
coupled with the law of averages
virtually guarantees enough will get it right
to make more brains to be made up
about exactly what steps to take
toward what we think we need to do
on this stony journey between delusion and mirage–
when to move, where to hide our dreams–
a journey where we finally learn
freedom is not a choice
a brain is free to choose.

[We’re condemned by birth to this bizarre unfree freedom in which we hop about trying to do this and to do that until we eventually land on a live one.]

Fortunately, my warty friend,
the soul is built to cruise.

[A very Donneian conclusion. Wanton-prisoners we may be, but we have a soul as well as body, and the soul can truly wander free.]

Paul Durcan’s poem, Glocca Morra, will mark Father’s Day at University Diaries. It’s a cheery miserable morbid sort of thing which UD discovered in this morbid volume. She doesn’t find the poem online, so she will simply quote parts of it here – enough to give you a sense of the thing. (The poem also appears in this collection.)

It’s a longish unrhymed casually expressed series of thoughts the writer has while gazing at his father dying in a hospital bed.

The whole poem, beginning Dear Daughter and ending Love, Dad is a letter to Durcan’s daughter, who “one day … will watch me die” as the poet now watches his father die. Generation after generation, the poet suggests, people closest to one another, who most love one another, remain painful mutual mysteries. (Norman Maclean’s father says to him, in A River Runs Through It, “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”)

Someone a few beds over has a little radio, on which the treacly How are Things in Glocca Morra?, from the musical Finian’s Rainbow, is playing. The song evokes a “fine day” in an idealized Irish village, nostalgically yearned after by the speaker, who has left it.

The cheap Irish sentimentality of that song counterposes itself throughout the poem to the bitter reality of the poet’s unfinished business with his always-remote, soon to vanish, father. When the poet was young, he and his father played games together in Phoenix Park:

Football, hurling, cricket, golf, donkey,
Before he got into his Abraham-and-Isaac phase
And I got the boat to England
Before he had time to chop off my head.

The transistor reminds him of

The day you bought your first transistor
You took us out for a drive in the car
The Vauxhall Viva,
Down to a derelict hotel by the sea,
The Glocca Morra,
Roofless, windowless, silent,
And, you used add with a chuckle,
Scandalous.

This is stream of consciousness, thought association, random music prompting a memory of a place in time when that same song emerged — in this particular case, as the name of a seaside hotel. The poet recalls the same irony that animates his reflections in the poem — the distance between that name’s winsome evocations, and the derelict reality to which the name is affixed.

You dandled it on your knee
And you stated how marvellous a gadget it was
A portable transistor,
And that you did not have to pay
A licence fee for it,
You chuckled.
A man not much known for chuckling.
The Glocca Morra,
Roofless, windowless, silent and scandalous.

Dandled it, like a child; stated how marvellous it was, this beautiful thing you could lift and carry around with you, like a child. In the silent dereliction of the father’s emotionless world, and now in the roofless windowless silence of the dying father’s ultimate vulnerability, this will turn out to be the best his son will get by way of paternal love — this moment of oblique joy. It will do.

Realizing this now, the poet begins to cry (The tears are lumbering down my cheeks ), and the tears awaken another, equally important memory – the memory of his father’s handwriting:

You had a lovely hand,
Cursive, flourishing, exuberant, grateful, actual, generous.

The son has been able, at the father’s moment of death, to reanimate him, to recall, in an act of filial blessing and love, the most intensely vivid life within the man. He has been able to decode a little bit the mystery of the transistor, the mystery of human transmission; and he shares that mystery – for what it’s worth – with his daughter.

If she too one day watches him die, as he has just watched his father die, the poet advises her to

Consider the paintwork on the wall
And check out the music in the next bed
‘How are Things in Glocca Morra?’
Every bit as bad as you might think they are –
Or as good. Or not so bad. Love, Dad.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Either you dislike it (most people dislike it) or you really love it.

This is from Josephine Hart, 1942 – 2011.

… cornucopia.

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A LIGHT STORM OVER THE OCEAN

A light storm over the ocean!
As if day were trying to wedge itself back in.
Flashes over clouds are like flashes over mountains.

After days of heat, a hard cold wind!
And the sheeting of clouds without rain.
A light storm over the ocean.

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