Spring hopes eternal, as it were. So there are all these poems and songs about disappointment, as the world regenerates but you – despite your hopes – do not. Or not very much. College boys are writing sonnets… But I’m on the shelf…

From the many-petaled bouquet of disappointed spring poems, take this one, by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

SPRING

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

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It is a tale told by an idiot, full of downs and fleuries, signifying nothing…

Rather bitter, aren’t we? Well, as the heart grows older, natural beauty in itself isn’t enough to subdue morbid thoughts. The post-romantic poet neutrally observes the crocus; she ain’t reveling in it. She notes the killing spikes, not the flowers.

The flowers probably aren’t out yet – it’s early spring…

Too early, as in the amazing Ted Hughes poem about the spring, in which he recalls gathering daffodils with Plath – to sell them – and the way the daffodils, like Plath and Hughes, were weirdly premature … or, better to say, immature. The whole poem regrets, abhors, the poets’ arrogant, oblivious immaturity, their belief that they inhabited a world of perpetual spring and daffodil windfalls.

We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else’s
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April – your last April,
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks –
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.

Sure, says Millay, there’s no death – it’s apparent (as in observe, note her almost comically dry language) that the earth is ever-renewing. But since we’re not…

And actually the earth isn’t either:

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too…

That’s Philip Larkin, The Trees. He’s talking about trees bursting into life each April.

Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing…

A tale told by an idiot, brain eaten by maggots. And then the poem shrinks to its smallest bit as the poet comes out with it: Life in itself / Is nothing… Like Leopold Bloom, soulsick at the futility of human existence as he surveys men in a pub stuffing their mouths: No-one is anything.

Only one thing interrupts our tidy step-by-step declension – ridiculous April, that idiot, babbling and strewing flowers. Babbling brooks, farcical flowers. A total jerk, Spring.

As I follow the unnerving news out of Fukushima, I think of James Merrill’s Prose of Departure, a late, morbid poem, describing a visit of his to Japan. (The poem isn’t available in its entirety online. Here’s another excerpt from it.)

Radiation – both remembered, from Hiroshima, and felt in every afternoon’s sun – is the black and blindingly white, the despairing and the appalling, correlative to the poet’s dread about friends back in the States who are dying.

The recognition of life’s “date line,” impending death, “comes flashing up” on the poet, like “the next six-foot wave in an epic poem.” He needs “a form of conscious evasion,” a “composure like the target a Zen archer sees through shut eyes.” Watching a Noh play, the poet embraces the evasion of art, in the form of an actor who “will relive moonlight, storm and battle, and withdraw, having danced himself to peace.”

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Later that night, as he observes the moon cloud over, spiritual and aesthetic composure fail the poet; he cannot evade “A dark thought that fills the psyche, leaving a bare brilliant cuticle, then nothing, a sucked breath, a pall.”

The next day, at a shrine, when he “place[s] incense upon [a] brazier already full of warm, fragrant ash,” the poet

tries vainly
to hold back a queer
sob. Inhaling the holy
smoke, praying for dear

life —

Burning, the burning of the body and the soul, the holy smoke of what was once the holiness of a beloved friend – for the poet, there’s absolutely no evading this. From now on, each section of the poem will feature counterpoints between exotic immediacies and homeland premonitions. With brilliant wordplay, Merrill will twist his perception of a painting (in this instance, View of Fuji) to fit his fatal mood:

Syringe in bloom. Bud
drawn up through a stainless stem…

Not spring, but syringe; and syringe, with the proximity of bloom and bud, will have us read bud as blood… drawn up… a pipetting syringe… The stainless stem suggests not purity so much as hospital sterilization.

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As the poem concludes, the poet makes explicit not only death, but the irradiating evisceration of our humanity:

The prevailing light in this “Hiroshima” of trivial symptoms and empty forebodings is neither sunrise nor moonglow but rays that promptly undo whatever enters their path. 

This killing radiation is the worst form of energy in existence; all of the Proustian nuance, the artful evasive beauty, we give life in order to give it life, is knocked out. The poet imagines the x-rays his friends are undergoing, rays which, “in their haste to photograph Truth… eat through” all of their cultural apparel, all of their existential theatricals. (“[B]eing enchanted by the magic of experience provides a reason to live. Rather than being an aid to survival, consciousness provides an essential incentive to survive. Enchantment is itself ‘the biological advantage of being awestruck.'”)

“What’s the story, Doc?”
— dark, cloud-chambered negatives
held to the light.

Prose of Departure ends in a kimono shop, with the poet and his lover enchanted by “the most fabulous kimono of all: dark, dark purple traversed by a winding, starry path.”

Dark and light again, then, with a benign and storied lightness applied, generated, made up, by the artist, as a kind of defiance of both radiation’s momentary flash and death’s permanent darkness.

Dyeing. A homophone deepens the trope. Surrendering to Earth’s colors, shall we not be Earth, before we know it? Venerated therefore is the skill which, prior to immersion, inflicts upon a sacrificial length of crêpe de Chine certain intricate knottings no hue can touch. So that one fine day, painstakingly unbound, this terminal gooseflesh, the fable’s whole eccentric

star-puckered moral —
white, never-to-blossom buds
of the mountain laurel —

may be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.

… for the first time, at Dundee University, on March 19.

Audience members will be asked to recite the final lines of what many consider the world’s worst poem, William Topaz McGonagall’s Tay Bridge Disaster.

Sing it with me:

It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

He’s still writing poetry. We’ve already considered a couple of his poems on this blog, but let’s go ahead and do yet another to mark the big day.

JUNE LIGHT

Your voice, with clear location of June days,
Called me outside the window. You were there,
Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare
Of uncontested summer all things raise
Plainly their seeming into seamless air.

Then your love looked as simple and entire
As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face
As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,
Which promise always wine, by mottled fire
More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.

And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall
Into my hands, through all that naïve light,
It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight
As must have been the first great gift of all.

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Your voice, with clear location of June days,

[Like James Merrill, Wilbur’s good at finding words that hint at other words, words that don’t so much radiate out with meaning, as generate an inner, meaning-mingled heat. So take location. He’s setting the poem’s place in time – afternoon, June – so location has that straightforward meaning. But he begins with a reference to his lover’s voice, so part of our mind may well be registering, say, locution – especially with that word “clear” in front of it.

The setting is about clarity, with objects bright and clear in the summer light; but it’s also about the clear locution of the lover’s voice as she calls the poet, who’s inside, to come outside to be with her.]

Called me outside the window. You were there,

[You were there. The poem’s already beginning to build the idea of the brilliant, enthralling, absolute thereness of the loved one, her glorious radiant presence, her intense and delighting being in the world. This is a love poem — to the loved one, and to the loved world, and to the way the loved one’s charismatic and adored way of being, her intensified self-ness, her sheer miraculous outrageously exceptional placement on the earth, astounds and delights the poet, lifting him to positively religious heights of ecstasy.]

Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare
Of uncontested summer all things raise
Plainly their seeming into seamless air.

[The poem’s called June Light, so on one level this reference to light intends to describe the peculiarly intense and at the same time tranquil nature of early summer light. This isn’t oppressive light that bleaches out the visible world; on the contrary, it’s light that’s composed – calm, but also ordered, yielding a beautifully clear and fitting world whose objects – like the lover – burst out of the dull background world with hyper-dramatic being.

The lover too has this combination of brilliance and calm, radiance and soundness. She’s both exciting and pacifying.

The soft stare of summer is “just” – right, appropriate, undeniable (uncontested) – which is to say that – let’s put it the way Gertrude Stein might – there’s a there there. The world obviously and incontrovertibly exists.

Does this seem trite? The world exists. My lover exists. Big deal. These things are obvious.

But they’re so not obvious. The narrator of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein is sitting in Paris, on a gorgeous June day, on the balcony of a grand hotel, with a view of the most stunning part of the city, and he thinks:

The gloss the sun puts on the surroundings – the triumph of life, so to speak, the flourishing of everything makes me despair. I’ll never be able to keep up with all the massed hours of life-triumphant.

I mean here he is, having el major peak experience, and he despairs! He despairs because he doesn’t have whatever inside of himself to be adequate to it — yet the world is trying so hard to give him his Wordsworthian spot of time, his Sartreian perfect moment! What is the matter with him?

But everyone knows what the narrator means. “Slowly, out of every bending lane, in waves of color and sound, came tourists in striped sneakers, fanning themselves with postcards, the philhellenes, laboring uphill, vastly unhappy,” writes the narrator of Don DeLillo’s The Names. Vastly? Unhappy? It’s a brilliant Athens day, and they’re going to see the effing Acropolis! The American narrator refuses to visit the Acropolis at all, even though he lives in Athens. Something about how the place is “daunting.”

Okay so Wilbur is simply saying that the life force of the loved one represents a brilliance he can approach, a world-intensifying, clarifying force that doesn’t daunt. As a result, instead of joining the depressives in Bellow and DeLillo, for whom the sheer force of the physical and metaphysical world in its most beautiful, meaningful, and intense realizations is just too much, the poet revels in his access to that force. It is all thanks to the lover.

Seeming and seamless are nice too, eh? The quality of the light transforms the seeming, difficult to grasp world we live in most of the time, to a seamless, composed, real world.]

Then your love looked as simple and entire
As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face
As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,

[She wanted him to come outside because she wanted to toss him a pear she just picked. It’s beautiful, ripe, she wants him to see it and feel it. At this amazing moment of earthly and human clarity, when the world under its June light, and the lover under the influence of the June light, suddenly both take on absolute irrefutable acute being, what shines out most clearly is the fact of the lover’s love for the poet. The well-wrought, perfect ripeness and particularity of the pearfruit is the lover, in her fully manifest (legible) being, a higher being, if you will, brought into existence by virtue of her love for the poet.

In short, she’s happy to see him.

He can read who she is, what she’s feeling, from the lines of joy on her face, just as we can trace natural images on pearskin.

Sometimes the world, and the people we love, shine forth with entire vivacity and truth. As in the moment that ends Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, a memory of his brother fishing that “remains in my mind as if fixed by some chemical bath.”

He never stopped to shake himself. He came charging up the bank, showering molecules of water and images of himself to show what was sticking out of his basket, and he dripped all over us … Large drops of water ran from under his hat onto his face and then into his lips when he smiled.

I can never get to the word lips in these lines without feeling the almost unbearable intensity of Maclean’s love for his brother.]

Which promise always wine, by mottled fire
More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.

[I’m not sure what these lines mean. I think they mean something like this: The gorgeous flesh of the pear will become pear wine; or will be burned away in order for the pearfruit to become pear wine. The pear is even more vulnerable to the processes of time and transformation than we (more fatal fleshed); but although we have a longer earthly run (human grace), the pear certainly reminds us of our vulnerability toward death, the shutting down of all this being.]

And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall
Into my hands, through all that naïve light,
It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight
As must have been the first great gift of all.

[Yes, blessed, and the first great gift of all, and grace — You can read religion into this poem if you’d like, though frankly it seems more on the pagan side to me … Maybe that’s just me…

But anyway. 99.9% of poems these days are falling over themselves to capture these moments, and you can get knockoffs quick and cheap from a poet like Ted Kooser. But why not get the real thing?]

VALENTINE

Listen – I love you in the most absolute sense possible.
— Iris Murdoch, letter to Raymond Queneau, 1952.

Listen! Of all the senses of love, the most absolute
Is this one, where I’m young and you’re older, married,
And we drift through cities foreign to us both,
Cities still ruined, and speak French,
And stand on bridges trembling over foul water.

The most absolute sense possible of love – listen –
Is this one. A charming ex-surrealist.
Une fille épatante. They climb the hills near
Innsbruck and talk about his psychoanalysis.
Irishwoman. A little bun. She loves Kierkegaard.

In the most absolute sense, listen, I love you.
Others can listen in after we’re dead and
Figure out what that means. Read all about it.
Letters journals novels memoirs.
Somewhere I say you have a very beautiful head.

I love you in the most absolute sense possible.
Are you listening? My heart, beating on a bridge
In Austria, and among all the questions in my head
This one is absolutely answered. I would do anything
For you… Come to you at any time or place…

After you die, I affect a calm farewell:
He was a natural, absolute philosopher…
Some statement of the sort was expected of me.
But listen. In the most absolute sense possible,
Love pulses and pulses and pulses.

UD takes sections of Judith Thurman’s marvelous 2008 New Yorker essay about paleolithic art caves, changes a word here and there, and makes a poem.

(There’s a new 3D Werner Herzog film about one of the caves.)

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LETTER FROM SOUTHERN FRANCE

As the painters were learning
to crush hematite, and to sharpen
embers of Scotch pine for their charcoal
(red and black the primary colors),
the last Neanderthals were still living
on the vast steppe that was Europe.

The scratches made by a standing bear
have been overlaid with a palimpsest
of signs or drawings, and one has to wonder
if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition
that bear claws were an expressive tool
for engraving a record — poignant and indelible —
of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark.

“As we trailed the artists deeper and deeper,
noting where they’d broken off stalagmites
to mark their path, we found signs that seemed to say,
‘We’re sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.’ ”

Halfway home to the mortal world,
we paused and turned off our torches.
It takes the brain a few minutes to accept
the totality of the darkness — your sight
keeps grasping for a hold.
Whatever the art means, you understand,
at that moment, that its vessel is both a womb and a sepulchre.

On Elizabeth Bishop’s centennial, a reading of The Bight.

Go here for the poem uninterrupted by my commentary.

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THE BIGHT

[A shallow bay. We’re in Key West, where Bishop lived for a number of years, and we’re looking at a harbor. The word bite, and the word blight (Bishop was fond of Gerard Manley Hopkins, author of Spring and Fall), should certainly be floating around in our heads while we read.]

On my birthday

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.

[this. is. low. how. A simple poetic balance, and a calm straightforward assertiveness, express themselves right away.  And consider how low we are:  Already we’re at a bight; and now the bight’s at low tide.  Already a sense of melancholy.  Yet she says the poem’s written on her birthday.  Not in a very celebratory mood, I think.]

White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.

[As if the fluidity and depth of water weren’t compromised enough by all that shallowness, there’s also morbid skeletal marl sticking up out of the bight; and the anchoring pilings seem sadly pointless, since there’s so little water.  Upright, gathered, like sticks, they resemble matches.… Note the assonance throughout: tide, like, white, dry, pilings, dry.]

Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.

[Low again.  And water like fire?  We’ve seen it before, in one of her most famous poems, At the Fishhouses:

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.]

One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

[Baudelaire could make it sizzle; I cannot.  For me, the sound of nature is turned way down low.]

The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.

[That’s my music: An arid percussive click rather than any tonality; something strange and off the beat rather than something harmonic and measured.  That’s what I hear when I look most deeply at earthly life, when I dredge down to the truth.]

The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,

[You see how she’s – what’s Gioia’s word? – slyly awakening emotions in us?  Emotions having to do with what — depletion, futility, the contrast between our immense efforts to understand the depths of existence, to get the goods of life, and the paltry products of those efforts: rarely coming up with anything to show for it.]

and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.

[An elaboration of the effort-and-futility idea: We struggle (man-of-war) toward meaning (transcendent rather than earthly here, on impalpable drafts) until the sheer effort of it makes us tremble.]

The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.

[There’s something annoyingly stupid and pathetically messy about the ongoingness of human existence.  Although the scene is junky and depleted, eagerly panting little boats still keep coming in, their crappy cargo hanging out of their mouths.]

There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.

[A sharp dry eat-or-be-eaten world.  No treasures here.]

Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,

[Wonderful pun on stove – gas fire, but also the little boats crushed in any old way.]

and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.

[Nothing to show for the boats, relics of the last, not-yet-overcome trauma.  There’s something vaguely guilt-inducing about their abandonment and open vulnerability, something of  O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this! This is everyone’s messy moral and emotional life, bursting with compromise and unfinished business.]

The bight is littered with old correspondences.

[Since Baudelaire’s been mentioned, we might think here of his most famous poem, Correspondences.  But there’s nothing in Bishop’s poem akin to the almost mystical “profound unity” between our subjectivity and the natural world that appears in Baudelaire. “The unnamed correspondences [in Bishop] are not ecstatic, Emersonian revelations of relationship; rather, they are almost wholly negative,” writes Brett Candlish Millier.]

Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.

[The sharp bite of the dredge’s jaw unearths more white marl.  Same old shit.]

All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.

[We conclude how?  We conclude that, looked at with biting lucidity, the shabby contingency of life is simply awful.  A blight.  Yet, contemplating another birthday, another setting out into more life, we’re compelled to note also the sheer survivability of it all, the way most of us are in it and what the hell.]

The Worcester Telegram announces a birthday commemoration for the poet Elizabeth Bishop:

On Tuesday, Bishop’s 100th birthday, there will be a gravesite ceremony at Hope Cemetery in Worcester at 4:30 p.m. The gathering will include a reading of Bishop’s poem, “The Bight,” whose last lines provide the inscription of her tombstone: “All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.”

(Here’s a charming film about Bishop’s grave, and its inscription.)

There will also be Tuesday readings here and here, and a birthday party at a Halifax restaurant.

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Bishop’s work is a villa of the mysteries; we feel her assuming the full weight of human life; we feel her somehow gently housing that weight in her poems. Because she brings experience under the control of language, because she shapes it poetically, we say she is a powerful poet. Yet she gathers power not through imposing any architecture of ideas or feelings upon reality, but rather simply through offering reality a roof for the night. Shelter here, in these lines. Let me lodge you, look at you.

“The more one reads a Bishop poem,” writes David Orr in the New York Times, “the greater the sense of huge forces being held barely but precisely in check … [One feels] the enormous patience and skill that allowed her to hold the volcanic feeling on exhibit here in the poised vessels of her finished poetry.”

A vessel poised above huge forces – this describes a good deal of the best art. Leonard Bernstein describes Mozart’s G Minor Symphony as “a work of utmost passion utterly controlled.” Brahm’s Fourth, says Roger Scruton, conveys a “tragic feeling that is nevertheless utterly controlled, and utterly in control.” The sublimity of Beethoven, Dmitri Tymoczko suggests, lies not in strident statement and emotion, but instead in the way a passage like this one in the Tempest sonata (click on the image and then zoom in)

symbolizes both desire – in the form of the chromatically ascending chords – and limitation, as represented by the fixed upper note. It is as if Beethoven were suggesting that, while no amount of effort on his part would enable him to leap beyond the limits of his piano, his music demands that he try – as if the world of sticks and wires, the ordinary physical realm in which pianos exist, cannot be reconciled with the world of Beethoven’s aspiration. …[T]his coupling of an exhortation to transcendence (here heard as an inexorable chromatic chordal ascent) with a warning about the impossibility of success (the stubborn pedal point at the top of the piano) recalls Kant’s conception of sublimity. Like the Temple of Isis, the music seems to question its own adequacy, giving with one hand what it takes away with the other.

Passion and a strategic yielding to limitation – this combination gives Bishop’s poems their remarkable soundness, what Anne Stevenson calls “a kind of interior sense of rightness and excellence.” “We see the place, the person or the thing [in her poems] as if we were truly there, and we feel emotions that the author doesn’t state overtly but slyly awakens inside us,” writes Dana Gioia.

When the Trees Spoke

So the trees spoke, finally, under the weight of wet snow.
The townsfolk had waited forever. They wanted to know
Everything: How the oak could grow so early, so late,
Though smoked and shivered under waves of great
Weather. How the chokeberry bush evaded its fate
And breathed, both petal and stem unbroke.
What kept the dogwood off the lightning stroke
And kept the wavering willow immaculate?

The trees sighed, a condescension. How to evoke
For these yokels the specific, sickening freight
Of nature? Creak. Crack. Croak. Our branches hate
The cold you fancy a long white cloak…
The joy our limbs are given to know
Is to give out, under the weight of snow,
And fall to a ground without climate.

… plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

T.S. Eliot’s morbid poem says “The whole earth is our hospital.”

The wounded surgeon is the subject of a new study.

Surgeons “who practiced in an academic medical center” showed lower rates of suicidal ideation.

See Part One, here.

Prompted by the recital of part of Matthew Arnold’s poem, The Buried Life, at a memorial event for Richard Holbrooke, I wrote earlier about one way of defining a meaningful life. A meaningful life would be one you’ve made meaningful, in your own way; and one you’ve understood in terms of the coherence of those self-generated meanings.

Although Arnold’s poem begins as the speaker’s plea to his lover to stop, for a time, their fond but empty chatter, and get serious –

Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

– it’s really his own inmost soul the speaker’s after. The rest of the poem traces the poet’s frustrated attempts to unearth his own “hidden self,” his “soul’s subterranean depth,” so that he can know the truth of his being, and thus know the motive and shape of his life.

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But what’s the profit? Philip Larkin poses this question in one of his most famous poems, “Continuing to Live.” So you’ve been able, with stupendous effort, to uproot your deepest self. You finally, as the days wane, perceive who you are, and why your life was the way it was. You’ve illuminated, for yourself, your particular character and fate story. So what?

… [O]nce you have walked the length of your mind, what

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.

We’re at the place Wallace Stevens called the palm at the end of the mind, the place you get to when you’ve walked the full length of yourself; or, in Arnold’s metaphor, when you’ve dug down to the very bottom. But you’ve disinterred a purely contingent object, applying only to one man once, and that one dying.

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Richard Rorty thinks Larkin has made a fundamental mistake:

[Larkin’s mistake is to want a] ‘blind impress’ which applie[s] not only to ‘one man once,’ but, rather, to all human beings. Think of finding such an impress as being the discovery of the universal conditions of human existence, the great continuities, the permanent, ahistorical context of human life … [These conditions would be] necessary, essential, telic, constitutive of what it is to be a human. [If they exist, they will] give us a goal, the only possible goal, namely, the full recognition of that very necessity…

Traditional philosophers, Rorty writes, were “going to explain to us the ultimate locus of power, the nature of reality, the conditions of the possibility of experience. They would thereby inform us what we really are, what we are compelled to be by powers not ourselves. [The point of our lives would be] the … self-consciousness of our essence.”

Rorty goes on to say that philosophers in the wake of Nietzsche have seen “self-knowledge as self-creation…. [A] human life [is] triumphant just insofar as it escapes from inherited descriptions of the contingencies of its existence and finds new descriptions.” Larkin’s churlish conclusion, then, derives from his demand that there be universal and established, rather than contingent and new, truths.

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As to the value of those contingent truths to a larger world of human beings, here’s what Alexander Nehamas, writing about the centrality of the experience of beauty for the creation of a self and a life, argues:

[I]ndividuality and distinctiveness presuppose coherence and unity; without them, nothing can stand on its own as an object either of admiration or of contempt. If there are discernable in my aesthetical choices, in what I have found beautiful, in what I have in turn found of beauty in it, in the various groups to which my choices have led me, in what I received from them, and what I in turn had to give them – if my choices both fit with one another and also stand out from the rest, then I have managed to put things together in my own manner and form. I have established, through the things I loved, a new way of looking at the world, and left it richer than I first found it.

Winter Labyrinth on the Night of a Lunar Eclipse

What Yeats called the labyrinth of another’s being
Has nothing in common with this mythic path’s release,
The pith-and-substance aftermath, the freeing –
Once you’ve circled the maze – into peace.

When she was seventeen she thought she was seeing,
In his twisty allure, a mystery-lover’s feast,
Enigma variations for beginners, a pebbled circuit of meaning…
Even now she loves him; but she’s come ’round, at least,

To the true geometry of her own heart’s weaving:
How the coiling and coiling then was her own bully-beast,
Wanting him to be the mechanism of her freeing.

Mysterious, how the love never ceased.

… the poet and translator Richard Wilbur, who’s chugging along nicely at 89, with Anterooms, a new book of poems and translations. The Amherst Bulletin has a terrific article about him; it includes this poem, from the new collection, written in memory of Wilbur’s wife.

The House

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.

What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.

Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.

There’s something about these poems of the long-married… Like this similar one by Stephen Spender... These poems can feature a peculiar intimacy with the unconscious of the much-loved, much-lived-with person. The lover intuits the loved-one’s dreams from what the beloved speaks in sleep; or from what she tells him about her dreams on waking.

And these dreams clearly represent a profoundly privileged territory, a deep-lying region of the truest personal truths, the purest contingencies of one particular person. It’s no surprise that Wilbur, seeking a sort of contact with his dead wife, will go here, to the realm he alone was able to perceive while she lived, that he would constantly “put to sea” in search of the most rooted place her mind inhabited, her islanded house inside life’s flow.

Think of Matthew Arnold’s To Marguerite: Continued, in which another separated pair of lovers laments their separation:

For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain —
Oh might our marges meet again!

Meanwhile, there’s “the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea,” the same sea Wilbur sails over night after night, his own dreams trying to become hers, trying to be her dreaming mind, in order to find her, transcended, finally at home.

******************************

Widow’s walk. Salt. There’s no idealizing here; it is the grave, the salt salt sea, the white hotel of D.M. Thomas’s novel, the strange infinity of our ceasing, whose reality we allow ourselves to feel in dream-image.

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

This is the conclusion of Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens. This is the way you make love when the person you love has died: you set out as wisely and foolishly as you can on that wide water, and keep looking.

So applaud these University of Manchester students for having read all of Milton’s Paradise Lost aloud. Proceeds will go to the Royal National Institute of Blind People.

Here’s more information.

Half Full

Halfway up my back half-acre, I see a fox,
Beautifully camouflaged in the forest,
Winding through trunks in morning fog.

Send half-notes to half-there dog-
Woods. The fox is at his farthest.
He leaves the world as white as chalk.