An article in the Guardian about “strong calls for a proper memorial to [Sylvia Plath’s] life and work” prompts UD to consider just why she’s such a fine poet.

Readers tend to think of the spiky violent famous poems (Daddy, Lady Lazarus), but for UD it’s mainly about small moody works which are able, like many of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, to make the natural world somehow broadcast the poet’s inner extremity.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

The unsettling unclarity of this poem — the sense that the perceptual sense of the speaker is strangely and movingly messed up — signals a spiritual condition of urgent existential threat. A depressive person gradually loses her sense of the physical world around her in these few lines, and the final lines of the poem confirm that as the perceptual world dissolves, an entire world of death supercedes it.

Plath’s ability to establish this imperiled mood quickly, and sustain it through mere sequences of sketchy images, goes to the very heart of what makes lyrical poetry great: condensation, image, and the intense evocation through condensation and image of a particular state of consciousness.

The poem’s title is a painting’s title, naming what the artist will (we assume) describe — here, the way white sheep on a foggy hillside merge with the fog and become a sort of nothingness. The larger point of course will be the way in which the poet’s entire world is losing sharpness, definition, meaning, legibility.

She starts with personification:

The hills step off into whiteness.

Not merely the sheep step off, white into white, but rather the hills themselves, along with the entire natural world, undergo a white-out.

People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

This strikingly perceptual poem includes not merely the poet’s perceived world, but the poet perceived by the world; and since in her affectless state the distinction human/natural doesn’t really apply, she feels herself equally surveyed by stars and people. Or is it that she can’t tell the difference? Between the face of a star and the face of a person? Between a white sheep and a white hillside? In any case, in a reflection of her self-hatred, her despair reads all apprehensions of her as disappointed.

A brilliant and packed objective correlative here, the train carrying, as it were, the weight of her self- and world-annihilating misery. Her own final breath is anticipated in the trace of breath the train leaves behind; her mental and physical lassitude expresses itself in the poetic O slow; her sense of her rusted-out life appears in the color of the train – the train compared to a horse, with, again, a weird melding of the natural and the human-made… And note how carefully she’s worked the repeated O sounds in this stanza: O, slow, colour, hooves, dolorous. It amounts to a lament: O, O, O, O. Color and dolor make a rhyme, part of the odd incantatory feel of this lyric.

From white to black here – from the sheep, and the steam, and the foggy hills, all white, to the immediate reality of her inner experience: the blackness of sorrow. The world moves O slowly; but her depressed day moves swiftly, blackening by the hour as a flower left out will quickly blacken. Her repetition of morning, in the context of blackness, hints at mourning.

Her frantic mind moves her toward death; she feels herself as a physical being already dead: her bones hold a stillness. Her feelings, though, are most acute: From her infinitely pulled-back perspective, the far fields, the fields dissolving into obscurity and meaninglessness as she withdraws from life, break her heart, for they are the avatars of her oncoming reduction to nothingness.

See how she returns to stars at the end of the poem; liberated into death, the poet no longer suffers the disappointed face of stars (notice also all of the near-rhymes here, which deepen the poem’s mystical, chanting feel: threaten/heaven, star/dark, father/water, a feel conveyed throughout in any case merely by the radical shortness of each line). Her paradoxical heaven looks like hell – it’s pure death, after all, dark and starless. But heaven nonetheless, because it removes her from an agonizingly inchoate and uncomprehending world.

… a great love poet, has died.

UD finds this YouTube of Scots reciting some of his poems beautiful and moving.

Our local news radio describes a city under flood warning as the rain pours in this morning.

A moment ago the water let up a little, and I walked my half acre, dragging green-speckled limbs off the lawn and into the woods.

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Rain – the poet’s metaphor for sexual passion, for renewal after spiritual dryness, for letting go.

Also, in its aspect of gray and fog and subdual, just the opposite — life shut in, repression, imperception.

But in a new landscape, a postmodern one, rain seems to mean something else. It plays differently.

As in a poem like The Center for Atmospheric Research by Bin Ramke.

Like Don DeLillo, Ramke notices how pleasantly, and disturbingly, our smooth affluent American lives seem to be arranged for us. Everything’s prettied up, turned into pleasant, managed, mini-experience. Maybe pseudo-experience. In a small moment in The Names, Don DeLillo’s narrator, James Axton, describes heading to bed with his family, “our bodies arranged for dreaming in loose-fitting clothes.” Arranged. Some invisible benevolent life-manager has chosen those clothes carefully for us, has arranged even our unconscious experience for us. Into even our dreams, our most wild and hidden and personal aspect, some sedating, neutralizing stage manager has intruded.

Ramke’s poem — a surreal stroll through a postmodern weatherscape — extends this idea of the managed life, the managed consciousness, closely escorted through a pretty, though unsettlingly shrunken and simulacral world.

The poet is visiting an I.M. Pei designed lab for the study of the weather.

Pei designed the building with views,
smooth masonry, and the mountains aligned
for a photo opportunity; inside are files
sufficient for forever, for fine tuning weather.

The elaborately designed building, aligning the mountains (we align them; we bring nature into our design, our arrangement, thereby making nature feel unnatural); the files that fine tune the weather — from the outset, the theme is this DeLilloesque sense of a world entirely tamed and patterned by us.

Great Spangled Fritillary, the watcher vaguely recalls
from Teach Yourself Lepidoptery, a book.
He wanted to live in a land of appropriate weather
with views of mountains and with music constant.

And, you know, why not? Who wouldn’t want to live in a climate-controlled universe? Weather always appropriate, soft carefully chosen elevator music in the background… See how far we are from the Romantic notion of weather as the power outside and greater than we, the power that makes a mockery of our efforts to control the world. Now we control – interiorize, in the Center – even the power of weather.

He wants to tell a story but no one would listen,
like opera: Black women clean the floors
and shine the walls like silver nightly.
Computers whir Platonic as nuns. Nothing

escapes naming; storms arranged in teacups
like anyone’s collection, like rows of butterflies
pinned and satisfactory: this is the new landscape.

Let me tell you how being in this place feels to me. The telling will be surreal, and you won’t listen, becalmed inside your own version of climate control. But this weird technological world around me is almost spiritual in its hushed perfection, in the way the setting creates an autonomous and satisfying and ordered world whose power and tranquility make me never want to leave it. Everything is named here, arranged. No mystery, no anxious unknowing.

Also, though, dead. Pinned. The new landscape.

Now, as the poet continues his walk through the atmospheric exhibits, his thoughts take a bizarre turn.

Or there is a lewd father among the shrubbery

watching daughters in weather; he breathes heavily
and the wet wisdom begins, the storm gathering
to spill across the ridge, longed for.
Daughters must be warned against sincerity

of frantic violins: “He was a man of sympathetic
tendencies,” read the official report. “He was
smaller than he looked and tended to lick chocolate
from his fingers in a lascivious manner.”

He tried his wife’s patience, it is true,
and lived alone through the marriage, kept
his own counsel. With such petty symbols as
weather, he kept his own counsel.

So, the poet begins to imagine a narrative, in some way inspired by what he’s seeing, a kind of louche fairy tale in which an infantile voyeur masturbates while watching his own daughters as they stand out in an approaching rainstorm. The storm gathering… longed for… This is a perverse and pathetic endpoint for the sweeping Romantic narrative, the great thunderous sublime which ignited the lovers’ passion. Here bracing weather generates merely wet spill from a childish, solitary, small, and petty man.

A butterfly like weather; the climate like
laughter, the movement of small air. Clouds, too,
have names. Clouds leave home to find themselves.
Good money after bad, the fathers say, and close

the door called Nature against their coming back.
The funny little ways children have of making
the world the color they always wanted. Sunset.
Birds.

Again this theme of our infantile desire to condense and control the world, to shut nature out so that the unclarity and uncontrollability of clouds no longer threatens us. The clouds inside the Center are pseudo-clouds, named, pinned, like the butterflies. Like children, we make the world whatever color we want.

The poem concludes:

The mathematics of memory begin

to swirl like cookie dough, like chocolate with egg
and sugar and vanilla and butter. A bowl to lick,
dangerous with delight, as ultraviolet. Home again!
begs the mother and soon the sorry child walks

that long allée as rain begins to pour. Past
such petty symbols the boy returns through architecture,
a silly gauntlet: the butterfly, the mother, the fit
signatures of loveliness. His parents at the door,

the little cottage in the woods, Hansel home again
at last, the shining path. A little like a dream.
Ours is not a simple age, and things are what they seem
happily ever after in the malicious tiny rain.

Like the malsain father, the poet now recalls his similarly infantile childhood – sickly sweet, with much licking of chocolate icing, everything sweet comfort food, like this lab which reduces everything dangerous in the world to sweet comfort food. Indeed the lab’s unnatural infantility has prompted these infantile memories…

But now the poet admonishes himself – or rather his mother admonishes him – to leave the petty indoor weather world, to return to reality, to grow up, to go home.

Sorry to leave it, the child walks home, as “the rain begins to pour.” So this finally feels like reality — this is real rain falling, the real, grown-up, confused, out of control business of being an actual person in the actual world. As he walks back out through the lab, the poet again registers “the fit / signatures of loveliness,” the appropriate, arranged, satisfactory landscape of postmodern dreaming in which he’s been delighting.

And now home again for Hansel, lost but now found, back on the real path… It was all a dream…

Yet note the last two lines (note too that the poem does not rhyme except for this last stanza, which suddenly has exact rhyme):

Ours is not a simple age, and things are what they seem
happily ever after in the malicious tiny rain.

Despite its seeming infantility, our new postmodern landscape is not at all simple. It only looks simple, and benign. In fact, the cute little pseudo-rains inside the lab, all those adorably controlled exhibits we enjoy as we stroll by them in the science museum, seduce us into a very perilous ease about things. Outside the pretend rain, under the massive pelting of the actual, we’re shaken awake.

… has a post up which distinguishes the responses of atheists and Christians when fear-and-trembling-and-sickness-unto-death starts up.

Like many commentators, Linker is moved and meditative at the spectacle of Christopher Hitchens talking with his characteristic candor about death.

Linker cautions us to expect no deathbed conversions from a confirmed atheist like Hitchens. When immediately threatened with suffering and extinction, atheists might be tempted, as Primo Levi once was, at Auschwitz, to beg for divine intervention; but Linker quotes Levi writing that if he had given in to this, he would have felt ashamed. It would have been a betrayal of the truth.

For the religious, Linker suggests, moments of deep anguish are precious epiphanic events that transport us to the truth of our fragile humanity, and our related dependence on God to grant meaning and transcendence to an otherwise pointless, debilitated, and unredeemed existence. For non-believers, on the other hand:

… [A] person’s capacity to determine the truth depends on his or her ability to think calmly, coolly, dispassionately. It depends on the capacity to bracket aspects of one’s subjectivity (like intense emotions, including fear of imminent death) that might distort one’s judgment or obstruct the effort to achieve an unbiased, objective view of the world in itself.

Religious people tend to believe that “human beings are truest to themselves — most authentic — when they are most vulnerable.” For “the champion of rational enlightenment, the secular intellectual and social critic,” on the other hand, episodes of naked vulnerability represent reversions to the animal incomprehension and fear ever at work beneath our efforts toward understanding.

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While this seems to me broadly speaking a useful distinction, it overlooks some important things. It presents too stark an either/or. If you consider secular intellectuals and artists like Hitchens, Richard Rorty, and Vladimir Nabokov, say, you discover that they seem impelled as much by a profound Romanticism as by reason.

On the edge of his own death, Rorty wrote that “reason can only follow paths that the imagination has first broken.”

Family members, Rorty reports, have asked him if, at this moment of greatest vulnerability, he has felt the pull of religious faith.

No. Neither philosophy nor religion seems to provide ballast.

…[N]either the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.

Only poetry comforts and clarifies. Rorty repeatedly recites certain lines to himself:

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Calming but wholly human mantras, these, that take one intimately to what Hitchens in his autobiography calls “the fragility of love.” They pull us back from the precipice, at least emotionally, and strengthen us in the anticipation of our descent.

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Hitchens recently quoted — somewhat misquoted, but who cares — E.M. Forster: “Get on with your own work, and behave as if you were immortal.”

When you can’t get away with doing that anymore, it’s time to gather in to yourself your essential identity, an identity you share with many other people whose “temple,” Forster also writes (quoting him correctly here), “is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and [whose] kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.”

UD leaves tomorrow for her house in upstate New York. I’m not kidding when I tell you that this house is back of beyond. No internet connection, for instance.

I will therefore probably post every other day. Maybe more often, but probably around every other day.

Means of connection: Mr UD and I will drive down a series of steep dirt roads to a hot spot in Cobleskill, the closest town.

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Meanwhile, as we say farewell to Garrett Park, here’s a poem about what we’re leaving. A poem about a typical morning around these parts, late summer.

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AUGUST, ‘THESDA

Morning starts with the sound of a train.
I open my bedside laptop to see
If, after last night’s stupendous rain,
We’ve been reconnected to electricity.

Yes! New comments, new mail…
I glance beyond the sliding doors
To gauge how badly the gale
Has shaken the trees. More
Branches, limbs, and twigs to gather.

I sigh, get up, let out the dog, and go
To the kitchen to microwave a rather
Agèd cup of tea, and also
A plate of olive oil.
I toast tandoori naan
And dip it, soft and hot, into the oil.

Now I catch sight of a white-spotted fawn
Which stares at me and seems to linger.

I give it the finger.

I

The outcome of Palmer and Figes
Lacks even a hint of surprigese:
He who seeks to defame
Plays a dangerous game
And may have to pay multiple high fees.

II

As to the campaign of McInnis:
Finis.

… in here, but UD‘s nowhere near a good enough poet to write it.

I think we need Walt Whitman for this one. Can’t think, at the moment, of a contemporary poet up to the task.

… has never done much for UD. Many of his poems seem to her mere statements, and rather self-righteous ones at that. No humor, no wit, no surprising emotions. Wholesome poetry for right-thinking people.

I think William Logan’s appraisal is more or less right: Dreary, a village explainer.

[H]is poems are a species of prose … In his poems the writing is … wordy and lifeless … This run-on, the-sentence-is-everything-that-is-the-case style (like Molly Bloom on Prozac) is an aesthetic decision, not mere laziness. It just looks like laziness.

Merwin and Wendell Berry (about whose withdrawal of his papers from the University of Kentucky I’ve written here) are often written of together as ecopoets, and it’s true that they do a similar sort of agrarian nattering. Berry is a fine prose stylist, but his poetry, if you ask UD, doesn’t come across….

Here’s a Merwin poem dedicated to Berry.

Bread

to find themselves alone
before a wheat field
raising its radiance to the moon

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This seems to UD a very sketchy sort of narrative, a little pit stop at Epiphany. Its main emotion is condescension toward people who can’t transcend a life of physicality, can’t lift themselves up to the radiance of the wheat field. They just stand there clutching a piece of bread.

They’ve lost touch with their own depths, with the source of their bread. They’ve abandoned the rigors of the search for the sacred.

Perhaps the dark mysteries of spiritual life frighten them. Perhaps they’re conformists, more comfortable in the crowd than in the challenging aloneness of the radiance.

Back in the hot lowlands after a week in the mountains, UD spent today inside writing. At one point in the late afternoon she put on the broad-brimmed hat she got in Savannah, plus shades and bug spray, and watered her front garden. Really soaked it. Stood in the scorch and drenched every blade.

Here’s a poem about heat. It’s by D.A. Powell, a UD favorite. We’ve seen him on this blog before.

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graceless creatures that we are, unmake and befoul our beds
don’t tell me deluge. don’t tell me heat, too damned much heat

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I find Powell’s mix of out-there, messy, visceral emotion — here, for instance, he does nothing to hide the fact that he’s extremely bitter — with a sophisticated, polished, controlled poetic style, exciting. I’ve never seen anything quite like this particular clash. I really like it. Look:

either the postagestamp-bright inflorescence of wild mustard
or the drab tassel of prairie smoke, waving its dirty garments

either the low breeze through the cracked window
or houseflies and drawn blinds to spare us the calid sun

The first two stanzas give you alternatives – either this or that – but all four images on offer are pretty much the same thing: a hot, horrible, dessicated world. Stuck inside my house, blinds drawn against the heat, I can look at this or that, but existence has shrunk to a dry, small, low, drab, and dirty interior.

Calid is such a weird, rare word; its edgy enigmatic feel somehow contributes to the sense we get throughout the poem that the universe has nothing to do with miniscule unimportant us, that we’re small dry trivial plantlife…

one day commands the next to lie down, to scatter: we’re done
with allegiance, devotion, the malicious idea of what’s eternal

There’s nothing to want in these unlivable desert days. Instead of vibrant continuity from one day to the next, we get a sense that even nature knows how untenable it’s become. Nature commits a kind of diurnal suicide, telling each lurid summer afternoon to vanish, lie down, scatter.

We take nothing from these days – no memories, no experiences, only a conviction that we were wrong to love the earth, to feel part of it. We were wrong to assume we would be in a living world forever.

picture the terrain sunk, return of the inland sea, your spectacle
your metaphor, the scope of this twiggy dominion pulled under

crest and crest, wave and cloud, the thunder blast and burst of swells
this is the sum of us: brief sneezeweed, brief yellow blaze put out

Our arid land was once a vast inland sea, and we can picture that. We can at least generate the sort of refreshment that a metaphor represents… Yet all we’ve really generated with this particular picture is a bitter graphic representation of our thin dry twiggy lives, lives easily, promptly, to be pulled under by those deathwaves.

Yes, this is the sum of us. It’s all we are. “Sneezeweed flowers in late summer or fall. The common name is based on the former use of its dried leaves in making snuff, inhaled to cause sneezing that would supposedly rid the body of evil spirits.” We breathe for a few moments in a weedy world and then get snuffed out. Each of us is a small fire, soon extinguished.

Summer is cruel because it makes all of this visible; it makes us see the paltriness of our being, and the morbid reality of our fate. Next to the stark objectivity of the summer world, our metaphors, which try to dress up the world, make it beautiful and meaningful, give it the eternality of art, are really pathetic.

so little, your departure, one plunk upon the earth’s surface,
one drop to bind the dust, a little mud, a field of mud

the swale gradually submerged, gradually forgotten
and that is all that is to be borne of your empirical trope:

Each death, then — yours, for instance, my metaphor-generating friend — is a miniscule event, a raindrop that merely gives the dust of the world a bit more consistency… And then the poet drifts into an image of his friend’s grave, a small indentation in the earth, a swale, though even this, his grave, is “gradually forgotten.”

So much for the grand empirical fact of your having been here. You’re just one more trope, one more tired theme, one more poetic voice trying with various tricks of the tongue to make yourself and the earth come to life.

first, a congregated light, the brilliance of a meadowland in bloom
and then the image must fail, as we must fail, as we

graceless creatures that we are, unmake and befoul our beds
don’t tell me deluge. don’t tell me heat, too damned much heat

Specifically, your trope is the trope of every life: the organizing of the disparate parts of a personality into a self (a congregated light), blazing youth (a meadowland in bloom), and then the failure of that image, the failure of that self to sustain itself. We’re both awkward animals at odds with the earth (we unmake and befoul our beds), and we’re graceless also in the sense that we won’t be granted any transcendence of this dirty dry globe.

So really – and now the poet goes from bitterness to anger – really, don’t give out with any more of that metaphor-shit. Earth as a deluge, blah blah… What’s the point of imagining it as being anything other than what it is? No more tired, consoling tropes! You see where the flood trope takes you in any case. And no more whining about the heat. As if, when it breaks, things will be any different.

I’ve been considering a summer poem by Mark Strand.

Go here for the compete poem and a discussion of its first two stanzas.

Here’s the poem’s final stanza.

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My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace, small creatures –
the mouse and the swift — will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
small creatures –
the mouse and the swift — will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.

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My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace

The very simple narrative of this poem begins to conclude. His mother stands outside her farmhouse, smokes a cigarette, looks at the night sky… Then she goes inside. The sleep she will soon enter finds a correlative in the stones and fields that now “drift in peace.” But that phrase, given the death-hauntedness of this poem, drifts awfully close to rest in peace, especially when the poet makes them bare stones, so close to bare bones.

And there’s been a subtle temporal anxiety throughout the poem as well. Our lives seem peaceful drift, but actually, as the mother reflects in the second stanza, they are “the soundless storms of decay.”

small creatures –
the mouse and the swift — will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.

Again, note that though there’s little end rhyme in the poem, exact rhyme embeds itself in various lines (here mouse and house, drift and swift). And note that in a typical poetic move Strand veers away, as his mother prepares for sleep, from the mother herself, and instead projects her hiddenness and frailty onto the small creatures nesting in her house along with her.

Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.

Like the bay, with “its loud heaving,” the cricket adds a clear, loud, disturbing voice to this otherwise drifty tranquil scene. These repeated sounds toll the bell of time and confusion and futility… Think of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” — we are here as on a darkling plain… I mean, read the whole thing. Very similar to Strand’s poem, including the sound of the ocean stirring thoughts of the turbid ebb and flow of human misery…

And now see how Strand, through the simple device of a repeated letter, hushes his poem towards its end, one soft R after another soothing us off to sleep:

the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark…

The sea that keeps to itself – Could we be any closer to Arnold’s lament? The sense of a strict separation between the natural and the human world, the natural world which almost seems to taunt us with its enigmatic subsistence, its arrogant sense of superiority, let’s say, to our poor passing selves… This takes us back to a phrase earlier in the poem: She will not know why she is here.

And the poet, fully in control of his dominant metaphor throughout, returns to the parallel between the slow invisible deterioration of the physical world, and the slow, increasingly visible deterioration of his mother. Rimless dark reminds us of the vast nothingness of the starlanes, and of his mother’s loss of firmness and presence as she ages.

And now we come to the paradoxical last lines of this poem:

Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.

The poet makes his morbid meditation explicit. Let her sleep. She sleeps, through life, in vague veiled ignorance, and let her. After all, she is not yet dead, she does not yet have to anticipate with dreadful immediacy her death: The earth is not yet a garden about to be turned. The fields lie flat and tranquil, unshoveled yet for a grave. Let her be. The churchbells don’t yet ring for her. She’s like most people — occasionally chilled by long starlanes, but for the most part contentedly, dumbly, in the world.

It is much too late feels, as I say, paradoxical. Shouldn’t this be it is much too early? Too early for her to worry about her death?

But it’s the same paradox, I think, that we get at the famous conclusion of Eliot’s Prufrock:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The true waking, for lives lived in a fog, undersea, adrift, sleeping, is death itself. It is too late for the poet’s mother to awake to life; what she will awake to is death. She will awake from her rimless life into the stringency of death.

As always, I’ll first give it to you straight. Then I’ll present it again, with my comments.

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My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

by Mark Strand

1

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,
my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon’s ash-colored coat
on the black bay.

2

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.
And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour’s spell,
she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

3

My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace, small creatures —
the mouse and the swift — will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.

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This is a classic lyric. First-person. A private poignant moment evoked through many metaphors.

Yet despite its almost over-rich metaphorical content, the poem feels minimalist, its thin fraught lines conveying the poet’s impulse to say many things even as something holds him back.

The first stanza is one long sentence. It begins:

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,

The title tells us we’re in late summer, and the first lines tell us we’re in a beautiful rural setting in the evening. Already the feel is decidedly elegiac – end of the brilliant season (autumn approaching), end of the long summer day… Stricken inaugurates the parade of metaphors that stride this poem.

Indeed the poem, from the title on, is painterly, descriptive. Like many poems, it is essentially a list of physical features which, as the poem progresses, take on metaphysical implication. Elizabeth Bishop, UD thinks, does this sort of poem better than anyone else.

In this particular case, stricken (and similar words that succeed it) brings us to think about the mother’s increasing physical frailty, her growing proximity to death.

A note on style: There are few end rhymes in this poem (We do see hills and filled in this stanza.), but it’s nonetheless musical, lilting, a sort of chant, by virtue of assonance (moon, few), an almost constant recourse to monosyllabic words, and alliteration (few, filled, floats, fields).

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I’ll post this much. More on its way.

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Okay, I’m back. Those few stricken barns standing out amid the low-domed hills — This, let’s say, is his fragile mother standing out amid the world on this particular night, shining forth in her singularity to her son.

Yet her shine has dulled – veiled, dust-filled, floating already seem not merely words descriptive of the hazy summer night, but also figures for the mother’s indistinctness, her loss of firmness, as she ages.

my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon’s ash-colored coat
on the black bay.

Notice, first of all, how the poet has buried his mother in the middle of the stanza. This isn’t Poe, beginning his poem, “To Helen”

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea…

Yadda yadda. The first word of the poem is Helen; it’s all about Helen. Mark Strand doesn’t even address his mother — the poem’s really, after all, about the poet’s distress at his sudden realization of her perishability — and he certainly doesn’t put her at the beginning of his lyric. She’s half-hidden in the middle of the first stanza, as if to acknowledge from the outset her low-domed, dust-filled, dimming existence.

And the rest of this stanza merely intensifies the theme of her dwindling, all shadow and smoke and faintness and seepage. The gray island of his mother will be taken from his view in the “seepage of last light.”

Although a summer poem, this writing is dominated by the gray moon, a lifeless pallid light.

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.

Carpets, finials, graze – light and trees take on modest domestic and agrarian values in this poem about a plain country woman. The haze remains in this stanza, but now there’s a shift to images of nature’s power – the loud heaving of the bay, and the pines so lifted up as to reach the stars.

That loud heaving intimates the suffering of the mother, to which the poet will now turn.

And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour’s spell,

Starlanes is a neat neologism, sharing with finials and carpets the poet’s trick of almost comically domesticating the vast, powerful, and mysterious natural world. But there’s nothing funny about what comes next: the endless tunnels of nothing. Oldest poetic theme in the book, of course — grappling with your transience and insignificance in the cosmic scheme — but what matters is what poets bring to it. Strand, I think, brings something new.

she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

It’s not merely the nothingness into which we disappear that the mother contemplates; it’s the idea of life itself as silent ongoing physical decay.

Worst of all is the not knowing — living out an entire life in ignorance of its meaning; and aware of having been trapped into a certain sort of existence, but not understanding how that entrapment took place. Maybe all we can say is that we’re here because our parents “clasped and sundered, did the couplers’ will.”

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Final stanza tomorrow morning.

[Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n Roll] starts in a Cambridge garden in 1968 with a piper playing the Syd Barrett song, Golden Hair.

Barrett, the Pink Floyd writer and singer, appears now and then in the play, a figure for the seductive, subversive glory of art…

Golden Hair. It’s Barrett’s song, but it’s James Joyce’s poem.

The charismatic rock star undone by drugs (In Stoppard’s play, we see him in his mother’s Cambridge garden. Barrett retreated there, mentally broken, in the mid-seventies, and stayed until his death not long ago, at the age of sixty.) took the James Joyce poem, Golden Hair, from Joyce’s 1904 collection Chamber Music, and in 1969 set it to stark guitar, stark voice, cymbals, and a low drone.

Here are Joyce’s words.

Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair,
I hear you singing
A merry air.

Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair.

Barrett changes the words in the first stanza a little:

Lean out your window
Golden-hair
I heard you singing
In the midnight air.

Barrett makes of this poem (which, in its pull toward the passion of art and away from the chill anxiety of intellect, has much in common with the Yeats poem about Fergus that echoes through Ulysses) a very private chant. His notes go nowhere; he ventures only one or two changes. His song is musing, minimalist, hesitant, circular, self-absorbed, even though the poem’s content is clearly celebratory, the speaker energized by the fire of the woman’s singing to throw away his book, leave his room, and beg her to lean from her window, so he can see her.

Barrett isn’t going to the woman. He isn’t going anywhere. He even brings his voice down, decisively, in the last line, as if to close out any possibility of release from his trance.

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With Bloomsday coming up, UD ponders not only the generativity of art, the way Joyce’s work sings through the work of Syd Barrett, Samuel Barber, Kate Bush, John Cage, Jefferson Airplane, and many others (to note only his musical influence), but also the suffering of the artist, the suffering out of which art emerges. Stephen Dedalus, on June 16, 1904, is going the way of Barrett, after all, drinking himself to an early grave if he doesn’t watch out… Like Barrett, he’s acting outrageously, self-destructively, getting into fights…

And certainly part of what our hero Bloom attempts to convey to Stephen is how deadly intellect, understood as a kind of arrogant self-absorption, can be to the creation of art. Art’s passion is a human passion, and Dedalus isn’t human enough yet. Hasn’t loved. Holds himself aloof from humanity. Bloom humanizes Stephen by embodying for him the capacity for selfless love. Bloom barely knows Stephen, but intuits, as a compassionate and perceptive human being, the depth of his suffering. He follows him around late at night in Dublin, worried that Stephen will get into trouble.

Stephen duly gets into trouble, and Bloom gets him out of it, takes him to his home, gives him hot chocolate, talks to him late into the night, escorts him out of the house (Stephen politely declines Bloom’s invitation to stay the night), and watches with him, from the yard, the quiet spectacular starry sky. This night sky watching produces one of the most famous lines from Ulysses:

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

The line incorporates much of what one loves in Joyce’s prose: Neologisms (Nightblue is a kind of partner to skyblue; and, no, night isn’t black, or it’s not always black. Night and day aren’t always all that different; in Key West, I was amazed at how white clouds appeared in the sky late into the evening…Heaventree is heavenly. We might also hear lemontree. ). Assonance (humid nightblue fruit). Metaphor (The constellations make trees; each star is a fruit on the tree). Alliteration (heaventree, hung, humid.)

More deeply, there’s something exhilarating about the implicit humanizing, naturalizing, worlding, call it what you will, of the entire universe in this sentence. The distant, enigmatic, intimidating stars which make us feel small and transient are in this sentence gathered into our earth, made an extension of our trees and forest, our earthly garden. There’s a sort of heady insolence about this Romantic gesture, this pulling of the heavens down to earth, this re-sizing of the cosmos to fit us. This is Walt Whitman, claiming the universe, embracing all in his human arms.

More than anything, perhaps, we love the way this famous line seems ineffably balanced, as the stars seem balanced on the heaventree; somehow in the very composition of the sentence, in its smooth stately self-control, God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

But of course this is the power of the artist, the power of art, that we’re registering. To be lifted up by a perfect phrase or sentence is to hear the piper in the Cambridge garden and follow him. It is to hear the woman singing through the gloom and follow her.

Barrett and Dedalus — and Bucky Wunderlick, the rock star in Don DeLillo’s novel Great Jones Street (a character in part inspired by Barrett) — these people, these fictions, draw our attention not so much to our own experience of aesthetic rapture, as to the cost to the artist of aesthetic creation.

A reader reminded me recently of this great poem, by Delmore Schwartz. The Heavy Bear bears some resemblance, I think, to what David Brooks, in the NYT piece I talked about earlier today, calls The Big Shaggy.

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The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me

“the withness of the body”

The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
—The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

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When you study the humanities, you encounter poems like this one. Here’s another one. They’re all about one’s inability to understand oneself, as well as one’s inability to communicate with other people. Although a word would bare your heart and make you clear, you find yourself unable to speak, mute in the mouthing care of the beast.

These sorts of poems are meticulous considerations of the many barriers that stand between you and non-chaos. The heavy bear and the big shaggy are you, after all — they’re the intense, often twisted, enigmatic, deepest core of your being, a core from which emanate what Brooks calls “upheavals of thought,” a core whose operations perplex and affront you with your own darkness.

Let’s shed some light on all of this by doing a closer reading of Schwartz’s poem.

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The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,

[So far pretty innocuous – indistinguishable from Poohbear. Amusing. Face smeared with lots of honey.]

Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,

[The theme of weightiness, though, already takes on unsettling force. There’s something in me uncontrollable, unavoidable, and incredibly oppressive.]

The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,

[Hunger — appetites — will be a central theme of this poem, which clearly wants to note the bifurcation in all of us between the civilized cerebral higher being and this other being, fleshly and massive and clumsy and greedy. I like the list Schwartz provides here: candy, anger, and sleep. It’s funny. You can sort of see the lumbering infant or the drunk, first at a tit, then in a tantrum, then snoring.]

Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

[A sort of insane, all-purpose servant you can’t fire, the heavy bear in you is the principle of chaos, risk, and meaningless aggression.]

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,

[The sweet shapeless world of infantility, a world devoted to the instant gratification of your animal desires…]

Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
—The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.

[But the infant is gone; you’ve grown up and you know that you’ll die. Your response to this knowledge, however, remains infantile: trembling terror. In the daylight, you’re a big old bear, a big old egotist, showing off to the world; but alone in your bed you know how perilous existence is, how all your bulk – your quivering meat, your bulging flesh – will fall off the tightrope your just-barely-balanced life is and become “the darkness beneath.”]

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,

[That “black womb” is a strange and unsettling image. The womb carries a life, but a life which will end in death; it is as much a death chamber as an anteroom to existence. And of course the womb is a darkness… ]

Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,

[I cannot control myself. There is something inside me which distorts my intentions, seeks to undermine me, makes me laugh obscenely at my most sincere efforts to transcend mere physicality, mere bestial greed.]

The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,

[It’s undeniably me, this ugly, subversive energy, but I don’t understand it. It is the animal life that underlies my human life, the profane that smirks at the sacred; and its power is immense.]

Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

[The hundred million of his kind. The heavy bear squashes individuality itself; he reduces me to the identical primal creature everyone else is. There’s no differentiation here: We’re all the same howling wordless wanting animal. The poet returns in his last line to the football image in the first stanza. We’re stuck for life in a Hobbesian scrimmage for sweets.]

… has a couple of poems in this month’s Poetry Magazine.

Here’s one of them, and it’s a fine example of what a modern lyric poem can do as it snakes through the thoughts of a person observing a particular scene, and observing himself responding in certain ways to the scene…

But like all good poems, it’s also linguistically interesting. In this case, look at how Hudgins playfully repeats a strong G sound.

I mean, yes, it’s playful; the writer’s having fun with language. Yet as we begin to discern his theme, the Guh, Guh, Guh thing he’s got going begins to look, er, grave.

For the poem unsullied by UD‘s blue-colored commentary, click on the link at the beginning of this post.

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Grand Expensive Vista

[On first reading, we think this is Grand Expansive Vista. But no.]

As we sipped and mingled,
regaled
with oldfangled
canapés and beguiled,
or entertained at least, by gargled
oldies, I disengaged

[So the speaker’s at a party it seems, standing around drinking, and nibbling canapés.  The narrative begins right away:  He breaks from the gathering, disengages…]

and angled
across grass tenderly groomed,
past where electric tiki torches gleamed,
and, alone, gazed,
now truly beguiled,
at my hosts’ grand
expensive vista, mortgaged,
yes, and, yes, remortgaged.

[His friend has gone into debt in order to buy the view at which the speaker now marvels.  There’s nothing wild here; the grass is “tenderly groomed,” and one can assume the view too is just so…   I mean, it’s telling that the speaker’s first response to the view is to consider how expensive it must have been to get visual access to it.]

A low gold
moon glowed
against a plush black sky gauzed,
even filigreed,
with stars. Gowned
in old-growth oaks glazed
with moonlight over their autumn gilt,
the hills glowed
in concord with the golden moon.

[This description of nature isn’t exactly Coleridge.  The words – plush, gowned, gilt – suggest something bought, fashioned, groomed, humanly bejeweled.   There’s something a little too organized, something a little stagey,  in the “concord” of the hills with the moon.]

I lingered,
glad—discomfited and glad—
at what my friends’ greed
for beauty afforded me.

[Having done his description, the poet now turns to his consciousness.  How does this scene make him feel?  What does it make him think about?  Well, it’s complicated.  He’s both happy and uncomfortable.  Who could be unhappy at having the good fortune to be present at such a glowing night scene, such glorious earthly concord?  Yet we don’t find the poet in accord at all; he’s unsettled.  He doesn’t mince words:  This exquisite scene is a product of “my friends’ greed.”  Greed for beauty, to be sure.  But nonetheless greed.]

I argued,
self against self, what they’d gained
and lost, and me with them, entangled
as friendship entangles.

[Wrestling with himself now, the speaker goes back and forth on the perennial question of human grasping.  Does the fact that his friends have been greedy for the sake of beauty make them less unpalatable from a moral standpoint?  And what of the speaker’s own collusion in this greed?  He, after all, is their friend, and seems a willing beneficiary of their greediness.]

I nearly groaned
aloud with want before my friend grabbed
my elbow.

[I want this! Forget the moral crap, says the speaker.  I share the same infantile grasping for goodies that my friends have!  I want!  I want!]

“Gorgeous, eh?” I grinned
and agreed,
my voice greased
with hidden envy.

[Pretty little poem, eh?  Greed.  Envy.  This beautiful view seems to take one quite far from concord.]

From behind us, grilled
sirloin, pedigreed

[Greed and pedigreed.  Clever.]

meat sublimating on embers,

[A nice way of capturing in an image his smooth exterior sublimating – my voice greased – what is actually burning envy.]

triggered
another hunger.

[Yum.  The carnivore’s mouth waters at the aroma... We’ve been animals all along in this poem, going Guh, Guh, Guh…]

Life was not just good,
but too good:

[So here, as the poem ends, we get the moral kick.  It’s discomfiting to be in a world too rich.  By capturing, purchasing, and grooming the world, we make beautiful things kind of ugly.]

aged beef, aged wine after bourbon. We hungered,
and all the way back to his engorged
glass table, hunger was our guide.

[Read Wallace Shawn’s brilliant little book, The Fever. This poem shares with that book an interest in the way the glowing gold gauzy glaze of our greedy-for-beauty world diminishes us.]

UD can faintly — very faintly — recall her mother reciting the first lines of the poem Desiderata and then laughing at them. She used a fake British accent and a high-pitched voice.

She can recall her father joining her mother in this laughter.

UD didn’t know, then, that they were laughing at a poem — it was just some language her parents thought funny.

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Desiderata turns out to have been a wildly popular inspirational poem. It still is.

Terre Haute now has a sculpture of Desiderata‘s author, Max Ehrmann, sitting on a city bench.

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Deteriorata was the inevitable parody of Desiderata.