… who has died, age 97.
ELEGY
O flots abracadabrantesques,
Prenez mon coeur, qu’il soit lavé
*********************
Look to the heavens, Heliotrope.
Follow the sun. Sun, shine!
The streets are numbered, shelled, and soft:
Eleventh, Olive, Chestnut, Pine.
Mannikins puff pale cigarettes,
club girls clench calypso-colas;
from verdant rooftops yeomanettes
succinctly sigh: Sobre las olas.
You shipped him off address unknown
you shipped him far beyond Endurance
I cannot reach him on the phone
He left me all his life insurance.
Look to the heavens, Heliotrope.
Follow the sun. Sun, shine!
The streets are numbered, shelled, and soft:
Eleventh, Olive, Chestnut, Pine.
*********************
The epigraph is from Rimbaud, a very grotesque poem of his in which “the poet’s heart is puking over the poop of a ship.” He asks the waves – the magical, transformative, abracadabra, waves – to take his heart and wash it, clean it, make it no longer a heart that has been “depraved” by a depraved world. So let’s say that Smith has taken from Rimbaud the idea that the world is so nauseating and sordid (he’s writing this poem in the midst of yet another war) that our desperate desire to escape it becomes downright suicidal. Maybe it’s better to be dead.
The poem itself – a brilliantly condensed, weirdly suggestive and associative lyric – seems to address a soldier killed in the war (You shipped him off…), a young man to whom the poet softly and sympathetically speaks.
You, a young plant, a lover of the light, a follower of the sun – as you lie there dead, look up in the sky and see that sun. Follow it heavenward, to a cleansed realm of light. Throw off your casket (Pine), your dead body, your “shelled” body (bombed, eviscerated), and leave the degraded world, the realm of finitude and division, where the streets, like your days, “are numbered.”
And now there’s a stanza about that world left behind, with its indifferent partying semi-human (mannikin) cigarette and club girls who lean back in their chaises and briefly note the absence of the dead man (Over the waves extends the Rimbaudesque waves).
And now the voice shifts, and a mother or a wife angrily mourns his loss, and again an image from the sea appears in a reference to the famous ice-entrapped ship, Endurance. He could not survive the extremity to which he was subjected, and his survivor cannot fathom the distance now put between them.
Note how, like T.S. Eliot and many other modernists, Smith melds very high spiritual language (Look to the heavens) with very low modern/commercial language (He left me all his life insurance). The party girls, and his survivors, remain in a dark degraded world, while the heliotrope twists toward the sun.
And now this strange unsettling little song repeats its first verse, presses on the dead soldier its insistence that he cleanse himself entirely of this world, and ascend.
**********************
That was one way of putting it, to quote Eliot. Like most great highly compressed lyrics, this one is wide open to interpretation.