On festive and non-festive days, old UD loves to read the poems of James Merrill. In the last weeks of his life, he wrote Christmas Tree, in which his wasting body is compared to a holiday tree taken in and decorated by a celebrating family — he is made to feel loved and cared for and even prettied up, shined up, in his last days, although the poet/tree knows that, having been cut down, his/its days are very much numbered. The hospital was the tree farm, where the poet has been “looked after, kept still,” but now it’s clear “there [is] nothing more to do,” and the poet will have to leave the hospital and go home to die.

Yet it’s Merrill, the poet, who inexhaustibly, to the end, elaborates, accessorizes, decorates, warms, and bejewels life — as I said in my last post about him, he’s no discouraged Prufrock. He keeps going, keeps embellishing. He’s an artist, mes petites. We can’t rescue the family jewels from the fire, but he can. Even as he’s dying, he can. Surrounded by loved ones in his warm home, covered in thick “sables,” nonetheless jewels from life continue to “flash forth” around him from these coverings. He’s not buried yet. Propitiating miracle-makers (amulets, milagros) hang from his body and a song plays and replays – brilliant, magical life continues to be wound about him.

And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV
To keep the show going.

The holiday and the primitive at-home IV/ivy. To keep the blood going. Heart-stopping poetry if you ask me.

Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals
Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come—

No bullshit about it, I’m all lit up and about to die; my festive duties done, my poems written, I’m about to be stripped of my jewels, with my poor naked trunk about to be revealed for the rail-thin thing it is. I’m about to be buried, pine/IV “needles and bone.” And I’m ready to go.

Last image from last moments – a world in dusk, to be sure, but dusk “aglow,” with candlelight, loving faces, gifts brought to the tree, brought by the tree.

Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, praise.

The last lines of the last poem echo Merrill’s endless reverberating theme, as in his great poem “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” where he insists on walking the volcanic, gorgeous island, staying poised and balanced and upright, despite serious pain from ailments in his feet. The imperative always is to stay in the game, to remain receptive to all of life, to call and recall, and above all to lyrically praise.

Christmas Tree

⭐

To be
Brought down at last
From the cold sighing mountain
Where I and the others
Had been fed, looked after, kept still,
Meant, I knew—of course I knew—
That it would be only a matter of weeks,
That there was nothing more to do.
Warmly they took me in, made much of me,
The point from the start was to keep my spirits up.
I could assent to that. For honestly,
It did help to be wound in jewels, to send
Their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep
Fragrant sables that cloaked me head to foot.

Over me then they wove a spell of shining—
Purple and silver chains, eavesdripping tinsel,
Amulets, milagros: software of silver,
A heart, a little girl, a Model T,
Two staring eyes. Then angels, trumpets, BUD and BEA
(The children’s names) in clownlike capitals,
Somewhere a music box whose tiny song
Played and replayed I ended before long
By loving. And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV
To keep the show going. Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals
Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come—
No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn’t bear,
Now or ever, dwelling upon. To have grown so thin.
Needles and bone. The little boy’s hands meeting
About my spine. The mother’s voice: Holding up wonderfully!
No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today’s

Dusk room aglow
For the last time
With candlelight.
Faces love-lit
Gifts underfoot.
Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, praise.

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

Similar themes here.

Take these verses, call them today’s flower,

Cluster a rained‐in pupil might have scissored.

They too have suffered in the realm of hazard.

Sorry things all. Accepting them’s the art.

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The sad random childish awkward scissoring together of metaphor and sentiment makes of a poem a gift to the world, a gift to the lover.

This is clearly a pathetic gift, one of the sorry things all... The cluster the pupil makes means to be beautiful, a flower; but the pupil’s crude and cutting instrument of art – the scissors – guarantees a sorry thing, a thing unavoidably emerging from/entering into the realm of hazard, from our messy thrownness into being.

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head

               Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

               That is not it, at all.”

Prufrock knows the lover will not accept his poem, his gift, his hazarded random thing that carries his love and his hoped-for transcendent meaning. She, pillowed in contingency, had not meant to excite that sentiment, that meaning, at all, and she shatters him and breaks his heart refusing it. She will shatter him – so he will withhold the gift out of self-protection. He won’t even try.

Merrill the poet tries and tries in every poem; and for him, rather than withdrawing from the field of love and meaning and beauty and gift-giving, we must simply keep trying. The art that matters is the art of accepting what gifts there are – the hopeless lover’s overtures indeed, but more importantly the conditions of existence themselves: dailiness, balanced meals (see the post below) and all. Therein lies the true art – not the always-inept creation of a poem, but an open forgiving ever-reanimated ever-hopeful embrace of the sad contingency even in the most achieved Shakespeare sonnet.

Thus in his great poem “After Greece,” when a depressed Merrill returns home from the exuberant liberating glories of Athens to the crimped waspy realities of his American upbringing – that particular existence into which he was thrown – he ends with a kind of prayer:

 May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.

Best is to have the fortitude to take on the burden of your own sad contingencies — not head-on, because that would be ungeneratively painful (one of Merrill’s best-known collections is titled The Fire-Screen), as well as the sad contingencies of loved others. One will always be a clumsy “pupil” of life, expressively ‘reined in’ (Merrill loves to pun) by the repressive fire-screening in which all sane people must engage. The highest art is accepting those sorry things all — even as you forgive yourself for – speaking poetically, quoting Wallace Stevens – the intricate evasions of as.

Was.. He got in the way, today, of one of America’s thousands of thoroughly demented people with big big big guns.

It’s part of Udemy’s Faculty Project, and can be found here. (Remember: You need to register.)

… Elizabeth Bishop Day (she lived there for a few years and wrote some great poems about it), UD reads through her copy of The Complete Poems and gives Bishop a good think. The last lines of The Bight (my analysis of it is linked to up there, at great poems) became her epitaph —

— and it does rather capture her philosophy, not to mention her life, which was lived with background messiness (drunkenness, loneliness, depression) and foreground … if not cheeriness, at least with a pleasant public countenance. Many of her best, and best-known poems, meticulously observe an operable, operating, world (cargo ships coming and going at harbors, buses traveling Cape Breton), but it’s a lumbering, ultimately go-nowhere, always deteriorating, sort of thing… just like us…

Obviously the thought of life’s desuetude and apparent meaninglessness is awful, and some poems exist to prompt the thought; but what the poet mainly notes along the way is the cheerfulness – and even aestheticism! – we bring to existence nonetheless.

Reading a lot of Bishop’s poems in one sitting saddened me. No one says she has to be Whitman, but her buddies James Merrill and Malcolm Brinnin, let’s say, mixed the melancholy with – not superficial cheer, but merriment at the spectacle.

The best of the rest is poetry, which understands that the world worlds (Larkin: ‘Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest/ Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,/ And dark towns heap up on the horizon./None of this cares for us.’) (Stevens: ‘Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail/ Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness…’) — it all goes on without us; and though we crave worlding’s unconscious endless essence, we generate some of our greatest poems out of our failure to satisfy that craving. We are human selves, not berries ripening in isolation – in total wilderness! – to fulfillment. We want of course to ripen, to live in transcendent fulfillment with our nature, but we are bound, human all too human, to the world, to a running commentary with the world. A running battle with it, really:

“Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”

Our inescapable battle, observes Henry James, is with what humans have made of the world; there’s absolutely no chance we can abandon the battle in favor of some humongously seductive state of calm autonomous being. Only the world can world.

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Or, I mean, we can do stupid shit like mainline heroin and all the other opiates the Sackler family so famously monetized. UD ain’t gonna stand here and deny the depth of that business … Not so much MAKE THE WORLD GO AWAY… STOP THE WORLD I WANT TO GET OFF as make me a sweet berry ripening in the oxysphere…

AFTER GREECE

James Merrill 1969

Light into the olive entered
And was oil. Rain made the huge, pale stones
Shine from within. The moon turned his hair white
Who next stepped from between the columns,
Shielding his eyes. All through
The countryside were old ideas
Found lying open to the elements.
Of the gods’ houses, only
A minor presence here and there
Would be balancing the heaven of fixed stars
Upon a Doric capital. The rest
Lay spilled, their fluted drums half sunk in cyclamen

Or deep in water’s biting clarity
Which just barely upheld me
The next week, when I sailed for home.
But where is home – these walls?
These limbs? The very spaniel underfoot
Races in sleep, toward what?
It is autumn. I did not invite
Those guests, windy and brittle, who drink my liquor.
Returning from a walk, I find
The bottles filled with spleen, my room itself
Smeared by reflection onto the far hemlocks.
I some days flee in dream
Back to the exposed porch of the maidens
Only to find my great-great-grandmothers
Erect there, peering
Into a globe of red Bohemian glass.

As it swells and sinks I call up
Graces, Furies, Fates, removed
To my country’s warm, lit halls, with rivets forced
Through drapery, and nothing left to bear.
They seem anxious to know
What holds up heaven nowadays.
I start explaining how in that vast fire
Were other irons – well, Art, Public Spirit,
Ignorance, Economics, Love of Self,
Hatred of Self, a hundred more,
Each burning to be felt, each dedicated
To sparing us the worst; how I distrust them
As I should have done those ladies; how I want
Essentials: salt, wine, olive, the light, the scream–
No! I have scarcely named you,
And look, in a flash you stand full-grown before me,

Row upon row, Essentials,
Dressed like your sister caryatids,
Or tombstone angels jealous of their dead,
With undulant coiffures, lips weathered, cracked by grime,
And faultless eyes gone blank beneath the immense
Zinc-and-gunmetal northern sky.
Stay then. Perhaps the system
Calls for spirits. This first glass I down
To the last time
I ate and drank in that old world. May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.

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

Of course the system, such as it is, calls for spirits. You can imagine – you can forgive – Merrill hitting the bottle.

This passage from Love’s Work, Gillian Rose’s meditation on love and death, comes to mind as I read about the creeping, escalating de-creation of the island of Santorini, where “homes break apart” in the earthquakes.

Rose’s own disaster – the cancer that would kill her at 48 soon after she finished Love’s Work – generated her argument that life was best lived as an agon, an unceasing passionate losing heroic beautiful struggle toward clarity, justice, and bliss, against the forces of if you like subduction — error/fault, leading to destruction and death.

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UD’s favorite poem, James Merrill’s Santorini: Stopping the Leak, dances just this passionate expiring dance on the most beautiful of the world’s islands (Santorini is insanely beautiful because of its history of unimaginable natural catastrophe) at the very end of the long verse. The poet/poem dances

a grave dance - as if catastrophe
could long be lulled

A grave dance – serious, but also morbid, a dance danced over the centuries of bodies that lie under the island’s volcanic catastrophes. Merrill, visiting the island just having had his own radiation therapy for a cancer on his foot, is dancing on his own grave, and he is as much aware as Rose that the special spiritual passion ignited by the aesthetic bliss of being on gorgeously morbid/passionate Santorini merely damps for a time the subterranean fires. “No foothold on the void,” writes Merrill.

Or not really merely. If Rose and Merrill are right, that lulling dance over one’s grave is the finest expressive substance of our lives, the best that existence has to offer.

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

Merrill’s poem is obsessed with the business of boundaries, of avoiding both the crippling madness of what he calls “psychic incontinence,” when you let too much of the world in and are overwhelmed, and “cemented boundaries,” when, in terror of the fires that underlie, you close off the self in self-protection. [Tante] Taube, a veteran survivor, … had fought the grave to a standstill, balking death itself by her slowness, Saul Bellow’s Herzog thinks as he regards his aunt’s non-life balking death through sheer inactivity. Between the madness of too much and the deathliness of too little you find most of us working our way toward how much of our aliveness – to quote the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips – we can bear:

[E]verybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves… We all have self-cures for strong feeling. Then the self-cure becomes a problem, in the obvious sense that the problem of the alcoholic is not alcohol but sobriety. Drinking becomes a problem, but actually the problem is what’s being cured by the alcohol. By the time we’re adults, we’ve all become alcoholics. That’s to say, we’ve all evolved ways of deadening certain feelings and thoughts. One of the reasons we admire or like art, if we do, is that it reopens us in some sense — as Kafka wrote in a letter, art breaks the sea that’s frozen inside us. It reminds us of sensitivities that we might have lost at some cost. Freud gets at this in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It’s as though one is struggling to be as inert as possible — and struggling against one’s inertia.

Santorini is always reconstituting itself amid the undermining that is its own violent, beauty-making dissolution, and this is the ideal the poet pursues for himself and for us. The poet “tighten[s] by a notch/The broad, star-studded belt Earth wears to feel/Hungers less mortal for a vanished whole.” This is Rose again: Stop hungering for a vanished whole; you and Santorini are nothing but gorgeous fragments, and that contingency is all you ever will be. Be like the poet and stud the earth with aesthetic jewels:

Our lives unreal
Except as jeweled self-windings

The poet’s words on windy Santorini are

bellowed to recycle
The bare, thyme-tousled world we’d stumbled on

We bejewel the bareness; we break what’s frozen, or quench the fires. Silent Santorini can only live in

imbecile 
Symbiosis with the molten genie

Our symbiosis is verbal. Ours are self-windings – they emerge from our human individual expressive battles between stasis and agon; and what our noblest battles produce will be the spoken truth of the broken beauty of being.

The first I found in a review of James Merrill’s poetry; the second is from Nabokov’s Pnin. They attracted me because I’m starting my traditional end of/beginning of the year Life Wisdom blog post, and the sentiment seemed a good place to start.

But for now, just having arrived in Boston for Christmas, I’m going to take a nap.

… appears, UD likes to post this great James Merrill poem:

ISLAND IN THE WORKS

From air seen fathom-deep
But rising to a head –
Abscess of the abyss
Any old night letting rip
Its fires, yearlong,
As roundabout waves hiss –

Jaded by untold blue
Subversions, watered-down
Moray and Spaniard…
Now to construe
In the original
Those at first arid, hard,

Soon rootfast, ramifying,
Always more fruitful
Dialogues with light.
Various dimwit under-
graduate types will wonder
At my calm height

Vapors by then surmounted
(Merely another phase?)
And how in time I trick
Out my new “shores” and “bays”
With small craft, shrimpers
Bars and rhetoric.

Darkly the Old Ones grumble
I’ll hate all that. Hate words,
Their schooling flame?
The spice grove chatted up
By small gray knowing birds?
Myself given a name?

Waves, as your besetting
Depth-wish recedes,
I’m surfacing, I’m home!
Open the atlas. Here:
This dot, securely netted
Under the starry dome.

(Unlike this page – no sooner
Brought to the pool than wafted
Out of reach, laid flat
Face-up on cool glares, ever
So lightly swayed, or swaying…
Now who did that?)

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

Analysis.

More analysis.

A witty, erudite writer in the mode of James Merrill, he was 92.

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

May 26 1969: The Grievance

No one dies. That is all we can say for certain.

Something dies us,

As it lived us. We are lived. And died.

A personal pronoun is superfluous here.

It is simple;

Our grammar of death must be revised.

And we are not reduced to tears, not reduced. The thing

Our tears are for

Extends us: we are widened to the term

Which lies beyond our tears. We are not reduced.

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

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

Fellow Philip Larkin fans might be reminded, on reading this poem, of these lines:

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,   
And age, and then the only end of age.

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

More tersely, fellow Adam Phillips fans might simply quote this remark:

When people say, “I’m the kind of person who,” my heart always sinks.

I wrote about her on this blog a few years ago. Here’s what I said.

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

I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s Blue Nights – her chronicle of her daughter’s death and her own aging – on this flight from Phoenix to Baltimore. It’s kept me occupied. We land in fifteen minutes.

I like Didion’s mournful chant, her brief, much-repeated litanies. She plays the “blue night” idea (we want to think of our lives as long summer nights that never darken) beautifully through the text. Her constant rounding back to painful motifs and memories cuts a deeper and deeper circle of implication, the prose grinding down until we’re surrounded by very dark canyon walls.

It’s poetic prose, stating and restating its symbols, making them a dirge. She’s troubled, in the text, by her technique of indirection, but she needn’t be. Solemn poetic dance is the best way to get at this stuff – in particular, the ridiculous tendency to believe in the permanence of life and health and happiness, “this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, and death.”

Returning, as I am now, from seven blissful days in Sedona, Arizona, I could almost assume this ridiculous tendency myself. The sweet spot: Didion’s eye travels over that long moment when her life achieved the sweet spot: Love, vocation, money, friends, glamor, fame, seaside Malibu in bloom… It’s rare for anyone that things turn out that well, and that they turn out that well for any length of time. Didion had this; and inevitably her book dwells on that delight, wonders if the recollection of the delight can sustain her.

She doesn’t think it can.

UD will cop to sharing with her a failure, so far, to confront certain certainties. She does, though, Didion-style, circle around them a lot.

The darkening to black of the blue night. It’s happening just outside UD‘s window right now. Maybe it’s not so much about not confronting it as not knowing how to play it (play it as it lays) – this bizarre concurrence of sweet and dark.

I know what I do. What I do is – like Didion – keep moving, keep feeling gratitude and love and excitement. The red rocks shine in the short blue night and I passionately respond.

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

The sun cannot change, writes James Merrill to his just-born nephew in Little Fanfare for Felix Magowan:

It’s earth, it’s time,
Whose child you now are, quietly
Blotting him out. In the blue stare you raise
To your mother and father already the miniature,
Merciful and lifelong eclipse,
Felix, has taken place;
The black pupil rimmed with rays
Contracted to its task –
That of revealing by obscuring
The sunlike friend behind it.
Unseen by you, may he shine back always
From what you see, from others.

UD‘s Christmas thoughts, as she wanders thro’ each charter’d Boston street thinking of the dead (who said – was it Saul Bellow? – that at a certain age every other thought should be of the dead?) — thinking, that is, of people whose efforts to understand themselves and the world are over… UD‘s thoughts are all about the pretty unliftable fog we move in forever. Love Lifted Me goes the great gospel song, and it’s pretty to think so.

Truly pretty are the great stories – our greatest stories – that settle us deeply into the fog, right in the thick heart of the cloud – and let us abide there: John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” whose drunken-boat drunk, Neddy Merrill, gets his name from Merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream. Kafka’s “The Judgement,” whose main character knows nothing of his appalling fate until seconds before he peremptorily carries it out. Kleist’s baffled Marquis of O, or the dreadful demented brothers in “Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music” – these are characters who struggle to exist at all inside the wall of Kleist’s endless discursive paragraphs. John Marcher’s mind-forg’d frigidity and fear finds itself similarly barely situated within the thick masterful paragraphs of Henry James.

O Lost.

All that’s best of dark and bright… This is Florida, where supremely brilliant days give way to the blackest of cosmic backdrops. The intensity of light and lightlessness draws poets, among them Charlie Smith.

Schubert in Florida

When you slunk across my dream

I was listening

to Schubert, I was standing in a stairwell

in a beach town, listening to Schubert’s darkest sonata

Poetry, so much of poetry, is dream. I’ve said this – and tried to demonstrate it – constantly on this blog. Poetry is the navigation of dream, if you like — poetry takes for granted our hard-won, fugitive awareness at any daylight moment; it tells us we are not really in command of ourselves. Rather we attempt, every blessed day, to marshal our consciousness-forces with enough plausibility to make it through social life, though a public world, all the time in peril of being pulled under into our private stream of consciousness.

So not really dark and light, but a tissue of them, a dance with them, a struggle — a musical counterpoint — between them, and this tends to be poetry’s territory, the exploration and expression of the mind oscillating between something like what Freud meant by ego and id. If Schubert’s darkest work waltzes forward with deep obscure personal sorrow, sunniest Florida strains hard in the other direction, all communal sweetness and light even as the cosmic blackdrop is always there. Smith will place his speaker in that tug of war as he tries to drag himself out of a darkly persistent passion for an ex-lover and enter the light of day.

thinking of children

coming on love for the first time, of their hands,

trembling as they reach across an obscure space

to touch the beloved who has become everything

important in life

Well I’ll be damned, writes Joan Baez in a song about her long-ago lover Bob Dylan, here comes your ghost again.  In this instance, the woman the speaker can’t get over has “slunk” into his dream, prompting, on his waking, thoughts of early, cryptic, all-encompassing passion… and, implicitly,  personal amazement at the lifelong intensity of his passion for the woman who haunts his dreams.

and thought how ridiculous

and destructive this is, this irrepressible need

for the loved one, the cascade through the self

of another’s presence – 

thinking of the music

picking my way through this like a man searching

tearfully for his most important possession, a man drifting

through one of the aging Florida beach towns

on an August day

Of course music, pure music, is pure dream; there’s a kind of structure, a kind of dream logic; and there’s an expressivity that is strong but inarticulable.  Dreams and music move along to some meaning, or at least both feel profoundly meaningful, and we pick our way through both because both often seem to contain not only the most important things but, in their self-contained power and beauty, some explanation, some justification, for the way we are.  

So… that “aging” town is our guy, having moved past passion to tearful acknowledgment of its weird loss/retention; and that Floridian August is the passion still somehow burning very bright – at least on the evidence of who goes slinking through one’s dreams.

who abruptly leaves the dolphin performance

and returns to his car

parked in the shade of a gumbo-limbo tree

and takes a nap

& dreams of his ex-wife crossing a sun-streaked lawn,

a fine woman who glances at him without desire

That “limbo” tree is a nice touch, since we’re arguing that all of us exist not in clarity of consciousness and then sleep, not in past and then present, but in a much more interesting state of limbo. And here the drifty confused impassioned old guy suddenly (not with forethought) leaves the bright dolphin display of the Florida beach and goes back to his Schubertian car (one assumes it’s his own radio he’s hearing when he stands in the stairwell) and takes the nap that generates the dream with which the poem begins: the lost lover never lost, always crossing the sun-streaked world of youth that his unconscious generates in the night.

as one would glance

indifferently at a stranger standing in an outdoor stairwell

in a beach town listening to Schubert playing on a car radio,

a stranger waiting almost patiently for a brief sadness

to quell and die down, so he might move on from there.

Moons can have moons and they are called moonmoons.

**********

Autumn Refrain

The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never – shall never hear. And yet beneath

The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never – shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

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

If you’d like more poetic thought on the moon, the full moon, and nothing but the moon, there’s also T S Eliot’s Rhapsody on a Windy Night (for full depressive effect, listen to Jeremy Irons or Tom O’Bedlam recite this poem), and Sylvia Plath’s The Moon and the Yew Tree (go here for UD‘s analysis of the Plath).

Theme of them all? Shall we sum it up?

Regarde James Merrill: AU FOND EACH SUMMIT IS A CUL-DE-SAC

When UD got to the word “amorality” in the famous anonymous op-ed, she was pleased. She loves the word amoral, its soft letters smoothly rolling out, and inside it love itself – amor, folded equally beautifully inside the famously beautiful word sycamore.

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

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality
Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored…

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

The long soft Os
You moored in your prose…

Although everyone knows
Amoral: poetry, moral: prose

When eye and ear encountered those
Something poetic interposed

(Moored, and the Moor himself arose
Root, The Name of the Rose)

Amid constitutional throes
Aesthetic repose

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

When something poetic interposes, we fly above morality. For his poem, “A Spring Song,” Donald Davie chooses as epigraph a phrase from Pope:

“stooped to truth and moralized his song”

Truth is what we’re moored in; art frees us. Here’s Davie’s poem.

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

Spring pricks a little. I get out the maps.
Time to demoralize my song, high time.
Vernal a little. Primavera. First
Green, first truth and last.
High time, high time.

High time and a long time yet, my love!
Get out that blessed map.
Ageing, you take your glasses off to read it.
Stooping to truth, we potter to Montoire.
High time, my love. High time and a long time yet.

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

Spring pricks because the dude is old and way unspringlike; the whole poem is an ironic Spring Song, a sour, self-mocking meditation on the increasing failure of the yearly regreening project, and the unavoidable oncomingness of his dissolution/silence (syntax collapses; diction kit begins to fall apart).

Meanwhile – ahem! – let’s de-moralize our song – that is, let’s use poetry for what it’s always been – a way to sidestep and postpone, beautifully, sinuously, the ugly obdurate boring truth of death. “First / Green, first truth and last.” Obvious truth: We’re born; we die.

So, shit. Have a high time while you can; haul out the maps and travel the Loire Valley.

But it was precisely his wife’s act there, last summer, of getting out a map – such a simple, ordinary gesture – that shatteringly disclosed for the poet the truth of their both being very old. “Ageing, you take your glasses off to read it.”

So, fuck. I just did it. I stooped to truth.

Okay, so sometimes one stoops. But one ought not stop. Let’s not stop at truth. Let’s keep traveling and keep singing the amoral song, the song that doesn’t say anything but truthlessly, ruthlessly, ecstatically, sings.

Merrily we roll along, so where do we go tomorrow? Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow fuck I did it again, let my truthy mind creep in a petty pace to the last syllable and dusty death. James Merrill made the same point, although in the last stanza of his poem, “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” it’s not singing but dancing:

Here, finally, music that would take Satie
Twenty-five hundred years to reinvent
Put naked immaturity through paces
Of a grave dance – as if catastrophe
Could long be lulled by slim waists and shy faces…

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As if!

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Shake it off! There. Back to the amoral song and dance. High time, my love. High time, and a long time yet.