Poetry for Students
National Advisory Board Susan Allison: Head Librarian, Lewiston High School, Lewiston, Maine. Standards Committee Chairperson for Maine School Library (MASL) Programs. Board member, Julia Adams Morse Memorial Library, Greene, Maine. Advisor to Lewiston Public Library Planning Process. Jennifer Hood: Young Adult/Reference Librarian, Cumberland Public Library, Cumberland, Rhode Island. Certified teacher, Rhode Island. Member of the New England Library Association, Rhode Island Library Association, and the Rhode Island Educational Media Association. Ann Kearney: Head Librarian and Media Specialist, Christopher Columbus High School, Miami, Florida, 1982–2002. Thirty-two years as Librarian in various educational institutions ranging from grade schools through graduate programs. Library positions at Miami-Dade Community College, the University of Miami’s Medical School Library, and Carrollton School in Coconut Grove, Florida. B.A. from Univer-
sity of Detroit, 1967 (magna cum laude); M.L.S., University of Missouri–Columbia, l974. Volunteer Project Leader for a school in rural Jamaica; volunteer with Adult Literacy programs. Laurie St. Laurent: Head of Adult and Children’s Services, East Lansing Public Library, East Lansing, Michigan, 1994–. M.L.S. from Western Michigan University. Chair of Michigan Library Association’s 1998 Michigan Summer Reading Program; Chair of the Children’s Services Division in 2000–2001; and VicePresident of the Association in 2002–2003. Board member of several regional early childhood literacy organizations and member of the Library of Michigan Youth Services Advisory Committee. Heidi Stohs: Instructor in Language Arts, grades 10–12, Solomon High School, Solomon, Kansas. Received B.S. from Kansas State University; M.A. from Fort Hays State University.
Table of Contents Guest Foreword “Just a Few Lines on a Page” by David J. Kelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Literary Chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix 60 (by Rabindranath Tagore) . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Author Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Poem Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Poem Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Historical Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Critical Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Address to the Angels (by Maxine Kumin) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Author Biography Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview Criticism . . . . . . . Further Reading . .
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18 19 22 23 23 24 25 37
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The Afterlife (by Billy Collins) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Author Biography Poem Text . . . . . Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview Criticism . . . . . . . Further Reading . .
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38 39 40 41 42 42 43 43 49
The Continuous Life (by Mark Strand) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Author Biography Poem Text . . . . . Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview Criticism . . . . . . . Further Reading . .
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51 51 52 53 54 54 55 55 61
The Country Without a Post Office (by Agha Shahid Ali) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Author Biography Poem Text . . . . . Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview Criticism . . . . . . . Further Reading . .
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63 64 65 66 67 68 68 69 72
The Darkling Thrush (by Thomas Hardy) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Author Biography Poem Text . . . . . Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview Criticism . . . . . . . Further Reading . .
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74 74 75 76 77 77 78 79 90
Duration (by Octavio Paz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Author Biography Poem Text . . . . . Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context
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93 93 94 95 96 97
Critical Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
The Garden Shukkei-en (by Carolyn Forché) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Author Biography Poem Text . . . . . . Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism . . . . . . . Further Reading . .
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107 107 108 109 110 111 112 112 117
The Greatest Grandeur (by Pattiann Rogers) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Author Biography Poem Text . . . . . . Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism . . . . . . . Further Reading . .
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119 119 120 122 123 123 124 125 129
The Last Question (by Dorothy Parker) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 Author Biography Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism . . . . . . . Further Reading . .
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130 131 133 134 135 137 137 146
Midnight Verses (by Anna Akhmatova) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Author Biography Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism . . . . . . . Further Reading . .
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148 148 150 151 152 153 154 162
New Rule (by Anne Carson) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Author Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Poem Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
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Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism . . . . . . . Further Reading . .
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166 167 168 169 170 177
Song of Reasons (by Robert Pinsky) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 Author Biography Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism . . . . . . . Further Reading . .
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179 179 181 182 182 184 184 195
Spring-Watching Pavilion (by Ho Xuan Huong) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Author Biography Poem Text . . . . . . Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context
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198 198 198 200 200 201
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Critical Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
Temple Bells Die Out (by Matsuo Basho¯) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Author Biography Poem Text . . . . . . Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism . . . . . . . Further Reading . .
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209 210 210 211 211 212 213 213 219
To an Unknown Poet (by Carolyn Kizer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Author Biography Poem Text . . . . . . Poem Summary . . Themes . . . . . . . . Style . . . . . . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism . . . . . . . Further Reading . .
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221 221 222 223 224 224 225 226 239
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Cumulative Author/Title Index . . . . . . . . . 261 Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Subject/Theme Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Cumulative Index of First Lines . . . . . . . . 279 Cumulative Index of Last Lines . . . . . . . . 285
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Just a Few Lines on a Page I have often thought that poets have the easiest job in the world. A poem, after all, is just a few lines on a page, usually not even extending margin to margin—how long would that take to write, about five minutes? Maybe ten at the most, if you wanted it to rhyme or have a repeating meter. Why, I could start in the morning and produce a book of poetry by dinnertime. But we all know that it isn’t that easy. Anyone can come up with enough words, but the poet’s job is about writing the right ones. The right words will change lives, making people see the world somewhat differently than they saw it just a few minutes earlier. The right words can make a reader who relies on the dictionary for meanings take a greater responsibility for his or her own personal understanding. A poem that is put on the page correctly can bear any amount of analysis, probing, defining, explaining, and interrogating, and something about it will still feel new the next time you read it. It would be fine with me if I could talk about poetry without using the word “magical,” because that word is overused these days to imply “a really good time,” often with a certain sweetness about it, and a lot of poetry is neither of these. But if you stop and think about magic—whether it brings to mind sorcery, witchcraft, or bunnies pulled from top hats—it always seems to involve stretching reality to produce a result greater than the sum of its parts and pulling unexpected results out of thin air. This book provides ample cases where a few simple words conjure up whole worlds. We do not ac-
tually travel to different times and different cultures, but the poems get into our minds, they find what little we know about the places they are talking about, and then they make that little bit blossom into a bouquet of someone else’s life. Poets make us think we are following simple, specific events, but then they leave ideas in our heads that cannot be found on the printed page. Abracadabra. Sometimes when you finish a poem it doesn’t feel as if it has left any supernatural effect on you, like it did not have any more to say beyond the actual words that it used. This happens to everybody, but most often to inexperienced readers: regardless of what is often said about young people’s infinite capacity to be amazed, you have to understand what usually does happen, and what could have happened instead, if you are going to be moved by what someone has accomplished. In those cases in which you finish a poem with a “So what?” attitude, the information provided in Poetry for Students comes in handy. Readers can feel assured that the poems included here actually are potent magic, not just because a few (or a hundred or ten thousand) professors of literature say they are: they’re significant because they can withstand close inspection and still amaze the very same people who have just finished taking them apart and seeing how they work. Turn them inside out, and they will still be able to come alive, again and again. Poetry for Students gives readers of any age good practice in feeling the ways poems relate to both the reality of the time and place the poet lived in and the reality
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of our emotions. Practice is just another word for being a student. The information given here helps you understand the way to read poetry; what to look for, what to expect. With all of this in mind, I really don’t think I would actually like to have a poet’s job at all. There are too many skills involved, including precision, honesty, taste, courage, linguistics, passion, compassion, and the ability to keep all sorts of people entertained at once. And that is just what they do
with one hand, while the other hand pulls some sort of trick that most of us will never fully understand. I can’t even pack all that I need for a weekend into one suitcase, so what would be my chances of stuffing so much life into a few lines? With all that Poetry for Students tells us about each poem, I am impressed that any poet can finish three or four poems a year. Read the inside stories of these poems, and you won’t be able to approach any poem in the same way you did before.
David J. Kelly College of Lake County
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Introduction Purpose of the Book The purpose of Poetry for Students (PfS) is to provide readers with a guide to understanding, enjoying, and studying poems by giving them easy access to information about the work. Part of Gale’s “For Students” Literature line, PfS is specifically designed to meet the curricular needs of high school and undergraduate college students and their teachers, as well as the interests of general readers and researchers considering specific poems. While each volume contains entries on “classic” poems frequently studied in classrooms, there are also entries containing hard-to-find information on contemporary poems, including works by multicultural, international, and women poets.
poem. A unique feature of PfS is a specially commissioned critical essay on each poem, targeted toward the student reader. To further aid the student in studying and enjoying each poem, information on media adaptations is provided (if available), as well as reading suggestions for works of fiction and nonfiction on similar themes and topics. Classroom aids include ideas for research papers and lists of critical sources that provide additional material on the poem.
Selection Criteria
The information covered in each entry includes an introduction to the poem and the poem’s author; the actual poem text (if possible); a poem summary, to help readers unravel and understand the meaning of the poem; analysis of important themes in the poem; and an explanation of important literary techniques and movements as they are demonstrated in the poem.
The titles for each volume of PfS were selected by surveying numerous sources on teaching literature and analyzing course curricula for various school districts. Some of the sources surveyed included: literature anthologies; Reading Lists for College-Bound Students: The Books Most Recommended by America’s Top Colleges; textbooks on teaching the poem; a College Board survey of poems commonly studied in high schools; and a National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) survey of poems commonly studied in high schools.
In addition to this material, which helps the readers analyze the poem itself, students are also provided with important information on the literary and historical background informing each work. This includes a historical context essay, a box comparing the time or place the poem was written to modern Western culture, a critical overview essay, and excerpts from critical essays on the
Input was also solicited from our advisory board, as well as educators from various areas. From these discussions, it was determined that each volume should have a mix of “classic” poems (those works commonly taught in literature classes) and contemporary poems for which information is often hard to find. Because of the interest in expanding the canon of literature, an emphasis was
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also placed on including works by international, multicultural, and women poets. Our advisory board members—educational professionals— helped pare down the list for each volume. If a work was not selected for the present volume, it was often noted as a possibility for a future volume. As always, the editor welcomes suggestions for titles to be included in future volumes.
How Each Entry Is Organized Each entry, or chapter, in PfS focuses on one poem. Each entry heading lists the full name of the poem, the author’s name, and the date of the poem’s publication. The following elements are contained in each entry: • Introduction: a brief overview of the poem which provides information about its first appearance, its literary standing, any controversies surrounding the work, and major conflicts or themes within the work. • Author Biography: this section includes basic facts about the poet’s life, and focuses on events and times in the author’s life that inspired the poem in question. • Poem Text: when permission has been granted, the poem is reprinted, allowing for quick reference when reading the explication of the following section. • Poem Summary: a description of the major events in the poem. Summaries are broken down with subheads that indicate the lines being discussed. • Themes: a thorough overview of how the major topics, themes, and issues are addressed within the poem. Each theme discussed appears in a separate subhead and is easily accessed through the boldface entries in the Subject/ Theme Index. • Style: this section addresses important style elements of the poem, such as form, meter, and rhyme scheme; important literary devices used, such as imagery, foreshadowing, and symbolism; and, if applicable, genres to which the work might have belonged, such as Gothicism or Romanticism. Literary terms are explained within the entry, but can also be found in the Glossary. • Historical Context: this section outlines the social, political, and cultural climate in which the author lived and the poem was created. This section may include descriptions of related historical events, pertinent aspects of daily life in the culture, and the artistic and literary sensibilities
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of the time in which the work was written. If the poem is a historical work, information regarding the time in which the poem is set is also included. Each section is broken down with helpful subheads. • Critical Overview: this section provides background on the critical reputation of the poem, including bannings or any other public controversies surrounding the work. For older works, this section includes a history of how the poem was first received and how perceptions of it may have changed over the years; for more recent poems, direct quotes from early reviews may also be included. • Criticism: an essay commissioned by PfS which specifically deals with the poem and is written specifically for the student audience, as well as excerpts from previously published criticism on the work (if available). • Sources: an alphabetical list of critical material used in compiling the entry, with full bibliographical information. • Further Reading: an alphabetical list of other critical sources which may prove useful for the student. It includes full bibliographical information and a brief annotation. In addition, each entry contains the following highlighted sections, set apart from the main text as sidebars: • Media Adaptations: if available, a list of audio recordings as well as any film or television adaptations of the poem, including source information. • Topics for Further Study: a list of potential study questions or research topics dealing with the poem. This section includes questions related to other disciplines the student may be studying, such as American history, world history, science, math, government, business, geography, economics, psychology, etc. • Compare and Contrast: an “at-a-glance” comparison of the cultural and historical differences between the author’s time and culture and late twentieth century or early twenty-first century Western culture. This box includes pertinent parallels between the major scientific, political, and cultural movements of the time or place the poem was written, the time or place the poem was set (if a historical work), and modern Western culture. Works written after 1990 may not have this box.
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• What Do I Read Next?: a list of works that might complement the featured poem or serve as a contrast to it. This includes works by the same author and others, works of fiction and nonfiction, and works from various genres, cultures, and eras.
When citing text from PfS that is not attributed to a particular author (i.e., the Themes, Style, Historical Context sections, etc.), the following format should be used in the bibliography section:
Other Features
When quoting the specially commissioned essay from PfS (usually the first piece under the “Criticism” subhead), the following format should be used:
PfS includes “Just a Few Lines on a Page,” a foreword by David J. Kelly, an adjunct professor of English, College of Lake County, Illinois. This essay provides a straightforward, unpretentious explanation of why poetry should be marveled at and how Poetry for Students can help teachers show students how to enrich their own reading experiences. A Cumulative Author/Title Index lists the authors and titles covered in each volume of the PfS series. A Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index breaks down the authors and titles covered in each volume of the PfS series by nationality and ethnicity. A Subject/Theme Index, specific to each volume, provides easy reference for users who may be studying a particular subject or theme rather than a single work. Significant subjects from events to broad themes are included, and the entries pointing to the specific theme discussions in each entry are indicated in boldface. A Cumulative Index of First Lines (beginning in Vol. 10) provides easy reference for users who may be familiar with the first line of a poem but may not remember the actual title. A Cumulative Index of Last Lines (beginning in Vol. 10) provides easy reference for users who may be familiar with the last line of a poem but may not remember the actual title. Each entry may include illustrations, including a photo of the author and other graphics related to the poem.
Citing Poetry for Students When writing papers, students who quote directly from any volume of Poetry for Students may use the following general forms. These examples are based on MLA style; teachers may request that students adhere to a different style, so the following examples may be adapted as needed.
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“Angle of Geese.” Poetry for Students. Eds. Marie Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 5–7.
Velie, Alan. Critical Essay on “Angle of Geese.” Poetry for Students. Eds. Marie Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 7–10.
When quoting a journal or newspaper essay that is reprinted in a volume of PfS, the following form may be used: Luscher, Robert M. “An Emersonian Context of Dickinson’s ‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society.’” ESQ: A Journal of American Renaissance Vol. 30, No. 2 (Second Quarter, 1984), 111–16; excerpted and reprinted in Poetry for Students, Vol. 1, eds. Marie Napierkowski and Mary Ruby (Detroit: Gale, 1998), pp. 266–69.
When quoting material reprinted from a book that appears in a volume of PfS, the following form may be used: Mootry, Maria K. “‘Tell It Slant’: Disguise and Discovery as Revisionist Poetic Discourse in ‘The Bean Eaters,’” in A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Edited by Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith. University of Illinois Press, 1987. 177–80, 191; excerpted and reprinted in Poetry for Students, Vol. 2, eds. Marie Napierkowski and Mary Ruby (Detroit: Gale, 1998), pp. 22–24.
We Welcome Your Suggestions The editor of Poetry for Students welcomes your comments and ideas. Readers who wish to suggest poems to appear in future volumes, or who have other suggestions, are cordially invited to contact the editor. You may contact the editor via Email at:
[email protected]. Or write to the editor at: Editor, Poetry for Students The Gale Group 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331–3535
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Literary Chronology 1644: Matsuo Basho¯ is born. 1686: Matsuo Basho¯’s “Temple Bells Die Out” is published. 1694: Matsuo Basho¯ dies of a stomach ailment in the summer. c. 1775: Ho Xuan Huong is believed to have been born sometime between 1775 and 1780, in a village near present-day Hanoi, North Vietnam. c. 1820: Ho Xuan Huong dies sometime around 1820. 1840: Thomas Hardy is born on June 2 in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England. 1861: Rabindranath Tagore is born on May 7 in Calcutta, India. 1888: Anna Akhmatova is born on June 23 in the Russian town of Bolshoy Fontan, near the resort town Odessa. 1893: Dorothy Rothschild Parker is born August 22 in West End, New Jersey. 1900: Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” is published. 1909: Ho Xuan Huong’s “Spring-Watching Pavilion” is published. 1912: Rabindranath Tagore’s “60” is published. 1913: Rabindranath Tagore is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 1914: Octavio Paz is born March 31 in Mexico City.
1925: Maxine Kumin is born on June 6 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1925: Carolyn Kizer is born December 10 in Spokane, Washington. 1928: Thomas Hardy dies January 11 in Dorchester, Dorset, England 1928: Dorothy Parker’s “The Last Question” is published. 1934: Mark Strand is born April 11 in Summerside on Prince Edward Island, Canada. 1940: Pattiann Rogers is born on March 23 in Joplin, Missouri. 1940: Robert Pinsky is born on October 20 in Long Branch, New Jersey. 1941: Billy Collins is born on March 22 in New York City. 1941: Rabindranath Tagore dies August 7 in Calcutta, West Bengal, India. 1949: Agha Shahid Ali is born on February 4 in New Delhi, India. 1950: Carolyn Forché is born on April 28 in Detroit, Michigan. 1950: Anne Carson is born on June 21 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. 1962: Octavio Paz’s “Duration” is published. 1965: Anna Akhmatova’s “Midnight Verses” is published. 1966: Anna Akhmatova dies on March 5 in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Russia.
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1967: Dorothy Parker dies on June 7. 1978: Maxine Kumin’s “Address to the Angels” is published. 1984: Robert Pinsky’s “Song of Reasons” is published. 1986: Carolyn Kizer’s “To an Unknown Poet” is published. 1988: Carolyn Forché’s “The Garden Shukkei-en” is published. 1990: Mark Strand’s “The Continuous Life” is published. 1991: Billy Collins’s “The Afterlife” is published.
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1991: Octavio Paz is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 1993: Pattiann Rogers’s “The Greatest Grandeur” is published. 1997: Agha Shahid Ali’s “The Country Without a Post Office” is published. 1998: Octavio Paz dies of cancer on April 19 in Mexico City. 2000: Anne Carson’s “New Rule” is published. 2001: Agha Shahid Ali dies of brain cancer on December 8.
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Acknowledgments The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book and magazine publishing companies for assisting us in securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/ Kresge Library Complex, and the University of Michigan Libraries for making their resources available to us. Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this volume of Poetry for Students (PfS). Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know. COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN PfS, VOLUME 18, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING PERIODICALS: Gettysburg Review, v. 4, Spring, 1991 for “Mark Strand,” by Harold Bloom. Reproduced by permission of the author.—The Hollins Critic, v. xxi, December, 1984. Copyright 1984 by Hollins College. Reproduced by permission.—The Iowa Review, v. 10, Fall, 1979 for “Past Halfway: ‘The Retrieval System’, by Maxine Kumin” by Sybil P. Estess. Copyright © 1979 by The University of Iowa. Reprinted by permission of the author.—Sulfur, v. xi, Fall, 1990. Reproduced by permission.— Victorian Poetry, v. 11, Season, 1973 for “Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’: The ‘Nightingale’ Grown Old,”
by Charles E. May. © West Virginia University, 1973. Reproduced by permission of the author. COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN PfS, VOLUME 18, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING BOOKS: Ali, Agha Shahid. From The Country Without a Post Office. W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Agha Shahid Ali. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Collins, Billy. From Questions About Angels: Poems. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. Reproduced by permission.—Corn, Alfred. From Carolyn Kizer: Perspectives on Her Life and Work. Edited by Annie Finch, Johanna Keller and Candace McClelland. CavanKerry Press Ltd., 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Annie Finch, Johanna Keller and Candace McClelland. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Forché, Carolyn. From The Angel of History. HarperCollins, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Carolyn Forché. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.—Huong, Ho Xuan. From Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong. Edited and translated by John Balaban. Cooper Canyon Press, 2000. Copyright 2000 by John Balaban. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Kizer, Carolyn. From The Nearness of You. Copper Canyon Press, 1986. Copyright © 1986 by Carolyn Kizer. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.— Maynard, Katherine Kearney. From Thomas Hardy’s Tragic Poetry: The Lyrics and the Dy-
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nasts. University of Iowa Press, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by the University of Iowa. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Ownbey, E. S. From Essays in Honor of Richebourg Gaillard McWilliams. Edited by Howard Creed. Birmingham-Southern College, 1971. Reproduced by permission.—Paz, Octavio. From The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987. Edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger. New Directions Publishing, 1991. Copyright © 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990 by Eliot Weinberger. All rights reserved.—Pinsky, Robert. From History of My Heart. The Ecco Press, 1984. Copyright © 1984 by Robert Pinsky. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.— Rogers, Pattiann. From Geocentric. Gibbs Smith. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Strand, Mark. From The Continuous Life: Poems. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1990 by Mark Strand. Reproduced by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.—Tagore, Rabindranath. From Gitanjali: A Collection of Prose Translations Made by the Author from the Original Bengali. Scribner Poetry, 1997. Copyright 1913 by Macmillan Publishing Company. Copyright renewed 1941 by Rabindranath Tagore. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Scribner Poetry, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Macmillan. PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS APPEARING IN PfS, VOLUME 18, WERE RECEIVED FROM THE FOLLOWING SOURCES: Agha, Shahid Ali, photograph by Stan Sherer. Reproduced by permission.—Akhmatova, Anna
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(seated), photograph. Archive Photos, Inc./Express Newspaper. Reproduced by permission.—Carson, Anne, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Collins, Billy, during a press conference in New York, photograph by Beth A. Keiser. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Forché, Carolyn, portrait photo, photograph. © Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Hardy, Thomas, photograph. Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission.— Hardy, Thomas, photograph. Archive Photos, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Japanese haiku poet Basho¯, woodblock print. Corbis Corporation. Reproduced by permission.—Kizer, Carolyn, photograph by Thomas Victor. Reproduced by permission of the Harriet M. Spurlin on behalf of the Estate of Thomas Victor.—Kumin, Maxine, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Matsuo Basho¯, drawing by Koko.—Parker, Dorothy, 1933, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Paz, Octavio, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Pinsky, Robert, photograph by El Bailey. Reproduced by permission.—St. James Cathedral in Montreal, Canada, in the snow, photograph. Hulton/Archive. Reproduced by permission.—Strand, Mark, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Tagore, Rabindranath, photograph. © Bettmann/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.—Vietnamese villager returning home at sunset, after peddling goods in the city of Hanoi, photograph. © Reuters NewMedia Inc./Corbis. Reproduced by permission. Reproduced by permission.
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Contributors Greg Barnhisel: Barnhisel directs the Writing Center at the University of Southern California. Original essay on The Garden Shukkei-en. Kate Covintree: Covintree holds a bachelor’s degree in English and is currently pursuing a master of fine arts in writing at Emerson College. Original essays on Duration and SpringWatching Pavilion. Diane Andrews Henningfeld: Henningfeld is a professor of English at Adrian College where she teaches poetry, literature, and critical theory and writes widely for a variety of educational publications. Original essay on Midnight Verses. Pamela Steed Hill: Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. Entries on Address to the Angels and Song of Reasons. Original essays on Address to the Angels, The Greatest Grandeur, andSong of Reasons. David Kelly: Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature. Entries on Duration, The Greatest Grandeur, and Midnight Verses. Original essays on Duration, The Greatest Grandeur, and Midnight Verses. Sheri E. Metzger: Metzger teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico and is an adjunct professor in the university honors
program. Metzger is also a professional writer and the author of several reference texts on literature. Original essay on New Rule. Frank Pool: Pool is a published poet and teacher of advanced placement and international baccalaureate senior English. Entry on The Last Question. Original essays on The Afterlife, The Last Question, and Temple Bells Die Out. Ryan D. Poquette: Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. Entries on 60, New Rule, and SpringWatching Pavilion. Original essays on 60, New Rule, and Spring-Watching Pavilion. Mary Potter: Potter, a writer of fiction and screenplays, teaches writing at the University of San Francisco. Original essays on The Country Without a Post Office and The Last Question. Chris Semansky: Semansky is an instructor of literature whose writing appears regularly in literary journals. Entries on The Afterlife, The Continuous Life, The Country Without a Post Office, The Darkling Thrush, The Garden Shukkei-en, Temple Bells Die Out, and To an Unknown Poet. Original essays on The Afterlife, The Continuous Life, The Country Without a Post Office, The Darkling Thrush, The Garden Shukkei-en, Temple Bells Die Out, and To an Unknown Poet.
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60 It is not known to any certain degree when and where Rabindranath Tagore published the Bengali version of the poem known as “60.” This title is derived from the poem’s numerical placement in his English translation of Gitanjali, which was first published in England in 1912. This English volume, although it shares the name of one of Tagore’s earlier volumes of Bengali verse, is actually comprised of poems from several of Tagore’s previous volumes of Bengali poetry. As a result, scholars have been unable to trace the origins of most of the poems in the English Gitanjali. In addition, Tagore heavily altered the structure and, in some cases, the content of the poems when he translated them into English. Because of this, it is appropriate to use the year 1912 for the purpose of dating the poem’s creation.
Rabindranath Tagore 1912
The English Gitanjali was a landmark event that happened almost by accident. Tagore translated a group of his poems into English to pass the time while he was sick, then showed his translations to some influential English writers and editors, including William Rothenstein and William Butler Yeats—both of whom helped to publish and promote the English Gitanjali. A year later, Tagore made history by becoming the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Westerners were initially enamored of Tagore’s poems for their peaceful, mystical qualities, which contrasted sharply with a world on the verge of a harsh, global war. “60,” which features children playing on a universal seashore, contrasts metaphysical and religious ideas with the human world to demonstrate the
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Debendranath educated the author himself, reading works from several languages, including English. Modern European writers, particularly the romantics, became one of Tagore’s main influences. Other influences included the Vaishnava poets of medieval Bengal and his classical Indian heritage. Tagore wrote poetry from an early age and published his first poetry collection, Kavi-Kahini, in 1878. Over the next three decades, he published more than sixty additional volumes, including poetry, plays, songs, short stories, sermons, essays, and novels. He also founded an experimental school at Santiniketan in West Bengal, where he hoped to blend Eastern and Western traditions, and wrote in support of India’s independence and the abolishment of the Indian caste—or social hierarchy—system. However, when he spoke out against the violence of militant Hindus fighting for India’s independence, his popularity waned, and he retreated into his personal writing.
Rabindranath Tagore
blissful ignorance of children, who do not know about the adult world. The poem also emphasizes the idea of unity, underscoring Tagore’s lifelong goal to unite Eastern and Western traditions—a challenge at the time in British-controlled India. Generally speaking, Bengali readers know Tagore for his body of work, while many Westerners still associate Tagore only with Gitanjali. A current copy of Tagore’s “60” can be found in the latest paperback English edition of Gitanjali, which was published by Scribner Poetry in 1997.
Author Biography Tagore was born on May 7, 1861, in Calcutta, India. He was the youngest of fourteen children. His father, Debendranath Tagore, was a writer, scholar, and religious reformer, and Tagore rarely saw him, although he felt his influence. Tagore’s education initially consisted of private tutors, although he eventually attended several different schools in Calcutta. However, he skipped class often, preferring to commune with nature rather than sit in a classroom. When Tagore was twelve, his father took him on a mountain retreat to the Punjab and the Himalayas. During this four-month journey,
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Ironically, it was at this point that Tagore came to the attention of the rest of the world. Although Bengali readers knew Tagore for his variety of achievements, most non-Bengali readers were introduced to Tagore with his English translation of Gitanjali (1912), which included the poem, “60.” With the help of some influential English writers and editors such as William Butler Yeats and William Rothenstein, this collection made Tagore an instant success. Following the immense popularity of the volume, which was reprinted in 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he was invited to speak around the world. Unfortunately, many English-speaking readers are still unaware that Tagore’s other works often receive higher praise from Bengali readers. Initially, after the English publication of Gitanjali, many readers and critics thought of Tagore as a mystic, given the content of the poems in the English Gitanjali, and given Tagore’s saintly appearance. Perhaps because of this, Tagore’s later poetry volumes that were translated into English were not received as well as Gitanjali. During his lifetime, these English volumes included The Gardener (1913); The Crescent Moon (1913); Balaka (1916); The Fugitive and Other Poems (1919); Fireflies (1928); and Syamali (1936). Tagore continued to write up until just before his death on August 7, 1941, in Calcutta. Since his death, many volumes of Tagore’s fiction and nonfiction have been published. Some of the most recent include I Won’t Let You Go: Selected Poems (1992); The Collected Poems and Plays (1993); The
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English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore (1994); and The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates Between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915–1941 (1997).
The idea of endless worlds suggests a universal or infinite quality of some sort. In addition, Tagore introduces the image of a seashore in this sentence. He could be talking about an actual seashore, but the metaphysical context suggests that Tagore is talking about a symbolic one. A symbol is a physical object, action, or gesture that also represents an abstract concept, without losing its original identity. Symbols appear in literature in one of two ways. They can be local symbols, meaning that their symbolism is only relevant within the context of a specific literary work. They can also be universal symbols, meaning that their significance is based on traditional associations that are widely recognized, regardless of context. In “60,” the symbols are universal. Tagore is talking about a seashore, which is the opposite of the sea. The sea traditionally represents infinity—an idea that Tagore has already suggested with “endless worlds.” Following this line of thinking, the opposite of infinity, or heaven, is the mortal, human world. So, the seashore could represent this human world.
Poem Summary
The next line addresses the idea of infinity directly: “The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous.” Once again, Tagore could be simply describing a day at the beach, where children meet on the beach, the sky is calm, and the sea is choppy. The next line—“On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.”—certainly supports this idea of children playing by the sea. This line also repeats part of the first line, so that the paragraph is bookended by the same image—a technique that Tagore uses throughout the poem. However, looking at the poem symbolically, one can find significance in many of the images. First of all, besides the idea that the sea represents infinity, water in general is a symbol for life or creation, in a feminine sense. Likewise, the “infinite sky” traditionally symbolizes heaven, and is often associated more generally with the male forces of creation. So, taken together, the sky and sea represent male and female creation forces. Next to these two cosmic forces, the seashore, representing the human world, seems almost insignificant, except for the presence of the children.
Paragraph 1
Paragraph 2
Tagore’s “60” is a prose poem, so it uses paragraphs in place of poetic stanzas. The first paragraph begins with the line: “On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.” Based on the phrase “endless worlds,” one can see that this poem may have some metaphysical, or supernatural, qualities.
The second paragraph describes the children in more detail. The first line notes that they “build their houses with sand and they play with empty shells.” When sand is used to build a house, it suggests impermanence, since the “vast” ocean will just wash away these sand houses with the tide.
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Media Adaptations • Tagore’s The Crescent Moon: Prose Poems was produced as an audiobook in 1996 by AmberAllen Publishing. The book is read by Deepak Chopra. • Tagore’s Gitanjali was produced as an audiobook in 1994 by Sound Horizons Audio-Video. The audio book, entitled Gitanjali: Offerings from the Heart, is read by Deepak Chopra. • Three of Tagore’s short stories, “Sampati,” “Monihara,” and “The Postmaster,” were adapted for film in India by Satyajit Ray and released in 1961 under the title Teen Kanya (the title means Three Daughters). A subtitled version containing only “The Postmaster” and “Sampati” was released in the United States in 1963 by Columbia Tristar Studios. The film, titled Two Daughters, is available from Columbia/ Tristar Home Video.
This idea of impermanence is reinforced by the idea of empty shells, since the animals that inhabited the shells have died and left only their shells behind. In general, however, shells are linked to the water from which they come, so they share water’s creation meaning, especially in the feminine sense. The second sentence notes: “With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep.” The withered leaves suggest death, as do the boats, since journeys across water have traditionally been associated with death. So far, Tagore’s symbolism seems to be pointing to a cycle of birth and death, although it is still too early in the poem to understand why this might be. The last sentence states: “Children have their play on the seashore of worlds.” In the first stanza, the children were meeting “with shouts and dances;” now, they are playing.
ignorant about the ways of the world, unlike the “Pearl fishers” and “merchants” who are forced to make a living. Instead, the children engage in idle activities that have no economic purpose: “children gather pebbles and scatter them again.” The last sentence in the paragraph reaffirms the fact that the children are not concerned about money. They do not seek “hidden treasures,” and they do not know “how to cast nets.” This is a surface reading of the middle paragraph. However, once again, when one looks at the symbolism of the paragraph, it takes on a deeper meaning. Traditionally, a “net” symbolizes the power of the gods to trap humans and hold them in the mesh of life. Since the children know nothing of nets, Tagore could be saying that they are not yet bound to life, as adults are bound. The pearls that the pearl fishers search for are also significant. Pearls have many symbolic meanings. If Tagore is indeed using pearls in a symbolic way, he is most likely including them as a sign of the permanence that is lacking elsewhere. Mortals like the pearl fishers seek out these symbols of permanence because most other aspects of their lives are not permanent. Also, at one point, pearls were thought to be the tears of the gods. Both of these interpretations fit in with the religious tone of the poem.
Paragraph 4 In the fourth paragraph, the focus shifts from the children to the sea, which is suddenly very active: “The sea surges up with laughter and pale gleams the smile of the sea beach.” Although Tagore uses terms like “laughter” and “smile,” one should not be fooled. The sea is dangerous, as the next line notes: “Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby’s cradle.” Once again, Tagore is giving the sea an image of feminine creation, or motherhood. However, this image has an ominous undertone because the unsuspecting children are at risk, even though they do not understand the danger of the “death-dealing waves.” As if to reinforce the juxtaposition of innocence and death, the last sentence notes: “The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea beach.” One can imagine the children playing in the waves of the sea, unaware that this may be dangerous and perhaps fatal.
Paragraph 5 Paragraph 3 The middle paragraph gives more information about these children. “They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets.” The children are
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The final paragraph repeats the first line of the poem: “On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.” Since the first line, the situation in the poem has changed drastically. The “restless water” has
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churned up into “death-dealing waves.” In the second sentence of this paragraph, Tagore notes: “Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships get wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play.” In the sky, which was “motionless” in the beginning, a “tempest” now rages. It is interesting to note that the sky is “pathless.” Not even a tempest can disturb the permanent quality of the sky. Likewise, not even “wrecked ships” can leave a mark in the water, which is “trackless.” The poem does not indicate whether or not Tagore is referring to the children’s toy boats that have been wrecked or the ships of the merchants and pearl fishers. One suspects the latter, since this image is more tragic, and is consistent with the rest of the sentence, which states that “death is abroad.” Yet, the “children play.” No matter what natural catastrophes have taken place over the course of the poem, Tagore ends with the certainty that “On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.” Given the heavy symbolism of creation, life, and death evident in the poem, Tagore seems to be underscoring the blissful ignorance of childhood, which makes children more susceptible to death, but which is more peaceful than the stressful adult world.
Themes Mortality Throughout the poem, Tagore includes images and symbols that suggest the idea of human frailty. In the beginning of the poem, the children meet on the seashore, but “the restless water is boisterous,” an ominous sign that something bad could happen. The children use “withered leaves,” which represent the dead parts of a tree, since leaves die after they fall from a tree. They use these leaves to “weave their boats,” which they set adrift “on the vast deep.” The deepness of the ocean also suggests mortality, since the ocean’s vastness is permanent and can easily capsize the boats or drown the children, especially since “They know not how to swim.” While the children play, the adults in the poem, represented by the “Pearl fishers” and “merchants,” are intimately aware of their need to survive. Even if the “restless water” does not kill them, they could starve if they do not find enough pearls or sell enough goods to feed themselves. The death imagery in the poem becomes even more prominent near the end of the poem, when Tagore envisions the sea beach gleaming a “pale” smile. Paleness is often associated with sickness and
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Topics for Further Study • Research the relationship between Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi, and compare the religious, philosophical, and political beliefs of these two Indian leaders. Also, write a short biography of Gandhi. • When Tagore received the Nobel Prize in 1913, he made an infamous speech to his countrymen in India. Research this speech and write a short report giving some reasons why he might have said what he did. Find a complete copy of this speech and deliver it to your classmates. • Poets since ancient times have incorporated images of the sea in their poetry. Find one other poet, from any point in history, who uses vivid imagery of the sea in his or her poetry. Read a poem by this poet, and compare the sea imagery in this poem to Tagore’s “60.” • Research how the various levels of Indian society treated their children around 1912. Imagine that you are a child in this time period and write a journal entry describing what your typical day is like. Use your research to support your ideas. • Compare infant mortality rates in India in 1912 to infant mortality rates in India today, and discuss the likely reasons behind any similarities or differences.
death, so if the beach is gleaming, it could be a bad portent. In fact, as the next line notes, the sea contains “Death-dealing waves.” By the end of the poem, a tempest is raging, “ships get wrecked,” and “death is abroad.”
Innocence While adults like the pearl fishers and merchants are aware of this imminent death, the children in the poem are blissfully innocent. They meet “with shouts and dances” while the water is getting churned up around them in the beginning. The children’s world, like the restless water, is chaotic. “They build their houses with sand,” unconcerned
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that the tide may wash them away. They “smilingly” send their toy boats out on the ocean, unaware that the boats will probably “get wrecked in the trackless water.” They are unconcerned with the “Deathdealing waves,” which “sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby’s cradle.” The adults in the poem cannot afford to be this innocent or ignorant. Their lives are organized, rigorous, and full of survival tasks and skills like swimming and casting nets. The children’s innocence shields them from understanding the sea’s warning sounds. However, this ignorance also makes the children more susceptible to death, which is “abroad” even while the “children play.” So, while the children enjoy a more peaceful existence, the trade off is that they lack the natural, self-preserving fear of death that comes with the knowledge of adulthood. As a result, they literally frolic with the waves, which could kill them at any moment.
Unity Tagore repeats the first sentence or a variation of it four times in the poem: “On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.” No other line or phrase is repeated this many times in the poem. When a poet singles out a sentence like this and repeats it several times, it generally means that he or she is trying to reinforce an idea. In this case, Tagore is underscoring the idea of a meeting. This meeting is among children, who have traveled from “endless worlds.” This idea suggests a meeting of such importance that it transcends physical or other boundaries. Since Tagore’s lifelong quest was to reconcile Eastern and Western traditions, a desire that he wrote and spoke about at length, it makes sense that he would have children from all lands do this in his poem. After all, if children, who are the future of any society, are risking death and destruction to travel to a meeting, then perhaps someday they can meet as adults, too. Looked at in this way, Tagore could be using the word “worlds” to mean nations. It is a common practice in English for somebody to refer to a distant nation or land as a different world, especially if its customs are radically different from one’s own.
Style Prose Poem Tagore translated his Bengali poems from verse poetry into prose poetry, a controversial decision that drastically changed the style and con-
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tent of each poem. A prose poem is a form of poetry that is a hybrid between prose and poetry. Prose is characterized by the use of full sentences and paragraphs that tend to proceed uninterrupted in a linear fashion until they are complete. Authors use blocks of prose description to develop concrete, complete ideas. Poetry, on the other hand, often proceeds in a nonlinear fashion, using fragments of thoughts, feelings, and images to convey a certain message to the reader. When the two forms are combined into a prose poem, as they are in “60,” the effect is unique. The poet is able to develop complete ideas using uninterrupted sentences, but these sentences are full of flamboyant, literary techniques common to poetry. For example, the middle sentence of the fifth paragraph says: “Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships get wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play.” Grammatically speaking, this is a complete prose sentence, composed of a series of four separate statements. In a prose piece, Tagore could use this same structure to describe virtually anything, even something as mundane as how he spent his day: “I went to the post office, bought stamps, saw a friend, and ate lunch.” The difference between these two sentences is immediately apparent. The latter sentence contains four separate actions in a series, but it is flat and boring, and lacks the kind of vivid imagery, symbolism, and shocking juxtaposition of raging tempests, destroyed ships, impending death, and children playing. To put it another way, prose poetry like that used by Tagore in the English Gitanjali poems seeks to elevate the conventions of prose to the literary level of poetry.
Historical Context Indian Nationalism and the Bengal Partition As much as Tagore and others like him preferred to spend their time in contemplation of their God, the political situation in India often affected them or their poetry. In “60,” Tagore writes: “Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships get wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.” Images like these, while certainly containing religious significance, also speak of instability in general. They also hint at the idea of a coalition, a “great meeting.” For Tagore, these themes often came from issues associated with the British control of India. Mary M. Lago says, speak-
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Compare & Contrast • Early 1910s: India struggles to win its independence from Britain, who rules over the subcontinent. An English viceroy is in charge of the daily affairs of government. Today: India is a democratic state. It features a parliamentary form of government. The elected members of the federal and state parliaments in turn elect a president, who serves a five-year term. • Early 1910s: The entire subcontinent is united under British rule, and most political threats and conflicts occur from within the borders of the subcontinent. Today: The subcontinent is divided into three separate states—India, Pakistan, and Bangla-
ing generally about Tagore’s life and work in her chapter on “Tagore’s Traditions” in Twayne’s World Authors Series Online: “The basic theme . . . was constant: the search for ways to keep civilization, in the East and in the West, unified in a world increasingly divisive and contentious.” Tagore was an activist at the time that he wrote many of the poems in Gitanjali. In 1905, Tagore joined the nationalist movement to block the partition of Bengal. Prior to this event, certain groups had opposed British rule, but many citizens did not get involved. However, when the British government attempted to divide the province of Bengal, in an administrative move that was meant to increase the government’s efficiency in the province, it did not take into account local sentiment. The British government ignored petitions signed by tens of thousands of citizens, who grew to millions during protest rallies. However, Tagore did not believe in violent protest, and when militant nationalists turned to terrorism, Tagore withdrew his support and retreated to his peaceful, religious writings. As E. J. Thompson notes of Gitanjali in his book, Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Work: “We may feel that in such books and such a man we have the earnest hope that the enmity of East and West will be reconciled.”
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desh. India and Pakistan, which is predominantly Muslim, have a long-standing border dispute. In 1998, this dispute erupts when India performs nuclear weapons tests, prompting a response from Pakistan, which conducts its own nuclear weapons tests. • Early 1910s: Although Indians subscribe to many different religions, the majority are Hindus. Today: The majority of Indians still subscribe to Hinduism. At the end of the twentieth century, Hindu groups begin a massive nationalist movement, placing pressure on non-Hindus to conform to Hinduism.
Imperialism, Alliances, and the Escalation to World War I When Gitanjali was published in 1912, the unity that Tagore was seeking was apparent among many nations, but this unity ultimately led to the start of World War I. The imperialistic drive of many nations in the late nineteenth century had created a number of massive colonial empires. Just as Great Britain ruled India, other smaller or weaker nations were ruled by larger or stronger powers in similar ways. In an attempt to prevent conflicts, these large colonial empires created alliances with each other. However, while this idea worked in theory, all of the world’s great powers at the time— including Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States, Japan, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, and Germany—felt it necessary to fortify their armies, which sparked an arms race and fostered a sense of distrust. By the early 1910s, the various great powers were suspicious of each other. Kristine M. Rogers, in her essay for Rabindranath Tagore: Perspectives in Time, is one of many critics who believe that this unstable political climate helped inspire the warm reception of Tagore’s Gitanjali. Rogers says, “Certain poets and artists in England, among them William Butler Yeats and William Rothenstein, found comfort
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against the menacing portents of the First World War in Tagore’s translations of some of his religious poetry.” In any case, this tense situation exploded in the Balkans, when the Austro-Hungarian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a young Bosnian who had support from a Serbian nationalist group. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and the intricate system of global alliances, which had been meant to avert war, pulled all of the great powers into it.
Critical Overview When Tagore first published the English Gitanjali in 1912, it featured an introduction by the celebrated Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who notes: “I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.” This was just one of the many glowing comments that Yeats made about the volume, which he helped Tagore publish. This lavish praise, coupled with the fact that the volume led to Tagore becoming the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913), whipped the public into a frenzy. Critics and readers both agreed with Yeats’s comments, praising the book and buying enough copies to warrant several printings. For example, in an influential 1913 article on Tagore for the Fortnightly Review, Ezra Pound notes: “There is the same sort of common sense in the first part of the New Testament, the same happiness in some of the psalms.” Pound also says that Tagore “has given us a beauty that is distinctly Oriental.” This tendency to associate Tagore with the Orient, coupled with the mystical quality of his Gitanjali poems, reinforced the idea of Tagore as a mystic— an idea that Yeats had helped to create. Not everybody agreed with this assessment. In his 1915 article about Tagore in America, Joyce Kilmer notes: “I wish that Mr. Yeats would stop calling Mr. Tagore a mystic. It is so silly! Mystics don’t commune with the Infinite and then sell their communings to a magazine.” Still, even Kilmer agreed that Tagore was a great writer: “No one will deny that Mr. Tagore is an able literary craftsman. He is not, as he has been called, the greatest living poet, but he is the most versatile writer living.” However, this tide would soon turn. As K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar notes in his foreword to Rabindranath Tagore: His Mind and Art, “after 1919, there was a reaction against Tagore and an indifference to his later work.” The same popularity that launched Gitanjali into literary history also doomed
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Tagore’s reputation as a writer of anything other than mystic poetry. As Mary M. Lago notes in her chapter on “Tagore’s Lyric Poems” in Twayne’s World Authors Series Online, most non-Bengali reviewers reinforced Tagore’s reputation as a mystic. Lago says, “A theme repeated frequently by reviewers was that of the contrast between Tagore’s Eastern philosophy and outlook, to which was attached the catchall label of ‘mysticism.’” In addition, most non-Bengali readers assumed that Gitanjali represented the best of Tagore’s poetry. However, as Lago also notes: “Many Bengali critics consider it over-sensuous, so much given to musings and digressions about beauty that it falls short of the standard of his best work.’” Once the thrill of Tagore’s initial introduction to the West wore off, even loyal supporters like Yeats withdrew their support of Tagore. Tagore’s popularity steadily declined in the next few decades. According to Melvin D. Palmer, in his essay for Rabindranath Tagore: American Interpretations, interest in Tagore picked up after 1956. As Palmer notes, part of this was due to the centenary publication of Tagore’s English works, “but it also coincided with a larger turning to the East that swept America in the sixties and still shows some signs of life.” Noted writer Hermann Hesse says in a 1957 essay: “I would be happy if I lived to see his triumphant re-emergence after the testing period of his oblivion.” However, while Tagore’s popularity has increased in recent years, there is still a tendency to associate him with mystic poetry, or, even worse, with Gitanjali alone. Sujit Mukherjee, in his 1964 book Passage to America: The Reception of Rabindranath Tagore in the United States, 1912–1941 further explores the irony of Tagore’s reception: “Instead of being only an introduction abroad to his work, the volume became the yardstick of all that came afterwards, especially of his poetry.” Some critics have, in the second half of the twentieth century, attempted to view Tagore’s entire body of work in an effort to make an unbiased assessment of the author. In 1961, in the centenary volume of Tagore’s works, Buddhadeva Bose compares Tagore’s vast body of work to that of Goethe. However, as Bose notes, “unlike Goethe, he has left no supreme single achievement by which we could justifiably judge him.” Likewise, Palmer notes in 1981 that an unwarranted bias favoring Gitanjali still exists among many critics. Palmer says, “there persists a certain blindness to the possibility that his early poems in English did not uniformly merit the great attention they received.”
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Criticism Ryan D. Poquette Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette discusses the structure that Tagore uses in his poem. When authors write prose poems, they do not need to pay as much attention to structure as when they write verse poetry. Blocks of prose can be as long or as short as the author wants, since the poetic elements like imagery and symbolism are what help to elevate the prose to prose poetry. However, when Tagore translated “60” into a prose poem from its Bengali-verse source, he paid close attention to the structure. Perhaps this is one reason why those who have commented on the poem like it so much. At first glance, the poem does not appear to be any different than many of Tagore’s other nature poems. In her essay “Tagore’s Lyric Poems,” Mary M. Lago observes that “Nature is the touchstone, again and again, and it is a rare poem by Tagore that does not reflect in some way the skies, rivers, and landscape of Bengal.” From the reviews of the few critics who have commented on “60,” it seems that the poem is more than just one of Tagore’s many reflections on nature. In his essay on Tagore for Rabindranath Tagore: American Interpretations, Melvin D. Palmer notes: “Only rarely do I find lines in Tagore that satisfy my hunger. One such is this, from Gitanjali, 60: ‘On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.’” Likewise, in his book Passage to America: The Reception of Rabindranath Tagore in the United States, 1912–1941, Sujit Mukherjee comments on “60,” which was also included in Tagore’s later collection, The Crescent Moon: “One outstanding piece from Gitanjali included here under the title ‘On the Seashore’ is this volume’s sole distinction.” Finally, Yeats singled out this poem to conclude his laudatory introduction to Gitanjali. By examining the structure of the poem, one can see why this poem has received almost universal praise. First, in broad terms, the poem is perfectly symmetrical in its thematic structure. The center line of the third paragraph—the exact center of the poem, in fact—anchors the poem in place. This sentence reads: “Pearl fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again.” This sentence stands on its own in the poem. No other sentence mentions the pearl fishers or merchants. However, every other sentence in the poem has a comple-
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Tagore’s focus on stability may also point to the political situation in India at the time. Although India was controlled by the British and torn by conflict, Tagore had high hopes that India would someday be independent and stable.”
mentary sentence within its respective paragraph. Continuing the example of the third paragraph, the paragraph starts with the following sentence: “They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets.” Compare this with the last sentence of the third paragraph: “They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets.” The first half of each unit mimics the style of the other, while the second half of each phrase is identical: “they know not how to cast nets.” Moving from the center of the poem outward to paragraphs two and four, one can see that these two paragraphs are also symmetrical. Once again, the first and third sentences of each paragraph mirror each other in some way. In the second paragraph, the idea of playing on the sand is repeated in both the first and third sentence. In the fourth paragraph, the phrase “pale gleams the smile of the sea beach” is repeated in the first and third sentences. So is the motion of the sea. In the first sentence, the “sea surges.” In the third sentence, the “sea plays.” This symmetrical pattern continues in paragraphs one and five. The symmetry is also apparent between corresponding paragraphs, not just sentences. In other words, while the first and third sentences of the first paragraph mirror each other, the first paragraph also mirrors its symmetrical partner, the fifth paragraph. When one looks at the poem as a whole, the symmetry of the paragraphs is as follows. Paragraphs one and five both feature the children meeting under a calm and violent sky. Paragraphs two and four feature, respectively, the children playing and the sea playing. And the lone middle paragraph
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describes the children’s ignorance of adult, worldly ways. This pattern helps to emphasize the change in tone from calm to threatening. If this were the only structural consistency, Tagore’s poem would be considered neat and organized. However, Tagore takes it one step further. In addition to following a theme pattern in his sentences and paragraphs, he also follows a length pattern. Within each paragraph, the syllable length of each sentence can be described as long, medium, or short. No two sentences within any paragraph match each other in length, so there is always one long, one medium, and one short sentence. When one uses these designations to label each paragraph, another pattern emerges. For example, in the first paragraph, the first sentence is: “On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.” This sentence is eleven syllables long, as compared to the middle sentence, which is twenty-two syllables long, and the last sentence, which is seventeen syllables long. This pattern of short / long / medium is repeated in the third and fifth paragraphs, and reversed in the second and fourth paragraphs. While this careful analysis of sentence length may not seem necessary, it does underscore Tagore’s inventive structuring. Poets generally do not engage in such strict exercises of structure unless they have a purpose. In this case, Tagore is giving each paragraph an ebb and flow pattern that mimics the waves moving from the sea to the shore and back. This ebb-and-flow pattern also holds up if one adds up the total number of syllables in each paragraph. The first, third, and fifth paragraphs are all medium length, while the second paragraph is short and the fourth paragraph is long. This structure gives the poem stability, which contrasts nicely with the instability discussed within the poem. In commenting on the “organic structure” of the poem, Mukherjee observes that the whole is “controlled by contrasts that evolve out of the central opposition between the helpless children and the mighty sea.” It is as if Tagore wishes to give his readers unstable and dangerous imagery, like the restless sea, but at the same time he wants to reassure them that it is okay. As Mukherjee notes, the idea of playing, as evidenced in the joyous meeting of children, is set up as a powerful ideological weapon against the fear of death. According to Mukherjee, “In the power of play lies the eternal triumph of life, as long as ‘on the seashore of endless worlds there is the great meeting of children.’” Tagore’s focus on stability may also point to the political situation in India at the time. Although
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India was controlled by the British and torn by conflict, Tagore had high hopes that India would someday be independent and stable. He also hoped that he and other Indians would be able to reconcile the conflicting Eastern and Western ideals of his time. In his book Rabindranath Tagore: His Mind and Art, B. C. Chakravorty discusses one of Tagore’s Bengali poems, which may or may not be the source of the English “60.” Since Tagore radically changed his Bengali versions when converting them into the English Gitanjali, scholars do not usually know which Bengali poems correspond to the English poems. However, most critics agree that Tagore retained the essence of the Bengali version in each English translation, and the seashore location of this Bengali poem sounds similar to the location in “60.” Thus, Chakravorty comments about the Bengali poem: “Tagore conceives India as the meeting ground of different nations of the world.” Everybody has “joined together on the seashore of humanity—that is India. From time immemorial India has cherished the ideal of unity.” Whether or not this poem is talking about the same seashore, Chakravorty’s comments are relevant to “60,” since they indicate that Tagore’s forced stability of the structure might signify his desire for political and cultural unity. Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on “60,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
G. Singh In the following essay, Singh discusses Tagore’s international literary and social influence, explaining how the poetic mastery of Tagore’s Song Offerings, in which “60” appears, won the praise of poets like W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Rabindranath Tagore, Indian poet, playwright, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and philosopher wrote mostly in his mother tongue Bengali, but also in English. He founded at Santiniketan an international university, Vishva Bharati, which was to be a bridge between the cultures of the East and the West, and whose motto is: “where the whole world forms its single nest.” A patriot to the core—“I shall be born in India again and again, with all the poverty, misery, and wretchedness”— Tagore sided with England on the eve of World War II in 1939, declaring that “no Indian can wish England to lose the war she is fighting for the sake of liberty.” Although a versatile writer, painter, and musician, Tagore was essentially a lyric poet and as the author of Gi¯ta¯ njali (Song Offerings) he acquired in-
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ternational fame. W. B. Yeats said of Song Offerings that it was a work of supreme culture which had stirred his blood as nothing had for years. Ezra Pound regarded Tagore as “an artist pure and simple, an author whose voice has almost as many nuances as one can expect from Voltaire and whose sense of humour is as delicate as that of any poet living in Paris.” He was also struck by what he calls “a saner stillness” in Tagore’s poetry as well as by “its subtle underflow.” The songs in Song Offerings, the poet’s colloquies with God, seek to define and at the same time to transcend the dichotomy between “I” and “Thou,” or the Vaishnava duality between the divine and the human, between the contemplator and the contemplated. Like Kabir, Tagore brings to a most intimately personal realization of God a musical as well as a lyrical skill, an imagery at once realistic and evocative, and a wealth of symbols and concepts from the most disparate faiths and philosophies. “Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure,” he tells God the Lover and the Master, “This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it with fresh life.” Desire and inspiration, joy, and dedication merge into one another, and the music so born is both prayer and poetry, ecstasy and confession: “When thou commandest me to sing it seems that my heart would break with pride; and I look at thy face, and tears come to my eyes.” The joy of singing makes the poet forget himself and “I . . . call thee friend who are my Lord.” Poetic and artistic technique burns itself out at the altar of a devotion that knows no pride and has a rhythm and a music all its own. But the real song that the poet wants to sing remains unsung and the poet spends his days in “stringing and mastering my instrument.” There is that silent communion with his lord and lover to sustain and inspire him, and he feels that the object of his adoration is “on every side,” “in everything” and “at every moment.” However, even though every moment seems to be ripe for the meeting between the poet and his lover, it never really takes place; for that would indeed be the end of his quest and yearning, the soul substance of his song. But such is the intensity of his yearning that it turns what is intangible into something concrete and fully realized. It is, in fact, this interplay between the tangible and the intangible, which enables the poet to express “the-life-throb of ages dancing in my blood,” as well as to retrieve something from what is perpetually threatening to dissolve and to give it a new meaning and a new rhythm. Thus even death ceases to be a challenge,
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The songs in Song Offerings, the poet’s colloquies with God, seek to define and at the same time to transcend the dichotomy between ‘I’ and ‘Thou,’ or the Vaishnava duality between the divine and the human, between the contemplator and the contemplated.”
and the poet is eager to “dive down into the depth of the ocean of forms,” “to die into the deathless.” If Song Offerings is Tagore’s masterpiece and his most characteristic book, it is because none of his subsequent volumes of poetry—The Gardener, The Crescent Moon, Fruit-Gathering, The Fugitive and Other Poems, for instance, or even the posthumously published poems Wings of Death—achieves the kind of freshness and subtlety of creative inspiration, together with technical mastery, of this book; nor do they add anything to the poetic and mystical philosophy so superbly expressed in Song Offerings. Among Tagore’s more important plays are Chitra¯ ngada (Chitra), Daghar (The Post Office), Raja (The King of the Dark Chamber), The Cycle of Spring, and Raktu-Karabi (Red Oleanders)—all of which centre upon the conflict between the vital urge represented by the human personality, and the impersonal and mechanical force represented by industrialization, with the ultimate triumph of personality. Among Tagore’s novels, Gora¯ and GhareBaire (The Home and the World) are the best known. Both are novels with a political and social background. As a short-story writer too Tagore was a pioneer in Bengali literature and he published several collections of short stories—The Hungry Stones and Other Stories, Mashi and Other Stories, Broken Ties and Other Stories, and The Runaway and Other Stories. Tagore’s short stories are studies in psychology or impressionistic sketches depicting
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the village life in East Bengal. Some of Tagore’s better known short stories from these volumes “Kabuliwala,” “Home-Coming,” “Number One,” and “Laboratory.” Of his literary, political, and philosophical essays the ones most worthy of note are Sadhana, Nationalism, Personality, Creative Unity, The Religion of Man, and Crisis in Civilisation. A celebrated article of Tagore’s is entitled “The Call of Truth” (March 1921); it is addressed to Ghandi and sums up Tagore’s political creed. While hailing Ghandi as “the wielder of that rod which can awaken India in Truth and Love,” Tagore criticized his campaign for non-co-operation, which included a call to the nation to spin and weave their own clothes and to burn foreign cloth. “What irony of fate,” Tagore wrote in a letter from Chicago, “that I should be preaching co-operation of cultures between East and West on this side of the sea just at the moment the doctrine of non-co-operation is preached on the other side!” Ghandi rebutted his arguments and defended non-co-operation as a “protest against an unwitting and unwilling participation in evil, a struggle against compulsory co-operation, against one-sided combination, against the armed imposition of modern methods of exploitation masquerading under the name of civilization.” For all his optimistic faith and idealism—he described pessimism as “a form of mental dipsomania” and never suffered from it himself—Tagore ultimately accepted Ghandi’s views about exploitation. For, shortly before his death, he wrote: “I look around and see famished bodies crying for bread. I have seen women in villages dig up ground for a few drops of drinking water, for wells are even more scarce in Indian villages than schools.” Tagore travelled practically all over the world and met most of the eminent writers, thinkers, and artists of his day. A few months before his death, the University of Oxford conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. Source: G. Singh, “Tagore, Rabindranath,” in Reference Guide to World Literature, 3d ed., edited by Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast, Vol. 1, St. James Press, 2003, pp. 985–97.
Gail Mirza H. A. Mirza In the following essay, Mirza and Mirza discuss the spirituality of consciousness in Tagore’s poetry as the poet advanced through romantic, mystic, and realist phases.
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The complexity of Rabindranath Tagore’s genius and the extraordinary range of his intellectual and artistic interests have been noted by scholars in India and the west alike. While hailed primarily as a poet, Tagore excelled as a dramatist, essayist, novelist, short story writer, and, in nonliterary endeavors, as painter, philosopher, educator, musician, social reformer, and ambassador of good will to cultures as diverse as China, the U.S., and Latin America. Tagore’s creative versatility serves to conform his own belief that most great artists function at higher levels of awareness, often experiencing a natural, spontaneous urge for total Self-realization, which in Vendata (the highest aspect of Hindu philosophy) is called Unity Consciousness. This principle of unity (Sahitya) is the focal point of Tagore’s aesthetic philosophy; derived from the root Sahit, meaning “to be with,” the word Sahitya is the Sanskrit term for both “unity” and “literature.” In his book Sahitya (1908) Tagore emphasizes that man’s sense of oneness with the rest of creation is the root of all aesthetic delight; the poet is essentially restating the Vedantic view of art, which holds that artistic expression has its basis in states of consciousness and that the highest creative expression can only follow from the artist’s own direct experience of pure consciousness (Turiya). In Sahityer Pathe (1926) the poet states, “Aesthetic delight is such a sense of harmony beyond the object that it does not delay in merging with our consciousness. In this case the revelation of truth of the object is the same as the revelation of my consciousness.” The distinguishing characteristic of all great artists, according to Tagore, is their ability to enlarge their own consciousness to the point that it becomes one with the Universal Self, thereby intuiting or reflecting all other selves. In this regard Tagore considers the writing of poetry to be a spiritual discipline, a kind of via purgativa. Thus he shares the Hindu view of art as Sadhana—the process of spiritual training which transforms consciousness in such a way that the artist (individual self) can no longer be separated from his art (Universal Self). In The Cycle of Spring (1917) Tagore states: “The secret of all art lies in self-[as opposed to Self] forgetfulness. The poet or artists sets free the poet or artist in us.” Tagore emphasizes the ability of art to raise the consciousness of not only the artist, but the perceiver as well: “True art withdraws our thoughts from the mere machinery of life, and lifts our souls above the meanness of it. It releases the self from the restless
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activities of the world and takes us out of the noisy sickroom of ourselves.” Critics generally recognize three major stages in the poetic development of Tagore: 1) “romantic” poetry expressing a vague longing for essence transcending the mutability of matter (preGitanjali, 1878–1908); 2) “mystic” poetry describing the synthesis of matter and spirit (Gitanjali, 1909–1915); 3) “realist” poetry defining the role of duality in the human experience (post-Gitanjali, 1916–1941). Tagore’s early poetry, of which Chitra is a good example, consists largely of verse narrative, miscellaneous poems, songs, and poetic drama. Gitanjali, for which Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913, consists primarily of his prose translations of selected lyrics from the 1910 Bengali version of Gitanjali and Gitalipi. Gitanjali, which literally means “Song Offerings,” is a long, free-verse poem which depicts the author’s growth of consciousness from “drunk delight” (Ananda) in creation as a child, at the start of the poem, to the acceptance of and thus transcendence of the cycle of birth-and-death (Samsara) when he is an old man at the end. Tagore’s later poetry, from Fruit Gathering (1916) on, far exceeds his earlier poetry both in volume and quality. Tagore left much of his later work untranslated, but what we do have in English reveals a poet keenly aware of the fragmentation experienced by modern man, yet confident in man’s ability to achieve unity through the creative processes and the evolution of his awareness. Source: Gail Mizra and H. A. Mirza, “Tagore, (Sir) Rabindranath,” in Reference Guide to English Literature, Vol. 2, Writers H–Z, 2d ed., edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick, St. James Press, 1991, pp. 1303–05.
Edward J. Thompson In this excerpt, Thompson gives a sometimes mixed, but overall positive, review of the poetry and short stories of Tagore. [Though] Rabindranath has never ceased to learn, and is as great a thief as any in all literature, it is in the pre-Ma¯ na¯ si period that we must look for influences. First, of course, are the Bengali Vaisnava lyrists. The poet’s own authority compels this statement, for did he not in the Bha¯ nu Singha songs carefully catch their very notes? And he has never ceased to praise them, has translated them, and always refers to them as his masters. Be it so, then; one must suppose that they are. Yet I have always been rebellious under the importance he ascribes to them, and I believe he does them too much honour.
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The distinguishing characteristic of all great artists, according to Tagore, is their ability to enlarge their own consciousness to the point that it becomes one with the Universal Self, thereby intuiting or reflecting all other selves.”
I will say frankly that I am sure they have not influenced him to anything like the extent he has persuaded himself. He is grateful to them because they put him in the way of finding his gift of pure song, and therefore he is more filial than he need be, mistaking for parent those who are only among his chief teachers. . . . Rabindranath’s real master has been Kalida¯ sa¯ . He never misses a chance of paying Kalida¯ sa¯ homage, either by explicit panegyric or by the subtler way of paraphrasing or quoting. . . . Frequently, when the strain is ostensibly a Vaisnava one, and the theme is Krishna and Ra¯ dha¯ , the real mood is not Vaisnava at all, but, as obviously as possible, is Kalida¯ sa¯ ’s. The two poets [Kalida¯ sa¯ and Rabindranath], the greatest India has ever produced, differ as strikingly as they resemble each other. The one is the poet of mountains, rejoicing in their strength and vastness. The other is the poet of rivers and of quiet places. But the two between them so completely represent Indian landscapes, that any third poet hereafter must seek some other way to fame. Both are passionate lovers of the rains, and have given us picture after picture of them which is perfect in faithfulness and charm. Both, again, love the gentler beautifies of Nature and character; and both are at home in symbolism and mingle with easy grace in the affairs of Gods and Immortals. A very important strain in Rabindranath’s work is the influence of folk-tale and folk-poetry other than Vaisnava. This is responsible for many charming moments, and also for occasional moments of dulness, when it contributes to that cult of the trivial which is the defect of his great quality of interest in the smallest things. The great epics, too, have
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. . . [Kalida¯sa¯s and Rabindranath] . . . differ as strikingly as they resemble each other. . . . But the two between them so completely represent Indian landscapes, that any third poet hereafter must seek some other way to fame.”
given him thoughts and incidents that have touched him to fine issues. . . . He was called, while in his teens, the Bengali Shelley, and he has translated Shelley, and has acknowledged him as an influence. The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, he says, was like a transcript of his mind in his youth. ‘I felt as if I could have written it. . . . Shelley’s mythopoea, his compound adjectives, his personifications, his unhappiness, especially his vague, poetical unhappiness,—these things fill Evening Songs. From Keats’s Odes he learnt, if my guess is right, to build up magnificent stanza-forms in his own tongue, by which he enriched it immensely. His stanzas are very many, and carried Bengali poetry far beyond the metres introduced by Hemchandra Banerji. . . . But a stronger influence than Keats was Browning. This influence came as he entered upon maturity. It is very marked in the new psychological interest of many poems in Ma¯na¯si, it is present in that first group on non-symbolical plays, it is present most strongly and nobly of all in the short dramatic dialogues of the later nineties, Ga¯ndha¯ri’s Prayer [Gandharir Avedan] and Karna and Kunti. In his novel, The Home and the World, he has made a striking adaptation of the scheme of The Ring and the Book, telling the one story through different minds. But, in the case of a wide and desultory reader like Rabindranath, it is not possible to say where he found the suggestion for this or that idea or phrase. It is enough, that he has ‘taken his own where he found it,’ and has laid under contribution German, and French, and Russian literature, as well as Sanskrit and English.
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It must be admitted that he has written a great deal too much, and that the chief stumbling-block in the way of accepting him among great poets is the inequality of his work. . . . There is a recurrence of a certain vocabulary, of flowers, south wind, spring, autumn, tears, laughter, separation, tunes, bees and the rest, which sometimes is positively maddening. This sort of thing is most apparent when he is least inspired, but it is by no means absent from his best work. . . . Even in much of the noblest work of his later years, his incorrigible playfulness, the way in which, often when most serious, he will fondle and toss with fancies, spoils some splendid things. . . . From all this comes sometimes a sense of monotony, which hides from the reader the richness and versatility of his work. This is the great weakness of his earlier work, that which finishes with Chaita¯li. One is often surprised, on analysis, to find how much of even his most exquisite work is built upon themes well-worn with him. . . . Moon, Spring, sigh, eternal separation, night and full moon, laughter, flute, unrest, tears, weeping, Hope,—these are the old performers. . . . There is many a passage in Rabindranath when you might call the roll, and, if one of these were present, all the rest would click their heels and answer. Here, in the supreme inspiration of Urbasi, they are transfigured into unsurpassable loveliness, which no criticism can touch. Yet, as the flawless Idea which lives in God’s presence suffers loss with the judgment of us mortals for the faulty embodiments of that perfection which we see and have made, so even on the best of the poems of his early period some shadow falls from memory of the many passages which have their accidents without their essential of inspiration. Yet this fault really witnesses to a great strength, his wonderful abundance of imagery. . . . Here we get very close to the heart of his genius, and can confidently claim for him the title of great poet. No poet that ever lived (I shall use this phrase again) has had a more constant and intimate touch with natural beauty. He can use, at his best, the same images and pictures, the oldest ones in the world, a score of times in as many lines, and each time with freshness and charm. His wealth here is inexhaustible, and it is manifest in prose as in verse, and today, after his swift advance in mastery of the tongue, is almost as manifest in English as in Bengali. [Too] many suppose that Rabindranth is a poet of softer beauty, evading the sterner. But this was never the case, even in his early work; at any rate, was never the case after Evening Songs. In Ma¯na¯si,
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for example, in one of the grandest and most terrible sea-storms in the world’s literature—written, not by and Englishman, but by a Bengali. He has a thousand pictures, all distinct from each other, and all perfect, of every Indian season. Autumn is a favourite of his, as she deserves to be; and he personifies her as Lakshmi, the gracious goddess. Noon in the summer heats is another favourite; and he can make the page quiver with its tense, blinding quietness. Again, no poet that ever lived has shown such a power of merging not only himself but his human figures with their landscape. Here he is absolutely great, and absolutely original. Sometimes, the mingling is a matter of subtle and exquisite perception of the intimate inter-relation beween mind and matter. . . . This rich, individual gift of his nowhere finds more satisfying expression than in his short stories. . . . [There are] outstanding qualities of the best stories . . . which put him among the world’s greatest short story writers. First among them is their range and variety. This writer or that has surpassed Rabindranath in some quality or other. But where are we to find a writer of stories so different and so good as Hungry Stones, Living or Dead, Subha¯, Cloud and Sun, The Kingdom of Cards, The Trust Property, The Riddle Solved, and The Elder Sister? Four of these eight are of the deepest tragedy, a very unusual feature in an Indian writer; two are of tragedy of a less mixed and absolute kind, but sufficiently poignant, with irony salting the bitterness and with tender laughter softening the pathos; one deals with a realm of sheer phantasy, two are ghostly; several are masterly psychological studies. It is strange that his stories have received so little fame in the West; they are the most under-rated of all his work. Source: Edward J. Thompson, Excerpt from Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Work, in Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Work, edited by Kalidas Nag, Y. M. C. A. Publishing House, 1921, pp. 112 ff.
Ezra Pound In this essay, Pound gives a favorable overview of the poems of Tagore. The appearance of “The Poems of Rabindranath Tagore” is, to my mind, very important. The movement of his prose may escape you if you read it only from print, but read it aloud, a little tentatively, and the delicacy of its rhythm is at once apparent. I think this good fortune is unconscious. I do not think it is an accident. It is the sort
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I do not think I have ever undertaken so difficult a problem of criticism, for one can praise most poetry in a series of antitheses. In the work of Mr. Tagore the source of the charm is in the subtle underflow. It is nothing else than his ‘sense of life.’ ”
of prose rhythm a man would use after years of word arranging. He would shun kakophony almost unwittingly. The next easiest things to note are the occasional brilliant phrases, now like some pure Hellenic, in “Morning with the golden basket in her right hand,” now like the last sophistication of De Gourmont or Baudelaire. But beneath and about it all is this spirit of curious quiet. We have found our new Greece, suddenly. As the sense of balance came back upon Europe in the days before the Renaissance, so it seems to me does this sense of a saner stillness come now to us in the midst of our clangor of mechanisms. There is in [Mr. Tagore] the stillness of nature. The poems do not seem to have been produced by storm of by ignition, but seem to show the normal habit of his mind. He is at one with nature, and finds no contradictions. And this is in sharp contrast with the Western mode, where man must be shown attempting to master nature if we are to have “great drama.” It is in contrast to the Hellenic representation of man the sport of the gods, and both in the grip of destiny. If we take these poems as an expression Bhuddistic thought, it is quite certain that they will change the prevailing conception of Bhuddism among us. For we usually consider it a sort of ultimate negation, while these poems are full of light, they are full of positive statement. They are close in temperament to what we are usually led to call Taoism.
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What Do I Read Next? • Some critics consider E. M. Forster’s controversial A Passage to India (1924) to be one of the author’s greatest novels. The book, which was published in the racially tense times when India was still under British control, examines whether or not it is possible for members of the two cultures to be friends. • In Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, originally published in 1923, the author and mystic offers his philosophy on many topics, including love, marriage, and religion. The narrative takes place in a sandy, timeless place that is similar to the metaphysical location in Tagore’s “60.” • Carol E. Henderson’s Culture and Customs of India (2002) explores what life is like for Indian residents today. The book includes sections on every major aspect of Indian life, including food and dress; women, marriage, and family; and religion.
• Jeffrey Paine’s Father India: How Encounters with an Ancient Culture Transformed the Modern West (1998) examines the many ways that India’s culture, including politics and religion, has influenced the Western world. Paine examines these influences in a broad sense and also discusses how India affected Western individuals such as William Butler Yeats. • In addition to his poems, Tagore also wrote many prayers. Herbert F. Vetter collected and edited several of these prayers in The Heart of God: Prayers of Rabindranath Tagore (1997). • Tagore was deeply influenced by the nature of his native India, which often inspired his writings. In The One and the Many: Readings from the Work of Rabindranath Tagore (1997), William Radice offers new translations of Tagore’s poems along with corresponding photos of India and its people.
• Although Tagore’s poem features idealistic images of children, the reality of many children’s lives on the Indian subcontinent are often very harsh, especially for girls. In her memoir Meyebela: My Bengali Girlhood (2002), exiled writer Taslima Nasrin writes about what life was like for her growing up in a Muslim family in Bangladesh.
• In recent years, critics have begun to pay attention to Tagore’s non-verse works, most notably his short stories. Tagore’s Selected Short Stories (2001), translated by Sukanta Chaudhuri, includes several of Tagore’s tragic stories.
Briefly, I find in these poems a sort of ultimate common sense, a reminder of one thing and of forty things of which we are over likely to lose sight in the confusion of our Western life, in the racket of our cities, in the jabber of manufactured literature, in the vortex of advertisement. There is the same sort of common sense in the first part of the New Testament, the same happiness in some of the psalms, but these are so apt to be spoiled for us by association; there are so many fools engaged in mispreaching them. . . . If these poems have a flaw—I do not admit that they have—but if they have a quality that will put them at a disadvantage with the “general reader,” it is that they are too pious.
Yet I have nothing but pity for the reader who is unable to see that their piety is the poetic piety of Dante, and that it is very beautiful. . . . I do not think I have ever undertaken so difficult a problem of criticism, for one can praise most poetry in a series of antitheses. In the work of Mr. Tagore the source of the charm is in the subtle underflow. It is nothing else than his “sense of life.” [Rabindranath Tagore] has given us a beauty that is distinctly Oriental, and yet it is almost severe, it is free from that lusciousness, that overprofusion which, in so much South-Oriental work, repels us. His work is, above all things, quiet. It is sunny, Apricus, “fed with sun,” “delighting in sunlight.”
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One has in reading it a sense of even air, where many Orientals only make us aware of abundant vegetation. Source: Ezra Pound, “Rabindranath Tagore,” in the Fortnightly Review, Vol. 99, No. DLX, March 1913, pp. 571–79.
tives in Time, edited by Mary Lago and Ronald Warwick, Macmillan Press, 1989, pp. 26–49. Tagore, Rabindranath, “60,” in Gitanjali, Scribner Poetry, 1997, p. 78. Thompson, E. J., Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Work, Association Press, 1921, p. 106. Yeats, William Butler, “Introduction,” in Gitanjali, Scribner Poetry, 1997, p. 10.
Sources Bose, Buddhadeva, “Rabindranath Tagore and Bengali Prose,” in A Centenary Volume: Rabindranath Tagore, 1861–1961, Sahitya Akademi, 1961, pp. 102–13. Chakravorty, B. C., Rabindranath Tagore: His Mind and Art, Young India Publications, 1971, pp. 65–66. Hesse, Hermann, “Hermann Hesse on Tagore,” in Later Poems of Rabindranath Tagore, translated by Aurobindo Bose, Peter Owen, 1974, p. 7, originally published in 1957. Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa, “Foreword,” in Rabindranath Tagore: His Mind and Art, by B. C. Chakravorty, Young India Publications, 1971, p. 7. Kilmer, Joyce, “Rabindranath Tagore,” in America, Vol. 13, No. 14, July 17, 1915, p. 355. Lago, Mary M., “Chapter 1: Tagore’s Traditions,” in Rabindranath Tagore, in Twayne’s World Authors Series, No. 42, Twayne Publishers, 1976. —, “Chapter 2: Tagore’s Lyric Poems,” in Rabindranath Tagore, in Twayne’s World Authors Series, No. 42, Twayne Publishers, 1976. Mukherjee, Sujit, Passage to America: The Reception of Rabindranath Tagore in the United States, 1912–1941, Bookland Private, 1964, pp. 126, 129–30. Palmer, Melvin D., “Tagore’s Poetry in English: A Candid View,” in Rabindranath Tagore: American Interpretations, edited by Ira G. Zepp Jr., Writers Workshop Publication, 1981, pp. 78–98. Pound, Ezra, “Rabindranath Tagore,” in the Fortnightly Review, Vol. 99, No. 560, March 1913, pp. 571–79. Rogers, Kristine M., “Rabindranath Tagore: Inheritor and Creator of Traditions,” in Rabindranath Tagore: Perspec-
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Further Reading Chatterjee, Bhabatosh, Rabindranath Tagore and Modern Sensibility, Oxford University Press, 1996. Chatterjee collects a number of essays that address the changing perceptions of Tagore’s work throughout the years. These essays discuss common issues in Tagore’s work and raise new issues that have yet to be explored. Dutta, Krishna, and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, Bloomsbury, 1995. In this biography, Dutta and Robinson examine all aspects of Tagore’s life and offer commentary on his major works, including the English Gitanjali. James, Lawrence, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Much of Tagore’s poetry, including “60,” contains direct or indirect references to the political situation in India, in which he was intimately involved. James’s book discusses the rise and fall of British rule in India, including how it affected citizens in both countries. Lago, Mary M., ed., Imperfect Encounter: Letters of William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore, 1911–1941, Harvard University Press, 1972. The story behind the publication of the English Gitanjali has received as much attention as the poems themselves. In this book, Lago traces the development of Tagore’s reputation in both the East and West, using the letters between Tagore and Rothenstein, the man most directly responsible for Gitanjali’s publication.
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Address to the Angels Maxine Kumin 1978
When “Address to the Angels” first appeared in Maxine Kumin’s book The Retrieval System (1978), she had been mourning the loss of Anne Sexton, a fellow poet and personal friend, for four years. The title poem in this book refers to her metaphorical notion that one can “retrieve” lost loved ones through the expressions and behavior of their animals—in Kumin’s case, her dog has the “brown eyes of [her] father,” now dead, her goat “blats in the tiny voice” of an old piano teacher, also dead, and a boy she once loved “keeps coming back” as a yearling colt. “Address to the Angels” continues the sentiment of “The Retrieval System,” for it, too, is about personal loss and the role of animals in helping humans come to terms with it. It is also about the role of “angels” who purportedly “circulate among us” to keep humans from being alone when facing tragic events. This is not a religious poem, yet it is not wholly unreligious either. While it may reveal a cynical view on how much comfort angels really offer, it also reflects a persistence to carry on in spite of doubt and insists that each person needs individual resolve to overcome grief. While The Retrieval System is a readily available title, “Address to the Angels” also appears in Kumin’s volume of selected works, Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, published in 1982.
Author Biography Maxine Kumin was born Maxine Winokur in Philadelphia on June 6, 1925, and has spent most
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of her life in New England. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Radcliffe College, during which time she met and married Victor Kumin, a Harvard graduate. The couple settled in suburban Boston, but Kumin did not begin publishing poetry until nearly ten years after that. In 1957, she enrolled in a poetry workshop where she met another suburban Boston housewife—and another soon-tobe major poet—Anne Sexton. Kumin and Sexton began a friendship, which included writing children’s books together, that lasted until seventeen years later when Sexton, long troubled by depression and psychosis, committed suicide. In the late 1950s, Kumin began a teaching career, and, to date, she has been a professor, visiting lecturer, senior fellow, and poet-in-residence at more than fifteen colleges and universities across the country. Once she began writing, she wrote prolifically, her work spanning the genres of novels, short stories, children’s literature, essays, and, of course, poetry, of which she has published more than a dozen collections. Since her first published collection in 1961, Kumin’s poetic work has been well received, earning her a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a National Council on the Arts and Humanities fellowship, and the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for her 1973 poetry collection Up Country. Spending most of her adult life raising horses, sheep, and dogs in rural New Hampshire, Kumin has gleaned much poetic inspiration from her experiences as a farmer and rancher. Her love for animals, especially horses, figures heavily in her use of metaphors and in the recurring themes in her work. Likewise, Sexton’s untimely death has been a source for much of Kumin’s work published after 1974. The poem “Address to the Angels,” published four years later, draws from Sexton’s suicide, as well as other personal losses. As a young and middle-aged woman, Kumin not only raised horses but rode them as well, developing the skills of a professional and competing in riding events. In her later years, she became a driver, and, ironically, it was her determination to continue equine sports that nearly cost Kumin her life. In 1999, at the age of seventy-four, she was in a driving accident that left her with a broken neck, broken ribs, and severe internal bleeding. Her struggle to survive resulted in a memoir of the ordeal called Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery, published in 2000. In 2001, Kumin chronicled the struggle in poetry with the publication of her latest collection The Long Marriage.
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Maxine Kumin
Poem Summary Lines 1–3 The first three lines of “Address to the Angels” set the scene in which the speaker envisions the events of the poem. As with many poems, the real action takes place within the mind of the narrator while he or she is physically somewhere else. Here, the speaker describes being in an airplane, “Taking off at sunset,” when the ascension of the plane makes the sun appear to be pulled up with it and “pin[ned] . . . over the rim” of the earth.
Lines 4–6 In these lines, Kumin offers a contradiction to the metaphor proposed in the first three lines. This time, the speaker questions whether the airplane, instead of pulling up the sun, seems more to “push down” the horizon as one may use a nail file to edge down a “loose cuticle.”
Lines 7–13 At the beginning of these lines, the speaker reveals her state of mind while she is traveling by plane. She is “up here grieving, tallying / [her] losses,” and, although she is not specific at this point, later in the poem she discloses the identities of those “losses.” For now, her mind wanders to a
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Media Adaptations • An audio tape from Poets in Person: A Series on American Poets and Their Art, featuring an interview with Kumin, was published by the Modern Poetry Association in 1991. The interview is titled “Maxine Kumin in Conversation with Alicia Ostriker,” and the tape is widely distributed. • In 1979, the Academy of American Poets recorded and produced an audio tape of a Kumin reading. Titled simply “Maxine Kumin,” the sixty-minute tape contains selections from her first book through The Retrieval System, as well as an introduction by poet Jane Shore.
casm or innocent humor is not clear, but the quirky nod to world-renowned evangelist Billy Graham suggests a wry—though not bitter—wit. What Graham has “assured” the speaker of is that God has sent angels to “circulate among” humans, letting them know that their lives on earth are not all there is, that there are celestial beings watching out for them. If the speaker is indeed “assured,” it is not clear at this point in the poem.
Lines 21–26 Throughout the remainder of the second stanza, Kumin paints a less-than-admirable picture of angels going about their daily “twenty-four-hour duty,” portraying them more as clumsy, unhelpful onlookers than heaven-sent protectors of humanity. They “flutter” about the speaker and the “house and barn / blundering into the cobwebs” like characters in a slapstick comedy. But Kumin also suggests a less humorous side to angels, as they only look on while “pots boil over” and “the cat torture[s] / a chipmunk.”
Lines 27–32
creation myth, possibly a take-off on a NativeAmerican legend that contends the world rests on the back of a giant sea turtle, though here Kumin’s creature is a “giant fish” that is curled into a ring shape—with its tail in its mouth—making a suitable surface to hold a “flat” earth. In this myth, “sinners” meet their fate on Judgment Day when they all fall “overboard into the black gulf.” At first, it seems odd for the speaker’s thoughts to take such an abrupt turn from the loss of loved ones to creation lore, but she offers a reason in the next three lines.
Lines 14–16 Here, the speaker still considers the ways of the past, lamenting the times before airplanes and automobiles when humans “walked distances / or went by horse.” Perhaps the most critical suggestion she makes here is that “we . . . knew our places / on the planet,” implying that in the modern world people are less secure in their relationship with nature, possibly even less sure of the purpose of life.
Lines 17–20 In these lines, Kumin introduces her dubious subjects, “angels,” whom she calls “God’s secret agents.” Whether she intends this as irreverent sar-
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The scenario that rounds out this stanza poses a conundrum of sorts regarding the speaker’s real opinion on the role of angels in her life—or, at least, on her property. Like the over-boiling pot and the forsaken chipmunk, the pony’s situation is a dire, possibly deadly one as he is forced to hang by his caught halter from a tree branch all afternoon. Once again, the angels are seen as useless bystanders unwilling to intervene in the horse’s miserable predicament. Then, the speaker calls into question not their willingness to be of help but their ability to do so. Perhaps their purpose is not to prevent bad things from happening but to be of comfort when they do. Here, the speaker hopes that “six equine angels” were at least present to “fan / the strangling beast” until he was either released or escaped his pain through death.
Lines 33–36 The third stanza of “Address to the Angels” is more contemplative and philosophical than the second. In these opening lines, the speaker asks a rhetorical question about how much anyone can really understand the suffering of another. She uses the point as a springboard to the main contention—that animals are “honest” creatures because they do not have the intellectual capacity “to lie.” This, of course, is a backhanded gibe at human beings who do indeed have the capacity, which she considers next.
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Lines 58–64
As the last part of line 36 notes, “Man,” when he is about to die, “has a compulsion to come clean.” It is a common assumption that even the most “sinful” of human beings, when facing death, will admit their wrongful acts and become repentant in hopes of gaining God’s forgiveness before it is too late. Whether that is true in all cases, it is a familiar enough notion to call death the “sacred criterion,” that is, the definer of the right time to tell the truth. Even so, Kumin allows for a distraction in the process of coming clean, and it is yet another human one: “Always it is passion that / confuses the issue.” In the speaker’s case, the emotion that gets in the way is sadness, recalling the grief over personal losses that she expresses in the first stanza.
Finally, the speaker identifies the last loss as one of her daughters—not a child who has died, but one who has run “off with her European lover” and is now an “unbelonger” to her mother’s world. The speaker’s sarcasm is more caustic here, as she wants to know if the angels were merrily fluttering about, or “whirligiging,” over the luggage of the runaway lovers and whether these secret agents of God gave their official approval (“imprimatur”) of the escape. The speaker stresses the painfulness of losing her daughter this way by comparing it to losing her friend and father through death. But with her child, it is “death-by-separation.”
Lines 43–48 To further explain her position, the speaker ends the third stanza with a reference to being in the airplane flying over Boston with the sun now set. This time, the speaker provides a clearer view of the cause of her grief, and she admits her own role in it. Not only does the speaker long to have back the loved ones now gone, but she also wants a chance to re-live part of her own life so that she “can do it better.”
Lines 49–53 In the fourth stanza, the speaker identifies the people she alludes to in line 8 as “my losses.” These first five lines refer presumably to Anne Sexton, Kumin’s “best friend” who “did herself in” not long after the two had shared lunch on Sexton’s last day. The questions posed to the angels throughout this stanza are both rhetorical and accusatory, as the speaker essentially demands to know where they were—and, ultimately, what they did to help—when all these bad things were taking place. In her friend’s case, the speaker wants to know if the angels caught “some nuance” in their conversation that day, some little hint at what the friend was about to do that the speaker herself did not detect.
Lines 54–57 The second person identified is the speaker’s father who apparently died of heart failure with the speaker at his side. Here, the speaker accuses the angels of doing nothing to “ease [him] out / of his cardiac arrest” while she sat by the hospital bed “holding his hand.”
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Lines 65–68 In the final stanza of the poem, the speaker stops asking questions and simply addresses the angels regarding her own thoughts on their existence, her own opinion on whether their presence bears any significance. These first four lines imply that they are not significant at all. Even if they do exist, she finds “no consolation” in it because they spend their time “helplessly observing” instead of intervening to make things better. Calling them members of a “sacred CIA” is parallel to her initial descriptor of “God’s secret agents.”
Lines 69–71 These three lines reiterate the speaker’s physical environment while all the thoughts of grief and losses and angels are going through her mind. They also serve to lighten the mood with ironic humor in describing invisible angels as “flattened / against the Fasten Your Seatbelt sign” or “hugging” the toilet bowl in the plane’s restroom, obviously not keen on this kind of flying. But, in spite of the brief levity, Kumin ends the poem with a more somber observance.
Lines 72–74 The final three lines reflect the speaker’s resolve for the human condition, with or without angels. “[E]ach one of us,” she claims, is a “prisoner” of our own lives, “locked up” within the events of “our own story” and, apparently, helpless in preventing the tragedies that occur. While this conclusion may seem to express only pessimism and hopelessness, one who knows much about Kumin and her work understands that there is more than human doom reflected here. This poem is about survival. Even locked inside it, the speaker determines to overcome whatever the outside world throws her way.
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Topics for Further Study • What creation myth may Kumin have in mind in the first stanza of the poem? What similar cultures or myth is this associated with and why do many creation stories span so many different cultures and time periods? • Kumin and Sexton were close friends and fellow poets, yet their work is remarkably different. Discuss some differences in theme, voice, and style, and also try to note similarities. • What world religions include the presence of angels in their doctrines? Discuss some of them, if any, that address Kumin’s contention that heavenly beings are unable to help when humans need it most. • If you have had a pet or favorite animal in your life, describe what effect the animal had or has on your own human behavior, moods, or attitudes.
direct parallel to the old creation legend she has just described. In other words, she has simply turned from one myth to another, from giant fish to “[n]ow angels,” noting only a difference in time, not truthfulness. The mocking tone of the rest of the second stanza supports the notion that angels are only imaginary creatures, and this address to them is little more than an exercise in wry humor. Yet, the tone changes in the second half of the poem when the speaker becomes resigned to the idea that there are no answers to her questions. If one can take the first sentence of the final stanza at face value, then the phrase “knowing you’re around” must disclose the speaker’s true belief in the matter. Angels do exist. She knows it. If the issue, or the struggle, is resolved so easily, however, then why all the agonizing over it? Why torture herself with memories of how her friend and her father died, how her daughter disappeared, if she admits believing in “God’s secret agents” but takes “no consolation” in it? Perhaps these are just more unanswerable questions, but one thing is clear: it is the struggle itself that makes this such a powerful theme in Kumin’s work. Which side the speaker ends up on is not the point. That she is caught up in the flux is.
Animals and Humankind
Themes Religious Faith versus Human Will The most dominant theme in this poem is the human struggle between acceptance and denial of a higher power, between the longing to believe in something and the individual willpower to go it alone. The simple fact of the title implies that the speaker at least allows for the possibility of unworldly beings or else there would be no “angels” to “address.” However, the irony and doubt that permeate this poem are unmistakable, and one cannot be sure, even in the end, which side of the struggle the speaker winds up on. The first indication that the speaker denies the existence of angels is at the end of the first stanza and beginning of the second. The former closes with the description of a creation myth, one involving a giant fish, a flat earth, and a big black gulf for sinners, a fanciful tale whose purpose and value lie far outside the realm of reality. The first line of the second stanza may seem like an abrupt shift in thought, but perhaps Kumin intends it as a
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A secondary theme in this work turns up as a major one in many of Kumin’s poems, but, here, the role of animals in human life acts as a backdrop for the larger issue of the human response to religion. Kumin essentially uses the images and situations of the chipmunk, cat, and pony to emphasize the odd, unhelpful behavior of angels who stand by and watch while the animals suffer. These four-legged creatures are important for another reason as well: they “are honest through their inability / to lie.” In singling out the animals as honest, Kumin is actually saying that humans, as well as angels, are not. When a horse or a chipmunk is suffering, one knows it, but, of human beings, she asks, “Who knows how much or how little / anyone suffers?” Only imminent death may make a human “come clean,” but animals are innocent throughout their lives, innocent of harboring ill will, innocent of theft and murder, innocent of cheating and lying. Notice, though, that the poem points out animals’ inability to lie, suggesting that if they could, they would. More likely, Kumin’s implication is directed toward humans: they can and, so, they do. The poet makes one other subtle comment on the role of animals, found tucked within the cre-
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ation myth of the first stanza. In pointing out the difference between the old days when people knew their “places / on the planet” and contemporary times when technology has enabled mankind to leave the ground, Kumin notes that people were not alone way back when. Instead, they “walked distances / or went by horse.” Including the horse in a lamentation on how much better life was when humans were at peace with nature is not just to show the animal’s function as a mode of transportation. Rather, it points to the role of the animal in helping to keep its two-legged master grounded.
Style Contemporary Free Verse The poem is written in contemporary free verse, though it is not without some standard poetic crafting by the poet. Kumin uses alliteration (like-sounding consonants or vowels) and a few subtle slant-rhymes that may go unnoticed on a first-read. Note the repetition of the s sound in the first two lines with the words “sunset,” “city,” “seems,” and “sun.” In line 3, there are likesounding vowels in “pin” and “rim,” and the consonant r in “rim” is paired with “round” in the following line. Samples of alliteration like these are found throughout the poem, such as “barn,” “blundering,” and “boil” in the second stanza; “compulsion,” “come clean,” and “criterion,” in the third; and “some sacred CIA” in the final. Because the poem has no specific rhythm, the rhymes that it contains are not as obvious as those in a tightly structured and metered poem. In the first stanza, “round” and “down” are not so subtle, but “distances” and “places” sound good together even though their connection is not as apparent. The same may be said for “beast” and “past” in the second stanza, “out,” “wet,” and “bed” in the third, and “European lover” and “an unbelonger” in the fourth. The rhymes are not exact, but the words used together provide an appealing rhythm. Probably the most intriguing rhyme comes at the very end of the poem where “lavatory” is paired with “our own story,” a small bit of humor, courtesy of style.
Historical Context The decade of the 1970s was one of personal tragedy for Kumin, and defining her work during
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this period within its cultural or historical context seems to belie the real anguish of its inspiration. The latter part of the period is not remembered as a time of grieving in American history, nor was the country experiencing the social turmoil and violence that had rocked it during the previous decade. Instead, there was disco music and the smiley face, platform shoes and leisure suits, feminism, shopping malls, and Archie Bunker. There was personal analysis instead of social consciousness, and the Watergate scandal in Washington became must-see TV around the nation. In short, the 1970s is remembered as a time when the counterculture became the no-culture. In spite of the narcissism and triviality that tended to rule the 1970s, the period was not without its share of social adversity and historical significance. It saw the end of the Vietnam War, though few heralded the occasion with little more than contempt for America’s involvement in the first place. Citizens turned away in grief at the loss of human life, and politicians who had supported the conflict turned away in shame at North Vietnam’s victory. President Nixon had already lost favor with many Americans for keeping the country in the conflict, so, when his role in the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up was made public, much of the nation’s citizens wanted to see him gone from the presidency. Nixon resigned from office in 1974. There were three presidential administrations during the 1970s—Nixon, Ford, and Carter—and all three attempted to bring about serious reforms in domestic and foreign policy, sharing an ideology on several issues despite the difference of political parties. All three were rebuffed by the American public. The idea of abandoning Cold War policy and sharing more geopolitical equality with the Soviet Union did not sit well with many Americans and neither did the prospect of sharing economic equality with Europe and Japan. Regardless of the presidents’ proposals for developing a more realistic economy and for re-positioning the United States in a world no longer willing to accept it as the sole leading nation, most citizens saw the new reforms as only fruitless compromises that weakened America’s status. The election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980 was a testament to this belief. Reagan demanded a victory in the Cold War and supported maintaining U.S. global leadership. His staunch, hard-line approach appealed to an American public emerging from two decades of a society gone wildly away from old-fashioned values and conservative politics. It seemed that the
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Compare & Contrast • 1970s: In 1978, cult leader Jim Jones is exposed for the mistreatment of hundreds of followers at his religious community in Jonestown, Guyana. As a result, Jones coerces community members to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, and 911 people die. Today: While religious cults still proliferate around the globe, more attention today is placed on the major religions of the world, both for their growth in members as well as their role in political activity. • 1970s: By the late 1970s, American youth (ages 15–24) suicide rates have increased more than 200 percent over the 1950s, ranking suicide as third in the leading causes of death for this age group. Today: Suicide rates for American youth have remained stable or slightly decreased since the
nation was suddenly saying “enough is enough” to liberal social and economic reforms and hello to the 1950s again. Regardless of whether one remembers the 1970s for Vietnam and Watergate or disco music and platform shoes, each individual may also recall the decade for something painful and sorrowful. After all, as Kumin points out in her poem, “each one of us” is ultimately “locked up in our own story.”
Critical Overview Kumin did not begin publishing poetry until she was in her mid-thirties, but in the decades since then she has produced many volumes of works across several genres and has done so with the admiration and respect of scholars, critics, and readers in general. In particular, Kumin is noted for her ability to defy a specific poetic category. Even
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1970s, but elderly adults have suicide rates more than 50 percent higher than that of the nation as a whole. • 1970s: Legislation to require the teaching of creation science is introduced in more than 20 states, but only Arkansas and Louisiana pass such laws. Both are struck down by federal courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court uses the Louisiana case Edwards v. Aguillard to prohibit the mandating of teaching creationism in public schools. Today: A recent public opinion poll, conducted by the People for the American Way Foundation, finds that most Americans want Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution taught in public schools and reject the notion that the evolution versus creationism debate is an “either-or” choice for educators. Only 20 percent think that evolution alone should be taught, and only 16 percent favor teaching creationism only.
though she consistently pays attention to the minute details of everyday life, from human idiosyncrasies to animal behavior, to the glory of plants and vegetables, she is not just a nature poet. Kumin writes much about the personal events of her life, though she is not just a confessional poet. As poet Neil Bowers writes in his essay “Poised in the Galloping Moment,” included in Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin, “The central brilliance of Maxine Kumin’s work is its refusal to be boxed and labeled. She is pastoral, yes, but also confessional, though not in the usual way; formal, too, but not rigidly so.” In his essay titled “The Retrieval System,” from the same collection, poet Mark Jarman says that “Maxine Kumin seems to be the kind of poet who feels compelled by the large themes and has written compellingly about them. Yet her essential poems, with their personal, odd uniqueness, look elsewhere, into surprising conjunctions.” Perhaps no critic has captured the essence of Kumin’s work better than Philip Booth who claims in “Maxine Kumin’s Survival,” an
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article for American Poetry Review published in 1978, that The Retrieval System proves Kumin “has simply gotten better and better at what she has always been good at: a resonant language, an autobiographical immediacy, unsystematized intelligence, and radical compassion.”
Criticism Pamela Steed Hill Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. In the following essay, Hill considers Kumin’s poem for its profound sorrow based on the ultimate aloneness of the individual. The sentiments expressed in “Address to the Angels” are neither difficult to grasp nor hard to sympathize with regardless of one’s religious beliefs. Some critics have speculated on Kumin’s reported atheism, but no one seems to have landed on a definitive declaration of such from the poet herself. Others may argue that this poem has little to do with spirituality and that it is more of an attempt to come to grips with personal tragedy outside the realm of faith in a supreme being. What is definite is that Kumin is noted for her themes on survival and human willpower, and one could reasonably argue that those are the central issues in this poem. One could also make a case for the poem’s thematic irony and wit, even for the threads of humor that serve to string together the more somber or bitter observances. But do these human feats and emotions convey the full realm of everything the work intends to express? Do they even touch on its most crucial point? No. And the reason lies in its dark conclusion. The final three lines of this poem extinguish life from the other seventy-one. No matter how clever, how vibrant, or even how cynical the language and messages become throughout the work, its ending is profoundly sorrowful. Here, angels, real or imagined, are useless, as is apparently every other human attempt to connect to something higher, some superior being whose presence may be a comfort to a troubled human. The conclusion is that “each one of us” is “our own / prisoner.” Each individual is “locked up in our own story.” In other words, there is no hope of finding help outside the individual mind or beyond the capabilities of individual human will, and the key words that
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While the dismal concentration on personal grief in the third stanza may seem to foretell a dismal ending, it is still surrounded by too many possibilities for hope to be wholly indicative of such a conclusion.”
define the ultimate state of each human are “prisoner” and “locked up.” This sad resolve comes as some surprise at the end of “Address to the Angels,” for it is not hinted at earlier in the poem. One may say that when the speaker talks about being “up here grieving” as she describes the pony’s suffering while idle angels look on and counts off her losses in the fourth stanza, she foreshadows a pessimistic end to the poem. Yet each point is offset by a counterpoint, suggesting that the speaker may reach some reconciliation with her elusive subjects, some kind of understanding of what their purpose is and why they do not seem to be of much help when it is needed most. The speaker immediately follows her pronouncement of grief with an allusion to a creation story containing a judgment day, doomed sinners and, presumably, saved believers, and a longing for a better time when humans are more in tune with the world around them. This may not be on par with a happy fairy tale, but neither does it condemn the human being to total isolation. Likewise, in spite of her pony’s agony, the speaker still wants to believe that “six equine angels” provide a little comfort for him, even if they cannot relieve him of his pain. The bitterness of the fourth stanza is followed by a statement that at least confirms the speaker’s acceptance of the existence of otherworldly beings, even if she finds “no consolation” in it. The phrase “knowing you’re around” implies that there is room for a relationship to develop, later if not now. However, all of these counterpoints are negated by the final three lines, lines that make room only for the ultimate aloneness of the individual.
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If any part of the poem reflects even a small glimmer of such a sorrowful outlook, it may be the third stanza, the middle of the work that offers more philosophical musing than concrete description. Just the question that opens it—“Who knows how much or little / anyone suffers?”—suggests a morbid contemplation on the human condition. The fact that this feeling is reserved for humans is made clear in the immediate juxtaposition of how animals handle their own suffering. Animals are “honest” about it, neither concealing nor exaggerating the amount of emotional or physical pain they are in. “Man,” Kumin says, “has a compulsion to come clean,” particularly in his final moments of life. Here again, the theme appears to be about making connections, about the human desire and need to find solace in a supreme being, one who may forgive all sins and save the dying person’s soul before the body dies. Why should any of these suppositions be included in the speaker’s dialogue with angels if the purpose of these beings is categorically removed from the human’s? Is her dialogue really only a monologue? If that is the case, and if she is essentially “locked up” in her own “story,” then it is a regrettable place to be held “prisoner.” Note what her story entails: “Always / I think that no one can be sadder than I am.” Granted, this statement smacks of hyperbole, for one can usually find a less fortunate, “sadder” human being than oneself; however, the sentiment is founded on real feelings. If the speaker always feels that she is the saddest person on earth, that thought surely creates aloneness. If the only way to overcome the sadness is to get “part of [her] life back” in order to “do it over,” that desire is obviously in vain. While the dismal concentration on personal grief in the third stanza may seem to foretell a dismal ending, it is still surrounded by too many possibilities for hope to be wholly indicative of such a conclusion. There is still one possible option regarding the poem’s ending worthy of consideration. Perhaps the poet did not intend for it to be pessimistic at all. Perhaps its apparent sorrowfulness is really no such thing in the mind of the speaker. As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Kumin is a survivor, both in her personal life and her poetic life. Her dominant themes reflect the power of the human will, and she is living proof that it works. So, when the speaker declares in “Address to the Angels” that having “God’s secret agents” around is no consolation, even when they are with humans in their everyday lives around the house or on airplanes or anywhere else, Kumin does not necessarily mean that to be a bad thing.
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Perhaps being “locked up in our own story” is as it should be, with each individual committed to personal strength and personal resolve with no need of divine intervention. This reasoning would definitely be in keeping with a poet who does not claim any particular religious belief or any tendency toward finding one. The flippant, if not sarcastic, depictions that precede the final three lines of the poem may simply imply a tongue-in-cheek observation of the futility of angels. Highlighting the ineptness of these supposed supernatural creatures could be merely an effective way of pointing out the more realistic powers of the human mind. After all, portraying angels as less-than-noble “sacred CIA. . . . flattened / against the Fasten Your Seatbelt sign” in the airplane does not paint a very respectable picture of them; rather, this depiction is laughable. One may reasonably assume that the poem’s main theme is the survival of human will and the uselessness of a power beyond it. If this is indeed the intention, Kumin’s success in expressing it is debatable at best. The fact that the conclusion is difficult to swallow simply cannot be ignored. “Address to the Angels” is suffused with ironies, but perhaps the most important one lies outside the single poem and within the creation of poetry in general. Kumin’s work is a wonderful example of how this genre can both perceive and deceive at once; how it can appear straightforward and still be convoluted; how it can use a short form to cause long arguments usually left unresolved. These points are not meant to confuse the reader but to stimulate healthy intellectual debate and force a pause in first assumptions. While the belief here is that the conclusion of this poem is full of sorrow because it leaves the human being alone in the universe, one may also read it as a positive outcome if one has knowledge of typical Kumin themes. The bottom line is that one should read the poem with an open mind. Whether the ultimate aloneness of the individual is a good thing or a sad thing will always be left up, ironically, to the individual—yet another paradox in a work summarily based on them. Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “Address to the Angels,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Diane Wakoski In the following essay, Wakoski gives a useful overview of Kumin’s poetic and worldly philosophy, discussing how Kumin’s naturalistic poetry helps sustain the poet throughout the evolution of her life.
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Maxine Kumin, who jokingly has referred to herself, the earth motherly nature poet, as “Roberta Frost,” at first may seem to possess a very simple sense of the physical world. But she is a metaphysician too. Her best collection of poems, The Retrieval System, explores ideas that make the notion of death acceptable. Much has been made of her close friendship with Anne Sexton, but its literary importance probably resides in forcing Kumin to leap out of her comfortable physical world of family and benevolent nature into a craggier world and personality, more like that of curmudgeonly Robert Frost. Earth mythology is always about use and misuse. Thus, the concerns of Kumin as a person become central to the concerns of any twentieth-century of the world: how can we survive the autumn, the “fall,” of our misused earth? In “Grappling in the Central Blue” Kumin offers this ongoing theme in her poetry: Let us eat of the inland oyster. Let its fragrance intoxicate us into almost believing that staying on is possible again this year in benevolent blue October.
Over the years some of Kumin’s best poems have concerned her children and her Demeter-like role, grieving the loss of them as they grow up, but what is most compelling is that she never accepts the impossibility of return, even if it be through magic or metaphysics. Body is as transformable as any other matter. She shows in “Seeing the Bones” her willingness to accept the pain of evolution— This year again the bruise-colored oak hangs on eating my heart out with its slow change
—but she insists on the myth and magic that make return, retrieval, and reincarnation possible. She concludes the poem with the ritual of reconstructing her lost daughter from old artifacts: I do the same things day by day. They steady me against the wrong turn, . . . Working backward I reconstruct you.
The charm with which Kumin works out her belief in worldly return is captured in many poems, including “The Retrieval System” (“It begins with my dog, now dead, who all his long life / carried about in his head the brown eyes of my father”). In “On Reading an Old Baedeker in Schloss Leopoldskron,” a typical and lovely Kumin poem (“Soft as beetpulp, the cover / of this ancient Baedeker”), she speaks of the ongoingness of the world, with both
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In addition to her rich and smooth wit, Kumin’s greatest skill is to make images, wonderful images, that turn into big metaphors.”
people and “swans / in their ninetieth generation” returning often. In “Primitivism Exhibit” she returns to the theme of a retrieval system: Longest I look at the dread dog fetish, whose spiky back is built of rusty razorblades that World War II GI’s let drop on atolls in the South Pacific they were securing from the Japs who did not shave, but only plucked stray hairs from chin and jaw. I like the way he makes a funky art out of cosmetic junk standing the cutting edge of old steel up straight to say, World, get off my back.
Kumin believes in animal species and sees the human animal as having a chance for survival, as in “In the Park”: You have forty-nine days between death and rebirth if you’re a Buddhist. Even the smallest soul could swim the English Channel in that time
The best of Kumin’s poems, like this one, maintain a cool humor and charm. In addition to her rich and smooth wit, Kumin’s greatest skill is to make images, wonderful images, that turn into big metaphors. Playing with dualities and manipulating everyday language so that it works with the complexities of ideas and patterns, she invokes the irony that comes out of Dionysian tragedy. A few lines from “Marianne, My Mother, and Me” define Kumin’s poetry and her life: “We / must be as clear as our natural reticence / will allow.” The one thing that is clear throughout her substantial body of work is that she believes survival to be possible, if only through the proper use of the imagination to retrieve those things that are loved well enough. Source: Diane Wakoski, “Kumin, Maxine,” in Contemporary Poets, 7th ed., edited by Thomas Riggs, St. James Press, 2001, pp. 663–65.
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Susan Ludvigson In the following excerpt, Ludvigson writes about the range of Kumin’s poetry. Life may not be wholly rational, Maxine Kumin says in her poetry, but it is to some degree manageable. In a period when most contemporary poetry reflects a chaotic and meaningless universe, Kumin is one of a handful of poets who insist upon order—upon finding or creating meaning where others deny it exists. Working primarily in traditional poetic forms, Kumin structures her poems as a way of controlling her world. She says in a Massachusetts Review interview, “I think that there is an order to be discovered—that’s very often true in the natural world—but there is also an order that a human can impose on the chaos of events. That’s what writing poetry is all about. You begin with the chaos of impressions and feelings, this aura that overtakes you, that forces you to write. And, in the process of writing, as you marshall your arguments, as you marshall your metaphors really, as you pound and hammer the poem into shape and into form, the order—the marvelous informing order emerges from it.” While Kumin’s world is sometimes difficult, occasionally even nightmarish (her third book of poems is titled The Nightmare Factory, 1970), it is more often relatively ordinary; it is a world in which problems may be serious but rarely sensational. Though she is often linked with her friend Anne Sexton, Kumin is not, for the most part, a confessional poet. While the “I” of the poems is usually herself and the poems are frequently personal in tone and reference, Kumin consistently reaches beyond the self to an external reality as compelling—both to her and to the reader—as the journey inward. Kumin has been compared to Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop as well as to Anne Sexton: Lowell for his sense of tradition, both in form and in his emphasis on family, religion, and New England; Bishop for her attention to precise, objective detail; and Sexton for her focus on the personal, the introspective. But it is the tie between Kumin and Sexton that fascinates many readers. Because the two women were close friends who regularly sought each other’s advice about poems, critics have looked for and sometimes claimed to find mutual influence. Dabney Stuart says of one of Kumin’s recent collections: “It’s Anne Sexton . . . who presides over much of this book . . . over the sense of loss as a complex of need and weary sophistication, issuing sometimes in poems that treat the
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body lightly, as a composite of riddles.” Kumin and Sexton have denied such influence, however. In a 1974 interview with Women’s Studies, each claimed she never tampered with the other’s voice, and each offered, according to Sexton, “to think how to shape, how to make better, but not, how to make like me.” Kumin and Sexton do share a concern for the place of women in the world and for the intricate relationships between men and women. A few of Kumin’s poems belong vaguely in the confessional category, which she says “is part of a long and honorable tradition in poetry; the voice of the I. I think we have that in every age to some degree or other.” Like Sexton, Kumin began writing poetry as a kind of therapy, though she speaks of being “wretchedly discontented . . . and guilty about being discontented” rather than seriously distraught emotionally, as Sexton was. One of Sexton’s greatest contributions, says Kumin, was that “she made it possible for women to write about the quality of womanhood in a way that just could not have been taken seriously twenty years ago.” But despite a few common themes, Kumin’s range is considerably broader than her friend’s; and though Sexton wrote a good deal of formal verse, Kumin is more thoroughly committed to traditional poetic forms. Kumin believes the formal quality of much of her work is directly related to her degree of intimacy with the material. The more personal the subject matter, the more likely she is to depend on conventional devices. She explains, The tougher the form the easier it is for me to handle the poem, because the form gives permission to be very gut-honest about feelings. The curious thing for me is that rhyme makes me a better poet. Invariably I feel it does. This is a mystic notion, and I’m not by any stretch a mystic, but it’s almost as though I’m not capable of the level of language and metaphor that form enables me to achieve. It raises my language to heights that I wouldn’t be up to on my own. When I’m writing free verse, I feel as though I am in Indiana, where it’s absolutely flat and you can see the horizon 360 degrees around. You feel as though you have no eyelids, you can’t blink. I lose, I have no sense of, the line. There are people who work easily in this medium; they follow the breath rhythm and the normal pattern of speech. They feel totally at home and I feel totally bewildered. I have to be pretty comfortable about what I’m writing to write a freeverse poem; or else not terribly deeply involved. I almost always put some sort of formal stricture on a deeply-felt poem, maybe not rhyme, but at least a stanzaic pattern.
In Halfway (1961), her first collection, Kumin shows an early mastery of technique. Though her
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approach is cautious (some critics judge it boring), she deals skillfully with subjects that she continues to explore throughout her career: religious and cultural identity, the fragility of human life, loss and the ever-present threat of loss, the relation of man to nature. While the book received generally less enthusiastic reviews than most of her later work, there is considerable power in its more personal poems. In “One Dead Friend,” for example, grief over the loss of her friend K. C. Wang is as eloquent and poignant as in the later more nearly confessional poems about her father’s death. One of those “deeplyfelt” poems whose emotional content is kept in bounds by formal constraints, “One Dead Friend” employs rhyme and half-rhyme and a loose accentual rhythm. Here Kumin creates a poetic tension the reader recognizes as valid—a tension that reflects the conflict between the expression of sorrow and the need to come to terms with it, to “contain” it. Formerly a competitive swimmer, Kumin includes in this volume a number of poems about swimming, ranging from the playfully patterned “400-Meter Free Style,” which in its typographical arrangement resembles a swimmer’s laps down the length of the pool and back, to “Poem for My Son,” which uses swimming imagery to develop the theme of the child’s once-precarious hold on life and his mother’s inability to teach him more than the rudiments of survival. Recognizing that power over the lives of others—even one’s own children—is limited, that survival requires responsibility for the self, Kumin believes in letting go. Such relinquishing is necessarily difficult, requiring a conscious act of will on the part of the strong, whose natural impulse is always to protect others. Her own ease with water makes Kumin’s use of pool and sea symbols authentic and believable. In her excellent sestina “High Dive: A Variant,” the diver’s dread of every fall, however well prepared for or desired, is fully convincing. Kumin poses, through the metaphor of the diver, the poet’s consistent challenge: to perfect technical skills through diligent study and practice, and then to take chances—to attempt more than one can be sure of accomplishing, no matter how high the price of failure. Like the ripples circling the diver, the implications of the poem radiate outward—beyond diving, beyond poetry. Kumin suggests that any worthwhile accomplishment requires this extension past the knowable limits of experience. Such conscious risk taking, however exciting, is always fearsome. A major theme in her second book of poems, The Privilege (1965), is Kumin’s childhood am-
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Her forages into the troubled world of dreams, her complex and ambivalent attitudes toward nature and family, her unflinching confrontation with death—all these reveal Maxine Kumin as a writer whose human concerns and serious search for whatever we can discover of truth are the core of her poetry.”
bivalence toward religion. Her Jewish background is revealed as a source of minor conflict with her Catholic neighbors and of a more serious internal disquiet. In “Mother Rosarine” Kumin describes herself as a child who visited the convent next door “and swung on the door to His Kingdom / through which I did not dare pass,” saying she was “Wrong, born wrong for the convent games.” Finally, in the convent schoolroom, where she “sat alone with the varnished smell / of the scribbled desks, and dreamed of angels,” she found a rosary, stole it and slipped away, urgently longing for and, at the same time, resenting the world of the nuns. In another poem a legless man, grateful for the child-persona’s willingness to push his cart up the hill, pronounces her “a perfect Christian child.” Wanting to impress God and the sisters of “St. Joe,” the child has made a show of her good deed, but she is troubled by this inaccurate blessing. The poem ends with the guilty lines: “One day I said I was a Jew. / I wished I had. I wanted to. / The basket man is gone; the stone / I push uphill is all my own.” As an adult, Kumin has renounced formal religion. “Words are the only ‘holy’ for me. Any God that exists for me is in the typewriters keys.” But in the poems of The Privilege, religious identity is a crucial issue. Parent-child relationships are also at the heart of The Privilege; especially moving are evocations of the poet’s father, whose death she writes of in
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“The Pawnbroker.” Asked whether she tends to use an understated diction, a less “poetic” diction when she is dealing with intimate material, Kumin responds that she does. She says of that poem, “it did begin flatly. And it simply tells the details. It relies on a thickness of listing things to carry the notion. I wrote that elegy, ‘Pawnbroker,’ believe it or not, in syllabics as well as rhyme. That’s how terrified I was of writing it.” The series of love poems that comprises the final section of the book is particularly impressive. One of these, “January 25th,” celebrates the eventual return of spring and the ability of love tentatively to reassert itself. The final stanza is full of sparkling images: Now daylight the color of buttermilk tunnels through the coated glass. Lie still; lie close. Watch the sun pick splinters from the window flowers. Now under the ice, under twelve knee-deep layers of mud in last summer’s pond the packed hearts of peepers are beating barely, barely repeating themselves enough to hang on.
In this poem Kumin’s formal requirements are minimal. Only one true rhyme occurs in the stanza: beating, repeating. But the assonance, on, pond; still, milk; deep, peepers (which echoes beat, repeat), creates an irregular continuity of sound that assures the reader that things really do repeat: expectations will be fulfilled, spring will come, and love will revive. Renewal and love continue as themes in Kumin’s third collection, The Nightmare Factory. The book seems on the whole lighter than the title suggests, though the dark poems of the final section tend to distort that impression. Kumin says of the title poem, “I wrote it as a way of exorcizing a series of bad dreams about my recently dead father. I then had this fantasy that there is some distant Detroit-of-the-soul where all bad dreams are created, and out of the warehouse of goods, we are assigned certain recurrent nightmares.” The poem, which is the final one in the book, begins with the line “These are the dream machines,” and it goes on to chronicle nightmares of Nazis and cossacks, Klansmen and judases, and “postmen with babies stuffed in their mailsacks.” Michael True suggests Kumin is being pretentious here; that because she comes from an upper-middle-class, comfortably safe world, she has little experience with “sensational” topics. He also accuses her of indulging in self-pity as “a full-time occupation.” Such negative
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criticism is rare. More typical is R. D. Spector’s judgement that these are “wise poems, knowing in the ways of the world and the needs of the people.” The first section of The Nightmare Factory contains gentle and witty “Pasture Poems” about horses and cows and various aspects of country life. The second section, “Going From Here to There,” includes poems set in Amsterdam and Paris, in Boston and Washington, D.C. Some of the best pieces in the volume are found in section 3, “Tribal Poems,” which focuses on members of her family— children, parents, and great-grandfather. She speaks with awe of these people whose lives are central to her own, describing her daughter Jane in “The Fairest One of All” as one for whom there ought to be “slithers of satin / and diamonds buckled to your ears / And gold ropes cunningly knotted / under your breasts.” The poems celebrate the family, the tribe, whose Jewish heritage she is now comfortable in acknowledging: “Welcome ancestor, Rosenburg, The Tailor! / I choose to be a lifetime in your debt.” Section 4, “For Such a Man and Woman,” is a series of love poems, some joyous with fulfillment, some lamenting the fruitlessness of adultery. A typical poem in the latter category, “At the End of the Affair,” suggests that when a love affair must end, it should end destructively: “better to break glass, sop with towels, tear / snapshots up / pour whiskey down the drain . . .” Otherwise, the possibility of lapsing back is too great, and the conclusion will be the predictable “tangle in the same old snare / saying the little lies again.” Though adultery poems are fashionable among contemporary poets, often serving as vehicles for a more encompassing guilt, Kumin’s seem almost detached, as if she does not quite connect with the experience. In one poem, she claims the adultery she is describing is pure fantasy. Since evasion is not typical of Kumin, it is difficult to know whether she is merely reflecting current attitudes or expressing values she believes in. In either case, these poems are less convincing, less satisfying, than her more affirmative love poems. Finally, in section 5, “The Old Bad Times,” there are tough, sharp-edged poems of illness and pain and death. Up Country, Kumin’s fourth collection, won her the Pulitzer Prize. Centered in rural New England countryside, these poems respectfully call up images of Frost and Thoreau, whose spirits dominate the landscape. Using the mask of “the hermit,” Kumin presents a life in which “Nothing is sure / under this rooftree keel veed in / with rafter ribs.”
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What Do I Read Next? • Kumin’s collection of selected works from her first six books is called Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, and it includes “Address to the Angels.” Published in 1982, this book also contains previously unpublished poems and provides a good, overall look at the spectrum of Kumin’s work in the first two decades of her writing career.
• One of the most recent interviews with Kumin appeared in Atlantic Unbound, the online version of the Atlantic Monthly. Published on February 6, 2002, this interview by Erin Rogers, titled “The Art of Living,” is a candid talk with the poet as she comments on such various topics as her nearfatal horse-driving accident, Sexton’s death, and her own poetic response to September 11, 2001.
• Most readers who like Kumin’s poetry also enjoy Sexton’s, despite the obvious differences. The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton (1981) is the most comprehensive collection of Sexton’s poetry on the market. Fittingly, its foreword is written by Kumin.
• After journalist Pierre Jovanovic was suddenly thrown to the side by a mysterious force as a bullet crashed through the windshield of his car, he began an investigation into the presence of angels on earth. The result was An Inquiry into the Existence of Guardian Angels (1997).
Despite the unknowns, these poems end with the objective matter-of-factness of acceptance: “The hermit whistles as he picks. / Later he will put on his shirt / and walk to town for some cream.” Or: “He calls the old dog from the front stoop / and goes on walking his fences.” While Kumin’s view does not suggest a merging of the self with nature, it does insist on man’s affinity with the natural world. However uncomfortable he may sometimes be in this world, there is no better choice than to make his peace with it.
The poems of Up Country do not compromise. Never trivializing the experiences of rural New England life, Kumin celebrates their early importance. An old neighbor getting his first telephone, the first rain of spring, singing hymns to keep her swimming rhythm, picking dewberries—many of these lack thematic weight, but it is a testament to Kumin’s talent that she continually brings freshness and surprise to common subjects. Again, in House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate (1975), Kumin draws us to the wonders of the ordinary. Asked whether Louis Simpson’s description of an earlier book as “the attitudes and tone of prose in the form of verse” is an accurate assessment of her work, Kumin says she was not sure whether the statement is generally true. Yet in discussing House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, she admits, “if the naming and the particularizing of things is a function of prose more than it is of poetry, to that extent I do [agree with Simpson]. I think that the one thing that’s been consistently true about my poetry is this determination to get at that authenticity of detail. At the beginning of the book Kumin quotes Rilke, and then Louis Simpson quoting Rilke: “it is as though things are trying to express themselves through us. It may be, as a poet has said, we are here only to say house, bridge, fountain, gate.” The
Her unsentimental relationship with nature also allows Kumin to write poems like “Woodchucks” and “The Presence,” which are ostensibly “about” the necessary killing of woodchucks and mysterious tracks in the snow, but which chill us with her portrayal of man’s capacity for brutality. Reversing the man/nature role she sets up in the hermit poems, she shows man now asserting his sometimes irresponsible dominance over the natural world. In a straightforward poem on this subject, “The Vealers,” she presents a picture of newborn calves separated from their mothers after their first feeding and left to “bawl and doze sucking air” until, at ten weeks, they will be slaughtered so that humans may indulge their desire for “perfect flesh unstreaked with blood / or muscle.”
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quotation is essential to an understanding of her poems, for here Kumin presents her usual subjects without embellishment or interpretation. She catalogues cousins, childhood experiences, the lives of ancestors, encounters with fundamentalist Baptists in Kentucky, and her sense of kinship with both wild and domestic animals. In some, she presents collages of varied time sequences, in which the resulting pictures are frightening in their implications. “I can see that smart alec, Teddy / playing games behind the furnace / with Clara. They touch in the coal bin. / He gets ten smacks with the hairbrush / and his plane goes down in the Aleutians. / Arthur’s still sucking his thumb / the same arm he loses in Italy.” The psychic space between childhood and death, childhood and failure, is but a moment. Most of her cousins’ lives come to one or another kind of grief, and the speaker is left wondering what meaning to assign this apparently determined process. The relentless meter, with its three hard accents per line, reinforces the inevitability of the outcome, which extends beyond the tribe and suggests, more pessimistically than usual in Kumin, the fate of the entire family of man. Most reviewers applaud the book for its precision, its attention to detail, and its clear vision of life. Though Kumin relies a bit heavily on similes in these poems, her comparisons are remarkably evocative and startling: “her breasts fall down like pufferfish”; “the two foals sleep back to back / in the sun like one butterfly”; “Grandmother’s corset / spread out like a filleted fish.” Such inventive and accurate images elicit the reader’s admiration, no matter how densely they cluster. Whether she writes of the riddles of the body, the cruelty of scientific experiments with animals, the unreliability of anybody’s god, or her kinship with her favorite horse, the voice of House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate remains honest, modest, and convincing. The Retrieval System, published in 1978, is Kumin’s most recent book of poems. Now in her fifties, the “afternoon” of her life, she says, her poems reflect both the wisdom and the weariness of middle age. There is a certain resignation toward disappointment, especially in relation to her children, that was absent earlier. Poems about death— her dog’s, her father’s, Anne Sexton’s, and of course her own—are prominent. Yet even in these poems, Kumin’s balanced view is apparent: “When I’m scooped out of here / all things animal and unsurprised will carry on.”
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One of the most memorable poems in this collection occurs in the section devoted to her old neighbor. In “Henry Manley, Living Alone, Keeps Time,” she presents Henry as a victim of “sundowning . . . the way he loses words when the light fades.” Either as the result of a stroke or through the gradual disintegration of old age, Henry is frequently unable to remember nouns. The act of naming once again assumes crucial importance. In Henry’s troubled attempt to think of the words “window, wristwatch, cup, knife” is the echo of Kumin’s previous volume, House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate. Only by naming can man begin to know the nature of anything, to have any grasp of the real. The reader’s heart goes out to Henry when, after such loss, “Terror sweeps him from room to room.” At the end of the poem, when Henry retrieves the words for a while, “saying them over, able / to with only the slightest catch. / Coffee. Coffee cup. Watch,” the reader shares his relief and gratitude. The emphasis on naming, on words, on language generally is one of Kumin’s essential preoccupations, first to last. In a period when most poets are “playing tennis without a net,” as Robert Frost once said of the practice of free verse, Kumin’s intelligent, imaginative approach to form is richly satisfying. Her forages into the troubled world of dreams, her complex and ambivalent attitudes toward nature and family, her unflinching confrontation with death—all these reveal Maxine Kumin as a writer whose human concerns and serious search for whatever we can discover of truth are the core of her poetry. Yet it is equally true that much of her work can be characterized as Victor Howe aptly describes House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate: “Its goodness is the goodness of home-made bread, handknit socks, or a row of translucent jellies, distilled by an expert and put on the window sill for the sun to shine through.” Source: Susan Ludvigson, “Maxine Kumin,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 5, American Poets Since World War II, Part I: A–K, Gale Research, 1980, pp. 416–22.
Sybil P. Estess In the following essay, Estess explores Kumin’s The Retrieval System, regarding Kumin’s reaction to close friend Anne Sexton’s death and how that event stirred the feelings of loneliness and anger in “Address to the Angels.” The Retrieval System, Maxine Kumin’s sixth book of poetry, is about surviving loss. It confirms things many of us already knew about its author, a just-past-middle-age, increasingly refined, non-
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suicidal poet. The main value in both her life and her poetry is preservation. That which is retrieved in her system may be the simple life of fruits and vegetables or it may be something in her unconscious. But in The Retrieval System the things that most need to be recovered, savored and saved are the memories of those no longer within the poet’s physical reach. This is the primary kind of loss with which Kumin, in her mid-fifties, lives. Kumin’s courage in dealing with loss is evident in the poems written about her friend Ann Sexton who died in 1974. After a lunch of tuna sandwiches and vodka at Kumin’s Boston house, Sexton drove to her own garage and asphyxiated herself. From all accounts, especially Kumin’s— which she will be, as she says, “gathering up for years”—the friendship of these two women was extraordinary. Both came to writing late: Kumin at nearly thirty, pregnant with her third child, and Sexton around the same age, after her first mental breakdown. By the end of their time together they had shared much: the collaborative writing of several children’s books; the pain of Sexton’s ceaseless psychological strife; and their (remarkably different) poetry. In Boston, each had had a separate telephone installed for their daily, often daylong talks. Kumin remarked in a conversation with me, and later informed an interviewer, that these calls often lasted all day, beginning in the morning and continuing through temporary interruptions during which they kept each other “on the line” while each went about her routine. If either wished to resume the conversation she would whistle loudly into the receiver. In “Address to the Angels” Kumin writes of her deep loss at Sexton’s death: “Always / I think that no one / can be sadder than I am.” Although such pain is absolute, Kumin’s statement here is obviously exaggerated. Yet, as if to prepare for that blatant sentimentality, the poet precedes these lines with the admission that “Always it is passion that / confuses the issue.” In any case, by staying with this poem, a reader locates its more crucial substance: the loneliness and anger which result from surviving middle-age and feeling left alone. The poet protests the absence of “angels, God’s secret agents” who she is “assured by Billy Graham, / circulate among us to tell / the living they are not alone.” Such beings might have protected her against, or at least helped her bear, so terrible a burden, but did not. Job-like, Kumin asks, “Angels, where were you when / my best friend did herself in?”
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In any case, by staying with this poem, a reader locates its more crucial substance: the loneliness and anger which result from surviving middle-age and feeling left alone.”
“Progress Report,” another poem which deals with Kumin’s grief over Sexton’s death, begins with this long, sorrowful sentence: The middle age you wouldn’t wait for now falls on me, white as a caterpillar tent, white as the sleetfall from apple trees gone wild, petals that stick in my hair like confetti as I cut my way through clouds of gnats and blackflies in the woods.
Kumin suggests to Sexton, now on “the other side,” that “the idea of going on without you” seems so difficult that she might not be able to “carry on”: Dear friend, last night I dreamed you held a sensitive position, you were Life’s Counselor coming to the phone in Vaud or Bern, some terse one-syllable place, to tell me how to carry on.
But without Sexton’s advice, Kumin does go on, seemingly because she determines, over and over, to survive: and I woke into the summer solstice swearing I will break your absence into crumbs like the stump of a punky tree working its way down in the world’s evening down to the forest floor.
Kumin herself has stated that she wondered whether she would be able to write at all after Sexton died. But indeed she has, even after such loss, written some of her most plaintive poems. Philip Booth has rightly noted how “gently the ironies reverberate within” the “seeming facticity” of many lines from this book. We witness this
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phenomenon where subtle enjambment creates almost shocking irony, such as in “white / as a caterpillar tent, white / as the sleetfall from apple trees / gone wild . . . ” or in “swearing I will break / your absence into crumbs.” In such ways this poet cuts her linguistic path through grief, “through clouds / of gnats and backflies in the woods.” In the fourth section, “Body and Soul,” Kumin places two other poems about Sexton. In “How It Is,” a month after Sexton’s death Kumin is wearing a blue jacket her dead friend left, becoming, in the first strophe, her suicide friend. Hauntingly, the poem begins, “Shall I say how it is in your clothes?” Then snapshot-like lines tell the reader part of how it is: The dog at the center of my life recognizes you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic. In the left pocket, a hole. In the right, a parking ticket delivered up last August on Bay State Road. In my heart, a scatter like milkweed, a flinging from the pods of the soul. My skin presses your old outline. It is hot and dry inside.
The poem concludes by suggesting just how intense the heat, how dry the terrain is in that lonely interior within which Kumin endures without and with Sexton: I will be years gathering up our words, fishing out letters, snapshots, stains, leaning my ribs against this durable cloth to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.
“Gathering up,” “fishing out,” “leaning” are all downward motions which any solitary survivor recognizes as the person attempts to rebuild out of loss. More than this, what any poet works both with and against in order to attempt such a process is “dumbness.” Kumin’s metaphors transform pain into language, the essential groundwork for her ability to speak of and from Sexton’s death. Perhaps the saddest poem that Kumin writes about her recurring memories of Sexton is the complicated and chilling “Splitting Wood at Six Above.” As if she wishes unconsciously to postpone stating the grim finality of Sexton’s death, it is not until the third line in the second strophe of the poem that the poet tells the reader what the real subject matter is: “You are four months dead.” Until then, only the action of the title is described: I open a tree. In the stupefying cold —ice on bare flesh a scald— I seat the metal wedge with a few left-handed swipes, then with a change of grips lean into the eight-pound sledge.
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It’s muslin overhead. Snow falls as heavy as salt.
Finally, in the thirty-third line of the poem, Sexton is addressed: See you tomorrow, you said. You lied. We’re far from finished! I’m still talking to you (last night’s dream); we’ll split the phone bill. It’s expensive calling from the other side.
“Splitting Wood at Six Above” alludes, of course, to former telephone conversations, to how dreams help or don’t help Kumin work through memories, to her New England life which requires her to split wood to stay warm, and to a connection between the pain of “splitting wood” in six-degree weather and splitting a nightmare “phone bill,” which costs her much. The underlying thematic question of the poem, however, is what happens to the “soul” of something after death. For Kumin, people, like wood, are another kind of matter. (“Time will do this as fair / to hickory, birch, black oak . . .) Yet, “Even waking it seems / logical—” she writes, to assume that Sexton’s “small round / stubbornly airborne soul” ascended, and “none the worse for its trip,” arrived at “the other side.” Having likened the sound of the departing souls of the dead wood she splits to a single “flap” which rises, the poet mysteriously and appropriately ends the poem with a subtle metaphor for what haunts her most about Sexton’s death: “the sound of your going.” “Splitting Wood. . . . ” ends with five short, staccato lines: It is the sound of your going I drive into heartwood. I stack my quartered cuts bark down, open yellow-face up.
The chopping rhythm of this poem suggests the hard, flint-like reality of being split apart. The poem’s very creation is analogous to chopping wood, for the will to go ahead into what is cold and inhospitable is characteristic of the will to endure a New England winter, the will to survive the death of a friend, the will to metamorphose suffering into art. The language of “Splitting Wood” is cold, brittle. Only ten lies out of fifty-three do not end with a monosyllabic, accented word. A few of those words (“eyelash,” “ghost-puffs,” “tightrope”) comprise a spondaic foot. Others either end strongly (“puppet-squeak,” “combine”) or show the lightest sort of falling off (“nougat,” “stammer,” “hammer,” “calling”). Both rhythm and language re-
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trieve the experience of losing human contact, of being alone within the icy natural world. “Remembering Pearl Harbor at the Tutankhamen Exhibit,” also from the “Body and Soul” section, contrasts modern and ancient attitudes toward death. The poet wonders how many people in line with her to see the exhibit remember what became our planet’s most horrible descent into irretrievability, Pearl Harbor and the start of World War II. The poem proceeds to a denial that anything survives the thoroughness of modern destruction: . . . the king is conveyed with a case for his heart and another magnificent hinged apparatus, far too small, for his intestines, all in place, all considered retrievable whereas if one is to be blown apart over land or water back into the Nothingness that precedes light, it is better to go with the simplest detail: a cross, a dogtag, a clamshell.
A major question that Kumin and The Retrieval System pose seems to be “Is lost life, for contemporary people, retrievable?” Her answer is a qualified “Yes”: by imagination, and by metaphor, since metaphor allows imagination to emerge. The poet of the last lines of “Remembering Pearl Harbor” does not adhere to the belief in the resurrection of the body. But perhaps no American poet since Anne Bradstreet or Emily Dickinson— Kumin’s New England ancestors—has been so concerned with showing that soul, or Spirit, both exists and survives the body’s destruction. Stating in “Body and Soul: A Meditation” that she “ought to have paid closer / attention when Miss Bloomsberg / shepherded the entire fifth grade / into the Walk-Through Woman,” the poet remembers something curious about the experience: “there was nothing about the soul.” Kumin never locates the exact bodily home of psyche, yet she seems to think that souls are real: Still unlocated, drifting, my airmail half-ounce soul shows up from time to time like those old-fashioned doctors who used to cheer their patients in girls’ boarding schools with midnight bedside visits.
What The Retrieval System, like Kumin’s other books of poems, impresses us with is that only our unconscious and imaginative lives enable our bod-
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ies to house souls. On the other hand, Kumin, unlike Bradstreet or Dickinson, cannot imagine soul or Spirit apart from body or matter. In “The Excrement Poem,” Kumin writes, “I honor s— for saying: We go on.” For her, the body gives evidence that Spirit is. It is the body, therefore, that she fears to lose. In Kumin’s best poems, descriptions—even descriptions of relationships—are best communicated by metaphor, the most likely system of retrieval. Not surprisingly, of the two poems to her daughters (to whom this volume is dedicated) the more poignant is the more metaphoric “Seeing the Bones.” The mother receives “letters home that fall Fridays / in the box at the foot of the hill / saying the old news, keeping it neutral.” She remembers: In junior high your biology class boiled a chicken down into its bones four days at the simmer in my pot. then wired joint by joint the re-created hen in an anatomy project you stayed home from, sick.
Then, the real pain, the pain of loss, appears. “Thus am I afflicted, seeing the bones.” The final five lines of the poem read: Working backward I reconstruct you. Send me your baby teeth, some new nail parings and a hank of hair and let me do the rest. I’ll set the pot to boil.
In “The Envelope” Kumin speaks of the pleasing affection which daughters often have for their mothers, of the lasting models which women become for their female offspring, and, most of all, of the tentative consolation which these truths afford one who ponders the irretrievability of one’s mother’s life, or one’s own. Like those old pear-shaped Russian dolls that open at the middle to reveal another and another, down to the pea-sized, irreducible minim, may we carry our mothers forth in our bellies. My we, borne onward by our daughters, ride in the Envelope of Almost-Infinity, that chain letter good for the next twenty-five thousand days of our lives.
Even the nature poems in The Retrieval System, striking in their beauty or stirring in their forebodingness, reinforce the book’s central theme: the pain of loss. In “Territory” Kumin recounts the death of the toad mangled by the power mower: “... he goes on / lopsidedly hopping until his mother runs out.” “How It Goes On” concludes, The lamb, whose time has come, goes off in the cab of the dump truck, tied to the seat
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with baling twine, durable enough to bear her to the knife and rafter. O Lambs! The whole wolf-world sits down to eat and cleans its muzzle after.
Even poems which appear, at first, simply pastoral actually deal with either the acceptance of or strife against the life-death cycle that nature dramatizes. “July, Against Hunger,” an evocative description of haying time on a farm, proceeds in Proustian fashion as “The smell collects, elusive, sweet,” into the poet’s particular recollections of gray nights flicked with the snake tongue of heat lightning, when the grownups sat late on the side porch talking politics, foreclosures, war, and Roosevelt.
The poem’s second strophe deals with the irretrievable losses of middle age as well as with the confusing yet inevitable merging of past and present as one grows older: Loneliness fills me like a pitcher. The old deaths dribble out . . . . .... .... .... ...... . Meanwhile, a new life kicks in the mare. Meanwhile, the poised sky opens on rain. The time on either side of now stands fast glinting like jagged window glass.
The poem’s final sentences are defiant—as if to strike back at the mental and spiritual hunger of this July: There are limits, my God, to what I can heft in this heat! Clearly, the Great Rat waits, who comes all winter to gnaw on iron or wood, and tears the last flesh from the bone.
But if “July, Against Hunger” protests loss, the final poems in the book are beautiful representations of what it means to accept how the natural world retrieves itself. After describing the many serendipitous mortal things which surprise with joy or horrify with their “naturalness”—a frog in the old outdoor bathtub; two white-throated sparrows, singing; a dog which “brings in one half a rank / woodchuck no angel spoke up for”—Kumin ends the final poem in the book, “A Mortal Day of No Surprises,” with thirteen lucky lines. They sum up some of her acceptance of the potentials for and limitations of mortal retrievability: When I’m scooped out of here all things animal and unsurprised will carry on. Frogs still will fall into those stained old tubs we fill with trickles from the garden hose. Another blue-green prince will sit like a friend of the family guarding the doomspout.
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Him asquat at the drainhole, me gone to crumbs in the ground and someone else’s mare to call to the stallion.
In a poet’s sixth book, we expect wise and purposeful construction. Within The Retrieval System, a sure and satisfying connection exists between the poems concerning Anne Sexton’s death and those devoted to a portrait of Henry Manley, Kumin’s rural neighbor. Henry Manley represents one who endures. He is a “rich example” of how to live a soul-building life. Manley does not suffer Kumin’s kind of pain from loss, because he is even more connected to the natural world. In “The Food Chain” the poet describes Henry filling her pond with a “double tub of brookies” and warning her against kingfishers (of which he would rid himself with his air rifle) and martens: He stands there, busy with his wrists, and looking savage. Knowing he knows we’ll hook his brookies once they’re a sporting size, I try for something but all the words stay netted in my mouth. Henry waves, guns the engine. His wheels spin then catch.
The last poem of the Manley sequence, “Henry Manley, Living Alone, Keeps Time,” describes how life, for the aging, narrows to the essentials. For Henry these are, ultimately, “Coffee. Coffee Cup. Watch.” Henry sits stiff at the bruised porcelain table saying them over, able to with only the slightest catch.
But even though “Terror sweeps him from room to room,” Henry Manley seems to dwell with more submission to his fate than does metropolitan man: Knowing how much he weighed once he knows how much he has departed his life. Especially he knows how the soul can slip out of the body unannounced like that helium-filled balloon he opened his fingers on, years back.
There are dimensions of the poems in The Retrieval System which are more brilliantly “Kuminesque” than ever before: a language musical and lyrical, yet tough; reality re-imagined, as metaphor; a nearly fearless excavation into the unconscious; an attempt to make matter more palatable by locating spirit. Some of the poems here show flaws, of course. I notice most the occasional, forced tropes. It is arbitrary, for example, to compare time to a puppy (in “Waiting Inland”), and heavy-
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handed to say that one’s time is like “unwashed dogfood cans” (“Progress Report”). Occasionally, there are lines which are much too flat, even when they are intended to represent a flaccidity or emptiness within the subject matter or theme of the poem. The lines ending “Remembering Pearl Harbor at the Tutankhamen Exhibit,” already quoted, fall into this category. Another example of this shortcoming occurs at the end of “Making the Connection”: Brother, Brother Dog, is that who you were? Is that who I was?
But the majority of Kumin’s poems work well. Most of her music is fine, her ear for rhyme, and for the combination of melodious sounds, excellent. Listen, for instance, to the pleasing consonant consistencies, alliterations, and line breaks which create the right rhythms to describe a peaceful pastoral scene in its demise—the first strophe of “The Henry Manley Blues”: Henry Manley’s house, unpainted for eighty years, shrinks as attached sheds crease and fold like paper wings. An elm tree sheers the sitting porch off in a winter storm. And Henry’s fields are going under, where the beavers have shut down a local stream flooding his one cash crop, neat rows of pines he’d planned to harvest for Christmases to come. Their tips are beanpoles now, sticking up through ice. We skate on the newborn pond, we thump on the roof of the lodge and squat there, listening for life.
Maxine Kumin’s life, as she knows, and her writing career, is indeed past its mid-point. Her poems in The Retrieval System are, in general, far better than those which she put in her first fine book, Halfway. Over twenty years later, Kumin’s mature vision of what it means to sustain one’s life is not only more compelling than it was in 1957, but her voice is less formal, more convincing, even more human, surely more “sincere.” More than Halfway, more than The Privilege (1965), more than The Nightmare Factory (1970), more, even, than Up Country (1972), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, more than House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate (1975), The Retrieval System will return to us and return us to Kumin’s compassion; her dry-eyed sensitivity; her exemplary choices to live on, even with pain, rather than to give up; her transformation of matter into spirit, body into soul. Perhaps these poems will be discovered to be the best system by which to retrieve Maxine Kumin in decades to come.
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Source: Sybil P. Estess, “Past Halfway: The Retrieval System, by Maxine Kumin,” in Iowa Review, Vol. 10, No. 4, Fall 1979, pp. 99–109.
Sources Booth, Philip, “Maxine Kumin’s Survival,” in the American Poetry Review, Vol. 7, No. 6, November–December 1978, pp. 18–19. Bowers, Neil, “Poised in the Galloping Moment,” in Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin, edited by Emily Grosholz, University Press of New England, 1997, pp. 60–73. Jarman, Mark, “The Retrieval System,” in Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin, edited by Emily Grosholz, University Press of New England, 1997, pp. 92–97. Kumin, Maxine, The Retrieval System, Viking Press, 1978.
Further Reading Agran, Rick, Hildred Crill, and Mark DeCarteret, eds., Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets, Oyster River Press, 1999. As the title suggests, this book collects the work of poets who possess a certain New England quality in their work, including Kumin. Kumin, also writing the introduction, says that along with the “roses or lilies” contained in the collection, one will also find “thistles . . . and bind weed, even the . . . sting of nettle, which is as it should be.” This is a good look at poets from this region of the United States. Grosholz, Emily, ed., Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin, University Press of New England, 1997. This book is a must-read for Kumin fans. Its comprehensive essays by fellow poets are wonderfully written and provide a thorough look at Kumin’s poetry from the early days through the late 1990s. Kumin, Maxine, Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry, Copper Canyon Press, 2000. This recent collection of essays offers an intriguing look at the various elements of Kumin’s life, from contemporary country living to her friendship with Sexton. The prose is insightful, humorous, and easily accessible to all readers. —, In Deep, Viking Penguin Inc., 1987. Anyone who wants to understand where Kumin and her poetry really come from should read this collection of prose pieces. The subtitle and content of such titles as “Life on a Hill,” “The Mushroom Hunt,” “Two Foals,” and “The Poet and the Mule” emphasize the true inspiration for her work.
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The Afterlife Billy Collins 1991
“The Afterlife” was first published in Poetry magazine and is included in Billy Collins’s 1991 collection Questions about Angels, where it appears midway through the second section just before “The Dead.” It also appears in Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001) and is on Collins’s compact disc recording, The Best Cigarette (1997). The poem describes the speaker’s fantasies of what would happen if everyone, when they died, experienced the afterlife they believed in when they were alive. Like many of Collins’s poems, “The Afterlife” is rife with humor and a wry sense of the unusual. Life after death is a serious subject and one widely addressed in poetry, perhaps most famously in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Here, Collins deflates the gravity of the subject by poking fun at the ways in which people have imagined the afterlife. In nine free-verse stanzas, the speaker describes what comes after death for various types of Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and the agnostic. Collins draws on religious stereotypes and figures from popular culture for his imagery, creating a kind of “cartoonish” feel in the poem. This style fits the context, however, as the descriptions have the feel of a daydream and are interspersed with the images of a person preparing for bed and waking in the morning.
Author Biography In the early 1990s, Billy Collins became a major figure in the public imagination and, in the last ten
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years, has become arguably one of the most popular living poets in the United States, signing a sixfigure book contract with Random House and being named as the 11th U.S. Poet Laureate in 2001. William Collins was born in New York City on March 22, 1941, to William Collins, an electrician, and Katherine Collins, a nurse. He was educated at College of the Holy Cross, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1963 and at the University of California, where he received his doctorate in English in 1971. That same year, Collins accepted a position as assistant professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, and his first collection, Pokerface, was released in 1977 by Kenmore, a very small press. It was not until 1991, when Collins’s third collection of poems, Questions about Angels, was selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series that the poet began to develop a national reputation. Collins’s smooth and charismatic reading style proved a perfect fit for National Public Radio, where he frequently read his poems on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion radio program. In poems such as “The Afterlife” and “Questions about Angels,” Collins exploits traditionally serious subject matter like death and religion for a chuckle. However, his humorous approach to poetry is not popular with everyone. Although he has been hailed by many critics as the next Robert Frost—a poet who appeals to academic audiences as well as to the general public—Collins has also been labeled a writer of “light verse” and criticized for his sometimes comic tone. A tireless promoter of his writing and an advocate for poetry in the schools, Collins has won his share of awards. His 1995 collection, The Art of Drowning, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and he has received grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1992, the New York Public Library chose Collins to serve as “Literary Lion.” Collins’s most recent collection is Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), which has been well-received.
Poem Text While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth, or riffling through a magazine in bed, the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.
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They are moving off in all imaginable directions, each according to his own private belief, and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal: that everyone is right, as it turns out. You go to the place you always thought you would go, the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head. Some are being shot up a funnel of flashing colors into a zone of light, white as January sun. Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other. Some have already joined the celestial choir and are singing as if they have been doing this forever, while the less inventive find themselves stuck in a big air-conditioned room full of food and chorus girls. Some are approaching the apartment of the female God, a woman in her forties with short wiry hair and glasses hanging from her neck by a string. With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door. There are those who are squeezing into the bodies of animals—eagles and leopards—and one trying on the skin of a monkey like a tight suit, ready to begin another life in a more simple key,
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Media Adaptations • Collins recorded a spoken word compact disc, The Best Cigarette (1997), with Cielo Publishing. The CD includes Collins reading “The Afterlife.”
while others float off into some benign vagueness, little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere. There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves. He will bring them to the mouth of a furious cave guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her threeheaded dog. The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins wishing they could return so they could learn Italian or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain. They wish they could wake in the morning like you and stand at a window examining the winter trees, every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
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Poem Summary Stanza 1 In the opening stanza of “The Afterlife,” the speaker addresses readers as “you,” observing that, as they prepare for sleep, others are dying and “setting out on their journey.” Journey, in this sense, refers to the experience of the soul after it leaves the body. Collins is drawing on various religious traditions that claim the physical body holds the essence of a person which is released upon death.
Stanza 2 The speaker sets up the frame for his depictions of the afterlife in the first sentence with the claim, “They are moving off in all imaginable directions.” The remainder of the poem charts those directions.
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The “silent Lazarus” the speaker refers to is from the New Testament. In the Book of John, Jesus raises Lazarus of Bethany from the dead, but Lazarus does not speak of his experience. The narrator suggests that Lazarus knew that the afterlife was different for everyone but kept it a secret. The “alcove in your head” mentioned in the stanza’s last line is a metaphor for the imagination, that faculty of the mind that can re-arrange perceptions and ideas.
Stanza 3 This stanza describes two popular views of the experience people have immediately following death. The first view comes from those who have literally died and have come back to life, via cardiopulmonary resuscitation or natural means. Such people frequently describe seeing a blinding white light and passing through a tunnel or tunnel-like shape. The second view is more explicitly Judeo-Christian in its imagery and involves a God who judges people by the life they have led, assigning them a place in heaven, which they reach via “a golden ladder,” or hell, which they reach via “a coal chute.”
Stanza 4 This stanza’s descriptions more explicitly evoke certain people by virtue of what they believe they deserve in the afterlife. The first two lines describe sanctimonious and self-righteous people who believe they have led a good and just life (by Christian standards). The third and fourth lines describe people who have lived lives pursuing material pleasures, as suggested by their fantasies of “a big air-conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.” The speaker refers to these people as “the less inventive,” showing his own bias.
Stanza 5 This stanza evokes a stereotype of a feminist who asserts that God is a woman. In describing a middle-aged woman in glasses looking through the peep hole of an apartment at the recently dead, Collins pokes fun at the image of single, independent and intellectual women who reject status quo thinking about God’s gender.
Stanza 6 This stanza refers to those, such as Hindus, who believe in reincarnation. Reincarnation, known in Sanskrit as “samsara,” is the idea that the immortal soul reenters flesh (i.e., reincarnates) to resolve the consequences of past actions. Those entering the bodies of animals have been reincarnated as these animals. Collins uses a musical metaphor
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when he says these souls are “ready to begin another life in a more simple key,” suggesting that human beings are burdened by their intellect and capacity to imagine.
Stanza 7 This description of the afterlife evokes some New Age explanations of what happens on a subatomic level after death. The description uses characteristically abstract language to describe an abstract phenomenon.
Stanza 8 In this stanza, Collins cobbles together references to a number of myths. “Classicists” refer to those who study Greek and Roman literature. The “mythological creature” alludes to any number of figures from classical mythology such as the unicorn. The three-headed dog the speaker mentions is Cerberus, a figure from Greek mythology who guards the gates of hell. Collins makes Edith Hamilton, a popular twentieth-century educator, writer, and historian who wrote well-known books such as The Greek Way (1930) and The Roman Way (1932), the owner of the dog.
Stanza 9 In this stanza, the speaker accounts for all those people not included in his other descriptions. Their desires for and dreams of the afterlife are pedestrian, consisting of a wish to visit the pyramids or learn Italian, to simply live again. The poem comes full circle in the last lines, as the speaker again addresses readers, who, unlike those he has described throughout the poem, are alive.
Topics for Further Study • Divide into groups. Each group takes a major religion or ideology represented in Collins’s poem (e.g., Hinduism, Christianity, feminism, etc.) and researches its position on the afterlife. Present your findings to the class and then discuss what Collins’s representations leave out. • Take a class poll, asking students which stanza was most difficult to understand. Have students who understand particular stanzas explain them to those who do not. • Take a vote. Which of Collins’s descriptions of the afterlife seems most appealing and why? Discuss as a class. • Make a list of what you want for your own afterlife and then write a short essay analyzing those criteria for what they say about your values and how you live. • Research the stories of those who have died and then come back to life. How do they describe their experience? Are there any elements these stories share in common? Discuss in pairs. • Write a short poem using a speaker who has died and gone on to the afterlife. Have the speaker describe his or her surroundings. Read your poem to your class. • Make a list of all the poems having to do with the afterlife and death in Collins’s collection, Questions about Angels, and then write a short essay exploring the contradictions and similarities in his descriptions.
Themes Humor Because literature, especially poetry, has traditionally dealt with serious subject matter in a serious manner, critics rarely consider light verse “great” poetry. Collins’s poem uses humor, however, to make a serious point: human experience is malleable, and the unknown far outweighs the known. By caricaturing those who hold various beliefs about the afterlife, Collins shows just how silly trying to fathom the unknown can be. For example, by depicting the feminist “god” as a kind of middleaged librarian, he satirizes those who hold that God is a woman, and by depicting those who believe in reincarnation as trying to squeeze into “the skin of
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a monkey like a tight suit,” he lampoons the beliefs of a billion Hindus. Collins, however, is an equal opportunity offender in this poem, satirizing the beliefs of most major religions and even those who do not believe in organized religion.
Religion Historically, organized religion, particularly when it is enmeshed with government, has helped
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control the populace by describing the afterlife as a place of reward or punishment for the way people have lived their lives. Indeed, the laws of many countries are based, in part, on the religious traditions and teachings of those countries. Collins provides a primer of sorts in his poem on the positions held on the afterlife by large groups of twentieth-century people. He systematically addresses the beliefs of Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, classicists, feminists, agnostics, and atheists. In doing so, his speaker also indicts the religions themselves for being inadequate, for his portrayals include an implicit description of how individuals from these groups live. This strategy and the fact that, finally, the speaker has no belief of his own—apart from the ironic description of others’ beliefs—draw attention simultaneously to the emptiness of his descriptions and the suggestion that perhaps he believes in nothing.
Meaning of Life Theologians and believers of various systems have long argued that the afterlife is a place of reward and punishment for how an individual has lived his or her life. The meaning of life, then, its purpose, is to live well, treating other individuals with respect and kindness. The reward for a life well lived is eternal happiness in the afterlife (i.e., the life of the soul or spirit). For Collins’s speaker, however, the afterlife is a place of representations, a place of the imagination. The goofy way that he describes afterlives—the equal weight he gives to all possibilities—compounded with the speaker’s address to the reader in the last stanza, suggests that for the speaker the meaning of life is “simply” to be aware of the present and to participate as fully as possible in that awareness. The simple act of being able to awake and look at trees, the speaker suggests, is meaning enough for life.
Style Address A poem of address is directed towards a particular audience. In this case, the speaker addresses “you” in the first and last stanzas. This suggests that the “you” is the reader, but it is also the speaker himself, or at least another part of the speaker. By addressing the second person, the speaker can create a tone both distant and intimate and dramatize what is at root a lyric poem. Other poets who have used the second person for this effect successfully include Mark Strand, Margaret Gibson, and John Hollander.
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Tone The tone of a poem refers to the attitude or stance of the speaker towards the subject matter. Collins’s poem is at once comic and serious. His speaker takes a humorous stance towards the idea of life after death, treating the beliefs of others in a comic vein. Yet, the ending of the poem is elegiac. Elegies are poems or songs that mourn the loss of something or someone. Although “The Afterlife” does not mourn an individual, it does evoke the sense of loss, as evidenced in the poem’s final image of “the winter trees, / . . . traced with the ghost writing of snow.”
Caricature To caricature something is to distort or exaggerate its features. Most often, artists caricature the features of people rather than ideas. The portraits drawn by the late Al Hirschfeld, printed in The New York Times or magazines like Rolling Stone, display exaggerated facial features that distinguish his typically famous subjects. However, Collins caricatures the beliefs of various religions in his depictions of their respective doctrines on the afterlife. The result can be a comic and/or simplistic summary. Well-known writers who have successfully used caricature in their writing include Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope.
Historical Context 1990s When “The Afterlife” appeared in Questions about Angels in 1991, the United States was just emerging from the Gulf War, which started with Operation Desert Storm on January 16, 1991. U.S. troops were sent to oust Iraq’s army from Kuwait. The war lasted only forty-two days, and some estimate that more than 100,000 Iraqis were killed during this time. America has always been a fertile breeding ground for religious groups, both mainstream and unconventional, some dangerous. Americans were again reminded of this fact in 1993 when the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, investigating claims of firearms violations, raided the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, killing six Davidians and losing four of their own agents in the process. The Davidians, whose origins are in the Seventh-day Adventist church, were led by Vernon Howell (also known as David Koresh), a charismatic polygamist who prophesied the
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end of the world. A few months after the initial raid, the AFT again stormed the Davidian compound, and the compound exploded in flames, killing eighty-six people. Debate continues as to the cause of the explosion, though the government claims the Davidians started it. Most Americans, however, do not belong to religious groups such as the Davidians. The majority is Catholic or Protestant. In fact, the proportion of Catholics in the United States increased from 24 to 29 percent from the 1950s to the 1990s, a consequence of the growth of the Hispanic population, which is overwhelmingly Catholic, during those years. Protestants, meanwhile, are in the decline, while the Jewish population remains at about 3 to 4 percent. A growing number of Americans— 8 percent—claim no institutional religious affiliation at all, and about 40 percent are not active participants in the institutions to which they do belong. Millions claim to be part of various “New Age” movements. One of the more popular beliefs associated with New Agers is reincarnation, which Collins parodies in the sixth stanza. New Agers often appropriate and “re-tool” traditional ideas to meet their own needs, and in some ways Collins’s poem can be seen as a critique of the hyperrelativism of New Age spirituality. As a result of the New Age boom of the 1990s, many people began revisiting ideas about the existence of angels, and angel imagery spread throughout American culture. A 1993 Time magazine poll reported that a majority of Americans claimed to believe in angels, and books about angels topped the bestseller list. Collins’s book Questions about Angels, participated in this phenomenon. On Broadway, Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America featured an angel ministering to a man dying of AIDS, and a number of television shows featured angels as lead characters. In their article “Angels among Us,” Nancy Gibbs and Sam Allis observe that New Age angels are “Kewpie-doll” cute, not the fearsome angels that appear in the Bible. Allis and Gibbs note theologians’ understanding of the widespread interest: “For those who choke too easily on God and his rules . . . angels are the handy compromise, all fluff and meringue, kind, nonjudgmental. And they are available to everyone, like aspirin.”
Critical Overview Questions about Angels is widely acknowledged to be Collins’s breakthrough collection, picked by
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Edward Hirsch as a selection in the National Poetry series for 1990. Reviews, however, were mixed, and critics remain divided as to the merits of his poetry today. Penny Kaganoff, for example, reviewing the collection for Publishers Weekly, writes, “Collins’s images are often strange and wonderful but too frequently his poems are constricted by the novelty of a unifying metaphor.” Echoing a common response to Collins’s poetry often voiced by other critics, Kaganoff notes, “We can admire the scope of Collins’s imagination, but his poems rarely induce an emotional reaction, precluding us from any affinity with his experience.” Writing for Library Journal, Ellen Kaufman describes Collins’s poetry as “metaphyscial musings in a whimsical mode,” but admits that sometimes his poems are “occasionally glib or bland.” Reviewing Collins’s Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems for Poetry, Dennis O’Driscoll emphasizes Collins’s deft use of perspective and tone, asserting that “Billy Collins is not so much a comic poet inside whom there is a serious poet struggling to be let out as a poet who sees comedy as a legitimate vehicle for seriousness.” Those who admire Collins’s poetry are passionate about his work. Barbara Genco, for example, also reviewing Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems, emphasizes Collins’s accessibility to people who do not usually read poetry, and notes, “Collins’s poems are precise, funny, heartbreaking, ironic, fresh, and wise.”
Criticism Chris Semansky Semansky is an instructor of literature whose writing appears regularly in literary journals. In this essay, Semansky considers ideas of belief and imagination in Collins’s poem. A writer once said that nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed that “God is dead,” was a great religious thinker not because he pondered the metaphysics of Christian theology—he did not—but because in his scalding critiques of Christianity he addressed genuine religious questions such as “How should human beings live?” Collins, in his serio-comic book of poems, Questions about Angels, also addresses weighty religious questions without being religious. In poem after poem, he considers the ways in which religious imagery has become entangled
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By privileging the imagination over real belief in religious ideas, Collins participates in the modern inclination to see in literature and art a kind of secular salvation.”
with human thought and desire and ferrets out the meaning of such entanglements. In “The Afterlife,” for example, Collins draws on the ways in which life after death has been represented in a number of religions in order to underscore the essential mystery at the heart of all belief systems and to emphasize the relationship between imagination and belief. By privileging the imagination over real belief in religious ideas, Collins participates in the modern inclination to see in literature and art a kind of secular salvation. Imagination is at the root of belief. Although some people claim to have had visions of the afterlife, to have seen the dead, to have seen God, most believers content themselves with imagining how the afterlife might appear, based on its depiction in religious and historical texts. It is the human capacity to imagine that Collins really emphasizes in his poem. He begins this process by asking readers to imagine themselves going about the mundane activities of daily life, “preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth / or riffling through a magazine in bed.” These are the times when people daydream the most, when they review their day and think about their future. All of the poem’s images are associated with the end of the day and preparing oneself for bed. Just as readers prepare to end their day, the speaker suggests, the dead prepare to begin theirs. Collins’s unusual twist in the poem is that “everyone is right” in their beliefs about life after death. The dead begin their journey in the afterlife just where they left off in life, getting what they expected. Thus begins Collins’s satiric jabs at the idea of belief itself. By using the view of relativism to structure his poem, Collins makes fun of much contemporary political thinking associated with ideas
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of tolerance. Relativism is a philosophical position often associated with thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty. Relativists commonly hold that one thing (e.g., morals, beauty, knowledge, etc.) is relative to a particular framework or standpoint (e.g., culture, history, language, etc.) and deny that any standpoint is privileged over another. Critics of relativism assert that thinkers such as those named above claim that all belief systems are equally true and often blame relativists for the erosion of moral standards in contemporary society. Collins’s poem can be labeled relativist in that it asserts the afterlife of each individual is relative to his or her belief. Collins, however, is not serious in his claim. Rather, he uses the idea of relativism to challenge the very notion of an afterlife. He begins this challenge by calling on the authority of Lazarus, a biblical character best known for coming back from the dead. Collins turns Lazarus’s silence about his experience into a secret the speaker of “The Afterlife” divulges to readers. Part of the charm of the poem is that it uses the Bible’s authority to debunk its own representation of the afterlife. At a time when calls for diversity can sometimes paralyze the mind’s capacity to discriminate among even wildly varying choices, Collins illustrates the extreme of such thinking. His fantasy of an afterlife that pleases everyone exemplifies a kind of response that many might consider “politically correct,” in that no one is wrong and everyone’s belief is not only honored but validated. However, this is a fantasy, and Collins makes sure readers know that. By showing that Lazarus’s secret about the truth of the afterlife corresponds to the “alcove in your head,” Collins highlights the link between the imagination and belief. Specifically, he demonstrates how the latter is a consequence of the former. Thinking itself is abstract, as is belief, and neither could exist without the capacity of the mind to form images, to give shape to the tumult of desire that propels human beings forward on a daily basis. The images Collins chooses satisfy as they entertain, titillate, and offend. They are at once hilarious and blasphemous. Because the poem is about the afterlife, death plays a key role. Throughout the poem, the dead talk, they sing, they eat, but they never seem truly dead. Even when they “lie on their backs in their coffins,” they still desire. Collins’s genius is in domesticating the idea of death, making it palatable through his cartoonish depictions of the afterlife.
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The dead are not really dead but part of the continuum of life. He illustrates this idea in other poems in the collection as well, including “The Dead,” the poem immediately following “The Afterlife.” In the former poem, the dead watch over the living “Through the glass-bottom boats of / heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity.” Collins’s representations of the afterlife draw on images taken from popular culture, as much as they do hallowed religious texts and, as such, they illustrate the supremacy of the imagination, what poet Wallace Stevens called “the power of the mind over the possibility of things.” Rather than affirm the continuation of individual identity after death, Collins’s images play with the idea, manipulating readers’ desire for such possibility while simultaneously caricaturing it. In the popular poem, “Sunday Morning,” which spells out the significance of the imagination for modern society, Stevens writes, “Death is the mother of beauty.” By this, Stevens means that the inevitability of death gives value and beauty to life, and that human beings should find meaning in the sensuous experience of earthly things rather than waiting for a reward in the afterlife. Collins echoes this sentiment in the last stanza of his poem by describing the death of those who died believing in nothing. The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins wishing they could return so they could learn Italian or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain. They wish they could wake in the morning like you and stand at a window examining the winter trees, every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
The moral of the poem, then, is that the living should appreciate life, taking advantage of the opportunities they have and not spend it imagining what might come after death. Ingeniously, Collins bookends the various descriptions of the afterlife with the image of a person ending his day and beginning a new one, thus giving shape to both the journeys of the dead and the living. In addressing the reader, the speaker is also addressing himself. The “winter trees” and “the ghost writing of snow” evoke death’s presence in life, its reminder both to be aware of the possibilities of the present and to honor the past. Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “The Afterlife,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Frank Pool Pool is a published poet and teacher of advanced placement and international baccalaureate senior English. In this essay, Pool discusses Collins as an ironic, postmodern poet.
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What Do I Read Next? • Collins’s collection Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001) includes poems from his previous books of poetry. • J. Gordon Melton has assembled a comprehensive resource for information on a wide range of religious institutions and practices in the United States in The Encyclopedia of American Religions (1999). • Wade Clark Roof’s A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (1993) charts the varied spiritual explorations of this generation from the 1960s to the 1990s. • Daniel Quinn’s Turner Award-winning novel Ishmael (1992) explores the moral and spiritual issues that humanity must engage if it is to survive.
Billy Collins threatens to become the first genuinely popular American poet since Robert Frost and Rod McKuen. Unlike Frost, though, Collins suffers from a decades-long decline in publications that print poetry. Long past are the days when newspapers would regularly print verse and during which educated Americans were exposed to poetry in a variety of general magazines. But, unlike McKuen, whose works gained a great deal of popularity in the late 1960s, Collins is able to be accessible without being maudlin and banal. Collins’s success, though, has bred its own species of critic such as Jeredith Merrin, who lambastes Collins’s user-friendliness and lack of emotional depth. Writing in The Southern Review, Merrin asserts that Collins “is a writer who takes you for a walk on the mild side.” On the other hand, Collins has retained an audience of perceptive and appreciative readers. Writing in the prestigious journal Poetry, the reviewer John Taylor has said, “Ultimately, a funny-sad ambience characterizes his best work. His soft metaphysical touch seemingly derives from an acute awareness of man’s irreparable separation from both material reality and any
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If one has no hope of eternal reward and no fear of damnation, regret and whimsical musing are fitting and proper attitudes.”
conceivable spiritual horizon.” Collins is both accessible and accomplished; if he does not in the end plumb the depths of consciousness and the mystery of existence, he does write in an admirably engaging and entertaining style. “The Afterlife” is a poem with many postmodern sensibilities: allusive, ironic, self-reflexive, and humorous, it clearly illustrates the assets and liabilities of the poet’s style. Like many contemporary poets, Collins writes in free but not unstructured verse. His lines tend to contain five important stressed syllables, with a number of unstressed syllables falling in a natural, unmetered pattern. This rhythmic pattern is most likely a result of the poet’s sense of line and rhythm rather than any conscious decision. It resembles Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “sprung rhythm,” which counts only the important syllables, but it is considerably looser. Merrin calls it “approximate pentameter.” Occasionally, Collins will dispense with the five-beat line when it suits his purpose, as in the line “and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal.” In his line and stanza structure, Collins implicitly respects form but clearly does not regard it as something to distract from the other aspects of his poetry, such as humor, surprise, and allusion. Indeed, it takes some work to see that Collins uses any rhythmic structure at all. The beat of the poem, such as it is, does its work upon the reader subliminally, beneath the conscious appreciation for meter that one sees in the poems of Robert Frost or other formalists. One of the keys to understanding this poem is to recognize how the poet combines the mundane with the mysterious. Death is perhaps the most puzzling and inscrutable mystery that faces humans. It is the grounds of anxiety, the stuff of tragedy, and the source of sadness, poignancy, and passion. Most Americans, when polled, will say they believe in an afterlife, and doubtless many of those
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who cannot bring themselves to such a belief have meditated on what survives of an individual after one has, in Shakespeare’s words, “shuffled off this mortal coil.” Essentially, there are two approaches to death, the tragic and the comic. Collins is a funny guy, and this poem is characterized by a bemused lightness of expression and a tolerant comic vision. The opening lines of the poem juxtapose images of utter normality with a mysterious otherworldliness. The afterlife is seen as a nocturnal shadow-existence; the dead “of the day” start their journey each night, traveling away from the world of life and tooth-brushing and magazines. Collins does not have a single message to preach about the afterlife. A true relativist and postmodernist, Collins’s single central insight, the secret that even Lazarus, the man raised from the dead by Christ, will not reveal, is that there is no one destination, that “everyone is right, as it turns out.” If Paradise or Hell awaited everyone, regardless of their beliefs, then this would not be the light and humorous poem that Collins intends. Such a poem would challenge and frighten and imply moralistic judgment. The poet wants none of this; he couches his own poignancy over death in images that humorously reflect a variety of religious beliefs. Collins never quite states his own view on the afterlife, though he hints at it, at the end. The first images of the afterlife are recognizable from contemporary religious traditions and popular culture. Some of the dead go into a white zone, a zone that hints at transcendence and a passage into another realm, but which remains reverently agnostic in being free of any details. Subsequent images depict the judgment of God in an almost cartoonish way, “with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.” The conventional image of the celestial choir is invoked here as well. For the shallow and hedonistic, the afterlife is just as they too would want it. The “less inventive” find themselves surrounded by the sensory pleasures of “food and chorus girls.” But none of this is funny, and Collins has set out to amuse his readers. A typical Collins poem often revels in humor and wit and irony on its way to some insight that is more substantial. After the conventional views of the afterlife, the poet regales readers with other images and ideas. Some of the dead approach the apartment of a female God who observes them through a hole in her door. This God is fully anthropomorphized as a middle-aged woman with “short wiry hair.” Further, she has “glasses hung from her neck by a string.” Nothing could be farther from the God of Infinite Justice
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and Retribution. “Quite so,” one can imagine Collins saying. Many people want to be infinitely far from such a God. Some people believe in reincarnation, and Collins represents this idea by speaking of people who are gearing up for a new life, “squeezing” into new bodies. Readers read about one soul “trying on / the skin of a monkey like a tight suit / ready to begin another life in a more simple key.” Some are simply floating off into a sphere of “benign vagueness,” reflecting the view that the afterlife has nothing specific to be said about it, that it is merely, as Collins says, “the ultimate elsewhere.” It is all a matter of choice and individual belief, Collins seems to be saying at this point. Whatever one believes, that is what the afterlife is. Such a view is common among postmodern relativists. Such readers, and there are many of them, would find Collins’s poem to be enlightened and nonjudgmental. Nevertheless, some of the dead seem to be sillier than the others. A few classicists descend into a pagan underworld, guarded by Cerberus and, in a touch of mocking humor, Edith Hamilton, the compiler of one of the standard works of classical mythology, which is still taught in high schools and colleges. In their instructive book The Postmodern Turn, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner distinguish between modernist and postmodernist writers by saying, “Where modern artists were typically insular, obscure, and idiosyncratic in their work, postmodern artists began to speak in the most available, public, and commodified languages.” One of the keys to Collins’s accessibility is that he does not, like the high modernists Pound and Eliot, allude to obscure texts and sources, challenging the erudition of the reader and requiring footnotes for most students to follow. Instead, Collins generally limits his allusions to writers one can expect to encounter in good high school classes and undergraduate literature courses. As one might imagine, such a middlebrow approach alienates the erudite but gains a following among the general poetry audience. Collins’s poems reach out, not just to the readers of small and specialized journals, but to a public that wants some thoughtfulness but not bombast and pretentiousness. Jason Gray, in a sympathetic review in Prairie Schooner, calls the work the “poetry of the moment’s reflection, the sigh, the wish, the little hopes of life.” Fully congruent with postmodernism’s distrust for “meta-narrative,” Collins turns his attention away from grandiose gestures and systems and toward the lived moments and reflective incidents of a playful but rather quiet life.
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At the end of the poem Collins seems to reveal his own views of the afterlife and in which the humor turns poignant. Readers may infer that Collins himself does not believe in the sorts of afterlife he has depicted in his poem. He puts his own attitudes into the perspective of the great class of none-of-the-above. “The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins”; because these people have no particular views of the afterlife, they have no place to go. Earth is where they direct their thoughts. Or, in Merrin’s acerbic estimation, “What you already know on earth, he assures you, is all you need to know.” Since the dead have their own simple desires, they think about rather simple and modest activities such as learning Italian, visiting the pyramids, or playing golf. All these activities seem rather whimsical compared to grandiose concepts of the afterlife. But they are all things that humans do, some, at least, and that most are capable of doing. In this last stanza, Collins exhibits a mild regret that life is too short and there are many worthwhile things that will never be accomplished. At the end, Collins says, “They could wake in the morning like you.” This “you” is simultaneously a direct address to the reader, and it is the poet speaking to himself about his own mortality and his own limited sovereignty in the kingdom of the living. The dead, as Collins represents, wish they could stand examining the winter trees, with “every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.” Aside from the quiet evocativeness of the word “ghost,” this ending alludes to the famous conclusion of James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead”: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” For Collins, contemplation of the afterlife is really a call to reflect on life and the living. If one has no hope of eternal reward and no fear of damnation, regret and whimsical musing are fitting and proper attitudes. Collins, in his own quiet, unpretentious, and somewhat postmodern way, brings his poem to conclusion in a meditative moment that transcends irony. Source: Frank Pool, Critical Essay on “The Afterlife,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Tod Marshall In the following essay, Marshall positions Collins within a wide literary context of poets from Wallace Stevens to William Wordsworth, noting Collins’s penchant for the musicality of performance art and lyrical rumination.
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Frequently beginning with a subjective encounter with the external world, Collins’s poems then embark upon ruminations that may allude to literary figures (Dickinson, Wordsworth, Yeats, and others) or to philosophy and religion.”
Billy Collins’s poetry has received a great deal of critical acclaim and several prestigious awards. From his first mature work in The Apple That Astonished Paris to his later Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems, he has adopted a voice that is both philosophical and comic, intellectually stimulating yet accessible. In fact, Collins’s attraction to performance poetry (his CD audio book The Best Cigarette sold well) and his reasonably large popular appeal might seem antithetical to the critical acclaim he has received. To put it another way, the accessibility of Collins’s work and the emphasis by the poet and his publishers on his stature as a mainstream poet are quite unexpected in the work of one who is also so celebrated by academic critics. Whatever the case may be, Collins’s work is connected to the recent literary past and should be considered within the same context as the meditative lyrical practices of poets ranging from Wordsworth to Auden to the contemporaries Stephen Dunn and Linda Pastan. Frequently beginning with a subjective encounter with the external world, Collins’s poems then embark upon ruminations that may allude to literary figures (Dickinson, Wordsworth, Yeats, and others) or to philosophy and religion. Collins has found a great deal of success with this mode, and perhaps the only criticism that should be levied against his work is that it seems from Questions about Angels to Picnic, Lightning that there has been little exploration in form or in terms of themes and subjects. Considering a few of the titles in Questions about An-
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gels illustrates Collins’s meditative lyrical practice. “Reading Myself to Sleep,” “The Norton Anthology of Literature,” “Going Out for Cigarettes,” and “Weighing the Dog” are all poems that begin with a mundane experience and then move outward to a consideration of something meditatively engaging or philosophically puzzling. Another aspect of Collins’s work that separates him from a great many contemporary poets is the fact that he is also unabashed about using satire and humor, and his meditative lyrics utilize a range of tones, from the absurd to highly serious. Consider, for instance, these lines from “Marginalia” in Picnic, Lightning. The speaker asks all those who “have managed to graduate from college / without ever having written ‘Man vs. Nature’” in a margin to step forward, comically undercutting the pedantic aspects of teaching literature. In another poem, however, Collins writes: And the soul is up on the roof in her nightdress, straddling the ridge, singing a song about the wildness of the sea until the first rip of pink appears in the sky. Then, they all will return to the sleeping body the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree.
This poem has a tone that is much closer to the lyrical mode of a poet like Wallace Stevens, and, coupled with the comic riffs Collins uses elsewhere, it is illustrative of his tonal range. The voice in these poems is always intimate, however, in a way that Stevens’s work would never attempt to be. Perhaps this intimacy, as well as the frequent use of humor, is connected to Collins’s emphasis on the performance dimensions of poetry and on his use of CDs and public readings to promote his work. Collins makes frequent references to jazz and to musicians. This is another aspect of his interest in the performance possibilities of poetry and in the guise of improvisation his poems seem to aspire toward. The effects can be engaging if not always completely compelling as powerful poetry. Consider these lines from “I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Verson of ‘Three Blind Mice’”: And I start wondering how they came to be blind. If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister, and I think of the poor mother brooding over her sightless young triplets. Or was it a common accident, all three caught in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps? If not, If each came to his or her blindness separately, how did they ever manage to find one another? Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
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to locate even one fellow mouse with vision let alone two other blind ones?
There is doubt that this is clever, and it is popular. But many poets have attracted reasonably wide readership only to suffer anonymity in fifty years—or less. Whether Collins’s work will avoid such a fate is still a question, one perhaps connected to whether or not he is willing to depart from his previously praised modes and develop his abilities in different directions. Source: Tod Marshall, “Collins, Billy,” in Contemporary Poets, 7th ed., edited by Thomas Riggs, St. James Press, 2001, pp. 186–87.
Sources Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn, Guilford Press, 1997, p. 133. Collins, Billy, “The Afterlife,” in Questions about Angels, Quill, 1991, p. 33. Genco, Barbara A., Review of Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems, in School Library Journal, Vol. 47, No. 12, December 2001, pp. 56–58. Gibbs, Nancy, and Sam Allis, “Angels among Us,” in Time, Vol. 142, No. 27, December 27, 1993, pp. 56–64. Gray, Jason, “Review of Picnic, Lightning,” in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 75, No. 1, Spring 2001, p. 189. Joyce, James, “The Dead,” in Dubliners, Dover Publications, Inc., 1991, p. 152. Kaganoff, Penny, Review of Questions about Angels, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 238, No. 22, May 17, 1991, p. 59. Kaufmann, Ellen, Review of Questions about Angels, in Library Journal, Vol. 116, Issue 11, June 16, 1991, p. 81.
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Merrin, Jeredith, “Art Over Easy,” in The Southern Review, Vol. 38, No. 1, Winter 2002, pp. 202–16. O’Driscoll, Dennis, Review of Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems, in Poetry, Vol. 180, No. 1, April 2002, pp. 32–41. Stevens, Wallace, “Sunday Morning,” in Collected Poems, Knopf, 1975, pp. 66–70. Taylor, John, “Review of Picnic, Lightning,” in Poetry, Vol. 175, No. 4, February 2000, p. 273.
Further Reading Housden, Roger, ed., Ten Poems to Change Your Life, Crown, 2001. Housden offers a selection of poems, both new and old, that aim to reshape the way readers think about and experience their lives. The poems are “spiritual” in the widest sense of the word. Secor, Laura, “Billy Collins: Mischievous Laureate,” in Mother Jones, Vol. 27, Issue 2, March–April 2002, pp. 84–85. In this interview, Collins discusses his new job as poet laureate and his responsibilities after September 11, 2001. Sewell, Marilyn, Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women’s Spirituality, Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Sewell collects poetry by a variety of women and from a woman’s point of view, on topics including marriage, death, birth, and loss. Wuthnow, Robert, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II, Princeton University Press, 1988. Wuthnow’s study charts the major trends in American religious experience since the end of World War II, focusing on the decline in the denominational divisions that were once so important in American religious life.
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The Continuous Life Mark Strand 1990
Mark Strand’s poem “The Continuous Life” originally appeared in The New Yorker and is the title poem of his 1990 poetry collection by the same name. The volume contains poems written between 1980 and 1990, some humorous, some serious, some whose tone is in between. Critics have called “The Continuous Life” a perfect poem, and other readers seem to agree. New York City, for example, thought so highly of the poem they had it inscribed on a park bench in Hudson River Park. Appearing roughly in the middle of the collection, sandwiched between “Life in the Valley” and “From a Lost Diary,” the poem resonates with images of absence and death, Strand’s trademark subjects. The poem’s speaker addresses parents, offering them advice on what to tell their children to expect from life, and he implicitly addresses himself as well. In twenty-eight lines, Strand plumbs the human consciousness, alluding to the bustle of perceptions, thoughts, and behavior that make up a person’s life. The speaker is as intrigued by the chaos and emptiness of human life as he is by the ways that human beings stave them off, finding meaning in the mundane and strength in love. Though the language in “The Continuous Life,” like that in most of his poems, is abstract, the poem is relatively accessible, even for readers unfamiliar with Strand’s work.
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Author Biography Mark Strand has developed a reputation as a poet of absence and darkness, whose verse attempts to articulate the uncertainties of human existence. Born in 1934 in Summerside on Prince Edward Island, Canada, to salesman Robert Joseph and Sonia (Apter) Strand, Strand was raised in cities throughout the United States because of his father’s work. Although his childhood ambition was to paint, he found himself writing poems while attending Antioch College, encouraged by author Nolan Miller who was his teacher. Strand received his bachelor of arts degree in 1957 and subsequently took a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting from Yale in 1959 and a master’s degree from the University of Iowa in 1962. In 1964, Strand published his first collection of poems, Sleeping with One Eye Open, which introduced the eerie, disembodied voice that would become his signature style. Although critics sometimes categorized his work with that of neosurrealists and deep imagists, Strand’s poetry stood out for its sparseness and its obsession with death, otherness, and negation. One of his poems from that collection, “Keeping Things Whole,” remains a favorite of anthologists and is often cited by critics to illustrate Strand’s poetics of absence. Strand’s subsequent volumes, such as Reasons for Moving (1968), Darker (1970), The Story of Our Lives (1973), The Late Hour (1978), and Selected Poems (1980), solidified his reputation as one of America’s leading poets and won him admirers, including influential critics such as Harold Bloom. In 1990, when Strand published The Continuous Life— whose title poem remains one of the strongest Strand has ever written—he was named Poet Laureate of the United States. In addition to writing poems, Strand has written children’s books, story collections, and art criticism and has edited and translated numerous other books. Some of these include the children’s book The Planet of Lost Things (1982); an examination of American painter Edward Hopper’s art, Hopper (1994); a short story collection, Mr. and Mrs. Baby (1985); and, a translation of Rafael Alberti’s poems, The Owl’s Insomnia (1973). Strand’s recent work includes a poetry collection, Blizzard of One: Poems (1998), which received the Pulitzer Prize, and an anthology that he co-edited with Eavan Boland, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (2000). He has also published a well-received collection of essays on poetry, The
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Weather of Words (2000). Strand’s awards include a Fulbright scholarship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, three National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. A former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, Strand currently teaches at the University of Chicago.
Poem Text What of the neighborhood homes awash In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes, Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender, Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty, Have run their course? Oh parents, confess To your little ones the night is a long way off And your taste for the mundane grows, tell them Your worship of household chores has barely begun; Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops; Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do, That one thing leads to another, which leads to another; Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
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Media Adaptations • In 1996, Rhino Word Beat released a set of audiocassettes, titled In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry, on which Strand and other poets read from their work.
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur Of hours and days, months and years, and believe It has meaning, despite the occasional fear You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside, That your search goes on for something you lost— a name, A family album that fell from its own small matter Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours, You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear The careless breathing of earth and feel its available Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending Small tremors of love through your brief, Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.
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Likewise, figuring parenting obligations as “the swell of duty” allows Strand to steer clear of depicting his characters in any realistic manner, which he might do if providing examples of these duties. They are types, which means that Strand uses them to represent all parents and all children. The phrase “being adrift on a swell of duty” is an implicit metaphor in which the speaker uses imagery associated with water to describe how parents feel about their responsibilities to their children.
Lines 6–9 The poem’s narrator has access to both the thoughts of the children and the parents, and he speaks from a place seemingly outside history. In these lines, he answers his own question about how parents should respond to their children, who are watching them grow old and tired. By exhorting them to “confess,” he suggests that they have been less than honest or forthcoming with them so far. “Night” refers to death, and the speaker advises parents to reassure their children that they have plenty of life left in them, that they love doing “household chores.”
Lines 10–14 In these lines, the speaker urges parents to “describe” the meaning that can be found in everyday work tools such as “shovels and rakes” and the events that constitute daily life such as “cooking and cleaning.” There is no end to these things, the speaker suggests. Life is a series of such events, most of them small and seemingly insignificant. The narrator tells parents to “explain” life and death to their children, calling them “two great darks, the first / With an ending, the second without one.”
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Poem Summary Lines 1–5 The first five and a half lines of “The Continuous Life” consist of a rhetorical question. Rhetorical questions do not require answers. Rather, writers use them for special effect, often when they want to convince someone of a truth without making an argument. In these lines, Strand describes a relationship between parents and children in which the children look for signs that their parents have grown tired of their child-rearing obligations. He asks the question only so that he may answer it. The images of “children hunched in bushes” and “neighborhood homes” are general enough to apply to a wide range of people, places, and times.
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The tone of the poem, already mixed, becomes more complicated. In these lines, the speaker proffers the upbeat observation, “The luckiest / Thing is having been born,” but follows it with the recognition that “you live in a blur.” He encourages parents to tell their children that it is important to believe that this “blur” has meaning, in the face of feelings and evidence to the contrary.
Lines 19–22 In these lines, the speaker makes another command: “Tell the children to come inside.” This marks the end of playtime for the children and the end of the workday for adults. The speaker insists that parents now admit to their children their own uncertainty about life, their own attempts at un-
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derstanding their existence. Searching for a name or “a family album” mark attempts to understand one’s self in relation to others. By telling children that such a search is a lifelong activity, parents highlight the idea that life is a journey, and that the “getting there” is merely an illusion that keeps one trying.
Lines 23–28 In these lines, the speaker finally urges parents to admit that, in the end, they know nothing. He makes virtues out of “business” and “languor,” investing them with the power to create “small tremors of love.” As in many of his poems, Strand presents the idea that human beings have multiple selves, both across time (e.g., as a child, a parent, a grandparent, etc.), and in the present. This poem encourages parents to share with their children that fact, as well as the fact that, as they grow older, they too will experience the fears, anxieties, and desires that come with change.
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Topics for Further Study • Write a dialogue in which your future self speaks to your present self about the past. Speculate as to what you think you will know about life in the future that you do not know now. • Write a response to Strand’s poem, taking the point of view of children giving advice to their parents. Read the poem to your class and then discuss it. • Interview at least six children under ten years of age, asking them to describe the advice their parents give to them. Categorize the responses and then write a short essay interpreting their significance. • On the board, brainstorm responses to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” Discuss responses.
Themes Family In “The Continuous Life,” Strand seems to suggest that the idea of the nuclear family, in which each member has a specific role to play to support the unit and keep it intact, is rooted in fear, distrust, and dishonesty. In the opening lines, the speaker describes children waiting for their parents to give up, exhausted from their daily domestic duties. He presents parents as being beaten down and defeated, who have to force themselves to believe things about their lives and their futures merely to keep going. He also describes the relationship between the two as beset by miscommunication and concealment of information about how to survive in the world. In much of his poetry, Strand has sought to dismantle the myth of the family and to expose its more sinister qualities. Influenced by the writings of R. D. Laing, poems such as “The Dreadful Has Already Happened” and “My Life” show how the family acts to sap the life force from children, forcing them to conform to parental expectations. The children, in turn, become parents, who perpetuate the same acts on their offspring.
Death Death is everywhere in “The Continuous Life,” underwriting the claims the speaker makes about life. It is variously referred to as “the night” or one
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• Read the rest of the poems in Strand’s collection, The Continuous Life, and in an essay describe how they are similar to and different from the title poem. • In the last line of the poem, the speaker mentions “undeniable selves.” Discuss this line in relation to your self-image. Is there more than one of you? How so? When are these different selves most apparent? Write a short essay exploring the issue of multiple selves. • As a class, discuss how often each student thinks about death, and in what context. Does the awareness of death change the decisions you make or how you behave? Discuss as a class. • The narrator advises parents to tell their children, “That your search goes on for something you lost.” Do you consider your own life a search for something? Brainstorm answers on the board and then discuss as a class.
of “two great darks.” Like Wallace Stevens, who wrote in his poem “Sunday Morning,” “Death is the mother of beauty,” Strand uses the idea of death as a way to talk about how to live in its presence. He finds beauty in the ordinary such as “shovels
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and rakes, brooms and mops,” and advocates keeping busy and living close to the earth as ways to respond to the inevitability of death.
associated. Household chores, in this case, are closely associated with the above items.
Speaker Meaning of Life The advent of evolutionary theory and other scientific discoveries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coupled with a waning belief in a benevolent God, forced many human beings to search elsewhere for the meaning of their lives. Strand’s poem locates that meaning in the very search itself and in the small victories one can glean from the often deadening obligations of daily life, and the awareness that a coherent, stable individual identity is a fiction. These victories are embodied in the “small tremors of love” the speaker names in the last lines of the poem that shoot through “your brief / “Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.” Since the nature of these “tremors” is never specified, readers can see them in whatever way their imaginations consider fit.
Style Didactic Structure “The Continuous Life” is a didactic poem. Didactic poems seek to teach the reader about a subject through explanation and examples. Examples of didactic poetry include Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Parson’s Tale” and Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism.” The purpose of Strand’s poem is to teach parents how to interact with their children. The assumption behind the poem is that parents do not tell their children what life is really like. They ignore difficult to explain ideas such as the quest for meaning, the chaos of daily life, the doubts and fears that hound one’s actions, and death because they are unsure of themselves and how to proceed. The speaker’s tone is encouraging but urgent, underscoring the point that death can come any moment.
Imagery Imagery refers to the language writers use to convey a picture or relay an experience. Strand uses both concrete and abstract imagery in his poem. Often his concrete images are illustrations of a generalization. For example, as illustrations of “household chores,” an abstraction, he offers, “the beauty of shovels, rakes, brooms, and mops,” concrete images. These images are also metonymic. Metonyms are a figure of speech in which one thing is represented by another with which it is conventionally
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The speaker of a poem is not the same as its author, but is the voice narrating the poem. The speaker is closely tied to the poem’s point of view. Strand uses a third-person omniscient point of view, which means his speaker has access to the thoughts and desires of the characters in his poem, the parents and the children. In his stance towards his subject and his mode of address, the speaker can be described as detached, witty, weary, and confident.
Historical Context 1990s In 1990, when The Continuous Life was published, George Bush Sr. was midway through his presidency. His son, George Bush Jr., would be elected president in 2001, providing continuity— after an interruption of eight years—for the Bush family. The 1990s, however, are perhaps best known for their contribution to smoothing over communicative discontinuity, as millions of people worldwide began using the Internet as their primary means of exchanging information. “Born” in 1990, the World Wide Web revolutionized communication and business, enabling people to e-mail one another rather than telephone or write letters. In 1994, three million people had online accounts and, by 1998, more than 100 million users were online. Recent estimates put current usership of the Internet at more than a half billion, with the United States accounting for almost 40 percent of those. Many of these users bought and sold stock via online brokers during the economic boom of the 1990s, amassing great wealth. By the end of the decade, the Dow Jones index topped 10,000 for the first time and the NASDAQ topped 5,000, and unemployment dipped as low as 4 percent. Supporters of free trade argued that the passage in 1994 of the North American Free Trade Agreement played a large part in America’s booming economy, as it eliminated barriers to trade between neighboring countries, particularly Mexico and Canada. To protect Americans’ standard of living and its own geopolitical interests, the United States government sent troops into war-ravaged parts of the globe throughout the decade. In 1990, America came to Kuwait’s defense after Saddam Hussein’s
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Iraqi forces invaded that country. Casualties from the war include between 20,000–100,000 Iraqis dead and more than 200 Americans. America’s victory in the Gulf War assured it that the steady flow of oil it was accustomed to would continue. The Untied States continued to intervene in foreign conflicts, in 1992 sending marines to Somalia, an African country torn apart by a civil war. They failed in their mission to capture Mohammad Farah Aidid, a Somali warlord who had taken control of the country, losing a few dozen soldiers in the process. In 1994, some 20,000 American troops were deployed to Haiti to help reinstall President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who won Haiti’s first free presidential elections on December 16, 1990, but was ousted in a military coup the next year. The mission was successful and Aristide returned to Haiti in 1994. In the second half of the decade, tens of thousands of American troops participated in a NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia, attempting to stop Serbian atrocities against Muslims in Kosovo. While the United States was attempting to save lives overseas, domestically, American life expectancy continued to increase during the 1990s. The life span for Americans in 1997 was 73.6 for men, and 79.4 for women, up from 66.9 for men and 77.6 for women during the 1980s. Auto accidents helped cut short the lives of many Americans, as more than 49,772 died as a result of them in 1997.
Critical Overview By 1990, Strand had established a reputation as one of America’s preeminent poets. A review of The Continuous Life in People Weekly, a magazine not known for its poetry reviews, says about Strand’s collection: “His melancholy evocations of the landscape are joined here by hilarious mini-narratives, reflections on mortality” and on “the small tremors of love that resonate beyond death.” Writing for Raritan, Charles Berger praises the volume, noting, “The title poem of the volume gives the most vivid picture of the sublime familiarized into ‘a worship of household chores.’” Berger describes Strand’s lifelong project of charting the infinitesimal and nuanced shifts of the self, noting that the poem marks an attempt of a later self to make sense of an earlier one. Berger writes: “Hanging over the poem is the question of whether the continuous life is also the completed life, or merely the life built
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up from fallen time, the hours and days, the months and years.” Sven Birkerts compares Strand’s darkness to that of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka, noting those writers’ fascination with the void. Birkerts says that although many of the poems in the collection “fall flat,” there are a few that make reading it worthwhile. Of the poems, he writes: “While the void has by no means receded or become less void-like, the poet’s own angle of regard seems to have altered.” In an interview with Grace Cavalieri appearing in American Poetry Review, Strand says about “The Continuous Life”: “I like it because it seems so normal and so accessible. My guess is that people wouldn’t have much difficulty in understanding what’s going on in this poem.”
Criticism Chris Semansky Semansky is an instructor of literature whose writing appears regularly in literary journals. In this essay, Semansky explores ideas of continuity and life in Strand’s poem. As an allegory of sorts for the story of human existence, Strand’s poem “The Continuous Life” asks readers to rethink their notions of both continuity and life. These are familiar subjects for Strand, which he has addressed in numerous poems including the title poem from his 1973 collection, The Story of Our Lives. An allegory is an extended metaphor in which a series of actions or images stands in for other actions and things. Using a series of symbolic images and abstract statements, Strand’s poem seeks to describe the nuances of how a human being experiences being alive. In this sense, his poem universalizes experience but because the descriptions are so general, many readers can see the shape of their own lives in Strand’s depictions. That “shape” is informed by the idea of continuity, the notion of how someone retains a sense of him- or herself over time. Conventional, humanistic notions of selfhood most often describe identity as unified and coherent. People know who they are even outside of the material circumstances in which they live. They have an essence, a core to their being that remains the same through time. Strand’s poem challenges this idea, suggesting that human identity is a fragile thing, discontinuous, and not at all the anchor of meaning it has been made out to be. In this way, the title of the poem is ironic.
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Though the speaker fights to get outside of his story, he cannot, as it anticipates his every action, his every desire.”
The continuity depicted in the poem is associated with the sense that death is just around the corner. It is this awareness, rather than any feature of personality or uniqueness, the poem suggests, that marks human consciousness. In urging parents to share this awareness with their children, the narrator represents the “awareness” as a potentially damaging secret that mothers and fathers are nonetheless obligated to impart. Death is indispensable to understanding life, the speaker implies. To avoid acknowledging that is to shirk one’s duty. He exhorts parents to “Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do, / That one thing leads to another, which leads to another.” Time’s relentlessness is indistinguishable from the sense of existence, of being. Holding things together becomes the primary purpose of human activity. Strand’s representation of how people experience their being evokes German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of dasein, or “being-in-the-world,” which claims that people understand their existence in relation to how they perceive the actions and things of their everyday lives. This is the same ground of understanding that Strand’s narrator speaks from when he urges parents to tell their kids, “[Their] worship of household chores has barely begun.” It is the daily repetition of these chores that provides the glue for selfhood, that enables one to cultivate a sense of continuity. It is also the familiarity and security of these activities that enable human beings to continue living with the knowledge that they will die. Strand’s depiction of human life, like Heidegger’s, is deeply existential. More of an attitude towards existence than a detailed philosophy, existentialism’s primary tenet is that existence precedes essence. This means that one’s physical being comes before any development of self. Truth is not something already there to be discovered, but rather something that is constructed through a process.
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Other attitudes and ideas associated with existentialism include acute anxiety and dread, and a sense of absurdity towards one’s existence. Both of these are responses to the belief that, at root, human life is meaningless. In “The Story of Our Lives,” Strand uses the metaphor of the book to describe the contours of human experience, drawing the reader and another self he addresses into a self-reflexive narrative. Though the speaker fights to get outside of his story, he cannot, as it anticipates his every action, his every desire. The book has the last words in the poem, describing the speaker and his double: Whatever it was they would accept it. The book would have to be written and would have to be read. They are the book and they are nothing else.
This kind of bleakness also informs “The Continuous Life,” where the claustrophobia of self so prevalent in Strand’s other representations of being is extended to include the idea of others. The only comfort, the only “salvation” from selfconsciousness and the idea that life is meaningless, is to acknowledge one’s fears, to hand them down to others. Thus, the poem also explores the idea of inheritance, the duty one generation has to the next. In this way, Strand also plays with the idea that parents achieve “immortality” through their children. Children offer parents a sense of the continuity of their own lives and in telling parents to share the dark truths about life with them, the speaker highlights his own need for continuity. The speaker is a kind of parent addressing other parents, but one who also addresses the parent in himself. This is a familiar strategy of Strand’s, who writes more poems to “you” perhaps than any American poet. When he writes, “You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing / To prove you existed,” the speaker addresses his own fears as much as the fears of others whose behavior he would change. The “you” in the following lines is not each parent. Say that each of you tries To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear The careless breathing of earth.
The “you” is the speaker, addressing his various selves. The audience for the poem, then, ostensibly parents, is a fiction, a rhetorical device the author uses to present his description of the human condition. Audiences, however, are always a fiction, as they represent an image the writer has about his or her prospective readers, rather than any group of real bodies out there.
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The relationship between image and idea helps to structure the poem. Abstract words and phrases such as “surrender,” “Adrift,” “live in a blur,” “slipping away,” “something you lost,” and “You don’t really know” all highlight the uncertainty and unpredictability of human life. They are effects of living with the knowledge of the void, and they describe the instability of a world in which change and death are the only certainties. However, there are stays against the confusion, ways to fill up the nothingness, to give it meaning, even if that meaning is temporal. Strand does this by peppering the poem with concrete images such as “bushes,” “shovels and rakes, brooms and mops.” These things of the physical world provide a measurable way to index one’s place in the world, to locate the self in the blur of time. It is not a coincidence that the only end-stop lines in the poem come when the speaker describes these things. The rest of the poem consists of run-on lines, emphasizing the persistence of human consciousness, the continuing and unremitting activity of the brain. What is unusual about “The Continuous Life,” when compared with Strand’s other poems, is that, despite its bleakness, it ends with a kind of hope. By surrendering to what is and accepting the inevitable chaos, change, and death that comes with being alive, the speaker suggests that one can cultivate “small tremors of love” that extend “into your days, and beyond.” This love comes not despite the fact that human beings will die but because of it. It is the finality of death, the certainty that all of the “undeniable selves” that inhabit each person will end, that enables the recognition of beauty and gives birth to love. Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “The Continuous Life,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Gaynor F. Bradish Martha Sutro In the following essay, Bradish and Sutro discuss the “haunting and surreal” tones of Strand’s poetry, noting that his The Continuous Life is a collection “depopulated and prone to extinctions, untellings, and an ongoingness rooted in vacancy.” Mark Strand is one of the finest, most controlled of lyric poets, his poems written with an impeccable and seemingly effortless technique. They are fascinating not only as superbly finished poetry but also for the artistic strategies they employ and, despite his own completely distinct voice, for the other writers and artists they do not echo but evoke. The quintessential Strand can be found
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In [Strand’s] 1990 collection The Continuous Life, his first after a decade-long hiatus, the poet reminds us, in longer-lined poems and a few short prose narratives, that events do not necessarily lead to meaningful ends.”
in the concluding part of “Seven Poems,” from Darker. I have a key so I open the door and walk in. It is dark and I walk in. It is darker and I walk in.
Spare and windblown, these lines are stripped of everything nonessential. The utter simplicity of action and language, the repetitions, the subtle alternations in sentence structure (especially the shift to the comparative “darker”), and the placings of the “I” work to wondrous and mysterious effect. The voice is unmistakably Strand, yet the repetitions, the simple denotative words tricked into unexpected connotations, and the darkness are reminiscent of Samuel Beckett. The four lines are also a touchstone for other important aspects of Strand’s poetry. The symmetry of the last two lines shows an exquisite sense of balance, and precarious balances between dichotomies, opposites, and contradictions—such as absence/presence, dark/light, life/death, night/day, indoor/outdoor—are basic to his technique. The contraries, like the vocabulary, are simple, but they are artfully arranged, rearranged, and varied to create patterns of meaning and complication. An example central to man and artist is “I empty myself of my life and my remains” (“The Remains,” from Darker). Since the romantic beguilement with it, the subject-object dichotomy has provided the magic caesura that allows such contraries to merge or reverse themselves, and across that same caesura is the work of Beckett and Harold Pinter also written and “reality,” as in Strand, so brilliantly undermined.
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What Do I Read Next? • Roland Barthe’s The Pleasure of the Text (1973) is a difficult but rewarding meditation on the pleasure of reading. Many of Strand’s poems poetically address subjects in Barthe’s study. • Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), a postmodern novel, addresses themes that recur in Strand’s poetry, such as the role of the reader, the relationship between words and the material world, and how stories shape human beings’ conception of themselves and others. • In 1985, Strand published Mr. and Mrs. Baby, his only collection of fiction. Like his poetry, many of these stories concern fantasy and dreaming. • Strand’s Selected Poems (1990) contains most of the poet’s best-known work and is indispensable for critics or those interested in Strand’s literary development.
This undermined or transformation of the landscape of reality is accomplished as well by the suppression, implicit in lyric poetry, of narrative fact and dramatic situation. The entire volume of Strand’s The Story of Our Lives, with its deliberate allusion to storytelling, makes use of this method. Like Beckett, a virtuoso with endings and beginnings, and Pinter, who tells Betrayal backward, Strand manipulates narrative time and the sequence of events and deliberately excludes needed information. In The Story of Our Lives Strand begins with “Elegy for My Father,” the end of one of the stories, moves to a poem called “To Begin,” and ends the final poem, “The Untelling,” with the line “He sat and began to write.” The telling, not telling, or retelling of stories is explored extensively in this volume. The “Elegy for My Father,” with its ambiguous and intensifying refrain, “Nothing could stop you,” is one kind of story. “To Begin” recounts the true beginning, the struggle to write. “The Room” is an ambiguous
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dramatic situation that recalls in its oblique angle of vision Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy and his screenplay for Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad. The surface story is presented and dismissed in the poem “The Story of Our Lives,” which is followed by “Inside the Story.” The climax of the volume comes with the brilliant construction and deconstruction of a narrative in “The Untelling.” Here an account of a memory is told four times. Each time its telling is not right, and at the close of the poem the fifth attempt is about to commence. The story in its four variations is haunting and surreal, as these lines suggest: Although I have tried to return, I have always ended here, where am I now. The lake still exists, and so does the lawn, though the people who slept there that afternoon have not been seen since.
Many parallels come to mind. Among them are the strangely shifting landscapes of Georges Seurat, the novels of John Hawkes, the theater work of Robert Wilson, and Pinter’s screenplay for The GoBetween. Strand, who once studied to be a painter, has also written about Edward Hopper in an essay title “Hopper: The Loneliness Factor,” in which he argues that several of Hopper’s paintings are constructed around the dominant shape of a “nonexistent vanishing point”; the works cannot resolve their conflicts within their own boundaries. Interestingly akin to Hopper’s paintings, Strand’s poetry creates a central disquiet that resonates, often chillingly, beyond the lines on the page. Even poems written thirty years into his career seem to work and rework the conditions of his well-known “Keeping Things Whole” from the 1964 volume Sleeping with One Eye Open: “In a field / I am the absence / of field. / This is / always the case. / Wherever I am / I am what is missing.” In his 1990 collection The Continuous Life, his first after a decade-long hiatus, the poet reminds us, in longer-lined poems and a few short prose narratives, that events do not necessarily lead to meaningful ends. Like the weltanschauung of Kafka or Beckett, Strand’s is depopulated and prone to extinctions, untellings, and an ongoingness rooted in vacancy. “A.M.” says, Another day has come, Another fabulous escape from the damages of night, so even the gulls, in the ragged circle of their flight, Above the sea’s long lanes that flash and fall, scream their approval. How well the sun’s rays probe The rotting carcass of a skate, how well
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They show the worms and swarming flies at work, How well they shine upon the fatal sprawl Of everything on earth.
A surrealistic emptiness pervades the fortyfive sections of Strand’s long poem Dark Harbor, a collection that utilizes different tones, genres, and stances to create a full world of mysterious shapes and serene disappearances and that reads like a night of dreams: “And yet all you want is to rise out of the shade / Of yourself into the cooling blaze of summer night / When the moon shines and the earth itself / Is covered and silent in the stoniness of its sleep.” Many of the sections of the book concern themselves with aging and decline and with the role of poetry in the world: “Rivers, mountains, animals, all find their true place, / / But only while Orpheus sings. When the song is over / The world resumes its old flaws.” The poet of Dark Harbor always seems to find himself in the twilit world of fragile beauty and peril. The collection Blizzard of One evokes a more crowded world than the one we usually see in Strand, with poems dedicated to his poet and painter friends and with a looser, more unabashed verve swinging within the lines of the poems. Love passing, mortality, the sad frontier of nostalgia, and the eroticism of our lone interiors are still his concerns, but he seems to see them with flourish. In the book’s second poem, “The Beach Hotel,” he writes, Oh, look, the ship is sailing without us! And the wind Is from the east, and the next ship leaves in a year. Let’s go back to the beach hotel where the rain never stops, Where the garden, green and shadow-filled, says, in the rarest Of whispers, “Beware of encroachment.” We can stroll, can visit The dead decked out in their ashen pajamas, and after a tour Of the birches, can lie on the rumpled bed, watching The ancient moonlight creep across the floor. The window panes Will shake, and waves of darkness, cold, uncalledfor, grim Will cover us. And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleep We’ll fall, and there in the tided light discover the bones, The dust, the bitter remains of someone who might have been Had we not taken his place. Source: Gaynor F. Bradish and Martha Sutro, “Strand, Mark,” in Contemporary Poets, 7th ed., edited by Thomas Riggs, St. James Press, 2001, pp. 1160–62.
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Robert McDowell In the following essay, McDowell briefly explains how Strand’s poetic study of the “Self dissembling” is rendered transparent amid the “literary pyrotechnics” or “opaque ruminations” of his contemporaries. Through nine poetry collections, beginning in 1968, Mark Strand has gone about building his reputation with the cunning of a chameleon. Even with his early, more energetic poems in the volumes Moving and Darker, Strand had a tendency to become invisible between the dramatically different writing styles of a tight club of poet-friends: the literary pyrotechnics of Charles Simic and James Tate at one end, and the meditative, at times opaque ruminations of Charles Wright and the late William Matthews at the other. Perhaps not surprisingly, an at times unbearable anxiety permeates the poems: In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.
This vision of cynical self-absorption and eerie delight is reinforced by minimal attention to line and phrasing. It is almost as if the writer is insisting that the reader provide the additional insights and discoveries one would need to fill in the blanks, to populate the void. This method succeeds in creating a reciprocal anxiety in the careful reader, which spreads to cover the arc of Strand’s career. More than other poets of his generation, Strand has adapted his own writing to suit what he perceives to be prevailing currents in poetry. In the sixties his verses mimicked the irreverence of the Beats and Louis Simpson; in the seventies he often sounded like Simic, or Tate, or both; by the late eighties, after a younger generation had inspired a resurgence in narrative poetry, he laid claim to having always been a narrative poet; in the nineties, his poetry has become increasingly diffuse, strangely echoing, at times, his old nemesis, John Ashbery. But through the permutations of style, Strand’s one subject has always been the Self. It is not the Self made whole, or yearning for completion and greater awareness; it is the Self dissembling, the proud Self both preening in a mirror and refusing obligation by ducking out of the receiving line. It is the Self most interested in every aspect of itself:
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The anxiety of the earlier poems has been replaced by an attitude of world-weariness. It is as if the poet has come to the conclusion that every thought bears equal weight, that every idea is ephemeral, disposable.”
I cannot decide whether or not to stroll Through the somber garden where the grass in the shade Is silver and frozen and where the general green Of the rest of the garden is dark except For a luminous patch made by the light of a window. I cannot decide, and because it is autumn When the sadness of gardens is greatest, I believe That someone is already there and is waiting For the pale appearance of another.
The anxiety of the earlier poems has been replaced by an attitude of world-weariness. It is as if the poet has come to the conclusion that every thought bears equal weight, that every idea is ephemeral, disposable. Note how the narrator speaks with the coldness of stones, how the author’s early, gnomic utterances have given way to longer, Ashberyesque, prepositional phrasing, either creating multiple opportunities for indirection, or emotional and spiritual evasion. Either way, ennui constitutes the increasingly dominant tone of Strand’s compositions. In an era when American poetry has opened up to so many multicultural voices and small revolutions in style, Strand’s concise, distant, and bloodless manner, in language and in theme, stands out from the frenetic activity going on all around him. Many contend that this alone makes Strand the perfect point person, in a dark time, for a marginal art. But others question the truth, substance, and ultimate staying power of suck work. Source: Robert McDowell, “Strand, Mark,” in Reference Guide to American Literature, 4th ed., edited by Thomas Riggs, St. James Press, 2000, pp. 819–21.
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In the following essay, Bloom locates in “The Continuous Life” a “Sublime apotheosis fuller and deeper in its authority than anything previous in Strand.” It is now a decade since Mark Strand’s Selected Poems appeared. That volume confirmed the vision of Strand long held by his admirers: here was an authentic artist, legitimately descended from Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, and akin also to several crucial modern Hispanic poets. Strand’s voice, always grave and measured, seemed to go through most of his work with an extraordinarily controlled consciousness of self and the limits of self, in order to avoid being engulfed by a luminous phantasmagoria. A poet of Borgesian irreality, this earlier Strand found his way to a fresh evocation of a universal anguish, one that moved dialectically between everyone’s narcissism and anyone’s despairing quest for survival. Some months ago, recuperating from a recent illness, I spent many hours immersing myself in the manuscript of Strand’s The Continuous Life. I had read only two or three of its thirty or so poems before; my immersion was a continuous surprise, indeed an astonishment. In the movement from his mid-forties to his mid-fifties, Strand truly has given birth to his own father; he has re-invented his art and himself. What I always have loved most in Strand’s poetry is its capacity first to empty out, and then to renew or even reinvent the self. Eliot famously wrote of a rejoicing that depended upon inventing something upon which to rejoice. Strand rather restrains himself; he invents neither his happiness nor its object, but the self that can generate a drive. Happiness falls in Rilke; in Strand it comes when least expected, and then experiences a more traditional elevation into the uncanny. In an earlier poem, Strand luminously lamented: How can I sing? Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same. I empty myself of my life and my life remains.
It is a long road from that to a recent poem where Strand can write: Another day has come, Another fabulous escape from the damages of night.
The strength of refabling has replaced the obsession with self-emptying, as Strand teaches us again what Dr. Johnson first taught us: that the essence of poetry is invention or—as Strand would say—reinvention.
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That reinvention is continuous in The Continuous Life. In an elegy for the self called “Orpheus Alone”; in an epiphany named “Luminism”; in the extraordinary title-poem, “The Continuous Life,” one hears what Stevens termed the voice that is great within us rising up, in a Sublime apotheosis fuller and deeper in its authority than anything previous in Strand: Explain that you live between two great darks, the first With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur Of hours and days, months and years, and believe It has meaning, despite the occasional fear You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing To prove you existed.
Strand’s phantasmagorias are still with him, but modulated now into high comedy, as in a lovely poem about an arcane sect called “the great forgetters,” whose communal enterprise destroys reality: “Then Florida went and San Francisco . . . And afterwards Bulgaria was gone, and then Japan.” Strand gently recognizes that in a bad time we now are besieged by great forgetters, who are converting our academies into temples of forgetfulness. Our inchoate rhapsodies have become our academic impostors; we are in danger of forgetting how to read poems, which means that no one will know how to write authentic poems. Strand is of all true poets perhaps the least polemical, and so he is in no way responsible for my amiable attempt to employ him as text for one of my benign sermons against that rabblement of lemmings, our contemporary School of Resentment. I give you then Mark Strand, now one of the strongest of Sublime poets, and I conclude by expressing my renewed gratitude towards him for his poetry that helps renew me, perhaps most of all in the conclusion of one of his grand new poems aptly entitled “The Famous Scene”: So let the unsayable have its way. Let the moon rage and fade, as it will, and the heads Of Queen Anne’s lace bow down in the fields, And the dark be praised. We shall be off, Talking aloud to ourselves, repeating the words That have always been used to describe our fate. Source: Harold Bloom, “Mark Strand,” in Gettysburg Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Spring 1991, pp. 247–48.
Sources Berger, Charles, “Poetry Chronicle,” in Raritan, Vol. 10, Issue 3, Winter 1991, pp. 119–27.
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The strength of refabling has replaced the obsession with selfemptying, as Strand teaches us again what Dr. Johnson first taught us: that the essence of poetry is invention or—as Strand would say—reinvention.”
Birkerts, Sven, “The Art of Absence,” in the New Republic, Vol. 203, No. 25, December 17, 1990, pp. 36–38. Cavalieri, Grace, “Interview with Mark Strand,” in American Poetry Review, Vol. 23, Issue 4, July–August 1994, pp. 39–42. Gregerson, Linda, “Negative Capability,” in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 9, 1981, pp. 90–114. “Picks and Pans,” in People Weekly, Vol. 47, Issue 17, May 5, 1997, p. 41. Strand, Mark, “The Continuous Life,” in The Continuous Life, Knopf, 1990, pp. 21–22.
Further Reading Altieri, Charles, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 1984. Altieri surveys a number of poets, including Strand, describing their relationships to dominant poetic modes. Bloom, Harold, Figures of Capable Imaginaton, Seabury Press, 1976. Bloom is one of Strand’s staunchest supporters, as well as a leading critic of American poetry. In this collection of essays, he looks at the work of poets such as William Coleridge, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery and discusses Strand’s early work as embodying a kind of transcendental vision. Gery, John, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary Poetry: Ways of Nothingness, University Press of Florida, 1996. Gery explores the imagery of nuclear annihilation and emptiness in poets such as Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, John Ashbery, and Mark Strand.
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Kirby, David, Mark Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary Poetry, University of Missouri Press, 1990. Kirby’s study, though thin, remains the only booklength critical examination of Strand’s poetry and career. Stitt, Peter, “Stages of Reality: The Mind/Body Problem in Contemporary Poetry,” in Georgia Review, Vol. 37, 1983, pp. 201–10. Stitt discusses how a number of contemporary poets, including Strand, address the relationship between the mind and the body in their work. Strand, Mark, ed., Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry since 1940, Ecco Press, 1969. In this groundbreaking anthology, Strand presents poets who have had a deep influence on American poetry and on his own work. These poets include
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Adrienne Rich, Charles Olson, James Wright, and John Ashbery. —, The Weather of Words, Knopf, 2001. In this collection of essays, Strand examines the poet’s role in contemporary society and contemporary poetry’s debt to the past. He also discusses Virgil, William Wordsworth, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Donald Justice, and Joseph Brodsky, among other poets. Vine, Richard, and Robert von Hallberg, “A Conversation with Mark Strand,” in American Poetry Observed: Poets and Their Work, edited by Joe David Bellamy, University of Illinois Press, 1984. Strand discusses a number of subjects including poetic form, the poetry that has influenced him, and his relationship to critics.
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The Country Without a Post Office “The Country without a Post Office” was originally published as “Kashmir without a Post Office” in the Graham House Review. Agha Shahid Ali revised it, doubling its length and changing its name when he included it in the collection The Country Without a Post Office in 1997. The title of the poem derives from an incident that occurred in 1990, when Kashmir rebelled against Indian rule, resulting in hundreds of gruesome and violent deaths, fires, and mass rapes. For seven months, there was no mail delivered in Kashmir, because of political turmoil gripping the land. A friend of the poet’s father watched the post office from his house, as mountains of letters piled up. One day, he walked over to the piles and picked a letter from the top of one, discovering that it was from Shahid’s father and addressed to him. The poem, dedicated to Ali’s friend and fellow poet James Merrill, is long, often complicated, with a rhyme scheme that doubles back on itself and a structure that works through accumulation and association rather than narrative logic. The poem is filled with recurring phrases and words and with haunting images of longing and desire, which evoke the pain of one who struggles to understand what is happening in his own land and heart.
Agha Shahid Ali 1997
Author Biography Born February 4, 1949, in New Delhi, India, Agha Shahid Ali was raised in Kashmir in a sophisticated,
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lim Indian militants and the Indian government over control of Kashmir. The title poem from the collection “The Country Without a Post Office,” layers history and apocalyptic imagery to depict a nightmarishly beautiful landscape. Ali taught at a number of universities, including the University of Delhi, Pennsylvania State University, the State University of New York at Binghamton, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College. Ali has received numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the IngramMerrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Agha Shahid Ali
enlightened, and culturally rich Muslim household. His father, Agha Ashraf Ali, was a well-known educator in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir. Ali, who grew up speaking Urdu, Kashmiri, and English, attended an Irish Catholic school in Kashmir and later earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Kashmir, in Srinagar. He took his master’s degree in English from the University of Delhi and, after immigrating to the United States in 1976, took a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984. In 1985, he received a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona. Ali wrote his first poem, in English, at the age of twelve, though he claims Urdu as his mother tongue. Because the British colonized India, he considers English a South Asian language. While in India, Ali sent out poems regularly to American publications, which regularly rejected them. His breakthrough in poetry came in 1991 with the publication of A Nostalgist’s Map of America, which critics hailed for its lyric imagery and haunting voice. Exile, longing, and a global perspective inform much of Ali’s poetry, and the poet’s sense of both loss and belonging is abundantly evident in his collection The Country Without a Post Office (1997), which portrays the conflict between Mus-
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In addition to penning eight collections of poems, Ali also edited Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000) and translated The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992). He was director of the creative writing program at the University of MassachusettsAmherst when he died of brain cancer on December 8, 2001. His last book, Rooms Are Never Finished, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Poem Text 1 Again I’ve returned to this country where a minaret has been entombed. Someone soaks the wicks of clay lamps in mustard oil, each night climbs its steps to read messages scratched on planets. His fingerprints cancel bank stamps in that archive for letters with doomed addresses, each house buried or empty. Empty? Because so many fled, ran away, and became refugees there, in the plains, where they must now will a final dewfall to turn the mountains to glass. They’ll see us through them—see us frantically bury houses to save them from fire that, like a wall caves in. The soldiers light it, hone the flames, burn our world to sudden papier-mâché inlaid with gold, then ash. When the muezzin died, the city was robbed of every Call. The houses were swept about like leaves for burning. Now every night we bury our houses—theirs, the ones left empty. We are faithful. On their doors we hang wreaths. More faithful each night fire again is a wall and we look for the dark as it caves in.
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2 “We’re inside the fire, looking for the dark,” one card lying on the street says, “I want to be he who pours blood. To soak your hands. Or I’ll leave mine in the cold till the rain is ink, and my fingers, at the edge of pain, are seals all night to cancel the stamps.” The mad guide! The lost speak like this. They haunt a country when it is ash. Phantom heart, pray he’s alive. I have returned in rain to find him, to learn why he never wrote. I’ve brought cash, a currency of paisleys to buy the new stamps, rare already, blank, no nation named on them. Without a lamp I look for him in houses buried, empty— He may be alive, opening doors of smoke, breathing in the dark his ash-refrain: “Everything is finished, nothing remains.” I must force silence to be a mirror to see his voice again for directions. Fire runs in waves. Should I cross that river? Each post office is boarded up. Who will deliver parchment cut in paisleys, my news to prisons? Only silence can now trace my letters to him. Or in a dead office the dark panes.
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In this dark rain, be faithful, Phantom heart, this is your pain. Feel it. You must feel it. “Nothing will remain, everything’s finished,” I see his voice again: “This is a shrine of words. You’ll find your letters to me. And mine to you. Come soon and tear open these vanished envelopes.” And reach the minaret: I’m inside the fire. I have found the dark. This is your pain. You must feel it. Feel it, Heart, be faithful to his mad refrain— For he soaked the wicks of clay lamps, lit them each night as he climbed these steps to read messages scratched on planets. His hands were seals to cancel the stamps. This is an archive. I’ve found the remains of his voice, that map of longings with no limit.
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4 I read them, letters of lovers, the mad ones, and mine to him from whom no answers came. I light lamps, send my answers, Calls to Prayer to deaf worlds across continents. And my lament is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent to this world whose end was near, always near. My words go out in huge packages of rain, go there, to addresses, across the oceans.
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It’s raining as I write this. I have no prayer. It’s just a shout, held in, It’s Us! It’s Us! whose letters are cries that break like bodies in prisons. Now each night in the minaret I guide myself up the steps. Mad silhouette, I throw paisleys to clouds. The lost are like this: They bribe the air for dawn, this their dark purpose. But there’s no sun here. There is no sun here. Then be pitiless you whom I could not save— Send your cries to me, if only in this way: I’ve found a prisoner’s letters to a lover— One begins: “These words may never reach you.” Another ends: “The skin dissolves in dew without your touch.” And I want to answer: I want to live forever. What else can I say? It rains as I write this. Mad heart, be brave.
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3 “The entire map of the lost will be candled. I’m keeper of the minaret since the muezzin died. Come soon, I’m alive. There’s almost a paisley against the light, sometimes white, then black. The glutinous wash is wet on its back as it blossoms into autumn’s final country— Buy it, I issue it only once, at night. Come before I’m killed, my voice canceled.”
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Section 1 It should be noted that “The Country Without a Post Office” is very complex and allusive and is not “representative” of the empirical world in any direct way. A commonly held tenet of New Critical theory is that poems should not be summarized or paraphrased, because doing so distorts the meaning of the poem. Attempts to summarize Ali’s poem, then, or any poem worth its salt, inevitably are guilty of what New Critics called the heresy of the paraphrase. The epigraph of Ali’s poem is from one of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Terrible Sonnets,” which begins, “I WAKE and feel the fell of dark, not day.” Ali’s poem echoes many of the themes and images in Hopkins’s. In the first section of “The Country Without a Post Office,” the narrator returns to a country (Kashmir) where a “minaret has been entombed.” A minaret is a tower, used in Islamic architecture, from which a muezzin calls the faithful to prayer. Minarets are usually located at the corners of the mosque. The person climbing the stairs and reading “messages scratched on planets” also evokes the image of an astrologer. When he begins canceling stamps, he evokes the image of a postal inspector. The second stanza might refer to any of the numerous battles in Kashmir. The conflict in the 1990s involved Muslim militants rousting more than one hundred thousand Pandits (Hindus) from Kashmir Valley, also known as “Paradise” for its beauty, in an effort to secure control of the valley and state. The “us” and “them” the speaker refers to in the fifth line are the Hindus and Muslims, the
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Media Adaptations • Asia Pacific Forum has produced an audiocassette tribute to Ali, which includes the poet reading from his work. A copy can be received by writing to Asia Pacific Forum, WBAI 99.5 FM, 120 Wall Street, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10005.
two dominant groups of the region. The soldiers are Indian, many of whom burned homes and entire villages during the unrest. The call of the muezzin is the call to prayer, called salat, which is performed at dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, and night. With no muezzin, there is no prayer in the city. However, the speaker maintains, “We are faithful,” suggesting that they, like the other side, are fighting back, burning houses.
Section 2 In this section, images are repeated but used in different contexts. The fire and the dark of the first section are now words on a card found in the street, appropriate for a poem about a country that has ceased postal delivery. The speaker offers his own hands to “cancel stamps” and open the lines of communication. The second stanza introduces a character the speaker obviously wants to communicate with, but cannot. There is no nation named on the stamps because Kashmir is a disputed territory, fought over by India and Pakistan, and is not independent. The speaker looks for this person through the smolder and ruins of burned houses. In the last stanza, the speaker uses silence and fires as symbolic images that may give him a clue to the direction he should take.
Section 3 In this section the speaker takes on the role of the muezzin, exhorting people to come to him and buy stamps before he dies. The “glutinous wash” refers to the backs of the stamps. In the second stanza, the speaker addresses his own heart. He is
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having discourse with different sides of himself. The fire he is inside is the fire of being, the various identities that Ali has cultivated as an Indianborn Kashmiri. Ali was torn apart by the fighting between the Muslims and Hindus in Kashmir, empathizing with both sides. In the last stanza, the speaker has found his own voice by discovering “the remains” of the voices of others, specifically the muezzin who has died.
Section 4 In this final section, the speaker reads letters that have piled up, the communication of lovers. In his role as muezzin, he likens his cries to “dead letters sent / to this world whose end was near.” In the second stanza, there is a shift from “we” to “us,” signaling the recognition that those sending the letters and those receiving them are the same person. The speaker has now descended into a realm of madness, of undifferentiated identity. He is lost, seeing only his own “Mad silhouette.” In the final stanza, he uses the letters of a prisoner to figuratively comment on his own desperation and situation. The poem takes a more obvious personal turn in the last few lines when the speaker admits, “I want to live forever,” suggesting that his own death is imminent.
Themes Exile The twentieth century was a century of wars, when old countries dissolved and new ones sprang up. As a result, cultural and national identity was often in flux, products of shifts in population and changing borders. The image of exile permeates much twentieth-century poetry and is a primary motif in Ali’s poem. To be lost is to be in exile, not only from one’s country but from oneself as well. Ali’s speaker is both lost to himself and lost to his land. However, he seems to have found himself, at least temporarily, in the third section, when he says, “The entire map of the lost will be candled,” suggesting that self-knowledge will be possible for a short time, as he issues stamps at night. In the penultimate stanza of the last section, the speaker finally understands that he has “no prayer” that can save him and shouts, “It’s Us! It’s Us!” This shout illustrates the fact that the speaker has accepted the contradictions of his own heart, which are also the contradictions of his country, which, like the speaker, has no name.
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Communication Communicating is more than merely exchanging words. For Ali, it is an act of emotional understanding of the other and of self-knowledge as well. By using letters, stamps, and the post office as central symbolic images in his poem, Ali underscores both the need for communication and the impossibility of communicating. Not only is it literally impossible to communicate (at least by letter) in a country without a post office, but also it is difficult for the warring factions of Kashmir to communicate with one another, blinded as they are by their own passions and self-righteousness. The speaker’s identity and desires are comprised of contradictory elements, just as his homeland of Kashmir is. The more he can understand himself, the more he can understand the turmoil that is ravaging his country. The speaker moves from returning to the country at the beginning of the poem to acknowledging that he cannot save himself or, by extension, his country, at the end of the poem. Like Kashmir, the speaker’s heart is damaged, but also like Kashmir, it continues, fueled by its own courage and the need to go on.
Postcolonialism The term “postcolonialism” refers broadly to the ways in which race, ethnicity, culture, and human identity are represented in the modern era, after many colonized countries gained their independence. However, some critics use the term to refer to all culture and cultural products influenced by imperialism from the moment of colonization until today. Ali and his poetry are such cultural products. Ali was born in 1949, two years after Indian independence, in New Delhi, India, and raised in Kashmir, a territory claimed by both India and Pakistan. His family was Shia, a minority among the Muslims of Kashmir. In addition, he spent his mid-teens in Muncie, Indiana, before returning to India. The sheer fact of so much moving and so many cultural affiliations plays into the composition of Ali’s poems, especially “The Country Without a Post Office.” Here, the speaker is fraught with contradictions and competing desires, so much so that he seems to long for annihilation, if only to free him from the pain of so much confusion. “Everything is finished, nothing remains,” the poet says at one point and “I want to live forever” at another point. The change in the poet’s role from observer of the minaret to its keeper marks Ali’s attempt, through his poetry, to inhabit the contradictions rather than to keep them at bay. In doing so, however, he risks his own sanity.
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Topics for Further Study • Write a letter to a classmate describing the qualities you admire about him or her. Do not sign it. Put the letter in a box at the front of the class. Each person in the class picks a letter from the box and reads it aloud to the rest of the class. • In what ways does the form of Ali’s poem restrict what he can say? In what ways does it give him more freedom in what he can say? Discuss as a class. • Make a timeline of the significant historical events of Kashmir, and post it in your class. • After the terrorist attacks that happened in the United States on September 11, 2001, many Americans began asking questions about the Islamic faith. Compile an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list from your class, and then research the answers to these questions, sharing them with your class. Do the same for Hinduism. • Keeping in mind what you learned from the FAQ assignment above, discuss how Ali’s poem can be read as a prayer. Discuss this idea in groups and then as a class. • How important is the postal service to your daily life? How important is email and the telephone? Assume all of these communication options have been taken from you; how would you respond? Discuss as a class.
Style Form “The Country Without a Post Office” is written in four sections, each composed of three eightline stanzas (octaves) rhymed ABCDDCBA. This unconventional, yet symmetrical, rhyme scheme mirrors the movement of the speaker, who moves in and out of darkness, up and down the minaret. Each line contains roughly ten syllables, which provides one more restriction on the poet. The restrictions of the poem create a tight linguistic
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environment, which parallels the suffocating emotional state of the speaker, who struggles to understand himself and to make sense of the war raging in his homeland.
Address Who is the “he” the speaker returns to find? There is no definitive answer. The person the speaker seeks can be both a lover or a loved one and a part of himself with whom he is seeking to make contact. The latter point makes sense when one considers the third section in which the speaker addresses his own heart a number of times, encouraging it to “feel.” The assumption must be, then, that the speaker has had a difficult time feeling before he returned.
Imagery Concrete imagery appeals to the senses. Ali uses concrete images that are also symbolic and universal to evoke ideas and emotions familiar to most readers. Some of these include “fire,” signifying purification and ruin; “lamp,” signifying insight; and “heart,” signifying passion and emotional turmoil. Taken as a whole, Ali’s imagery suggests powerful yet conflicting emotions, which underline his speaker’s state of mind.
Historical Context 1990s Ali’s poem describes the destruction of his homeland, Kashmir, and the endless battles fought by Hindus and Muslims to control it. Located north of India and bordered by Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China from the west to the east, Kashmir was one of more than five hundred states of India that Britain controlled when power was transferred to the people in 1947. After Pakistan sent troops into the region to annex the states, the ruler of Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh, signed the Instrument of Accession on October 26, 1947, making Kashmir part of India. This did not stop the bloodshed or fighting, however, as various Muslim and Kashmiri independence groups continued to battle Indian forces for control of the region. Pakistan tried to annex Kashmir in 1965 and 1971 but failed, and in 1990 a new outbreak erupted between Pakistan and India over Pakistani support of Muslim militants in Kashmir. More than a hundred thousand Hindus fled Kashmir Valley, fearing for their lives, and India moved more troops into the region
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to stop cross-border infiltration from Pakistan. Insurgents assassinated Hindu officials, and in return the Indian military routinely harassed, and often shot, peaceful unarmed demonstrators. Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto traveled to Pakistan in 1990 promising a “thousand-year war” to support the militants, and Pakistan threatened to use nuclear weapons if Indian forces crossed the Line of Control. In an effort to control the growing tension, the Bush administration imposed economic and military sanctions on Pakistan and won assurances from the Pakistani government that Pakistan would stop supporting training camps for Kashmiri insurgents. In the late 1990s when Ali published his poem, the United States had focused its overseas attention on Eastern Europe. In 1996, America sent twenty thousand troops to Bosnia as part of a NATO peacekeeping force, and in 1999 they joined NATO in conducting air strikes against Yugoslavia in an attempt to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Domestically, the United States economy was booming, due in large part to the popularity of the Internet. While Ali was composing a poem using the symbol of a country without a post office to express his grief over the relentless strife in his homeland, millions of other people were sending electronic mail with telephone wires, cable lines, and satellite dishes. Some of the most gripping stories coming out of the wars in Yugoslavia involved residents of Sarajevo, which had been bombed into rubble, emailing outsiders during the war. Industry analysts estimate that email messages sent daily will exceed 60 billion worldwide by 2006, compared with 31 billion email messages sent daily during 2002. More than half of such messages will be person to person. The emergence of email as the preferred form of communication for millions of people worldwide means that postal services will have to begin to find new ways to compete.
Critical Overview Reviewers of The Country Without a Post Office universally praised the collection. Writing for Publishers Weekly, for example, Dulcy Brainard and Sybil Steinberg note Ali’s precarious emotional predicament in having to endure his native country’s turmoil from afar, writing, “We find lyric strained to its limit” in his poems. Daniel Guillory agrees. In his review of the collection for Library Journal, Guillory observes, “The book is a
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poignant, nostalgic evocation of Kashmir, Ali’s homeland. . . . Kashmiri myth and culture hang like a tapestry around the poems.” Eric Bryant also reviewed the book for Library Journal. Bryant calls the collection a “poignant, nostalgic evocation of Kashmir” and claims, “With the population decimated and the post office destroyed, Ali’s poems become ‘cries like dead letters,’ and the poet becomes ‘keeper of the minaret.’” When Ali died, a number of Indian media carried his obituary, noting the popularity of the collection. Rukun Advani, for example, writing for telhelca.com, said, “The violence . . . [in Kashmir] affected him deeply, personally and as an artist.” It shaped him, ironically, to write some of his finest poems, such as the title poem in The Country Without a Post Office.
Criticism Chris Semansky Semansky is an instructor of literature whose writing appears regularly in literary journals. In this essay, Semansky considers the significance of the imagery in Ali’s poem. By threading key phrases and words throughout “The Country Without a Post Office,” Ali creates a fabric of loss in which the speaker mourns not only his homeland but also his own heart, both casualties of the conflict in Kashmir. Ali uses images associated with the post office and with Kashmiri culture to highlight the tremendous damage he and his land have suffered. In creating a character that is hybrid muezzin, postal worker, and astrologer in the first section, Ali makes the connection between prayer and social communication. Prayer expresses the relationship between the individual and God. Letters reflect the relationships between individuals. The person in the first stanza who “cancel[s] blank stamps” does so because there is no longer any place to deliver them: “each house [is] burned or empty.” The “archive for letters with doomed / addresses” is literally the place where mountains of letters are stored in closed post offices. They cannot be delivered because of the increased danger resulting from intensified fighting between Hindus and Muslims and because many of the people to whom the letters are addressed are either dead or have fled. When the muezzin dies, the land is left without prayer, “robbed of every Call.” A land bereft of the symbol of its spirituality is a land in chaos.
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Once he makes communication with himself, the speaker can act as a conduit for others.”
Ali evokes the spiritual emptiness of the land and its emotional volatility by repeating the words “dark,” “wall,” “fire,” “flames,” and “ash.” Literally, these words describe the details of attacks of the Indian army against Muslims in Kashmir, when they would burn down houses and sometimes entire towns, frequently under the cover of night. The Indians were responding to attacks by militant Muslim groups against “Pandits,” or Hindus, in Kashmir and India. However, Ali also uses these words in a different context in the poem, when they become metaphors for his own emotional isolation and emptiness. The speaker wanders in darkness, the world lit only by the “wicks of clay lamps,” and at other times he is lampless, “opening doors of smoke, / breathing in the dark.” Indecisive, the speaker is imprisoned in the darkness of his own heart, repeating himself, babbling: “The lost speak like this. They haunt / a country when it is ash.” The images of being lost and of destruction such as those enumerated above stand in stark contrast to the image of paisley, which Ali uses to evoke Kashmiri culture and its multi-ethnic complexities. Paisley refers to a shawl, made typically of soft wool or silk and woven or printed with colorful curved abstract figures, and it can also refer to the design itself, which began as a flowering plant and evolved into a teardrop shape. The word “shawl” derives from the Persian shal, and the history of the modern shawl dates to the late sixteenth century when shawls were woven for the great Mughal emperor Akbar, in Kashmir. As such, many Kashmiris consider paisley a national icon. Ali uses it to describe letters (“parchment cut in paisleys”), a form of capital (“a currency of paisleys”), and a prism of sorts (“a paisley / against the light”). In the penultimate stanza, the speaker, walking up the minaret, “throw[s] paisleys to the clouds,” celebrating his madness. Like paisley, rain also appears throughout the poem, which holds significance for Kashmiris— and particularly for Ali, who considers it a harbinger of change. Rain also obscures vision, making
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What Do I Read Next? • Ali’s last collection of poems Rooms Are Never Finished (2002) was nominated for a National Book Award just a month before he died. • Ali edited the groundbreaking anthology Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000), which features Arabic, Indian, and English poets writing in this traditional and challenging Arabic form. • Mystery writer M. Kaye sets her novel Death in Kashmir: A Mystery (2000) in Ali’s homeland. Kaye’s story evokes the haunting beauty of Kashmir’s landscape and the inscrutable quality of its residents. • In Painted Mountains: Two Expeditions to Kashmir (1987), a collection of essays and stories, mountain climber Stephen Venables recounts his treks in Kashmir and other exotic locales.
it difficult for both friends and enemies to see one another. When the speaker returns to the country, he returns “in rain,” and when he exhorts his heart to be faithful, he does so “In this dark rain.” Rain is also the figurative container for the speaker’s message: “My words go out in huge packages of rain, / go there, to addresses, across the oceans.” Rain, especially during monsoon season in Southeast Asia, is relentless and destructive, yet it also brings relief from oppressive heat and helps extinguish the fires raging through Kashmir. Like most of Ali’s images, the image of rain is complex. Much of the poem is set inside a minaret, the tower at the corner of a mosque and from which the muezzin makes his calls to prayer. The minaret, “entombed” in the opening lines of the poem, also doubles at points as a kind of spiritual post office from which stamps are cancelled and messages read, and as a grave. Like the minaret, the speaker also stands out from the larger “thing” to which he is attached. In the speaker’s case, the thing is his country, which he watches from afar. It is only when he returns that he can fully witness its de-
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struction. (Although Ali taught in the states, he went home every summer to Kashmir.) The minaret functions in the poem as a sacred place from which the returning speaker, in the persona of poet, can help save his people by opening up lines of communication. He does this once he takes over for the muezzin in the third section of the poem. Those lines of communication, however, are also within the poet. Over and over, he exhorts his heart to have faith, to feel: “This is your pain, Feel it. You must feel it,” he says. Once he makes communication with himself, the speaker can act as a conduit for others. In the minaret, he has “found the remains / of his voice, that map of longings with no limit.” By using lines from one of Hopkins’s sonnets as an epigraph, Ali foreshadows that the speaker’s relationship to himself in the poem is a metaphor for his relationship to his country. Like Hopkins, Ali uses the image of the heart and the metaphor of “dead letters” to describe the idea of being lost and the pain of being a stranger to one’s emotional life. However, whereas Hopkins’s speaker needs to clear his heart to feel God’s love, Ali’s speaker needs arouse his heart to feel his love for his land and people: “Heart, be faithful to his mad refrain,” he implores it. Ali also learned from Hopkins the idea of “inscaping,” a way to represent (and to read) the world by marking the relationship between the individual thing and the pattern and context to which it belongs. “Paisley,” “fire,” “heart,” “dark,” “house,” “letters,” “rain,” “stamps” are like dots throughout Ali’s poem that readers need to connect to see the whole picture. Only, it is not a picture readers are left with, but rather a symphony of feeling, contradictory and irreducible, like the poet himself. Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “The Country Without a Post Office,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Mary Potter Potter, a writer of fiction and screenplays, teaches writing at the University of San Francisco. In this essay, Potter discusses the use of narrative in Ali’s poem. “Nothing seems more natural and universal to human beings than telling stories,” J. Hillis Miller, Yale literary theorist, writes in “Narrative.” Starting from this premise, he reasons that because humans have so deep a need for narrative, they also have struggled, since Aristotle did in his Poetics, with their meaning. Miller draws from all narrative forms—novels, stories, and poems alike—three basic elements: a change in a situation; three persons, a protagonist, an antagonist, and a witness; and a
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patterning of key elements. From the simplest ghost story told at the campfire’s edge to War and Peace, Miller holds that all narratives contain these elements. For the more inaccessible works of literature, they can easily—and especially—be used to decipher meaning. “The Country Without a Post Office” is a poem that blends the many influences in the poet’s background and presents a complex narrative. In the first line, a first-person narrator, a witness to the Kashmiri rebellion, is identified. This narrator is the “I,” who has returned to the region of India that in 1990, as Ali writes in a preface to a later volume of his poetry, Rooms Are Never Finished (2002), was “the cause of hostility between India and Pakistan since their creation in 1947” that “erupted into a full scale uprising for self-determination.” Seventy thousand people died in the atrocities, and, as he continues, “Because both countries are nuclear powers now, international anxiety has increased: Kashmir, it is feared, may be the flashpoint of nuclear war.” The “I” who was in exile returns to a country where “a minaret has been entombed. / Someone . . . each night climbs its steps / to read messages scratched on planets.” In these opening lines, the minaret, the slim tower that tops a Muslim mosque, harks to the Muslim dilemma in Ali’s and India’s pasts; and an anonymous “someone” looks to the stars for astrological meaning, as historically it has been practiced in India and by some in Islam. “Someone” also identifies another person in the poem. Yet, the “someone” cancels stamps in a post office that is already an “archive” “for letters with doomed/addresses, each house buried or empty,” and the final line encapsulates the mass destruction of the Kashmiri catastrophe. In the second stanza, the first-person narrator describes even more anonymous persons, Kashmiri refugees, who “see / us through them—see us frantically bury / houses to save them from fire that / like a wall / caves in. The soldiers light it, hone the flames, / burn our world to sudden papier-mâché.” The first-person singular becomes plural in these lines, first with “us,” then with “our,” marrying the first-person subjective case with the objective, the “they” in the poem, so that “our world” resonates and achieves political significance. It is not “them” versus “us” when there is genocide, in such incidences of ethnic wars, Ali’s conflated narrators seem to say. In the third stanza, Ali’s enlarged narrator continues, “we bury / our houses,” and the poet alternates between “theirs” and “we” as a “wall” of “fire” leaves everyone with nothing left to do but “look for the dark as it caves in.” Completing the
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The evolution of his many narrators dramatizes the journey of an exile in search of brothers so that the reader enters a dismal journey with global significance.”
first three stanzas and first half of his poem, Ali concludes his portrayal of his destroyed homeland and the futility of conflict. The exile returned home has become “everyone,” witnessing the offenses against humanity. In an interview titled “Poems Are Never Finished,” which he gave before he died, Ali remarked upon his name, Shahid, which means “beloved” in Persian and “witness” in Arabic: “I like the fact that it has two meanings and that I’ve been able to use them in my poetry in one way or the other. . . . Some people say that the act of witnessing seems to be central to my poetry.” Through the shifting perspectives in the poem, Ali’s narrator witnesses the destruction in Kashmir. Ali’s narration shifts at the beginning of the fourth stanza. A postcard personified, or given human characteristics, speaks in direct quotation: “‘We’re inside the fire, looking for the dark,’ / one card lying on the street says. ‘I want / to be he who pours blood.’” The point of view is a jumble as it considers the destruction and the guilty individuals with bloody hands. From this chaos, the narrative voice exclaims, “The mad guide! The lost speak like this. They haunt / a country when it is ash.” The narrative represents those lost when Kashmir rebelled against Indian rule. With an emphatic shift at the end of the fourth stanza, Ali addresses a “Phantom heart” to “pray he’s alive” at the beginning of the fifth. “I have returned in rain / to find him, to learn why he never wrote.” His narrative point of view is suddenly direct, the narrator in exile who seeks a lost friend. In the rest of the poem, the “him” whom he is seeking is clearly named: “He may be alive, opening doors of smoke, / Breathing in the dark his ash-refrain.” From the confused point of view arises the narrator’s purpose and a clarification of the narrative situation. The
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narrator never finds the one lost in the destruction. Through the use of a poetic device called synesthesia, a blending of the senses appealed to, (in this case vision and hearing), the narrator expresses the difficulty of looking for him: “I must force silence to be a mirror / to see his voice again for directions.” In addition to the persons in the poem, Ali uses the narrative situation to attempt to name a country with “doomed / addresses, each house buried or empty.” Yet, because the situation really does not change and Kashmir is not freed, the “new stamps, rare already, blank, / no nation named on them” do not represent an independent Kashmir. The poet also repeats certain key elements throughout his stanzas, houses that are “buried” and “empty,” for example, to show that the situation has not changed. “Fire,” “burn” and “dark” are recurrent words as villages burn throughout; and a world on fire is forever impassible. “Each post office is boarded up” is the declarative sentence near the end of the poem, and the narrator has lost touch with his friend. Even paisleys, which, as Daniel Guillory writes in his review of The Country Without a Post Office, are important in Kashmiri myth, cannot be delivered to his friend. Bruce King, in his review of “The Country Without a Post Office,” remarks that perhaps Ali’s “intense emotional involvement with Kashmir has led him to experiment with so many forms. . . . The poems create an evolving loose narrative with seeming digressions harmonizing with the main themes through repeating images and phrases.” In “Country Without a Post Office,” it is not only through the repetition of images of destruction in Kashmir, key elements that Miller names, but also through shifting narrative personages that Ali makes his reader a witness of the chaos in a region that is as yet unresolved. His use of these forms evokes memories of Kashmir’s past as they call up its present unrest. The evolution of his many narrators dramatizes the journey of an exile in search of brothers so that the reader enters a dismal journey with global significance. Source: Mary Potter, Critical Essay on “The Country Without a Post Office,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Sources Advani, Rukun, “Agha Shahid Ali: A Few Memories,” telhelca.com, http://www.tehelka.com/channels/literary/2001/
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dec/8/lr120801agha.htm (last accessed January 2003), December 8, 2001. Ali, Agha Shahid, “The Country Without a Post Office,” in The Country Without a Post Office, W. W. Norton, 1997, pp. 48–51. Brainard, Dulcy, and Sybil S. Steinberg, Review of The Country Without a Post Office, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 244, Issue 8, February 24, 1997, pp. 86–87. Bryant, Eric, Review of The Country Without a Post Office, in Library Journal, Vol. 117, No. 12, July 1997, p. 102. Gamalinda, Eric, “Poems Are Never Finished: A Final Interview with Agha Shahid Ali,” in Poets & Writers, Vol. 30, No. 2, March–April 2002, pp. 44–51. Guillory, Daniel L., Review of The Country Without a Post Office, in Library Journal, Vol. 122, No. 13, August 1997, p. 92. Hopkins, Gerard Manley, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th ed., edited by William H. Gardner and Norman H. MacKenzie, Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 101. King, Bruce, Review of The Country Without a Post Office, in World Literature Today, Vol. 71, No. 3, Summer 1997, p. 590. Miller, J. Hillis, “Narrative,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Letricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Further Reading Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Routledge, 1995. This anthology provides the most comprehensive selection of texts in postcolonial theory and criticism to date, featuring ninety of the discipline’s most widely read works. Well-known theorists, such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhaba, are represented, and their essays have been edited for clarity and accessibility. Ganguly, Sumit, Conflict Unending, Columbia University Press, 2002. Ganguly presents a concise, dispassionate summary of each Indo-Pakistani conflict since 1947, foregrounding the two countries’ claims to Kashmir. Kak, Subhash, Secrets of Ishbar: Poems on Kashmir and Other Landscapes, Manohar Publishers, 2000. The first part of this book details the author’s memories of Kashmir, and the second part describes landscapes of his imagination. Critics claim Kak is one of India’s finest poets. Said, Edward, Orientalism, Vintage Books, 1978. Said’s study of how the West has historically represented the “Arab” world ranks as one of the most important works of postcolonial theory.
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The Darkling Thrush Thomas Hardy’s gloomy poem about the turn of the twentieth century, “The Darkling Thrush,” remains one of his most popular and anthologized lyrics. Written on the eve of the new century and first published in Graphic with the subtitle “By the Century’s Deathbed” and then published in London Times on New Year’s Day, 1901, the thirty-twoline poem uses a bleak and wintry landscape as a metaphor for the close of the nineteenth century and the joyful song of a solitary thrush as a symbolic image of the dawning century. Like much of Hardy’s writing, “The Darkling Thrush” embodies the writer’s despair and pessimism. This is partially offset, however, by the artfulness of the poem itself. Hardy was sixty years old when he penned the lyric, far past the life expectancy for a man of his time. A few years earlier he had stopped writing novels, after critics panned Jude the Obscure, and turned to writing poetry exclusively. “The Darkling Thrush” is included in his second volume of verse, Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), in the section “Miscellaneous Poems,” sandwiched between “The Last Chrysanthemum” and “The Comet at Yell’ham,” two other bleak poems of nature. Harper & Brothers published Poems of the Past and the Present in an edition of one thousand copies, and a few months later a second edition was published in an edition of five hundred copies. The poem also frequently appears in poetry anthologies such as The Norton Anthology of Poetry because it is a transitional poem, illustrating the trepidation and doubt many people felt about the future as the
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Victorian era came to an end and the modern era was about to begin.
Author Biography Poet and novelist Thomas Hardy was born in the third year of Queen Victoria’s reign on June 2, 1840, in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England, to Thomas Hardy, a stonemason, and Jemima (Hand) Hardy. Hardy’s father, who played the violin, and his mother, who loved books, encouraged their frail son’s pursuit of literature early on. Hardy entered the new school at Lower Bockhampton in 1848 already knowing how to read. In 1856, Hardy apprenticed with architect John Hicks and, in 1862, he moved to London to work with Arthur Blomfield’s architectural firm. He returned to Dorset in 1867 and worked again with Hicks, this time overseeing the restoration of old village churches. Hardy, however, read and wrote regularly all the while and, in 1865, he published his first piece, the short story “How I Built My House,” which appeared in Chamber’s Journal. Although Hardy’s first love was poetry, he made his reputation as a novelist. In 1868, he fin-
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ished his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, but no one would publish it. In 1871, he published the novel Desperate Remedies in three volumes with William Tinsley, but its sales were mediocre. Critics praised his next novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), comparing it to the work of George Eliot. The unexpected success in 1874 of Far from the Madding Crowd, which was serialized in Cornhill, cemented Hardy’s reputation as a first-rate novelist and allowed him to devote all of his time to writing. The novel also identified Hardy with rural characters and the fictional region he called Wessex, which he based on Dorset and the surrounding area. Hardy’s future novels, many of which were also first serialized, include The Return of the Native (1878), The Trumpet-Major: A Tale (1880), A Laodicean (1881), Two on a Tower: A Romance (1882), The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid (1883), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented (1892), and Jude the Obscure (1896). After critics panned Jude the Obscure, Hardy stopped writing novels and devoted himself to poetry. Even though he had been writing poetry since the 1850s, he had published little of it, preferring instead the money that novel-writing brought him. Hardy published his first collection of poems, Wessex Poems and Other Verses, in 1898, and Poems of the Past and the Present in 1901. Though they did not make him the kind of money he had been making writing novels, they were critically praised (for the most part) and helped establish him as a leading British poet. Lyrics such as “The Darkling Thrush,” written on the eve of the twentieth century, and “Drummer Hodge,” an indictment of the British involvement in the Boer War, became instantly popular and continue to be reprinted in anthologies. Hardy published eight volumes of poems in all. By the time of his death in 1928 of a massive heart attack, he had become an international celebrity, and admirers came from around the world to visit him. His many awards include the Order of Merit, 1910, from the British government and a number of honorary doctorates in literature from schools such as Cambridge University (1913) and Oxford University (1920).
Poem Text I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey,
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And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The land’s sharp features seemed to be The Century’s corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.
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Media Adaptations • In 1915, Laurence Trimble directed Far from the Madding Crowd for the English cinema.
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• Far from the Madding Crowd was reproduced in 1967, this time directed by John Schlesinger. • Academy Award-winning director Roman Polanski adapted and directed Tess of the d’Ubervilles for the screen in 1979. • The Return of the Native was produced for English television in 1994, directed by Jack Gold and starring Academy Award-winning actress Catherine Zeta-Jones.
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Stanza 1 The opening lines of “The Darkling Thrush” establish the tone and the setting of the poem. Hardy underscores the speaker’s meditative mood by describing him leaning upon a “coppice gate,” meaning a gate that opens onto the woods. The presence of frost tells readers it is winter, and the adjective “spectre-grey,” a word Hardy coined, suggests a haunted landscape. The word “dregs” means the last of something, but here the dregs act upon the “weakening eye of day,” making the twilight “desolate.” In the fifth and sixth lines, the speaker uses a simile to compare “tangled bine-stems” to “strings of broken lyres.” Bine-stems are the stems of shrubs, and a lyre is a stringed musical instrument similar to a harp. Although “score” is a musical term, Hardy uses it to create an ominous visual image. While the speaker is outside contemplating a bleak landscape, the rest of the world is comfortably inside, warmed by “their household fires.”
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Stanza 2 In this stanza, the speaker uses metaphor to describe the barren landscape as the corpse of the nineteenth century. The now personified century is entombed in the sky (“the cloudy canopy”), and the wind is its “death lament.” Lines 13–14 refer to the seeds of spring, which are now “shrunken hard and dry.” The description literally depicts what happens to seeds during winter, but figuratively the speaker implies that the very processes of nature are at a standstill and that the next spring might not come. In the last two lines, the speaker compares himself with “every spirit upon earth,” projecting his despondency onto the world.
Stanza 3 This stanza marks a break in the tone and action of the poem, as the speaker hears an old thrush break out in song. Thrushes are fairly common songbirds and usually have a brownish upper plumage and a spotted breast. “Evensong” means a song sung in the evening, significant here both for an “aged” bird and because it is the last day of a century. The image of the bird “choosing” to “fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom” suggests both hope and desperation and resonates with the speaker’s own emotions. The image also evokes the phoenix, a mythological bird with a beautiful song that self-reincarnates from its own ashes.
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Topics for Further Study • Compare the attitude of the speaker in Hardy’s poem towards the new century with your own attitude towards the beginning of the twentyfirst century. What similarities and differences do you see? Discuss this as a class. • In groups, compose a poster based on Hardy’s poem. You will have to decide what to put in and what to leave out from what he describes. Feel free to use abstractions in your depiction. Hang the poster on the wall, and then discuss with your class the choices you made in composing it. • Write a short essay exploring the influence of romanticism on Hardy, who was a Victorian poet. How are his poems about nature different from John Keat’s, William Wordsworth’s, or Percy Bysshe Shelley’s? • Compose a short essay comparing and contrasting Hardy’s poem with Keats’s “Ode to a Nightengale” and Emily Dickinson’s “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers.” Why do all of these poets choose song birds as central images in their poems? How do the different styles of these poets qualify the role of the songbird in the poems? • Write a poem or a story about a time when you were depressed or feeling very sad, and include what happened to change your mood (assuming it has changed). Be sure to include at least two “nonce” words in your poem or story. Nonce words bear a resemblance to currently used words or phrases. Hardy often created nonce words, like “outleant” (lean out), for specific poems or stories. • Write another stanza for the poem that takes place a year later. Follow the poem’s meter and rhyme scheme exactly. Take turns reading your poems to the class, and then discuss the differences among them.
Stanza 4 In this stanza, the speaker expresses incredulity at the bird’s singing (“carolings”), literally wondering what on Earth (“terrestrial things”) could
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make it so happy. The incongruity of a joyful bird amidst such a stark landscape is striking, and it puzzles the speaker who, though he can recognize joy, cannot experience it himself. However, the word “blessed,” the capitalization of “Hope,” and the limiting phrase “terrestrial things” open the possibility that there might be religious or spiritual reasons for the thrush’s behavior. The speaker’s acknowledgement that he is “unaware” of the cause of the bird’s singing also suggests the possibility that there may indeed be a cause for it and that the speaker might in time come to know that cause.
Themes Search for Meaning The speaker’s despair echoes Hardy’s own world-weariness and loss of hope for humanity’s future. Isolated from those who have “sought their household fires,” the speaker sees a death-haunted landscape and a “growing gloom.” Hardy himself mourned the passing of agricultural society and saw little cause to celebrate England’s rapid industrialization, which helped destroy the customs and traditions of rural life. The speaker’s connection to the past has been severed, and he cannot find meaning in the present, and the dawning century, symbolized by the thrush’s song, offers little in the way of meaning. The bird is “frail, gaunt, and small,” and his “carolings,” though joyful and “fullhearted,” are an evensong and about to end. Any meaning that a new beginning might bring with it is nowhere to be found, not in the landscape and not in the speaker’s heart.
Nature In Hardy’s poem, nature is not a pretty place where flowers bloom and fuzzy animals frolic in the sun waiting to be petted. It is governed by the cycle of life and death and is largely indifferent to human needs or desires. “The Darkling Thrush” deromanticizes nature by taking even the capacity for renewal away: “The ancient pulse of germ and birth, / Was shrunken hard and dry.” Romantics such as William Wordsworth often depicted nature as awe-inspiring, simultaneously inscrutable and full of meaning. Hardy’s speaker, however, finds no inspiration in the processes of the natural world. Though he has meditated on the nature of life, he has found no life in nature. Even the thrush, the harbinger of hope, is “aged” and on its last song.
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By using the exhausted landscape as a symbolic projection of the speaker’s own interior life, Hardy makes a bleak comment on the potential of human nature as well.
Chaos and Order The form of Hardy’s poem is traditional in meter and rhyme and acts as a container of sorts for the chaos of the landscape he describes. Other structural parallels similarly give the poem a coherence that the poem’s themes work against. The speaker’s posture leaning “upon a coppice gate,” for example, is like the “Century’s corpse outleant.” By juxtaposing the chaos of a dying world with the order of its description, Hardy illustrates and underscores his own status as a poet with one foot in Victorian England and the other in the modern world.
Style Form Composed in four octet, or eight-line, stanzas, with an ABABCDCD rhyme scheme, “The Darkling Thrush” is written in iambic tetrameter, with lines one, three, five, and seven carrying four stressed syllables, and lines two, four, six, and eight carrying three stressed syllables. In poetry, a foot refers to a group of syllables, one of which is accented. An iambic foot, the most popular in English verse, consists of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. The restrictions of these conventional features are at odds with the tone of despair and portrayal of meaninglessness in the poem, creating a tension that gives the poem energy and emotional depth.
Diction Diction refers to an author’s word choice. Hardy is known for his innovative use of the English language, and he frequently coined new words in his poetry. He called words created for a single occasion “nonce words,” and in “The Darkling Thrush” he uses a few, including “outleant,” “blastberuffled,” and “spectre-gray” to fit the meter and rhyme scheme of the poem. He was especially deft at creating compound words such as the latter two. A student of the English language, Hardy also echoed unusual words used by other poets. The unusual word “darkling,” for example, was used by John Keats in “Ode to a Nightengale” and by Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach.”
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Personification Personification is a trope, one of the two major divisions of figures of speech. To personify something is to give human qualities to inanimate things. Hardy does this throughout the poem, describing twilight as the “weakening eye of day” and the landscape as “The Century’s corpse.” Personification allows him to paradoxically make the land “come alive” while at the same time to describe its death-like features. Other tropes include metaphor, metonymy, simile, and synecdoche.
Historical Context 1900 and the British Empire When Hardy wrote “The Darkling Thrush” in 1900, the British Empire had expanded to include almost 4 million square miles. England controlled a sizeable portion of the world’s land, including India, large swaths of Africa and China, Australia, and Canada. Some were outright colonies; others held “dominion” status. Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), which includes “The Darkling Thrush,” also contains many poems expressing Hardy’s dismay with British imperialism. Poems in the section “War Poems,” for example, deal primarily with the Boer War. In 1899, the British High Commissioner of Cape Colony in South Africa, Alfred Milner, schemed to gain power of the gold mines in the Dutch Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, precipitating a war with the Boers. More than a half million British soldiers fought in the war and tens of thousands were killed before the war ended in 1902 with the Treaty of Vereeniging. Hardy’s disillusionment with humanity was also a disillusionment with his country’s policies. Britain viewed its imperialistic expansion as a moral responsibility, using Darwin’s theories of evolution as a rationale for exerting greater control over their colonies. British writer Rudyard Kipling referred to this responsibility as “the white man’s burden,” meaning that it was the God-given duty of the British to civilize and Christianize those people whom the British assumed were incapable of governing themselves. Hardy was also disillusioned with the ways in which industrialization was changing how human beings related to their environment. During Queen Victoria’s reign, technologies such as the railway, electricity, the steamship, and suspension bridges re-shaped the working lives of millions of British subjects, sending them flocking to cities to work in
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Compare & Contrast • 1890s: The British Empire is at its strongest, controlling more than 4 million square miles worldwide, including India and large parts of China and Africa. Today: After losing control of foreign lands that were once a part of the British Empre, Great Britain heads the Commonwealth of Nations.
Today: South Africa is an independent and democratic country. • 1890s: At the turn of the century, the population of England and Wales is approximately 32.5 million. Today: The population of England and Wales is approximately 50.5 million.
• 1890s: Desiring control of South African gold mines, the British go to war against the Boers in South Africa.
factories and live in row houses. The agricultural depression of the 1870s further depleted the number of remaining farmers. By the turn of the century, more than 80 percent of Britain’s population lived in cities. Hardy’s pessimism, rooted in his lament for the now abandoned farms of the British countryside and for the loss of folk customs and traditions, is a pessimism of which the British in general have been historically accused. Poems such as “The Darkling Thrush” did nothing to dispel that image. The sentiment expressed in the last lines of the poem, that of a man who would like to feel joy but cannot, mirrors Hardy’s, and many other late Victorians’, attitude towards religion: he would like to believe in God, but he cannot. This shift in attitude came about gradually but was in no small part due to the influence of Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution, detailed in his study On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, published in 1859. Science itself, in its modern incarnation, was a product of Victorian England, replacing the fields of “natural philosophy” and “natural history.” Darwin’s claim that all life struggles to exist and that it is the survival of the fittest that ultimately wins out challenged Judeo-Christian notions that “man” is at the center of the universe and that the goal of one’s life is to strive for moral perfection. With the popularization of evolution and the formalization of science education in schools, more people began questioning the place of human
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beings in nature and the universe. Karl Marx’s publication of the The Communist Manifesto in 1848 also gave Victorians another way to think about their place in the social pecking order. By 1901, although churchgoing remained a regular part of small town life, only about 20 percent of the people in London regularly attended services.
Critical Overview On the whole, critics have been kind to “The Darkling Thrush,” praising both its subject matter and its form. It is one of Hardy’s most written-about poems. Richard Carpenter, for example, in his study of Hardy and his work, Thomas Hardy, writes, “[The poem] is sharp and clear in its images, harsh and austere in its feelings, done in Hardy’s most characteristic manner.” In his essay “Thomas Hardy: Moments of Vision,” Geoffrey Harvey calls “The Darkling Thrush” a poem of the highest imaginative order,” noting that the speaker mourns God’s death as much as the death of nature. Sheila Berger, in her study Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures, makes a link between what the speaker physically sees and the thematic vision of the poem. “There is a question in the air,” Berger writes, “as there is in much of the poetry.” Dennis Taylor reads the poem in the tradition of other “bird poems,” including Keats’s “Ode to a Nightengale,”
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Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” and numerous poems by William Wordsworth. Taylor writes, “‘The Darkling Thrush’ . . . announces itself as the last nineteenth-century revision of the great tradition.” David Perkins also notes the poem’s relation to other bird poems of the nineteenth century, specifically that all of the birds are symbolic of the visionary imagination. In his essay for English Literary History, Perkins claims that Hardy’s thrush, however, is a “more complicated— symbolic reference . . . with the implication that there is no hope of closing the gap between the speaker and bird.”
Criticism Chris Semansky Semansky is an instructor of literature whose writing appears regularly in literary journals. In this essay, Semansky considers modernist attitudes in Hardy’s poem. Critics have long called Hardy a transitional figure between the Victorian era and the modern world. Though it is easy to see the Victorian influences in his poetry, especially in his traditional verse forms and his nostalgia for older, simpler ways of living, it is often more difficult to see what makes him a modernist. In “The Darkling Thrush,” written at the beginning of a new century, Hardy evokes some of the ideas and sentiments that would influence numerous subsequent poets such as Wilfred Owen, Philip Larkin, and W. H. Auden and that would help to shape modernist attitudes towards history and humanity. These include the representation of nature as a hostile (or, at best, an indifferent) force, a tolerance for contradiction, and a deep pessimism about the potential for humanity to change its behavior. The Victorian era, lasting from 1837 until Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, was marked by intense and rapid change (political, technological, socioeconomic, and psychological), and writing during the period often addresses the idea of loss. One stereotype of Victorian writing, especially poetry, depicts it as overly polite, grave, and with a thread of uncertainty and doubt running through it. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867), for example, laments human misery and the loss of faith. The Victorians were fearful of what the future would bring. They were riding the crest of an unprecedented buildup of their empire, but if the
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The speaker is left alone outside with death all around him.”
British were proud of their status as “world civilizers,” they were also insecure as they waited for resistance or retaliation. Like Americans today, the Victorians had to bear the obligations and scorn that come with being a world power. In addition to the geopolitical responsibility that came with international might, the Victorians had to contend with changes in how they perceived themselves in the universal scheme of things. Writers such as Marx and Darwin forced Victorians to reassess their relationship to one another and to nature. Darwin’s theory of evolution caused many to rethink the purpose of their lives. Literary modernism began to take hold in the 1890s. In the United States, writers such as Stephen Crane wrote stories about individuals driven by forces of which they were only dimly aware battling an indifferent nature. Hardy had been chronicling his own bleak view of the human condition in his novels in the last quarter of the century, and that bleakness continued unabated in his poems. The speaker of “The Darkling Thrush” is a typical Hardy character: a watcher, a thinker, one who projects onto the physical world his own emotional turmoil. Paradoxically, the world revolves around him, yet also seems to ignore him. This intense inwardness is also evident in how the speaker characterizes other people. It is not just some people or some families that have gone inside but “all mankind” that has retreated from nature’s threatening landscape and “sought their household fires.” The speaker is left alone outside with death all around him. The century that has passed is now a “corpse outleant.” The sense of loss is everywhere, in the “weakening eye of day,” in the “Winter’s dregs,” even in the procreative powers of nature itself, “the ancient pulse of germ and birth,” which is now “shrunken hard and dry.” In some ways, the poem is an elegy for the troubled nineteenth century. Elegies are meditative poems that lament the loss of something. However, there is no lamentation for a particular idea or object in Hardy’s poem—just the recognition of a passing and a sense
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of gloom and doom that the speaker generalizes to everything and everyone around him. The only lamenting done is by the figure of the century, which mourns itself. One can imagine that Hardy did not need the occasion of the century’s turn to write this poem. For Hardy’s speaker, the world is going from bad to worse, and the century’s passing is merely a way to keep time of misery’s march. The thrush, appearing in the third stanza, arrives as a potential savior for the darkness threatening literally to bury the speaker. That it “chooses” to “fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom” is significant, for it underscores the importance of individuality and free will, contentious ideas for late Victorians who were busy digesting notions that their ancestors were apes and that human beings are driven as much by biological imperatives as they are by rational decision-making. The landscape is not improving but becoming worse than before. Hardy believed that if humanity were ever to change, it would need to marshal its own resources and not rely on the Christian God to rescue it from self-destruction. The charges of pessimism against Hardy are so great that Norman Page, in his encyclopedia Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy, includes an entry on “pessimism.” However, Peter Casagrande, who wrote the entry, apologizes for Hardy, arguing that the poet is really misunderstood. Casagrande writes: “Pessimism was for Hardy not an end in itself but an instrument for exposure of his highly refined sense of reality—a sense better captured by the phrase ‘tragic realism’ than the word ‘pessimism.’” The tragic realism can be seen in the last stanza, in the speaker’s allowance for the possibility that human change may be possible, but that it is highly improbable. William Buckler notes the gloominess but argues that Hardy’s poem “functions in a narrow gauge between sentimentality and severity” and that the poem is successful because of its pacing of “poetic disclosure.” Buckler claims that Hardy’s “death-resurrection motif would pose no problems if it were purely naturalistic, but the capitalization of the crucial word ‘hope’ skews it toward the supernatural . . . and this is a problem.” Buckler “solves” this problem by making a distinction between the poet and the speaker, asserting that where the speaker sees “the pattern of a miracle” in the bird’s appearance, the poet “sees only a mystery.” Buckler concludes: Recognition of the discrepancy restores a wholly acceptable naturalistic insight to the poem while reveal-
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ing another dimension of its imaginative awareness, namely, the proneness of the human spirit, even in the face of massive empirical data, to leap to miraculous explanations that weaken rather than strengthen the transformation of spirit to which the poems speaks.
What Buckler describes is irony. However, his irony rests on the necessity of readers seeing the wink in the eye of the person writing the poem (Hardy). Buckler’s interpretation is weak, but it is one of many that critics have made of Hardy’s poem. The very fact that Hardy’s poem has occasioned such response speaks to its popularity and to the fact that so many readers have recognized in it the emotional impasse that continues to plague individuals in the twenty-first century. People want to believe that their lives have purpose, that the future will be better, if not for themselves, then for their children. However, all of the evidence speaks to the contrary. This evidence includes, during Hardy’s time, the wars (e.g., the Boer War of 1899–1902), which the British Empire waged all over the world in the name of civilizing “ignorant” peoples, and the degrading living conditions of the working class toiling in poverty in London and other industrialized cities. These urban laborers were now not only cut off from any relationship to the land but from the products of their own work as well. Technological progress and scientific knowledge had not brought enlightenment to the masses—just more misery and pain. This would become even more evident in the next decade and a half, when the world would plunge into war, with countries using new military technology to slaughter one another’s troops. Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “The Darkling Thrush,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Katherine Kearney Maynard In the following essay excerpt, Maynard explores the themes of death and a life without hope in “The Darkling Thrush,” especially as they relate to similar conclusions in nineteenth-century thought. The poem offers two complementary portraits of the “senselessness” of nature. One is literal and the other figurative, corresponding to the two meaning of “darkling”: “in the dark” and “obscure.” In the first two stanzas, the world appears physically dead. The first suggests the exhaustion of sense experience. There is little to see in the “spectre-gray” landscape; the “eye of day” is weak. “Winter’s dregs” offer little to satisfy the sense of taste or smell. Heaviness characterizes the sense of touch, as suggested by Hardy’s use of “leant” to
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describe his own physical posture in the scene. Finally, there is no sound at all. The image of tangled bine-stems resembling strings of broken lyres vividly conveys the utter silence of the scene. The second stanza extends this death-sense to include time as well as space. The landscape seems to represent the century that is ending, or dying, this New Year’s Eve. The land’s desolate features represent more than the simple and conventional figure of wintry death, or the lowest point in the cycle of seasons. A greater termination is occurring, involving the very “pulse” of creation. Hardy qualifies this assertion by frankly confessing his own “fervourless” condition; but the poem’s tone up to this point is seamless. There is even a touch of grandeur in the image of the clouds forming a canopy for the dead century. In the last two stanzas, nature, as represented by the singing thrush, displays a sudden vigor. Here, too, nature is “senseless,” inasmuch as the song does not arise from anything perceived in “terrestrial things.” That is, the song is not inspired by anything in the immediate scene, or anything Hardy might understand as a reason for song. The frailty of the bird itself, “gaunt and small” with “blastberuffled plumage,” also militates against any song. Donald Davie accuses Hardy of fudging the poem’s ending to avoid ruffling readers who might recoil at the prospect of a life without hope. “Can we doubt,” asks Davie, “that the reader of The Times in 1900, and the reader of anthologies ever since, and at present, read the lines to mean: ‘I, the notorious pessimist and author of Jude the Obscure, humbly confess myself foolish beside the sanguine and resolute wisdom of this bird’?” On textual grounds alone, a good case can be raised against Davie’s charge. Hardy published the poem with the title “By the Century’s Deathbed.” The poem’s theme is certainly the death of hope; but the revised title is infinitely more suggestive. If the thrush is “in the dark,” singing at night, flinging its soul into the “growing gloom,” it is also singing for what must remain to humanity decidedly obscure reasons. Whatever prompts the bird’s song is not evident to Hardy. The “illimited joy” of the song and “blessed hope” it betokens seem small recompense for the pain men and women endure now and have endured through the century. If the bird sings while humanity confronts the desolation of its existence, the question arises whether nature has any sense—awareness or concern—at all, for the thrush’s joy can only be heard as an ironic comment on humanity’s joyless state.
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By dint of mindless vitality, nature, in the form of the aged thrush, sings when a person would surely not sing: at that moment when one senses mortality and imagines the full weight of an entire century’s pain and suffering. . . .”
The striking image in the first stanza, the simile likening bine-stems to the strings of broken lyres, adds significant weight to Hardy’s sense of the century’s death. The simile unites a figure of human art with a figure of natural growth. The lyre suggests the sunny, song-filled youth of Western civilization, specifically the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, the troubadours of Provence, and more immediately for Hardy the Romantic poets of the century’s early decades. Palgrave, as we have seen, believed the Romantic poet rivaled and perhaps even outshone his Greek ancestor by virtue of an acuter sense of natural beauty. By fusing art and nature in this image, Hardy suggests the singular characteristic of the Romantic era: the attempt to find in nature a means to recapture the lyrical spirit of former ages. The image of tangled and overgrown stems illustrates humanity’s failure to find in nature a suitable accompaniment to its own human song. Things of the physical universe live, grow, and overgrow regardless of human wishes or needs. If the lyre was played in paeans to the gods, the tangled lyrestems suggest that nature offers no substitute for those lost spirits. Neither God nor nature accompanies humanity, comforts or consoles people, in this earthly existence. By dint of mindless vitality, nature, in the form of the aged thrush, sings when a person would surely not sing: at that moment when one senses mortality and imagines the full weight of an entire century’s pain and suffering stretching “afar or nigh.” In this respect, “The Darkling Thrush” is about the death of hope in the
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nineteenth century; for having lost faith in God and nature, people can place faith in no other benevolent force. Source: Katherine Kearney Maynard, “The Tragic Lyric,” in Thomas Hardy’s Tragic Poetry, University of Iowa Press, 1991, pp. 109–79.
Charles Lock In the following essay excerpt, Lock compares the singing of the thrush in “The Darkling Thrush” with Hardy’s role as poet and his view of poetry. Keats’s thrush, who is the speaker of the sonnet ‘O thou whose face hath felt the winter’s wind’ which is addressed to one saddened by the landscape of winter, exhorts the poet: Oh, fret not after knowledge—I have none, And yet the evening listens.
The joy of Hardy’s thrush, however, is not owed to the absence of knowledge but to the knowledge of ‘some blessed Hope’. That is a small, buried irony which is insufficient to explain Hardy’s choice of bird. For an adequate explanation we must turn to another poet, and to natural history and ornithology. In his Hardy of Wessex of 1940, Carl J. Weber pointed out the remarkable similarities between Hardy’s poem and the account of the missel-thrush in W. H. Hudson’s Nature in Downland, published in 1900: There is one thing to make a lover of bird-music happy in the darkest weather in January . . . Midwinter is the season of the missel-thrush . . . [I]f you should observe him in rough or gloomy weather, perched on an elm-top, swayed about this way and that by the gusts, singing his best, you must believe that this dark aspect of things delights him; that his pleasure in life, expressed with such sounds and in such circumstances, must greatly exceed in degree the contentment and bliss that is ours . . .
That the thrush should sing his best when the weather is most gloomy is not only an irony of Nature such as Hardy characteristically observes: it is also an image of the poet, cheerfully sounding from his own misery, helplessly improving on reality. The ironic distinction between Hardy’s thrush and Keats’s is only one, as we shall shortly see, of a number of clues and devices by which Hardy distances himself from the Romantic Lyric. To a certain extent modern poetry can be seen as nothing but a struggle against Romanticism, and it seems probable that in Hardy’s struggle—especially against the most admired models of Shelley and Keats—he derives support from Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’. As Lincoln’s
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coffin journeys across America, assimilating the nation to itself (‘the great cloud darkening the land . . . the cities draped in black’), a thrush sings ‘in the swamp’. While in Keats and Shelley the bird is implicitly a symbol of the poet or the poetic imagination, Whitman’s thrush is explicitly so: the bird is so common, his habitat so unpoetical, that Whitman need make no pretence of having ‘actually’ heard him: Song of the bleeding throat, Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know, If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)
The blatant symbolism, unrooted in natural observation, and the bird’s defiant unreality are confirmed by the address ‘dear brother’ and by the later apostrophe, ‘I hear your notes . . . I understand you . . .’ Lilacs do not bloom in mid-winter, so the contrast between the song and the weather, central for Hardy as for Hudson, is not available to Whitman: his contrast is effected through the habitat—a swamp, like a rag-and-bone shop, being a good place to find a symbol. Whereas Romantic Lyric describes a movement of bird and poet towards identification, Whitman assumes a fixed identity between them: the poet ‘warbles’ and the bird sings a ‘Loud human song’. The center of Whitman’s poem is the thrush’s ‘carol’ which is, explicitly, identical with the poet’s poem: And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.
There is no question of Hardy’s familiarity with Whitman—he is quoted in Desperate Remedies and in Tess—and little doubt of his presence in ‘The Darkling Thrush’. ‘When Lilacs Last . . .’ provides Hardy with a model of identity between poet and bird, thus enabling him to avoid the emotions of identification characteristic of Romantic Lyric. That ‘The Darkling Thrush’s third stanza contains no first person pronoun is crucial. Despite the title’s ‘Darkling’, what the poet almost conspicuously does not say is ‘I listen’. Nor does the poet say that he looked at the bird: the conventional movement in Romantic Lyric is to have the attention drawn and concentrated, with a corresponding action on the poet’s part. (Even Keats, the least physically active of Romantic poets, manages to suggest the movement to the poet by apostrophising the urn from different sides.) Hardy does not indicate any changes in the poet’s position after he
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has leant on the gate, nor does the poet apostrophise the thrush. The song is—audibly—‘full-hearted’, and the thrush is—visibly—‘frail, gaunt, and small’, but where is the poet who has heard and seen these things? By the conventions of symbolism the poet is, of course, the thrush, but he has not become the thrush. The Romantic Lyric occupies a passage of time during which poet and apostrophised object draw near to, meet or become one another, after which they withdraw into separateness once more. No time elapses in ‘The Darkling Thrush’. The poet’s absence from the third stanza is precisely matched by the temporal adverb, ‘At once’. The anticipated but missing phrase is ‘And then’. Casual reading supposes the thrush’s song to be subsequent to the poet’s leaning; ‘At once’, however, requires the beginning of the bird’s song to share an identical moment with another action. That moment must be the poem’s only moment, the moment into which the entire poem has been concentrated, in which the one action has been the poet’s leaning on a gate. The poem and the thrush’s song begin simultaneously. The poem fills but a moment, and so does the song, as W. H. Hudson observes: ‘the song is an outburst, a cry of happiness, and is over in a moment . . .’ ‘The Darkling Thrush’ thus achieves a figure of identity between the poet and the thrush, without movement in space or through time, without the process of becoming, of identification. With specific reference to Pasternak Roman Jakobson made a fundamental distinction between, on the one hand, metaphor and simile and, on the other. metonymy. ‘Metaphor works through creative association by similarity and contrast,’ says Jakobson, while metonymy is ‘association by proximity . . . images of the surrounding world function as contiguous reflections, or metonymical expressions, of the poet’s self.’ Hardy has effected the drastic break between the second and third stanzas precisely by a figurative shift from metaphor and simile to metonymy. The first stanza had placed the poet in the landscape, contrasting him to ‘all mankind’ indoors and comparing the bine-stems to ‘strings of broken lyres’; the second stanza compared the landscape to the Century, and assimilated both to the poet—‘as I’. In our analysis of those stanzas we have seen how the contrived appearance of poetic weakness and fervourlessness is expressed by figurative incoherence: similes are inverted; a figure is indeterminably metaphor or simile or both; visualisation is unfocussed, and conceptualisation is blurred.
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‘The Darkling Thrush’ thus achieves a figure of identity between the poet and the thrush, without movement in space or through time, without the process of becoming, of identification.”
The third stanza proceeds without the poet looking at or hearing the bird, and without any comparisons, whether metaphor or simile. Instead, contiguity is exemplified: in space, ‘overhead’, and in time ‘At once’. Just as there is no process, no desire for identification, no equivalent of Shelley’s ‘Be thou me, impetuous one!’ or Keats’s ‘I will fly to thee . . . Already with thee . . .’, so there need be no falling away, nothing unfulfilled, nothing to regret. The song of Keats’s nightingale has a beginning— albeit unspecified—and a stated end: ‘Fled is that music’. Hardy’s thrush neither begins nor ceases to sing within the poem, for his song is exactly coterminous with the poem. Through identity and simultaneity the poet is free of the feelings of desire and regret that characterise Romantic Lyric; his ‘I’ is absent; his feelings are elicited not by not being a thrush but by being metonymically poet and thrush. What is it for a poet to be metonymically a thrush? What is the significance of the contiguity? If the poet were the tenor of a metaphor or a simile, then to the bird would be attributed those qualities desired by the poet—song, freedom, the flight of inspiration—and imaginatively suggested by the bird’s ‘natural’ being. When the tenor is human a metaphor’s vehicle is anthropomorphic. Regardless of its subject, metaphor arranges and orders, patterning the contingent, unifying the disparate: it is the pre-eminent figure of Romantic poetics wherein matter is subordinated to the imagination. The problem of post-Romantic poetry lies in part in the conflict between the heritage of metaphor and the loss of faith in the power of imagination. If, far from revealing or shaping the truth, metaphor ‘makes nothing happen’ then it is not only useless but deceptive, decorative in the most pejorative sense.
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What Do I Read Next? • Richard D. Altick’s Victorian People and Ideas (1973) describes the social structure of Victorian England, with chapters on technological change, social structure, art, and religion.
was like to live in Victorian England. Mitchell covers topics such as education, health and medicine, technology, and the significance of the ever-expanding British Empire.
• Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is a love story set in rural England and marks his first real literary success.
• James Morris’s Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire (1968) describes how the empire grew and how the British people felt about it.
• The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer and released in 2001 by Cambridge University Press, collects critical essays on Hardy by prominent scholars.
• The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy (2000), edited by Norman Page, contains a wealth of information on Hardy, including an index of Hardy’s poems and characters and a glossary of dialect words and expressions used in his writings.
• Sally Mitchell’s Daily Life in Victorian England (1996) provides a thorough overview of what it
Metonymy, with its modestly imaginative acceptance of the world as it approximately is, tends to be the dominant figure in realistic narrative. The distinction formulated and made absolute by Jakobson had been a long time in gestation. Ricoeur paraphrases Gaston Esnault, writing in 1925: ‘the imaginative equivalence instituted by metaphor does more violence to the real than does metonymy, which respects the links inscribed in the facts’. Heidegger more bluntly claims that ‘the metaphorical exists only inside the metaphysical’. Hardy is predisposed to metonymy by his post-Romantic awareness of the fallaciousness of metaphor, and further encouraged in his evasion of metaphor by his metonymic practice as a novelist. To be, metonymically, a thrush is to respect the thrush’s own being, to apprehend, as it were from within, the thrush’s independence from the human imagination. When Whitman confides to his thrush: (for well dear brother I know, If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st die.)
he is sharing a secret that the Romantics never found out: that poets and birds are alike not only in their song but in the compulsion of their singing. Tennyson knew it, and therewith justified his ‘parade of pain’:
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I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing.
That birds sing from compulsion, and not unconsciously but from pain, has long been known. There is an Italian proverb, ‘L’uccello canta nella gabbia, non di gioia ma di rabbia’ (the bird sings in the cage, not in joy but in rage), which Webster might almost be translating in ‘We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.’ It is only with Tennyson and Whitman that the poet uses such a traditional observation about birds to subvert the complacency and ornithological ignorance of the Romantic metaphor. While the proverb specifically refers to the caged bird, Tennyson and Whitman see birds in general as partaking in the necessity and cruelty of Nature. Insofar as humans had come to be perceived as part of the evolutionary scheme of Nature the bird in poetry ceased to be merely a symbol for human projection. The metonymic contiguity instead challenges the poet to see himself in the bird’s terms—to find what is shared between poet and bird not in the invalidated realm of symbol but in the ‘real’ world of Nature. As integral as are metaphor and resemblance of the ‘Great Chain of Being’, are metonymy and contiguity to Evolution. When Hardy writes that the thrush ‘had chosen thus to fling his soul’ he is obviously ironic in as-
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suming that a bird has a soul and a choice. That is the first and manifest level of irony. Beneath that is the second level. Irony concerning the bird’s soul and choice becomes self-reflexive: does the poet have a soul or any choice about writing this poem? There is little possibility of significance in the mere fact of contiguity unless we respect the metonymical figure of identity, and suspect the poet’s song to be as unchosen, as determined, as the thrush’s. There is a third level of irony, that for all his protestations of metonymic identity with the thrush the poet cannot deny his consciousness, of himself and even of his compulsions. These three levels of irony establish, first, the difference between poet and thrush; second, the identity of poet and thrush in the song/poem and the compulsion of utterance; and third, the distinction between the poet’s utterance and his consciousness. This division is within the poet, separating the one who writes from the one who thinks and suffers—and who, in suffering, can question the worth of writing. As the thrush’s ‘carol’ within Whitman’s poem is the elegy on Lincoln that Whitman has been trying to write, so the thrush’s ‘carolings’ in the third stanza of Hardy’s poem are to be taken for the entire poem: fervourless in the growing gloom, the poet is inspired to write a poem and wonders—in this alone distinct from the thrush—what makes him do it. It is possible that this last distinction is manifested acoustically in the third stanza, through the elaborate patterning of short ‘u’ and long ‘o’ sounds. ‘Once . . . among . . . thrush . . . beruffled . . . thus’ are words of lyric expression, both bird’s and poet’s; ‘arose . . . overhead . . . chosen . . . soul . . . growing’ tend to be words of self-conscious interpretation, personifying and ironic. These two impressive sets of internal rhyme are deliberately accentuated by Hardy’s use of imperfect rhyme in the odd lines, a feature of this stanza only. The acoustic pattern continues in the last stanza: the conscious thinker in the poet sees ‘So little cause’ for the lyricist’s ‘carolings Of such ecstatic sound.’ The third stanza is the triumph of metonymy over metaphor: the poet is identified with the thrush not as a symbol but as a natural phenomenon. That both are part of the evolutionary scheme of Nature, and that neither bird nor poet has a soul or a choice, is the significance of their contiguity. The outstanding problem with which the final stanza must deal originates in what I have termed the third level of irony in 1. 23. Neither poet nor bird may have a soul or a choice, but the poet has those words and the consciousness of their ironic use. That consciousness can be explained only by the exclusion
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of some aspects of the poet from the metonymic identity: metaphor proposes itself once more as a possibility, even as a necessity. The last stanza, like the first two, contains a first person pronoun and an extensive landscape. The landscape had been, in the poem’s first half, as fervourless as the man, its tangled bine-stems like his weak poetic powers. Now, in the last stanza, the landscape is as it was before—in contrast with the twigs and the poet from both of which song issues. Who or what, then, is the ‘I’? Is it the poet metonymically identified with the thrush, or is it the poet metaphorically compared to the landscape in metaphorical contrast to the thrush? So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think . . .
The ‘I’, being detached, looking at the landscape, listening to the song, can see no cause for the singing of the bird which is the writing of this poem. ‘Why do I write?’ is the question implied at the beginning of the final stanza. The evidence of the landscape, what is ‘written on terrestrial things’, is insufficient cause or occasion of this poem. Like ‘chosen’, ‘written’ is a residue of the language of poetic fallacy, to be used only ironically or sentimentally: landscape can be interpreted as ‘written’ only by an observer who can presuppose a writer, and Hardy is not that observer. In his choice of the word ‘written’, ironically meant, Hardy approaches Nietzsche’s aphorism that, having got rid of God, we must now get rid of grammar. Grammar is the ordering of words, and its traditional, Aristotelian validity derived from the faith that the world is analogously ordered. In retrospect that validity seems to have withdrawn—from literature at least—in an inevitable progression: it is but steps from Ruskin’s identification of the pathetic fallacy, to the superior intellectual respectability of metonymy over metaphor, to the present sense of the invalidity of all discourse. That progression is enacted in ‘The Darkling Thrush’: what is not, or is inadequately, ‘written on terrestrial things’ is not inscribed in the facts and not only metaphor but writing itself is put in question. ‘I could think’ introduces the poem’s final clause with magisterial uncertainty: does ‘could’ mean ‘was able to’ or ‘might’? Our only syntactical guide is the perfect tense of the final line, which may encourage us to take 1. 29 in the same tense (‘was able to’) but does not compel us to do so. Either (to paraphrase the alternative meanings) the
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contrast between what I could see and what I could hear was so great that I was able to think that the thrush had some secret knowledge; or the same contrast was so great that I might now think that the thrush had some secret knowledge. What Hardy has carefully avoided writing is ‘That I could not think’, which is the logical and anticipated consequence of ‘So little cause’. That would be rational and ironic, unlike either reading of ‘could think’: both of them are sentimental, giving way to poetic language and the pathetic fallacy. While it is a pathetic fallacy to attribute ‘Hope’ to a thrush Hardy manages to establish some distance from the fallacy by describing within the poem the mental process of poetic surrender. This effect of ‘conscious illusion’ is characteristic of Hardy’s poetry: other examples include ‘The Oxen’s ‘Hoping it might be so’ and ‘My head unturned lest my dream should fade’ from ‘The Shadow on the Stone’. If it were certain that the oxen were not kneeling, or that the shadow was not his late wife’s, what difference would it make? Hardy would not be at all disappointed, but there would be no poem. For Coleridge poetry is mediated by a willing suspension of disbelief; for Hardy that willing suspension is part of the poem’s being. Thus the ambiguity of ‘could’ resolves itself: he was able to think and he is still able to think that there is ‘Hope’ in the thrush’s song. That is the occasion of the poem, the ‘enabling’ of the poem, regardless of what the poet actually does think. It is not mere ‘irony’ that has one aspect of the poet casting doubt on another, for it is only because of the other that Hardy is a poet at all. In 1897, having recently devoted his writing solely to poetry, Hardy recorded: ‘In spite of myself I cannot help noticing countenances and tempers in objects of scenery: e.g., trees, hills, houses.’ The poet ‘could think’ that ‘Hope’ ‘trembled through’ the thrush’s song. At the very moment when the poet has effected a partial detachment— through self-consciousness—from metonymic identity with the thrush, the distinction is questioned. ‘Trembling’ is, strictly speaking, an involuntary action, something we do ‘in spite of ourselves’. Hardy uses its musical association (both here and in the ‘tremulous’ of the first line of ‘Afterwards’), wherein the effect of trembling is intentional, to disguise the primary meaning. ‘Trembled’ does not mean that the thrush’s song is unchosen but that the ‘Hope’ that comes ‘through’ the song is involuntary. Since it is that very ‘Hope’ knowledge of which the poet attributes to the thrush, ‘trembled’ is cunningly selected. The thrush may be aware of the Hope in his song in exactly
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the same manner in which the poet is aware of what poetic language implies: awareness is quite other than intellectual endorsement. Whatever trick the poet tries he cannot evade the thrush. In Romantic Lyric the bird is anthropomorphised by metaphor, transformed into a symbol of the poet and of poetic aspirations. In Hardy’s poem the thrush remains a thrush and the poet in his metonymic identity with the thrush is deprived of his humanity. In the writing of this poem the poet separates himself from ‘all mankind’, being a bird not in the Romantic or symbolic sense but only naturally. This is Hardy’s resolution of the contradiction faced by numerous later writes—Kafka, Beckett, Ionesco, among other—that, however negative the intended mood or meaning, artistic form is always positive. In giving shape to despair, as Beckett obeys the injunction in Watt—‘Nothingness in words enclose’—there is always a purpose implied, even faith and hope. Beckett’s well-known description of his writings as ‘the expression that there is nothing to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’, poses the question that ‘The Darkling Thrush’ has tried to answer. Why fulfil that obligation, why yield to poetry and all the tricks of language when reason, seeing nothing, counsels silence? ‘And I was unaware’ not so much of the ‘Hope’ trembling through the thrush’s song—of which the poet has told us enough to be reckoned ‘aware’—as of the ‘Hope’ that trembles, in spite of the author’s intentions and wishes, through this poem, and through every great poem. In his description of the thrush W. H. Hudson wonders at ‘his habit of singing in weather that makes all other voices silent.’ Poetry is for Hardy not a rare and precious human achievement, as it had been for the Romantics, but a peculiar natural compulsion. Whether that compulsion—and the ‘Hope that trembles through it—is humanity’s last illusion before the silence of despair, or the very vindication of metaphor and poetry, attesting to the superiority of human values over the natural, is a dilemma that writing cannot resolve. Language always sides with meaning. Silence might differ, but for Hardy and the thrush, as for Beckett, silence is not an option. when Hardy writes his intellectual honesty obliges him to seem compulsive, to appear spontaneous, to contrive to be a rustic warbler. By the time Hardy was ‘resolved to say no more’ it was of course far too late. Hardy’s last poem was published months after his death: even the defiantly and honourably human resolution to ‘keep the rest
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unknown’ turned out to be only another of Nature’s compulsions. Source: Charles Lock, “‘The Darkling Thrush’ and the Habit of Singing,” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 36, No. 2, April 1986, pp. 120–41.
Charles E. May In the following essay, May asserts that Hardy “took Keats’s romantic view of nature” in “The Nightingale” and “inverted it to write an ironic rejection of such a view” in “The Darkling Thrush.” Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” written to commemorate the end of the nineteenth century, has always been called one of Hardy’s representative poems, sometimes even his best poem. But though it has been frequently commented on and anthologized, an important question about the poem has not been answered: Why did Hardy choose this particular subject to mark such an auspicious turning point? Carl Weber, the Hardy scholar who usually knows such things, says Hardy perhaps got the idea from W. H. Hudson’s “Nature in Downland” (1900), in which a thrush’s song suggests to Hudson a “contentment and bliss” beyond our own. Weber adds that Shelley’s “Skylark” also may have contributed to the source of the poem. Neither of these poses a very precise or significant parallel. James Granville Southworth catches the real echo in noting that in the word “Darkling” we have an emotive association with Keats’s “darkling I listen” in “Ode to a Nightingale.” However, this is the only echo Southworth sees in the poem, and he does not comment on its possible significance. David Perkins notes additional parallels and tentatively suggests that Keats’s “Nightingale” “may have been stirring in Hardy’s consciousness” when he wrote “The Darkling Thrush.” Asserting that the bird is a symbol of the visionary imagination and that hope of identification with it provides the drive in both poems, Perkins concludes that although the Hardy speaker fails to achieve identification, he does not challenge the rightness of the bird’s joy. “The Darkling Thrush,” Perkins says, “presents not a speaker who asserts a mournful pessimism as a necessary reflection from the facts of life, but rather one who feels himself to be incapable of seeing whole, being in some way stunted and incomplete.” I suggest that “Ode to a Nightingale” was not merely “stirring in Hardy’s consciousness,” but that the parallels by their very pervasiveness indicate that Hardy purposely took Keats’s romantic view of nature and inverted it to write an ironic rejec-
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In ‘ The Darkling Thrush,’ the focus is on the vacuity of nature and the speaker’s courage to exact ‘a full look at the Worst’ and reject such a participation.”
tion of such a view. The resulting reversal of the Keats poem makes an appropriate comment on the end of a century in which poets often saw nature as symbolically full of meaning and value worth identifying with. Further, I suggest that “The Darkling Thrush,” instead of being unusual for Hardy, as Perkins says, because in it the speaker partially renounces the claims of his own experience, presents a speaker who, like the persona in the second part of “In Tenebris” and in “Wessex Heights,” affirms the hard truth of his own experience and can only see the bird’s ecstatic song as ironic amidst the bleakness of its natural surroundings. The focus in “Ode to a Nightingale” is on the plenitude of nature and the speaker’s limitations in participating in it. In “The Darkling Thrush,” the focus is on the vacuity of nature and the speaker’s courage to exact “a full look at the Worst” and reject such a participation. Even a cursory look reveals that proportionately much more of Hardy’s poem focuses on “So little cause for carolings” than it does on the caroling itself. The dramatic situation and the subject itself pose an obvious parallel between the two poems. The nightingale, of course, is a species of thrush which has often had symbolic significance for poets because of its strange habit of singing only in darkness. This is surely why the bird’s song appeals to both Keats and Hardy. But here too we note the first significant difference. It is well known that Keats wrote his poem on a spring morning in 1819, while staying with Charles Brown at Hampstead. Thus, Keats, although sitting in “embalmed darkness,” can look forward not only to the coming day but to the rebirth of the year as well. In fact, in stanza five he celebrates the process of rebirth by noting the “coming must-rose, full of dewy
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wine.” Hardy’s thrush is also a nightingale singing in darkness, but here the speaker is in the darkness of “The weakening eye of day,” and the season is winter, not spring. There is no hope for rebirth here, only the death of the day, the year, and the century. “The ancient pulse of germ and birth/Was shrunken hard and dry.” The most significant contrast between the two poems is indicated by Hardy’s use of the word “Darkling.” In Keats’s poem the focus is on the speaker in a desirable darkness: “Darkling I listen; and, for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death.” The poet thinks it “rich to die” in such a moment of imaginative participation with the transcendent world of the nightingale. The darkness is a positive force that integrates him momentarily with the “shadows numberless” of the nightingale and nature. In Hardy’s poem the focus is more on the thrush itself in darkness; but the darkness here is a negative force which further emphasizes nature’s inability to satisfy man’s longing for transcendent meaning. Hardy sees little cause for carolings in “terrestrial things / Afar or nigh around.” The experience for Keats is a momentary perception of the order of nature. For Hardy it is the perception of the lack of such an order. This contrast between Keats’s view of nature as a plenitude and Hardy’s view of nature as a vacuum is maintained through the poem. Keats opens his poem by comparing his momentary unity with nature to the experience of emptying “some dull opiate to the drains.” Hardy picks up the image but uses it to refer to the vacuity of the year and the landscape, as “Winter’s dregs made desolate / The weakening eye of day.” Whereas Keats used the word “spectre” to refer to the world of man where youth “grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies,” Hardy uses the word to refer to the world of nature itself as the “Frost was spectre-gray.” A further significant contrast exists between Keats’s view of nature as soft and undifferentiated and Hardy’s view of nature as harsh and stark. Both speakers are in a tree-covered thicket, but for Keats it is “verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways” where “soft incense hangs upon the boughs.” For Hardy, “The tangled bine-stems scored the sky / Like strings of broken lyres” and “The land’s sharp features seemed to be / The Century’s corpse outleant.” While Keats’s nightingale is in “some melodious plot / Of beechen green,” Hardy’s thrush is on “The bleak twigs overhead.” This difference between the shadowy transcendence of the nightingale and the bleak reality
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of the thrush is further indicated by the fact that Keats never sees his bird; it remains part of the shadows, fully integrated with them. However, Hardy all too painfully sees his thrush, and it is “An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, / In blastberuffled plume.” Moreover, while the nightingale is “pouring forth” its “soul” in “full-throated ease,” the thrush in its greater desperation chooses to “fling” its soul “Upon the growing gloom.” There is a significant similarity and difference also in the songs. Keats’s bird sings first a “high requiem” and then a “plaintive anthem” which grieves the passing of the one moment of integration, but which also celebrates the hope for rebirth. Although Hardy’s bird sings of “joy illimited,” the wind counteracts this joy with a “death-lament” for the passing of the year and the century. The phrase suggests no such hope for rebirth. At the end of “The Nightingale,” Keats is left pondering the reality of the experience: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?” Which state is the true reality—the experience with the song of the nightingale or my experience now that the song is ended? “Do I wake or sleep?” For Hardy, there is more irony than ambiguity. The song of the thrush makes a bitter ironic comment on the reality he perceives, a reality which is clearly “written on terrestrial things / Afar or nigh around.” And there is nothing in such a world to justify the song of the bird. Whatever “blessed Hope” the thrush knows, Hardy is unaware of; and he realizes he will remain unaware of it. The reality of the cold winter setting, the death of the day, the death of the year, and the death of the century make this clear. The bird can only sing with such joy because it is exempt from man’s knowledge of death. It is true that Keats also perceives that the nightingale can sing only because it is not aware of process, change, mortality. But the nightingale’s song celebrates natural plenitude; and Keats is able, if only momentarily, to participate in this plenitude on the “viewless wings of Poesy.” Granted, Keats is tolled back to himself and the world of thought and change when the bird’s song fades, but he is still left with a valid experience of at-oneness, an experience he can accept with that Negative Capability which allows him to be in “Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Hardy, however, is not satisfied with “not knowing.” He is left at the end of the poem with his harsh awareness of a natural world that cannot fulfill man’s hope for value and meaning, a world that makes the song of the aged thrush an ironic indicator of the distance between the Romantic view
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of nature at the beginning of the century and the absurd view of nature at the end of the century. Source: Charles E. May, “Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’: The ‘Nightingale’ Grown Old,” in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring 1973, pp. 62–65.
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Sources Berger, Sheila, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structure: Framing, Disruption, Process, New York University Press, 1990, p. 100. Buckler, William E., The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Study in Art and Ideas, New York University Press, 1983, pp. 255–59. Carpenter, Richard, “Chapter Four: Poems, Verses, and The Dynasts,” in Thomas Hardy, Twayne’s English Author Series, No. 13, Twayne Publishers, 1964, p. 165. Casagrande, Peter, “Pessimism,” in Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy, edited by Norman Page, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 306–07. Hardy, Thomas, “The Darkling Thrush,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3d ed., edited by Alexander W. Allison, et al., W. W. Norton, 1983, p. 846. Harvey, Geoffrey, “Thomas Hardy: Moments of Vision,” in Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy’s Poetry, edited by Harold Orel, G. K. Hall, 1995, pp. 35–47. Perkins, David, “Hardy and the Poetry of Isolation,” in ELH, Vol. 26, 1959, pp. 253–70. Taylor, Dennis, “Hardy as a Nineteenth-Century Poet,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 183– 204.
Further Reading Armstrong, Tim, Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Armstrong uses literary theorists such as Jacques Derrida to investigate ghostliness, historicity, and memory in Hardy’s poetry. Gibson, James, and Trevor Johnson, eds., Thomas Hardy: Poems, Macmillan, 1979. This collection contains important essays on Hardy’s poetry by critics such as Thomas Gunn and Philip Larkin. Hynes, Samuel, The Patterns of Hardy’s Poetry, University of North Carolina Press, 1961. Hynes examines how Hardy’s poems contain irreconcilable conflicts and which poems he considers good. Millgate, Michael, Thomas Hardy: A Biography, Random House, 1982. Most Hardy critics consider Millgate’s biography to be the definitive one written to date.
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Orel, Harold, The Final Years of Thomas Hardy: 1912– 1928, Macmillan, 1976. Orel, the vice president of the English Thomas Hardy Society, uses a biographical approach to read Hardy’s later poetry. Paulin, Tom, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception, Macmillan, 1975. Paulin explores themes of vision and revelation in Hardy’s poems in this highly readable account. Pinion, F. B., A Commentary on the Poems of Thomas Hardy, Macmillan, 1976. Pinion’s study remains one of the most comprehensive resources for almost all of Hardy’s poems.
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Duration Octavio Paz 1962
Octavio Paz’s poem “Duration” was originally published in his 1962 collection Salamandra (1958– 1961), later published in English as Salamander. It provides an excellent example of one of the twentieth century’s most important poets working at his prime. In this poem, Paz, the 1990 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, shows his interests in writing poetry outside of the poetic tradition, in exploring new methods of using language on the page. The images that he uses here do not follow one another gracefully, but they do add up to a new way of looking at reality. By breaking reality into fragments and then putting them back together in careful arrangements, “Duration” is able to raise questions about the ways that the fragments of experience relate to one another. Paz was an important world literary figure from the 1950s until his death in 1998 and is considered by many to be the most important and influential writer that Mexico has ever produced. Much of his most notable experimental poetry was produced while he worked for Mexico’s diplomatic corps in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to poetry, he is known almost equally well as a literary theorist, with numerous books of essays about the nature of art and the possibilities of language. Today, “Duration” can be found in both English and Spanish in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957–1987, published by New Directions.
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Author Biography Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City in 1914. His grandfather was a writer, one of the first Mexican writers to write a novel about Indians. His father was active in politics, an aide to Emiliano Zapata, a populist land reformer who led a revolution against the government; a few years of Paz’s childhood were spent in Los Angeles, to which his father was forced to flee after Zapata was killed in 1919. When the family returned to Mexico City, Paz, in his teens, began publishing poetry and short stories. He enrolled in law school but, once there, he became politically active. In the late 1930s, he went to Spain to attend a conference of leftist Latin American writers. While there, he enlisted to help in the Spanish Civil War. After the war ended, Paz spent time in America on a Guggenheim grant, traveling as a journalist between New York and California, trying to popularize the plight of the Spanish people under the dictator Francisco Franco. His political work led him into the Mexican diplomatic service. In 1946, he was sent to France as a diplomat. Over the following twenty years, he also worked in embassies in Japan and India. Government work allowed Paz time for writing, and his literary output during this time was prodigious: in addition to poetry, he also produced volumes of essays, travel work, and other forms of writing that cannot be easily categorized. Much of his work has focused on identifying the national characteristics of his native Mexico. He founded and edited numerous literary reviews over the course of more than fifty years in literature. Paz quit the diplomatic corps in 1968, objecting to the way the Mexican government dealt with student demonstrations—firing into crowds and torturing those arrested—in Tlatelolco, a section of Mexico City. He remained active in politics and lent his support to left-wing organizations. His poetry was recognized with almost every major international award available, including the Jerusalem Prize, the Grand Aigle d’Or of France, and the Tocqueville Prize. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, after having been nominated several times. Paz died of cancer in Mexico City in 1998 at the age of eighty-four.
Poem Text I Sky black Yellow earth
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The rooster tears the night apart The water wakes and asks what time it is The wind wakes and asks for you A white horse goes by
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II As the forest in its bed of leaves you sleep in your bed of rain you sing in your bed of wind you kiss in your bed of sparks
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III Multiple vehement odor many-handed body On an invisible stem a single whiteness IV Speak listen answer me what the thunderclap says, the woods understand
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V I enter by your eyes you come forth by my mouth You sleep in my blood I waken in your head
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VI I will speak to you in stone-language (answer with a green syllable) I will speak to you in snow-language (answer with a fan of bees)
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I will speak to you in water-language (answer with a canoe of lightning) I will speak to you in blood-language (answer with a tower of birds)
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Poem Summary I The epigraph that starts this poem is from the I Ching, an important text of ancient Chinese Confucianism. The I Ching, also referred to as “The Book of Changes,” expresses the Taoist philosophy of yin and yang, the balance of opposites in all things. This is shown in the first two lines of “Duration,” which juxtapose the darkness of the sky against the lightness of the earth. In addition to a balance between things, line 3 presents a balance between objects and actions, as the crowing of a rooster, generally recognized as a sign that dawn is coming, is presented as a violent, tearing motion that can affect the night, dividing it into parts. The poem’s first section contains two lines, 4 and 5, that have parallel wording. In each case, Paz urges readers to rethink the reality of what is discussed. Of course, water and wind do not wake at any one point: they go on with a steady motion day and night. The poem gives them human characteristics, anthropomorphizing them. More specifically, it gives them the characteristics of the speaker of the poem by having the second one ask about a person to whom the poem’s speaker would be talking. The white horse at the end of the stanza is not, significantly, counterbalanced with another parallel image, implying that it is a symbol of freedom that is outside of the yin/yang perspective.
II The point of this stanza is to draw a comparison between the “you” being addressed in the poem and the elements of nature. It starts with a personification of nature, portraying the forest’s quiet stillness as “sleep” and the leaves that lie on the ground in the forest as a “bed.” After the first line, each subsequent line focuses on the human being surrounded by nature, and with each line the imagery becomes more imaginative. Imagining rain as a bed for a sleeping person is reasonable, because a person could sleep in rain or on top of the puddles it leaves. The “bed of wind” mentioned in the third line is less likely, however, as is the idea
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of singing in a bed. Mentioning wind draws a connection from this stanza back to the epigraph from the I Ching. The last line’s reference to kissing in a bed of sparks is a sexual reference, implying the electricity released in passion. Once more, there is an unstated contrast between the active verbs that Paz uses and the stillness that is associated with sleeping in a bed.
III Having alluded to sexuality in the previous stanza, here the poem uses imagery that is more openly erotic. Odor is a very sensual thing in poetry, if only because it is the sense that is least often represented by writers and therefore has a stronger impact on readers. The fact that the odor mentioned in the first line is both “multiple” and “vehement” gives it a stronger impact than it would have if it were restrained. The second line of this section connects hands to bodies, showing how all people are connected to each other on the “invisible stem” of the third line. This section ends with the same whiteness that ended the first section, a reminder to readers of the freedom of the image of the white horse. After portraying all of mankind as being connected and having made the connection between humanity and nature in the previous stanza, the poem reminds readers of things that exist outside of the closed circuit.
IV The nature of the fourth section is communication. The words in the first lines are the ones most often used to discuss conversation: “speak,” “listen,” and “answer.” They are not, however, presented in a way that is meant to resemble conversation. They are jumbled together without any punctuation in a way that does not allow for any give-and-take between them, as if the actions of speaking and listening and answering could happen all at once. Though the poem’s title, “Duration,” refers to an extended period of time, this line contrasts that by forcing three distinct acts together as if no time passes between them. The rest of this section shows another case of personifying nature. While the first line makes human communication a supernatural thing that occurs outside of the flow of time, the last three lines present nature communicating as humans do. The thunder is another reference to the poem’s epigraph, showing that the things of the world endure. The fact that it speaks here, and the woods understand, refers to the poem’s very first lines, about
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the relationship of the sky and the earth. The “understanding” in the poem’s eighteenth line shows Earth and sky—in essence, everything there is— interacting with each other and not just existing side by side.
V The poem, not having mentioned the “you” explicitly in several stanzas (and only having implied that character in the commands at the start of section IV), returns to an examination of human relations in section V. Here, human interaction is shown to be extremely intimate: the speaker of the poem is inside of the other person. They are linked by sight and by mouth. The third line of this section, “you sleep in my blood,” takes this relationship beyond the smaller concerns of two people and, instead, hints at genetic memory passed down through generations. In the style of the rest of the poem, its exact opposite occurs in the very next line: “You” is replaced by “I”; “sleep” is replaced by “waken”; and “blood” is replaced by “head.” The contrast is drawn here between the unconscious knowledge, carried in sleep and in blood, and conscious knowledge that occurs in the mind while awake.
Media Adaptations • Octavio Paz is included with fourteen other poets discussing their craft on Where Poems Come From, a 1991 videocassette from the Lannan Foundation. • Paz is also included on the video The Simple Acts of Life, a 1993 production from the Public Broadcasting System, featuring interviews by Bill Moyers. This video is part of Moyers’s The Power of the Word series. • In 1998, Films for the Humanities released a short video about Paz’s life called An Uncommon Poet: Octavio Paz, featuring interviews with Paz. • The Octavio Paz Foundation operates a web page at http://www.fundacionpaz.org.mx/main .htm, with links to other sites. This page is entirely in Spanish.
VI The poem’s final section summarizes the dualities that have been established earlier, showing the contrasts between language and nature, sense and nonsense, the “I” and the “you.” Of the four types of language that are referred to here—stone, snow, water, and blood—it is the last one that is a human property. Placing it at the end of the list like this brings it into the group, reminding readers that blood is as much a natural element as the other three. The parenthetical responses in the evennumbered lines of this stanza represent the poem’s most challenging mysteries. There is no symbolic significance to a green syllable, a fan of bees, a canoe of lightning, or a tower of birds. They are mentioned as appropriate responses to language precisely because they lack meaning, and dialog is therefore rendered impossible. This might seem to deal language a crippling blow, but, as it is presented in this poem, language is elevated, not diminished. Talk and answer are not connected sensibly, but they do exist together, and like yin and yang, like thunder and wind, they have a deep, natural relationship that goes beyond human comprehension.
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Themes Nature The epigraph of “Duration,” taken from the I Ching, shows the emphasis on nature that is to follow. The significance of thunder and wind, of all things, is not made clear, but the fact that they are here together tells readers that Paz intends to explore what they have to do with one another. Throughout the poem, natural elements, especially those related to weather, are used to raise questions about human relationships by showing readers parallels to human interaction. Rain, wind, thunder, and snow are all larger-than-life events that occur in the sky, but here they speak to the earth, and to humanity. The poem not only uses nature to represent human action; it also uses it to show human inaction as well. Forests are used to stand for human passivity, receiving the messages from the skies and processing them. In section II the forest is directly compared to a person who is sleeping (the first line
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Topics for Further Study • Draw a picture of a fan of bees, a canoe of lightning, or a tower of birds to show what Paz means by using these images in stanza VI. • Take one of the six sections of this poem, and build around it to create your own six-section poem. • In section IV, the poem states that “what the thunderclap says, the woods understand.” Write an extended dialog between the thunderclap and the woods that shows readers what they talk about. Give each character a distinct personality. • Since this poem was inspired by a line from the I Ching, the proper background music for it might be Chinese; then again, the proper soundtrack for reading it might be Mexican music, because of Paz’s life story; or it could be a different piece that has nothing to do with either of these cultures. Choose a piece of music that you think should accompany this poem, and write an extended explanation of why you think this poem and this music should be linked.
mentions “the forest in its bed,” and the following three discuss “you in your bed”); in section IV, the woods are said to “understand” what the thunder has to say. Being stationary, the trees represent the “yellow earth” that is mentioned in the second line, positioned in contrast with the activity of the black, starless sky.
Synchronicity Synchronicity is a term coined by the Swedish psychologist Carl Jung. It refers to the explanation that certain events that happen simultaneously are assumed to share some meaningful relationship, similar to cause and effect but less clearly ruled. In “Duration,” Paz points out events that happen near each other in time, and the simple fact that he focuses readers’ attention on them makes them seem to follow some sense of order that goes beyond the common scientific explanations for them. The crowing of the rooster is represented as more than a re-
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action to dawn; it is presented as a cause of dawn. The similarity between a dormant forest and a sleeping person is presented as if the two have a connection that is deeper than simple resemblance. Even the detached call-and-response of the last stanza has, for instance, a “canoe of lightning” that is said to be an answer to “water-language.” These questions and answers seem to have a sort of indefinable synchronicity because the poet has decided to present these unrelated ideas together. To some extent, all symbolic poetry can be thought to deal in synchronicity because it presents relationships that the logical mind cannot explain but that the unconscious recognizes. This poem, though, brings this feeling out to the surface, making readers accept odd similarities as more than coincidence.
Style Language Language is a commonly understood system of symbols that people use to communicate ideas. Although it is usually used to describe the exchange of words, the word “language” is also often used for nonverbal actions, such as “body language” or “the language of film.” The fact that “Duration” is concerned with language becomes clear in the very first section, when Paz has elements of nature, wind and water, asking questions. The questions that they ask are ones that a human would be concerned with, indicating that nature not only has the human ability to communicate but that human interests come with communication. The similarity between human language and interactions in nature is picked up again in the fourth section of the poem, where thunder speaks and the woods understand. In one sense, this is true, because the things of nature respond to one another: the animals in the forest might be riled by a thunderclap, for instance, and cause a commotion. Still, this kind of relationship between an event and its result is seldom described as “speaking” and “understanding.” Paz is using the words loosely, drawing a symbolic comparison between causality in nature and language in humans: still, it is a comparison that is rooted in reality. The interaction between the thunderclap and the woods has much in common with speaking and responding. That same section, IV, gives little serious consideration to human verbal interaction. By running the words “speak listen answer me” together without punctuation, the poem shows the weaknesses
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of human language, which can often be recited without any concern about how the listener will respond to what is said. By the final section, language has merged with nature. Language has no more meaning than the things assumed to be incapable of meaning. Stone, snow, water, and blood are all presented as things that have their own language, a language that the poem’s speaker promises to speak. Syllables are described as the color green, as if they were tangible things that could hold colors. Natural objects, such as bees, birds, and lightning, are considered to be acceptable answers. Paz has broken language down to its elements, showing how the human activity alone does not capture the interactive nature of dialog.
Cubism Critics have pointed out that Paz’s poetry was influenced by French cubism in painting. Cubism was a movement that began in 1908 in Paris. Its most famed practitioner was the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The point of this style of art was to capture the three-dimensional essence of an object and not necessarily to show how it looked from one fixed perspective. Therefore, a cubist artwork might show a person with both eyes on one side of his or her head or with limbs jutting out from the body in angles that do not seem natural. Like the I Ching, which is based around a series of sixty-four hexagrams, cubist art captures reality in geometric patterns. “Duration” shows a verbal equivalent of the cubist’s visual style. Rather than trying to present the world as it appears, Paz presents a sense of reality that corresponds with how the world feels, which it makes up from specific objects from reality. The nonlinear method of connecting ideas can be frustrating for readers, who do not know exactly why the poem jumps from one idea to another or even what certain images (such as the “manyhanded body”) are supposed to be. But the important thing for a poem like this is to leave readers with a sense of reality, hopefully one that is more real than they can get from their own experiences.
Structure This poem is written in six distinct sections, with no structural connection between them. Each section takes a format of its own, from the brief introductory lines that start section I, to the repetition of section II, to the incomplete clause of section III, to the statement and parenthetical response pattern of section VI. Any one of these sections could stand as its own poem; together, however, they create a cumulative effect. Considering the similarities and
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the differences between the sections leads readers to one overall idea, which is related to the mysterious thought expressed in the epigraph.
Historical Context At the time that this poem was created, in 1962, Paz worked for the Mexican diplomatic corps. The country was relatively stable. Less than fifty years earlier, though, it had been through a violent civil war. The revolution, from 1911 to 1917, had removed a dictator who had held the country by military force since 1876. It had been led by Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, for whom Paz’s father worked. With the overthrow of the government, Villa and Zapata, who went on to be remembered as folk heroes, and the government transformed into a one-party federal republic that followed socialist principles. After World War II came the Cold War, which pitted two superpowers against each other as they each tried to convert other countries to its economic system. Mexico’s neighbor, the United States, tried to spread capitalism: Mexico’s socialist political system made it more likely for Mexico to align itself politically with the Soviet Union, which supported the spread of communism. In the postwar years, countries across South and Central America underwent violent revolutions against the dictators who had controlled them. Since many of these dictators had been supportive of U.S. industries, the revolutions were spurred with anticapitalist rhetoric, which raised fears in Washington that anti-industrial rebellions were the result of an international Communist conspiracy. During the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for working behind the scenes in countries all over the Americas, training soldiers and providing them with arms; gathering intelligence against protestors; overthrowing the government of Guatamala in 1954; and in at least one case, that of openly Communist Cuba, arranging for the assassination of government leader Fidel Castro. While other Latin American countries were involved in political upheaval, Mexico was at peace. One reason for this was that it had become a major player in the world oil market. In 1938, the government had appropriated oil companies and thrown out the international conglomerates that owned them, causing a boycott on Mexican oil and products by Europe and the United States. After
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Compare & Contrast • 1960s: In the midst of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, each side monitors Latin American countries and maintains active spy networks within them to make sure that they will not form an alliance with the other. Today: Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Communist parties in Latin America have little support, and so most are shifting toward capitalism. • 1960s: Because of the low value of the peso, American tourists flock to Mexico for cheap vacations and inexpensive merchandise.
World War II, though, things changed with the election of Miguel Almán Valdés, the country’s first civilian president. He took a pro-business approach to helping the country’s stagnant economy and worked to modernize Mexico with electricity and water for rural areas and improved transportation. International companies were welcomed back in, finding a business environment that was friendly to the rich, even while most of the population lived in poverty. The United States government also found Mexico to be cooperative in its opposition to Communism. The CIA was allowed free rein to investigate and persecute suspected Communist agitators who it feared might be able to stir up interest in a Communist uprising. Mexico’s “special relationship” with the United States lasted until the late 1960s, when, in an attempt to curtail drug traffic, President Richard Nixon closed the border between the two countries, dealing a devastating blow to the Mexican economy. This reversed the trend of cooperation that had started in the 1940s, and Mexico sought economic independence from the United States. In the 1980s, Mexico aligned itself with rebels in several countries where the United States supported the standing governments, particularly Nicaragua and
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Today: Mexico is still a popular vacation site but not because of its price: several coastal areas have built resorts that have good reputations for sun and water sports. • 1960s: The environmentalist movement is launched with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962. The book warns of the dangers of pollution and makes readers worldwide aware of the delicate balance between humanity and nature. Today: School children are regularly taught about environmental science and the dangers of polluting the atmosphere, but still the government puts little emphasis on developing renewable resources.
El Salvador. This strained Mexican-U.S. relations further. However, around the same time the United States came to rely on Mexico’s support in its war against drugs. Because of the geographical closeness and the economic disparity between the two, both countries often find themselves allied, despite political differences.
Critical Overview Octavio Paz’s reputation as one of the greatest literary figures of Latin America in the twentieth century and certainly Mexico’s most important writer at that time rests on both his extensive output of poetry—over thirty collections over the course of fifty years—and his essays, which almost equal the poetry in quantity, thoughtfulness, and influence. The two categories of writing compliment each other. As John C. Fein put it in an essay titled “Toward Octavo Paz: A Reading of his Major Poems, 1957–1976,” “His success in diversified fields is heightened in the ways in which his essays and his poetry are complimentary: the core of his creativity is a concern for language in general and for the
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poetic process in particular.” In other words, critics’ positive reaction to Paz’s poetry is brought to an even higher level by the fact that his poetry is based on sound principles enumerated in his nonfiction, particularly those regarding the use of language. Salamandra (1958–1961), the 1962 volume that “Duration” was first printed in, is particularly often cited as an example of how Paz would work with ideas about language. Because critical approval of Paz’s work is universal, the only question that came up when he was awarded the Noble Prize for literature in 1990 was why it took so long. In his introduction to a volume about essays on the poet, Harold Bloom noted that giving him the prize was “one of the sounder choices,” alluding to the unusual degree of approval from literary critics around the world. As The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature summarized Paz’s career, “There is Spanish American poetry after Octavio Paz: generations of poets who reject his legacy, and others that continue his line of experimentation. Nevertheless, the imprint that Paz has given to the tradition as a whole will be with us for years to come.”
Criticism David Kelly Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature. In this essay, Kelly examines the third stanza of Paz’s poem as a noticeably strange part of a poem that is itself deliberately unusual. Octavio Paz wrote poetry for over fifty years, and he published extensive essays and articles about the nature of art. The mysteries of most of his works have been addressed and usually accounted for in some way. Still, there are fragments and stray lines that just do not make sense. Part of this was to the point: Paz wrote in a postmodern style, well aware of the technique that he used and the ways in which it violated the common understanding of logic. Even knowing this, though, does not keep readers from wondering what particular lines mean, especially when they appear in a context where everything else has a meaning, even if that meaning is specific only to the boundaries of that one poem. For instance, Paz’s poem “Duration” is clearly meant to make readers take a fresh look at how they perceive reality. It rewrites the rules and thus is not required to follow the standards that readers usually hold for knowledge. But
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It is, rather, a case where the poet has put a black hole in the center of the poem, a thing that defies logic and can only be known in terms of its relationship to other parts of the poem.”
there is still one section that does not fit, even within the world of this particular work. The third stanza of the poem marks a significant break in tone and subject matter from what comes before or after, and it is the reader’s job to at least wonder why. If there is to be any understanding, the first step is to admit that this is a poem that ought to be understood on its own terms. Paz wrote it in the late 1950s or early 1960s, a period when he was at his most productive and most avant-garde. The influences of surrealist painting and modernist poetry can be seen in the way that he easily dispenses with the formalities of ordinary experience: water talks, trees sleep in beds, bees fan out in response to “snow-language,” and so forth. Some readers find themselves put off by this heavy-handed type of free association, but it would be difficult to claim that it is pointless. Paz does not just force together opposites or unexpected images, here, the way a surrealist might. He is building toward one cumulative effect. That effect probably has to do with the words from the I Ching that the poem starts with, but it does not help much to look to them for understanding: they are too far removed from the poem’s center to offer much help until after the poem is already understood. An epigraph like this can set the mood of a poem, but its point is to raise questions, not provide answers. What can be safely said about this poem is that it concerns the relationship between nature and humanity. What feels like surrealism, like a constant violation of reality, is actually a continuous use of anthropomorphism, of attributing human motives and behaviors to nonhuman things. For what it is worth, Paz was known for focusing on the odd distinction that is intellectually devised between the
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What Do I Read Next? • Many critics believe that Paz’s finest work was in his extended essay The Labyrinth of Solitude, an extended meditation on the nature of the Mexican people and their character. It is now available in a 1985 edition from Grove Press. • The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957– 1987 was edited by Paz’s friend and collaborator Eliot Weinberger. The bilingual edition is available from New Directions, published in 1991. • Paz begins “Duration” with a line from the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of numerology. A current edition, assembled and translated by Taoist master Alfred Huang, is available from Inner Traditions International under the title The Complete “I Ching”: The Definitive Translation (1998). • Paz’s poetry is often compared to that of Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian writer of the same generation whose short stories have the same metaphysical quality Paz employed. Some of Borges’s best and most original work is included in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writing, published in 1998 by W. W. Norton.
“us” of humanity and the “them” of everything else in the universe. As Jason Wilson put it in a 1979 book about Paz, “Underlying all of Paz’s poetics is a myth about nature that can be conventionally schematized as seeing the natural (good) set against the artificial (evil).” This analysis might overstate the case somewhat—there is no real indication of a judgment of good or evil in “Duration”—but it does show how integral nature is to Paz’s poetry, confirming the idea that nature is a, if not the, key aspect of this particular work. Nature is represented by sky and Earth, by rain and wind and thunder, by forests, by birds and a rooster and a white horse. Humanity is represented by speech and bed and kissing. The lines blur: the natural things are the ones talking to each other in
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their own spontaneous dialog, and the humans are the ones who lose the ability to speak, entering one another through touch, resting in the blood like genetic code instead of understanding each other intellectually. If nature is assuming human skills, then it cannot be as simple as a matter of humanity being evil and nature good, or else the good would be contaminating itself. Besides, humanity and nature are so much alike in “Duration” that there is not really any representation of what Wilson might mean by “artificial.” Different theories about this dichotomy between nature and humanity might stem out into different directions, but they fail to account for the poem’s third stanza. There, the imagery does not easily fall into either category. It is nonspecific: the odor and the stem described in the first and third lines could apply to either humanity or nature, while the “hands” of the second line could be human hands or a metaphor for something else. Even though the poem is written in free verse and is not bound to any preexisting style, the style of this stanza stands out for its lack of a verb. Stanza III seems to be describing something, or things, either a body on a stem or else an odor, a body, and a stem. The first guess is more likely, since the word “on” in the third line connects the stem to the body; if this is the case, then the odor, which is not verbally connected to all of this, can be assumed to be part of the same item. What is that item? It has many odors and many hands and an invisible stem, and it has a single whiteness (which is different from saying that it is white). It has a body that is attached to the stem somehow. While the rest of the poem uses concrete imagery that refers to specific objects that the reader can easily bring to mind, this one stanza describes a phantom, a compilation of aspects that, when added together, turn into a creature that is not of this world. This is not a case where readers can look at all of the clues, add them up, and eventually conclude what the item in stanza III is. It is, rather, a case where the poet has put a black hole in the center of the poem, a thing that defies logic and can only be known in terms of its relationship to other parts of the poem. If it is a human body, its odors connect it to the natural essence of humans that culture tries to mask. If it is a thing of nature, its hands give it a human-like dexterity that paws, fins, wings, and antennae lack. The thing that most clearly makes it an object of the imagination, balanced between nature and humanity, is the multiplicity of it all: multiple odors, many hands. No one
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thing meets this description. This is a composite of all things, brought together on a stem (like a plant stem or a spine) that is invisible. One of the few definite things about this conglomeration is its “single whiteness.” There is any number of cultural or symbolic connotations that this could be referring to. A short list of things that “white” has been associated with would include purity, sterility, coldness, and extremes of heat and light. Some of these might apply to the item described in stanza III, but the poem does not give enough evidence about which ones might. What it does give, though, is another image that is only a little less mysterious than the indescribable one here. Stanza I, which describes water and wind showing the very personal concerns that the poet might have, ends with a white horse going by. It is an odd moment, not related to what has come in the previous lines, just as the thing described in stanza III is not really related to the rest of the poem. These two white objects are connected to each other more than they are to anything else. The description of a thing with odors and hands and a body and a stem puts readers in mind of all of the aspects of reality that this poem is trying to convey; showing this weird cluster of traits as a running horse gives it beauty and grace.
Ching or Book of Changes, a book of wisdom and divination. This book fascinated Paz because, as he tells Joung Kwon Tae in the interview called “I Ching and Poetic Creation: An Interview with Octavio Paz,” Paz believes the I Ching “brings together at once and in a single coherent and poetic time the changes of nature and with them those, the changes, of man. . . . man not alone but in relation to . . . society.” Paz’s poem “Duration” from his book Salamander is an early example of Eastern influence in his poetry. Paz begins this poem with an epigraph from the I Ching, “Thunder and wind: Duration.” His epigraph comes from the 32nd hexagram Heng, a reading that combines thunder and wind to create a meaning called Duration. According to the I Ching, this denotes both constancy and endurance. It also represents the cyclical course of natural and human life. The upper trigram (thunder) stands for movement without, while the bottom trigram (wind) represents gentleness within. These opposing forces are like a yin and yang. Paz was interested in the polarity of the I Ching, and the way it divided life into an either/or equation that was always interdependent, like masculine and feminine. Following these meanings, Paz has used this epigraph to open his love poem.
Even when a poem is as free of past poetic standards as “Duration,” it is still unsettling for readers to find one of six stanzas written in a different style. Octavio Paz was a cautious enough writer to know that. The third stanza seems to address the question of humanity versus nature in a different style, on a different plane of existence, than the others, but there can be no doubt that Paz meant it that way. Just before the middle of the poem, he made the decision to create an image that has attributes but no substance. This exercise of freedom is a challenge to the reader not to rest comfortably with knowing the poem’s basic themes, to be willing to question the unknowable.
Like a reading from the I Ching, Paz has separated his poem into six sections, each independent, each expanding on his understanding and feelings for his beloved. As Paz tells Tae, he sees this poem as “a suite of short poems” where he can obsess “on the subject of the union and separation of opposites.” Though Paz has followed this structure of six sections, his poem does not follow a logical sequence of events. He moves quickly from waking to sleeping, from love making to conversation. Each section is rather short: his longest section is also his last at eight lines. Each section does not immediately connect to the next; thus, each could not stand without the others.
Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on “Duration,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
In the first section, Paz begins his love poem upon waking. Every action of the morning is an action toward his beloved. Paz is not the one thinking of his beloved, instead it is “the rooster,” “the water,” “the wind” who are waiting for the dawn to again encounter the beloved. Without her, they are restless. Paz begins this section with “sky black,” and two lines down, he writes “the rooster tears the night apart.” The darkness cannot be held and must be moved to make way for the beloved.
Kate Covintree Covintree holds a bachelor’s degree in English and is currently pursuing a master of fine arts in writing at Emerson College. In this essay, Covintree explores the way Paz uses the Chinese system of the I Ching in this poem. In 1951 and 1952, Paz made visits to India and Japan. Somewhere during this time, Paz was introduced to the first modern translation of the I
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In the second section, Paz shows his beloved, “as the forest in its bed of leaves.” Here, in the
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how important language is to love. As he says in his interview with Tae:
This section is a conglomeration of dissimilar images, connected by their disconnect. Somehow, these uncommon connections bring with them an idea of the I Ching.”
wilderness, the rain, wind, sparks, and leaves make up her bed. In these beds, the beloved can sleep, sing, and kiss. Like the gentleness of the lower trigram of the I Ching hexagram, the bed becomes a fixed mark for her. From here, she is able to move outside of it and act and react to her environment. In the same sense though, when readers “meet” the beloved, she is passively lying in bed. In the first section, the morning seemed restless waiting for her arrival. Now, in this section, she simply waits in bed and responds to the earth. All of the beloved’s actions take place from her fixed mark of her bed. Until her “kiss,” her actions could be seen as happening independently, without the presence of another. With both of these first two sections, Paz uses plain and ordinary images: “rooster,” “water,” “night,” “wind,” “horse,” “bed,” “rain,” “sparks,” “forest,” “leaves.” What is unusual is the way he arranges them. He places items together in surprising ways. He makes the rooster an active aggressor who “tears the night apart.” He personifies, or gives human characteristics to nonhuman organisms, to the wind and the water so they can “ask” questions of the reader and the poet. In the second section, Paz complicates the image of a bed by making it a “bed of rain,” or a “bed of wind,” or a “bed of sparks.” These are unusual beds that are difficult for a reader to see initially. The easy and mundane image of a bed is shifted and transformed. To add to these new images, Paz pairs them with interesting verbs. In this way, he creates what Edward Hirsch calls “odd crossings” in his article “Octavio Paz: In Search of a Moment” in American Poetry Review. These disconnected images are, for Paz, one way to show the back and forth motion present in the I Ching. It is also a way for Paz to demonstrate
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There is one moment in which language points toward something beyond which is unsayable. It is the silence after language. . . . The poem, all poetry, is an organism made of words which, in the end is resolved in silence. The silence which unites hearts is founded on the word.
Paz moves from the immediate connection to the I Ching with the third section. He focuses further on his lover and on the endurance of their love. Here, the two lovers are together and absorbed in one another. As one body, they suddenly create a “many-handed body.” By writing “on an invisible stem a single / whiteness,” Paz acknowledges the deep connection that he shares with his beloved. It is the intimacy between the two lovers that becomes increasingly more apparent throughout the poem. In the fourth section, the poet directly addresses his lover. What he expects in response is her understanding. In this section, Paz is the thunderclap, the traditional Chinese interpretation of the husband in this I Ching hexagram. He is the one who can share information and will be the dominant force. But, just as important for Paz and this hexagram is the wind, which can also be seen as the woods. The wind/wood must understand and respond appropriately, so that the thunderclap knows it has been heard. Both husband and wife have important roles to play; they must both “speak listen answer.” This fourth section also becomes a direct address of the poet to the I Ching. Like tarot cards or astrology, the I Ching was used by the Chinese to help answer a troubling question. It is a form of divination still in practice. When the poet says “speak listen answer me,” he is not only speaking to his lover, but he is also speaking to the I Ching and to language. This is the force that gave him the initial response that is the epigraph. This fourth section returns to the I Ching directly, to the source of the first response. Here, the poet is reflecting on what the thunder and woods must do, how they respond and react to one another, and to the I Ching. With the fifth section, Paz shifts the time in the poem and thus shifts the reader’s attention. In this section, the speaker and lover are so tightly connected that they are a part of one another. They live in each other, he in her head, she in his blood. There is an urgency and immediacy in this section. This section is highly charged with passion and love between the “you” and “I.” In the first line, the poet writes, “I enter by your eyes.” With this line, the reader is left to wonder what it is the I has entered. Has he entered her soul? Their love? The
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marriage? The duration? Any of these answers would work. What is clear in this section is the all consuming love that is revealed. At only four lines, this is a very short section. In addition, its direct connection to the I Ching is difficult to see. However, this section is one that helps to ground the reader in the romance between the lovers. It is in these four lines that their devotion is most expressly shown. It is simple and clear. At the same time, this section, like the third section, is dependent on all of the other sections. Alone, this section would simply be melodramatic and overdone. Combined with the ideas and concepts of the other sections, this fifth stanza helps solidify the reader’s understanding of love, duration, and the poem itself. The sixth and final section is the longest and, in some ways most interesting. In this section, the poet informs the “you” as to how he will be communicating and then instructs the “you” on how to respond. Again, Paz makes strange and unusual connections. Technically, there is no such language as “snow-language” or “blood-language,” yet Paz speaks of these oddities as if they are known to everyone. In explaining how these languages need to be responded to, he also reveals new connections for the reader to these languages. Somehow, a “green syllable” can answer “stone-language.” A connection could be made between the stone and the color green, as they are both found in the earth. Thorpe Running, in his essay “Octavio Paz and the Magic of the Word” found in his book The Critical Poem says that “while the two terms of any metaphor do coexist, the distance between them is never closed, causing a never-ending contradiction.” Like the possible contradiction of a connection between thunder and wind, the connections between calls and response are filled with contradiction. This section is a conglomeration of dissimilar images, connected by their disconnect. Somehow, these uncommon connections bring with them an idea of the I Ching. Paz calls this idea “the double reality of time and of everything that exists: Perpetual change and perpetual reiteration” (expressed in Tae). At the same time, these parentheses are the only place where Paz uses any punctuation in the poem. In his earlier poem “Certainty” from his book Days and Occasions, Paz writes, “I know that I am alive / between two parentheses.” Now, in “Duration,” Paz shows his aliveness. He also shows that perhaps he is not asking his lover for the response, but his own inner self, which can be found
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through the practice of the I Ching. The poet himself can vacillate between the yin and the yang. In various sections, Paz uses repetition to shift his meaning and reemphasize his language. In this way, his images continue to turn and roll onto themselves, expanding the idea and propelling the text. It is never a simple series, these new lines push on the preceding lines to create layers. This follows his understanding of the I Ching and its role with language. As he tells Tae, I Ching “is a way of operating within language. . . . I saw in the I Ching an image of the rotation of nature.” It is this rotation of language with all its consistencies and inconsistencies that helps Paz express his love for another person in this poem. Source: Kate Covintree, Critical Essay on “Duration,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Hugo J. Verani In the following essay, Verani elucidates the influence of world philosophies on Paz’s poetic push to recapture “the natural innocence of man.” Within the landscape of the 20th century, in an increasingly specialized and divided world, Octavio Paz is a writer of exceptional and diverse interests, of prodigious versatility, unusual erudition and imagination, recognized as one of the major poets of our time and as a lucid interpreter of modernity. His critical thought includes a bewildering number of fields of human activity—art, aesthetics, philosophy, Oriental religion, anthropology, psychology, political ideology. The preoccupations that cross Paz’s writing—the search for lost unity and the reconciliation of man with himself and the universe, the celebration of love and of freedom of thinking, the merging of contraries, the reviving of the poetic work—converge in the reflexive prose of his essays and in a poetry that assumes the form of self-criticism and incessant interrogation, two sides of an organic whole of inseparable unity in its diversity, that constitutes an uncommon and passionate testimony of humanity. Paz is primarily a poet, considered (along with Neruda and Vallejo) as one of the truly outstanding Spanish-American poets of the 20th century. Paz sees poetry as a path towards the revelation of man, as a means to restore authenticity. Poetic creation and erotic love are the only ways to reconcile the opposing forces of the world, the only ways to transcend solitude and reach spiritual fulfilment. During the five years that Paz lived in France (1946–51), he participated in the surrealist movement and developed a lifelong affinity with its tenets.
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Paz sees surrealism as an activity of the human spirit based on the idea of rebellion, love, and freedom, as a total subversion, as a movement to recapture the natural innocence of man.”
system that encompasses the main intellectual currents of modern times. During almost half a century Paz has adhered to two fundamental premises: the questioning of all established truths and, above all, the passionate search for human dignity and the defence of the freedom of the human being, principles whose aim is always in Paz a recovery of the essential values of humanism. Source: Hugo J. Verani, “Paz, Octavio,” in Reference Guide to World Literature, 3d ed., edited by Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast, Vol. 1, St. James Press, 2003, pp. 771–73.
Sources Paz sees surrealism as an activity of the human spirit based on the idea of rebellion, love, and freedom, as a total subversion, as a movement to recapture the natural innocence of man. The conjunction of ancient Mexican mythology and surrealism (“telluric surrealism” as termed by Benjamin Péret) guides his quest for eternal values, his desire to transcend the contradictions of humanity. “Hymn Among the Ruins” and, above all, Piedra de sol (Sun Stone) are the masterpieces of this period of his poetry. His stay in India, as ambassador of his country (1962–68), profoundly affected his vision of the world and his approach to poetry. Many concepts of Oriental thought were incorporated into his poetics: detachment from the outside world, the illusory nature of the world, the stress on natural man, the illusion of the ego, sudden illumination, transcendence through the senses, rebellion against all systems. Ladera este and Blanco include the major poems of this period. After the early 1960s the most significant constants of Paz’s poetic work are experimentation with space and the use of visual effects. The most important poems of the 1960s (“Whole Wind,” Blanco) are constellations of juxtaposed fragments and of voices in perpetual rotation in which the simultaneity of times and spaces is the point of confluence in an inexhaustible net of relations that enrich the analytical reading of the text. In his poetry the spatial-temporal markings disappear, and all ages converge in a privileged moment, in that evanescent and fleeting, atemporal and archetypal present. Paz liberates language from the illusion of representing an empirical reality: spaces, times, and distant cultures interweave without explicit transition and give the poem a plural meaning. Paz is also a major essayist. Few SpanishAmerican writers, if any, have developed a critical
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Bloom, Harold, “Introduction,” in Octavio Paz, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 2002, p. 1. Echevarría, Roberto Gonzalez, and Enrique Pupo-Walker, eds., The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, Vol. 2, The Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 356. Fein, John M., Toward Octavio Paz: A Reading of His Major Poems, 1957–1976, University Press of Kentucky, 1986. Hirsch, Edward, “Octavio Paz: In Search of a Moment,” in American Poetry Review, Vol. 29, No. 2, March–April 2000, pp. 49–50. Paz, Octavio, “Certainty,” in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957–1987, edited by Eliot Weinberger, New Directions, 1991, p. 67. —, “Duration,” in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957–1987, edited by Eliot Weinberger, New Directions, 1991, pp. 114–15. Running, Thorpe, “Octavio Paz and the Magic of the Word,” in The Critical Poem, Bucknell University Press, 1996, pp. 30–50. Tae, Joung Kwon, “I Ching and Poetic Creation: An Interview with Octavio Paz,” in Salmagundi, No. 114–115, Spring–Summer 1997, pp. 153–65. Wilson, Jason, “The Nature Myth,” in Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 81.
Further Reading Altamiranda, Daniel, “Literary Theory and Criticism,” in Mexican Literature: A History, edited by David William Foster, University of Texas Press, 1994, pp. 341–63. This essay gives the background of literary theory in Mexico. Naturally, Paz is one of the central figures discussed, but Altamiranda presents other important critics around him. Needleman, Ruth, “Poetry and the Reader,” in The Perpetual Present: The Poetry of Octavio Paz, edited by Ivar Ivask, University of Oklahoma Press, 1973, pp. 35–43.
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Needleman’s essay examines what makes Paz’s intentions different from those of other poets, focusing mainly on the works in his collection Blanco. Quiroga, Jose, Understanding Octavio Paz, University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Quiroga provides an overview of Paz’s life and work.
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Running, Thorpe, The Critical Poem: Borges, Paz, and Other Language-Centered Poets in Latin America, Bucknell University Press, 1996. Running shows Paz in context with other similarly minded poets, focusing on Salamander as one of the best examples of the poet’s relationship to language.
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The Garden Shukkei-en Carolyn Forché 1988
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Carolyn Forché initially published “The Garden Shukkei-en” in Provincetown Arts in 1988 and included it in her third collection, The Angel of History (1994). The poem was also shown in conjunction with Danz Macabre photographic art exhibit at the School of Art, Arizona State University at Tempe and is included in the portfolio of show photographs, So to Speak. Forché takes the title and epigraph of The Angel of History from Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In haunting disembodied voices, the poems in the collection detail the atrocities of various twentieth-century horrors such as the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. In “The Garden Shukkei-en,” which appears towards the end of the collection, a Japanese woman who survived the bombing recounts the horrors of that time and how it has come to shape the ways in which she remembers the past and interacts with the world. Known as a strolling garden, Shukkei-en is dotted with islets of various sizes and surrounded by a range of hillocks on its north shore. The name “Shukkei-en” means “the Garden of Condensed Scenic Beauty.” It was heavily damaged when the Enola Gay, an American Boeing B-29 bomber, dropped an atomic bomb dubbed “Little Boy” on Hiroshima at 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945. The survivor in the poem remembers the death and destruction she witnessed during the bombing. Primarily a descriptive poem, “The Garden Shukkei-en” uses two voices, the Japanese sur-
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vivor’s and a woman who accompanies her, to structure the poem.
Author Biography Carolyn Louise Forché has built a reputation as a poet interested in chronicling injustices throughout the world. Her writing gives voice to the silenced and the oppressed and serves as a reminder of historical atrocities such as the Holocaust. Born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 28, 1950, to Michael Joseph and Louise Nada Blackford Sidlosky, Forché was raised in a city torn by racial tension and grinding poverty, facts that helped shape her world-view. Forché’s grandmother, a Czechoslovakian immigrant, inspired her granddaughter with her refusal to adopt American ways and encouraged her to learn about experiences of people from other countries and cultures. Forché was also heavily influenced by Our Lady of Sorrows School, which she attended for twelve years, and its emphasis on morality and social issues. In 1972, Forché graduated from Michigan State University and, in 1975, she received a master of fine arts degree from Bowling Green State University. In 1976, she published her first collection of poems, Gathering the Tribes, which received the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. In these poems, Forché introduced the subject that she would develop throughout her career: the individual’s responsibility to the past and to others. During the 1970s, Forché traveled to war-torn El Salvador, serving as a correspondent for National Public Radio and as a human rights observer for Amnesty International. Much of the material in her 1981 collection, The Country Between Us, derives from her experiences there. The book, which sold tens of thousands of copies, was the Academy of American Poets’ 1981 Lamont Poetry Selection and helped cement Forché’s reputation as a poet of political passions. In her third collection, The Angel of History, the title of which derives from an essay by critic Walter Benjamin, she evokes the loss and pain of those who have suffered from the consequences of twentieth-century wars. The poem, “The Garden Shukkei-en,” for example, interweaves the ghostly voice of the narrator with that of a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing during World War II. The collection won the 1994 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry. In addition to her poetry collections, Forché has edited the popular poetry anthology Against
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Carolyn Forché
Forgetting (1993), contributed text for various collections of photography, and translated the poetry of Robert Desnos, Claribel Alegría, and Mahmoud Darwish, among others. Her next collection, The Blue Hour, will be published in March of 2003. Her numerous awards include the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for The Country Between Us, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. She is also the recipient of the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award. Forché teaches in the master of fine arts program in poetry at George Mason University in Virginia.
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lifted snow would ascend a mountain.” This imagery evokes an otherworldly place, where the details of the present are barely visible. The “she” of the third line refers to the speaker’s companion, a Japanese survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Lines 4–7 In these lines, the speaker is reporting on the memories of her companion, who is haunted by images of the past. The people “crying for help” are victims of the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima. The bomb destroyed the city and killed more than half of its 400,000 residents. The shock of the bombing was such that neither “tears nor lamentation” made any difference to the burnt corpses that filled the river Ota or to the thousands crying for help.
Lines 8–16 A “matsu” is a type of pine tree. The speaker juxtaposes the image of the tree with the image of “barbed wire” to shock the reader and to evoke a sense of both beauty and horror. Lines 9–16 are spoken in the voice of the Japanese survivor, who is remembering what used to be in the garden and comparing it to what she sees now. She is so consumed with the past that she hallucinates a teahouse that is no longer in the garden and in it the victims of the bombing. The Ota is a river that runs through Hiroshima. When the speaker says that the weeping willow “etches its memory of their faces into the water,” she is figuratively saying that the tree’s branches form shadows on the water that resemble the Japanese character for heart.
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Poem Summary Lines 1–3 With its haunting simile, the opening lines of “The Garden Shukkei-en” create the tone for the poem. The speaker compares crossing a river “by way of a vanished bridge” to the way “a cloud of
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In these lines, the companion speaks, and then the Japanese woman speaks. The “burnt trunk wrapped in straw” is a memorial to those who died in Hiroshima, and touching it reminds the survivor of the physical effect the bomb had on her. The heat from the radiation was so intense that it literally melted the skin of people close to the blast. Her question, “Do you think for a moment we were human beings to them?” is rhetorical, which means that she obviously does not think that the Americans thought the Japanese were human beings. The woman’s confusion of the angel and the woman further underscores her inability to live in the present and shows the powerful hold that her memories have on her. The image of clapping hands to call the fish to the surface evokes the way that memory often responds to sensory stimuli. Line 24 echoes line 19. The woman does not believe the
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Americans think of the Hiroshima survivors. This line also suggests that the survivor’s companion is an American.
Lines 25–29 The survivor tells her companion that “nothing I say will be enough,” meaning that words cannot adequately represent the anguish of her experience. The image of dressing (that is, treating) radiation burns with vegetable oil illustrates the desperation of the survivors to ease their pain. The speaker compares the survivor’s mind to “the white froth of rice rising up kettlesides” to highlight her emotional and mental instability.
Lines 30–34 Forché links a common Japanese greeting to the Hiroshima bombing. The hibakusha refer to survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. By referring to Hiroshima as a “child’s city,” Forché links the past to the present and shows how the effects of the bomb, dropped more than fifty years ago, continue today in the emotional torment of the survivors. The graphic image of the crushed brain shows the persistence of memory and how the survivor cannot escape the past.
Lines 35–40 The survivor wonders if she is adequately expressing her experience to the companion, but ironically she worries that her words are “too precise” rather than too vague, a more common problem with communication, especially cross-cultural communication. In these last lines, the survivor shifts to a more abstract, less detailed language in her attempt to represent her experience since the bombing. She tells her companion that, regardless of circumstances, she and other hibakusha have managed to live their lives with some degree of normalcy, though always carrying with them the memory of the war and the bombing. The final image suggests a kind of moral awakening for the human race as to the potentially world-ending capacity of atomic warfare.
Themes Language and Meaning Forché’s poem shows the insufficiency of language to accurately represent the horrors of violence and war. By using two voices, one a report
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Media Adaptations • The Watershed Foundation released an audiocassette of Forché reading from The Country Between Us in 1982. • In 1994, the Academy of American Poets released an audiocassette of Forché reading selected poems.
on the survivor’s experience and the other direct speech from the survivor, Forché attempts to show the victim’s trauma from two perspectives, as if testimony from the survivor herself were not enough. The survivor tells her companion, “If you want, I’ll tell you, but nothing I say will be enough,” and at another point she asks, “Perhaps my language is too precise, and therefore too difficult to understand?” The survivor’s distrust of language to adequately convey her experience is a distrust shared by many poets and writers, who experiment with point of view, word choice, and narration to evoke rather than represent emotion and events. The shift in the survivor’s speech at the end of the poem from concrete to abstract and her noting of the “silence surrounding what happened to us” also underscore this point. The “silence,” however, is also literal. During the American occupation of Japan following World War II, the Japanese were strongly discouraged from discussing the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because it was considered a sign of anti-Americanism.
War Forché highlights the atrocities of war by describing its effects on survivors more than fifty years after the fact. This strategy enables her to illustrate the lasting damage that war has on its victims, especially when those victims are children. Because the bomb was dropped in 1945, almost all of the Hiroshima survivors were children or adolescents at the time. Since the bombing, while attempting to live “normal” lives, they have had to re-live on a daily basis the horror of what they witnessed. By setting the poem in a garden known for
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Topics for Further Study • Research the American bombing of Nagasaki during World War II, and compare it to the bombing of Hiroshima in terms of lost lives, destroyed buildings, and defeated morale. Present your findings to the class. • Compare the two voices in the poem: the American’s and the survivor’s. Which is more powerful, and why? Write a short essay backing up your claim with well-developed reasons. • Research the religions of Japan, and discuss how “The Garden Shukkei-en” can be considered a religious poem. • Compare “The Garden Shukkei-en” with the poem that comes after it, “The Testimony of Light,” in terms of how each represents the catastrophe of Hiroshima. Which is more powerful, and why? Discuss your responses in groups. • Many historians continue to claim that the United States had to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or else the war would never have ended. After researching the history of the decision to drop the bombs, hold a class debate arguing for and against the idea that the bombs had to be used. • In groups, compose a psychological profile of both speakers in the poem. Describe their values, emotional states, and desires. Be prepared to defend your descriptions with evidence from the poem.
its natural beauty and having a survivor speak about her experiences in that very garden when the bomb was dropped, Forché exploits the contrast between past and present, innocence and experience, underscoring the irrevocable losses that war incurs.
Memory In a way, “The Garden Shukkei-en” is a sustained exploration of the power and persistence of memory. The survivor of the Hiroshima bombing cannot escape her memories of the event, as they
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continue to shape the ways in which she interacts with her present. She “sees” a teahouse that is no longer there “and the corpses of those who slept in it.” Often, something she sees or touches triggers the intrusion of the past. For example, when she touches “a burnt trunk wrapped in straw,” she remembers how her own skin fell off as a result of radiation burn. Survivors of violent events such as bombings often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, a psychiatric disorder marked by flashbacks, nightmares, and a general sense of estrangement from daily life. This would account for the survivor’s dreamlike speech. Her emotional instability is also highlighted by the other speaker’s comparison of the survivor’s mind to “the white froth of rice rising up kettlesides.”
Style Voice The term “voice” refers to the agent, or narrator, who is speaking through the poem. Throughout the The Angel of History, Forché uses multiple voices to illustrate the violence and tragedy of the twentieth century. Instead of using one speaker who witnesses a particular atrocity and attempts to convey that experience to readers, Forché employs a number of speakers who interrupt and, at times, babble incoherently. Her structure of polyglot and fragmented speech, quotations from other writers, and description creates a collage-like effect. By using two speakers in “The Garden Shukkei-en,” a narrator who reports her experience walking through a garden with a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing and the survivor herself, Forché gives context and shape to the memories of the survivor, who has the last words in the poem. Other wellknown, twentieth-century poems that employ a similar structure include T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson,” and Ezra Pound’s cantos.
Imagery Forché juxtaposes images of nature with images of war to create a landscape that is at once beautiful and fraught with danger. For example, she begins the poem comparing how the companion and the survivor cross a river “as a cloud of lifted snow would ascend a mountain.” A few lines down, however, there is mention of “barbed wire” and corpses in a teahouse. However, because the war imagery is in the mind of the survivor, the danger
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Compare & Contrast • 1980s: After a decade of astounding stock market gains, Japan’s economy crashes in the late 1980s. Today: After a decade of astounding stock market gains, the U.S. economy crashes in 2001. • 1980s: President Ronald Reagan announces plans for a program to examine the feasibility of a missile defense system. Congressional critics deride the idea, calling it “Star Wars.” Today: Although China, Russia, and North Korea tell the United Nations Disarmament
is emotional. The survivor is reliving the trauma of the bombing, and readers, perhaps especially American readers, are experiencing shame or guilt.
Rhetorical Questions Rhetorical questions are not really questions per se. They are statements that are also sometimes evaluations posed as questions. Forché employs two of them in “The Garden Shukkei-en” to highlight the bombing survivor’s feeling of being a victim. The first, “Do you think for a moment we were human beings to them?” means “They did not even consider us human beings to have done this to us.” The second, “Do Americans think of us?” suggests that “Americans do not even think of us” (“us” meaning the survivors of the bombing).
Historical Context 1980s Forché has cultivated a reputation as a political poet. After her popular second volume of poetry, The Country Between Us, a collection of poems about the war in El Salvador, she set her sights on a more global target: the entire twentieth century. In the late 1980s, when she wrote “The Garden Shukkei-en,” Ronald Reagan was just finishing his second term as president of the United
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Commission that a U.S. missile defense system would threaten international security, trigger a new arms race, and undermine the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty, President Bush pushes to develop the system. • 1980s: The Reagan administration develops close ties to Japan as a Cold War ally. Today: The Bush administration cultivates closer ties to Japan, after the Clinton administration frequently clashed with Japan over trade issues.
States. Reagan’s term was marked by a strident self-righteousness and, during his administration, the United States became involved in a number of civil wars, including ones in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The Reagan administration’s relations with Japan, however, were strong, and during this time Japan was America’s major trading partner. Indeed, the Japanese economy during the 1980s was on track to surpass that of America, with Japan having overtaken the United States as the number one producer of automobiles and semiconductors. Japanese-American relations were also helped by the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided a formal U.S. government apology and $20,000 redress to more than eighty thousand Japanese Americans who were forced from their homes and placed in U.S. internment camps during World War II. Forché’s interest in writing about the effects of the Hiroshima bombing almost fifty years after the fact coincided with the Reagan administration’s Cold War rhetoric of the 1980s and the public’s fear that President Reagan might lead the United States into a nuclear war. Numerous nuclear warthemed films and songs were produced during this decade. The 1985 movie Back to the Future, directed by Robert Zemeckis, features a car powered by nuclear fuel stolen from Libyan terrorists who are trying to build an atomic bomb. The trio of Mad Max movies, Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior
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(1981), and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) that launched Mel Gibson’s career, are all set in the post-apocalypse outback of Australia and peopled with human survivors from World War III. Blockbuster movies such as the James Bond film Octopussy (1983) and director James Cameron’s Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Terminator (1984) similarly have scenarios in which the world is either on the brink of nuclear holocaust or dealing with its aftermath. Perhaps the most controversial film of this time is The Day After (1983), a television movie set in the Midwest that explores one family’s response to global nuclear war. Images of American nuclear missiles taking off from silos and atomic bombs exploding on American soil ignited controversy and reminded a younger generation of Americans of the ever-looming threat of nuclear war. The subject of nuclear war pervaded the music of the 1980s as well, including heavy metal, reggae, rock, and folk. Pink Floyd sang about the finality of nuclear war in “Two Suns in the Sunset,” while Underworld’s “Underneath the Radar” used early warning systems for nuclear war as a metaphor for love. Many songs protested the Reagan administration’s pro-nuclear stance in their lyrics, such as Escape Club’s tune, “Wild, Wild West”: “Gotta live it up, live it up / Ronnie’s got a new gun. / Headin’ for the nineties, livin’ in the eighties, / screamin’ in the backroom, / waitin’ for the big boom.” Reagan did not help matters when, before one of his weekly Saturday radio addresses in 1984, he joked into the microphone (which he thought was turned off), that the United States would commence bombing Russia in fifteen minutes. Musical groups including The Talking Heads incorporated his gaffe into their songs.
Critical Overview Although Forché has been widely lauded for her poetry and her humanitarian work, she has also been criticized for writing overtly political poetry. Critical reception for The Angel of History, in which “The Garden Shukkei-en” appears, however, has been mostly positive. Writing for Magill Book Reviews, David Buehrer notes Forché’s penchant for preachiness as well as her lyric brilliance, observing, “The Angel of History preserves and critiques, in a moralistic if stark tone, crimes against humanity and decency.” Don Bogen is effusive in his praise in his review of the book for the Nation.
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Bogen notes that Forché has changed her firstperson, “look at this” reportorial style she worked so well in her previous two collections, and he claims that The Angel of History is “clearly a breakthrough [volume].” A writer for The Virginia Quarterly Review gives the collection a mixed review, saying about Forché: “Her ambition is admirable, and the book is emotionally and intellectually moving.” However, the reviewer criticizes the collection, claiming, “at times [it] feels like Forché is trying too hard to convey the importance of what she has to say.” In a review for World Literature Today, Rochelle Owens faults Forché’s poetry for being so much like everyone else’s, asserting, “The writing is familiar in tone and reminiscent of sundry poets.” Owens ends her review with this unflattering observation: “The Angel of History does demonstrate its familiarity with modern and postmodern stylistics, a safe and skillful miming of one of the major experimental enterprises of the day.” More recently, Alicia Ostriker has written about the collection for American Poetry Review. In her essay “Beyond Confession: The Poetics of Postmodern Witness,” Ostriker sees Forché’s collection as an attempt to engage the material horrors of twentieth-century violence: “Both in content and structure, Forché’s poems attempt to represent both ‘the pile of debris’ that is twentieth-century history and the helpless yet indestructible impulse ‘to make whole what has been smashed.’”
Criticism Chris Semansky Semansky is an instructor of literature whose writing appears regularly in literary journals. In this essay, Semansky considers the idea of witness in Forché’s poem. Forché is known for writing a poetry of witness. Her first two collections are full of firstperson poems, the “I” who sees this or that atrocity and reports on it. She became famous for poems such as “The Colonel,” a thinly veiled autobiographical account of an experience in El Salvador with a diabolical military man. With her edited collection Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, Forché lets the victims speak for themselves. Poets such as Yusef Komunyakaa, Richard Wright, Bei Dao, and Dennis Brutus write about their direct experiences with racism, oppression, and war. In her introduction to that collection,
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Forché calls the poems “a poetry of witness,” asserting that such a poetry “reclaims the social from the political and in so doing defends the individual against illegitimate forms of coercion.” The poems in The Angel of History also constitute a poetry of witness, but a different kind. Here, Forché tells readers (in her “Notes” to the poems) she has jettisoned the first-person narrative lyric in favor of a poetry that is “polyphonic, broken, haunted, and in ruins, with no possibility of restoration.” In these poems, she patches together a range of voices, each of which vies for the reader’s attention and understanding. The “I” in the poems is never located, never identified fully, but rather floats in and out of the soup of other voices on the page. Sometimes, it is the angel of history who speaks. For example, in “The Garden Shukkeien,” Forché uses two speakers, who have a particular function in relation to each other. By structuring her poem this way, Forché can tell the story of the survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombing in two ways: through an eyewitness’s point of view and through a witness to that eyewitness’s suffering. The first speaker opens the poem. She accompanies the woman later identified as a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. The voice is spectral, haunting, and one can imagine the angel of history crossing the “vanished bridge.” The first speaker has access to the survivor’s thoughts, emotions, and actions. She tells readers about the woman with whom she travels: It is the river she most remembers, the living and the dead both crying for help.
It is a cold world that the speaker notes the woman remembers, one that “allowed neither tears nor lamentations.” Such a description underscores the utter shock of being hit by an atomic bomb and the fact that history is unforgiving. Survivors of the blast often talk about the hordes of injured and crazed people shoving their way through the streets, pushing one another into the river. Events happened too quickly to allow for mourning or tears. The past is there now, to be witnessed, but never undone. The survivor herself begins to talk in the tenth line: Where this lake is, there was a lake, Where these black pine grow, there grew black pine. Where there is no teahouse I see a wooden teahouse and the corpses of those who slept in it.
Shukkei-en is a garden of miniatures, full of replicas of famous landscapes. It was built on the banks of the Kyobashi-gawa, which is modeled on
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Alternating voices, often without any warning, dramatizes the poem, letting the action speak as well as the characters.”
Xihu (West Lake) in Hangzhou, China. The garden gains some of its effects, then, by manipulating space. Forché, in her collection in general and in this poem in particular, gains her poetic effects by manipulating time. The survivor witnesses a lake and pines in the present but cannot see them without also seeing the lake and pines of the past. In this way, she echoes the “seeing” of the angel of history. The figure of the angel comes from philosopher Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” an excerpt from which Forché uses as an epigraph for her collection: This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
The perspective of the angel parallels the image of Hiroshima in the poem, depicted as “A cemetery seen from the air.” It also parallels the idea of an adult looking back on the debris of her childhood, the suffering that formed her and continues to form her still. The image of childhood is central to this poem, because the victims of the bombing, the hibakusha, who are still alive today, were children in 1945. Their memories of the bombing are the memories of children, and Forché emphasizes this by making the voice of the survivor childlike and innocent. In the preface to his collection of first-person children’s accounts of the bombing, Children of Hiroshima, Arata Osada writes: These children, who had survived only by the merest of chances, had seen their parents, brothers and sisters, teachers or friends dying, crushed by the timbers of a fallen house, or being burned alive.
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In their study of the psychological effects of living in an age of nuclear weaponry, Indefensible Weapons, Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk note that survivors of Hiroshima experienced “a permanent encounter with death” and “a lifelong identification with the dead.” Falk and Lifton write that often the survivors behaved and lived “as-if dead.” Forché evokes this kind of death-in-life existence by alternating between the voice of the survivor and the voice of her companion, which the text suggests is an American woman. If Forché wrote the poem in the first person about the survivor, she would be returning to the kind of lyric that dominated her first two collections and that she had sworn off. If she wrote the poem solely from the first-person point of view of the survivor, she might be accused of appropriating her experience. Alternating voices, often without any warning, dramatizes the poem, letting the action speak as well as the characters. One example of this technique occurs after the description of the willow tree on the banks of the Ota. After the first speaker describes the survivor as stroking “a burnt trunk wrapped in straw,” the survivor says, “I was weak and my skin hung from my fingertips like cloth.” The effect is something close to a voice-over in movies and deepens the texture of the poem, providing readers with more than one access point to the emotion, conscience, and thoughts of both speakers. By using an American speaker and a Japanese speaker to illustrate the evils of atomic warfare, Forché foregrounds history itself rather than the travails of one individual. The Japanese survivor strolling through the garden is representative of the hundreds of thousands of other hibakusha. She is an example of how war can destroy lives but also of how good can come from evil. Her ability to survive more than fifty years after the atomic blast and after witnessing the incineration of her city attests to the strength of the human spirit and its capacity to cull hope from the grimmest of circumstances. The city itself has been rebuilt as a monument to memory. Small reminders of the bomb, such as the burnt trunk wrapped in straw in Shukkei-en, appear throughout Hiroshima. The Genbaku Dome (ABomb Dome), one of the few surviving buildings from the bomb, stands as a memorial to the dead, and Heiwa-koen (Peace Memorial Park), close to the epicenter of the explosion, includes a cenotaph, which contains the names of all known victims of the tragedy. Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “The Garden Shukkei-en,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
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Greg Barnhisel Barnhisel directs the Writing Center at the University of Southern California. In this essay, Barnhisel discusses Forché’s poem in the context of her larger concern with war, violence, and the effects of brutality on humans and their surroundings. Against the common stereotype that poetry restricts its subject matter to the individual psyche stands the work of Carolyn Forché, a poet who has relentlessly explored the vicious and violent history of the twentieth century in her poems. Winner of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award for her book Gathering the Tribes in 1976, Forché soon turned her focus away from the themes of family and descent that characterized that work. In 1978, Forché met Leonel Gomez Vides, the nephew of the El Salvadorian poet Claribel Alegria (whose work Forché was translating), and Vides prodded Forché to use her Guggenheim Fellowship money to come to El Salvador and witness that country’s poverty and growing violence. Always sensitive to the ways that war and political forces disrupt and destroy the lives of ordinary people, in El Salvador, Forché walked into a country that was about to descend into a decade of brutal war. A leftist insurgency, the FMLN, battled the conservative government. In response, the wealthy and the military organized paramilitary forces—death squads—to keep the population in fear. The election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency in 1980 provided the right-wing forces with moral, financial, and ultimately military support from the American superpower. During the 1980s, tens of thousands of Salvadorians died in battle and in acts of terrorism perpetrated largely by the military and death squads. These forces even killed Roman Catholic Cardinal Oscar Romero (who had asked Forché to return home for her own safety) and four American nuns. The brutality of those years in El Salvador is hard to overstate. Forché’s response was to try to address the unrest in her verse. In one of her most famous poems, “The Colonel,” she describes a Salvadorian military officer who dumps a sackful of human ears— the ears of his torture victims—onto the table. “They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this,” the narrator remarks. The colonel says to the poem’s narrator, “I am tired of fooling around . . . As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can f— themselves.” The poem ends with this haunting image: “Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.”
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The Country Between Us, the collection containing “The Colonel” and Forché’s other seven El Salvador poems, was very controversial. Many critics and poets complained that Forché had traded in pure poetry for an excessively political agenda. However, the book had great admirers in other quarters. Forché, for her part, defended the change in her poetry. In “El Salvador: An Aide-Memoire,” she wrote that by her trip to El Salvador I was to be blessed with the rarity of a moral and political education—what at times would seem an unbearable immersion, what eventually would become a focused obsession. It would change my life and work, propel me toward engagement, test my endurance and find it wanting, and prevent me from ever viewing myself or my country again through precisely the same fog of unwitting connivance.
For Forché, after this experience in El Salvador, any poetry that did not address issues of oppression and violence would constitute “unwitting connivance” with the perpetrating forces. During the 1980s, Forché remained active in social and political causes, even working as a reporter for National Public Radio in war-torn Beirut in the early 1980s. In 1992, she published an anthology of poetry, Against Forgetting, that compiled what Forché called in an interview in the Christian Science Monitor “the poetry of witness” of poets across the world. Also in this interview, Forché described this book as “a symphony of utterance, a living memorial to those who had died and those who survived the horrors of the twentieth century.” But, it was not until 1994 that Forché would publish another book of her own verse. In that year, The Angel of History appeared. Like Against Forgetting and The Country Between Us, The Angel of History takes as its subject witness: witness to the atrocities of the century, especially those of war. The title comes from the writings of the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, himself a victim of the Nazis. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (in a passage included as the The Angel of History’s epigraph), Benjamin writes that the angel of history was a spirit with his face turned toward the past. Benjamin writes Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole that which has been smashed. But, a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him toward the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
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For Forché, after this experience in El Salvador, any poetry that did not address issues of oppression and violence would constitute ‘unwitting connivance’ with the perpetrating forces.”
Benjamin’s pessimistic idea of history—the belief that catastrophes will continue to happen and will even gain momentum, and are in fact not separate events but simply manifestations of a greater unitary violence and evil in the world—strongly influenced Forché’s own view. In The Angel of History, Forché brings together the voices of victims of seemingly singular tragedies all over the world: the Holocaust in Europe, the “low-intensity conflicts” (a Pentagon term of the 1980s referring to the little wars around the globe) of the Cold War in the Americas and Africa, the atomic bombs in Japan. Her job is to record and to give voice, and by doing so to point out to her audience that all of these tragedies may not have the same causes, but they have the same effects on individual people. The Holocaust and the Cold War and the bombing of Hiroshima were very different events with different victims and different causes. Forché’s work emphasizes the commonality of these events in terms of their impact on individuals without glossing over the events’ differences. “The Garden Shukkei-en” takes its name from a garden in Hiroshima, Japan. In 1940, the Asano family—the feudal dynastic family of the Hiroshima area—donated the park to the government. Five years later, the park saw the unimaginable destruction of the atomic bomb. Forché chooses this site in which to locate her poem primarily for the shocking juxtaposition, of course; the horrific aftermath of the bomb could not contrast more starkly with the characteristically Japanese beauty of a carefully-landscaped pond with trees and even ceremonial tearooms. In the poem, a woman comes to the park, presumably accompanied by the narrator
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What Do I Read Next? • In 1995, Coffee House Press released an anthology of poetry titled Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, addressing the possibility of nuclear apocalypse. The collection, edited by John Bradley, contains poems from more than one hundred poets, including Adrienne Rich and William Dickey. • Paul Brian’s Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895–1984 (1986) provides a highly readable and detailed annotated bibliography of fiction depicting nuclear war and its aftermath.
of an unidentified French woman and a Japanese man, both married, who are having a brief love affair in Hiroshima many years after World War II. Both struggle to escape their past and live in the present. • John Hersey’s classic Hiroshima (1946) focuses on the lives of six survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. It remains one of the most useful and provocative accounts of the bomb’s aftermath.
• Marguerite Duras’s screenplay of Alain Resnais’s 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour was reissued by Grove Press in 1987. The film tells the story
• James Merrill was a widely respected poet whose work often explored human responses to living in the nuclear age. Timothy Materer’s James Merrill’s Apocalypse (2000) shows how apocalyptic motifs inspire and inform Merrill’s poetry.
(who may or may not be Forché herself) and tells the narrator about her feelings about returning here, where she may have walked during the war. For Forché, violence and brutality change people and things fundamentally, in ways that only the survivors can understand or even perceive. Her poems are filled with images of survivors—both people and landscapes—that are somehow different after experiencing war. Forché conceives of this change as not exactly a scar; it is more of a transformation of the self. Yet, even in their alteration, the survivors bear witness to what has occurred. The ears in “The Colonel” are now “dried peach halves,” but they can still hear. In “The Notebook of Uprising,” another poem from The Angel of History, Forché speaks extensively about the city of Prague and about how its inhabitants can sense the changes that first the Nazis and then the Soviets caused in the city as they crushed resistance. Throughout her work, Forché returns to a site very near the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, where in a basement a small Holocaust memorial served as one of Forché’s first introductions to the changes that great violence can wreak upon a whole city. Paris is never just Paris to Forché; it is always different from what it might otherwise have been, in ways that survivors can sense.
Hiroshima’s almost unique destruction (only Nagasaki can compare) transformed the woman in the poem in small, subtle ways. In what she says, the woman does not focus on the actual aftermath of the violence to any great extent; compared to the true carnage, the few images of horror (flesh hanging from her fingers “like cloth,” a woman’s brain crushed under a roof) are spare, yet they give an idea of how fundamentally this woman’s mind must have been changed by what she saw. She is a hibakusha, an A-bomb survivor, and it is not hard to imagine that when she closes her eyes all she can see are the corpse-choked rivers and the hanging flesh. Happiness in its true sense is no longer possible for her, as she says at the end of the poem. All she can experience is “something close.” By identifying herself as a member of a group (the hibakusha), she implicitly makes it clear that these experiences are shared by other survivors. The question of humanity is always close to the surface in Forché’s poems, and this one is no different. The Japanese woman poses the question, “Do you think for a moment we were human beings to them?” The answer, quite simply, is no. Acts of great violence strip victims of their humanity, transforming them into objects: the ears in El Salvador, the cattle car loads of Jews and Gypsies going to Nazi
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death camps, the 300,000 civilians turned instantaneously into corpses in Hiroshima. Conventional ethics demand that human beings treat each other always as ends in themselves, never as means to a greater end. In “The Garden Shukkei-en,” the Japanese woman’s rhetorical questions make it clear that in dropping the bomb the Americans have violated this ethical tenet and treated the inhabitants of Hiroshima merely as means, as objects, as less than human. The ironic corollary to this, Forché shows, is that the objects of violence are then transformed: once treated as something other than human, they are changed into something different, people whose lives merely “resemble” life. Fundamentally, violence will always do this. “How can these fields continue as simple fields?” the narrator in “The Angel of History” (the first poem in the volume The Angel of History) asks about the fields of battle in France and Poland. In “The Garden Shukkei-en,” the narrator says of the landscape that “where this lake is, there was a lake, / where these black pine grow, there grew black pine.” It may seem identical but it is not. Not even sensations or emotions can remain unaltered by the experience of violence: the Japanese woman says that We have not, in all these years, felt what you call happiness. But at times, with good fortune, we experience something close. As our life resembles life, and this garden the garden.
Nothing, whether people or landscape or feelings themselves, can be the same after going through the trauma of war and violence. Forché’s poems rarely leave the reader with any kind of uplifting possibility, any question of transcending tragedy, and “The Garden Shukkeien” is no different. The victims of the A-bomb are surrounded by “silence”: the silence of the grave, the silence of history, the silence of the garden itself. Providing faint comfort is the fact that in that silence they hear “the bell to awaken God.” What this means is ominously left unsaid. Source: Greg Barnhisel, Critical Essay on “The Garden Shukkei-en,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Sources Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, edited and translated by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 257–58. Bogen, Don, “Muses of History,” in the Nation, Vol. 259, No. 13, October 24, 1994, pp. 464–68.
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Buehrer, David, Review of The Angel of History, in Magill Book Reviews, November 1, 1994. Forché, Carolyn, “El Salvador: An Aide-Memoire,” in American Poetry Review, Vol. 10, No. 4, July–August 1981, p. 7. —, “The Garden Shukkei-en,” in The Angel of History, HarperCollins, 1994, pp. 70–71. —, “Notes,” in The Angel of History, HarperCollins, 1994, p. 81. Lifton, Robert Jay, and Richard Falk, Indefensible Weapons, Basic Books, 1982, pp. 38–48. “Notes on Current Books: Poetry,” in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 70, Issue 4, Autumn 1994, p. 136. Osada, Arata, ed., Children of Hiroshima, Harper Colophon Books, 1980, p. xx. Ostriker, Alicia, “Beyond Confession: The Poetics of Postmodern Witness,” in American Poetry Review, Vol. 30, Issue 2, March–April 2001, pp. 35–40. Owens, Rochelle, “World Literature in Review: English,” in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, Issue 4, Autumn 1994, p. 816. Ratiner, Steven, “Carolyn Forché: The Poetry of Witness,” in Christian Science Monitor, April 20, 1994.
Further Reading Gery, John, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary Poetry: Ways of Nothingness, University Press of Florida, 1996. Gery examines both the direct and the indirect impact of the nuclear threat on American poets from Gertrude Stein to James Merrill, providing detailed readings of over fifty poems and four general groups into which poems might be categorized: protest poetry, apocalyptic lyric poetry, psycho-historical poetry, and the poetry of uncertainty. Forché, Carolyn, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, W. W. Norton, 1993. In this extremely popular anthology, Forché collects the works of poets from around the world who bear witness in their poems to atrocities such as war, famine, and violent discrimination. Lifton, Robert Jay, and Nicholas Humphrey, eds., In a Dark Time, Harvard University Press, 1984. Psychiatrists Lifton and Humphrey have collected excerpts from literature of the last 2,500 years that comment on the psychological and imaginative confusion surrounding war. Lifton is known for his psychological studies of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Takaki, Ronald T., Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb, Back Bay Books, 1996. Takaki provides a concise exploration of America’s use of atomic weapons during World War II and questions the military necessity of dropping the bomb, suggesting that desire for intimidation, anti-Asian sentiment, and Harry Truman’s personality were all factors.
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The Greatest Grandeur Pattiann Rogers 1993
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Since her first poetry collection in 1981, Pattiann Rogers has built a reputation as one of America’s most perceptive and thoughtful poets. Her works generally concern the natural world, with close observation of simple facts used to build the case for a higher order in the universe. This is certainly true of “The Greatest Grandeur,” from Rogers’s 1993 collection Geocentric. In this poem, Rogers explores a variety of things that people have considered the greatest grandeur, or sign of the universe’s infinite wonder. With carefully chosen words and contrast of images, Rogers makes the magnificence of the natural world come alive on the page. The examples that Rogers gives of candidates for the greatest grandeur in life range from the tiny electrons that surround an atom, to the raging seas, to the open sky itself. In the end, the poem suggests that the greatest grandeur of the universe is found in “the dark emptiness contained in every next moment.” As with all of Rogers’s poems, a religious reverence is felt, but she does not advocate any one religious system; instead, she finds an aspect of nature that includes most major religions. “The Greatest Grandeur” is available in Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981–2001, Rogers’s collection of new and collected poems, published in 2001.
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Author Biography Pattiann Rogers was born on March 23, 1940, in Joplin, Missouri, to Irene C. and William Tall. Her family was relatively poor, supported by what money her father could make as an inventor. When she was twenty, she married John Robert Rogers. After earning a bachelor of arts degree in English literature from the University of Missouri in 1961, she worked as an English teacher to support him through graduate school. He became a geophysicist, providing a connection to science that can be seen throughout Rogers’s poetry. After the birth of the couple’s first son, Rogers stayed home to take care of him; another son soon followed. While her family always took first priority, it was while she was raising her children that Rogers developed her poetry career. Rogers’s first published book of poetry was The Expectation of Light, published in 1981, the same year that she received her master of arts degree from the University of Houston. Since then, she has published numerous volumes of poetry and essays and has been the recipient of several awards, including the Tietjens Prize and the Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, the Stroesse Award from Prairie Schooner (twice), and four Pushcart Prizes. She has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her works have appeared in more than fifty anthologies. She has been a faculty member of Vermont College and has been a visiting writer at the University of Montana, University of Arkansas, and University of Texas. Her collected papers from 1960 to 1999, including manuscript copies of her books, are archived at the University of Texas Library at Austin. Rogers still publishes frequently and does readings of her works often. In 2001, she published Song of the World Becoming: New and Selected Poems, 1981–2001, which gives an overview of her career. She and her husband currently live in Colorado.
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Poem Summary Lines 1–4 The first words of “The Greatest Grandeur” imply a discussion that has already been taking place: the subject of the discussion is only referred to as “it,” and readers are disoriented until they realize that the poem is already in the process of identifying the “greatest grandeur” referred to in the title. Rogers opens the poem with the image of a goanna, which is another name for the sand monitor. This lizard, which resembles an iguana, stands on its hind legs when defending itself, presenting the odd sight of its long slim body and short legs, which are made for scurrying along the ground, though it is at times propped up in a vertical pose. The idea that such a homely creature or its awkward motion could be seen as the greatest thing in existence is unlikely. Still, the third and fourth lines of the poem make a case that the goanna’s primitive structure and odd movements are signs of “tenacity,” or sheer persistence, brought to life.
Lines 5–10 The poem’s second stanza concentrates on one specific visual image, that of the contrast between the light color of the desert and the darkness of the hills that rise up in the distance. The desert is associated with rust in line 6, and in line seven it is called “dusk captured on earth in stone.” In the same way that the first stanza imagines the lizard as being the living embodiment of tenacity, here it takes an event—dusk—and gives it a physical presence. The second half of this stanza goes past capturing the simple visual effect of the desert to make a statement about grandeur. According to the theory put forth in line 8, grandeur is not in the stones of the desert or the hills, but in their contrast to one another. Rogers shows readers the contrast visually: the earlier description of “rust-orange rock” is balanced with “the blue-grey ridge of rain.” Orange is held up against its opposite, grey; solid rock is compared to liquid rain; and the flatness of the “expansive” desert is opposed to the vertical hills.
Lines 11–16 The poem’s third stanza offers two possible candidates for the title of “the greatest grandeur.”
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The first is finished off in the first two lines, but it has strong implications for the organization of the social world. In referring to “electron rings,” Rogers introduces an element that is too small to be experienced with the naked eye and so has to be observed through an electron microscope. This technology is relatively new, a creation of humanity’s ongoing pursuit of science and a confirmation that, rather than deadening the human appetite for mystery and grandeur, science enhances it by presenting new wonders that would not even have been thought about a hundred years ago. The use of the word “harmonics” in line 11 implies an artistic sense that is not usually associated with matters of hard science. The rest of the stanza is spent painting a picture of observable nature. Sandpipers are shore birds, usually found near oceans. Flying in circles, they resemble the rings of electrons mentioned in line 12. Rather than directly drawing attention to this circular motion, the poem refers to it with the language of geometry: “bisecting,” “arcs,” and “pitches.” The circular motion is further obscured when the poem describes it as “come and retreat.” These simple command words are reminiscent of how one might speak to an animal, such as a dog, and they serve to remind readers of the birds’ own narrow view of what they are doing. As with the case of the electron rings, the description of the sandpipers observes the relationship between science and nature. Whereas the earlier example described grandeur found in the course of scientific observation, the motion of the sandpipers describes a grand scene and then draws attention to the scientific elements within it.
Lines 17–21 The first line of the fourth stanza marks the first time that the concept of “grandeur” is actually named within the poem. It is mentioned in the title, but readers cannot always count on a poem’s title to clearly identify what the piece is about. This stanza contrasts terror and serenity, focusing both emotions on events in the sky. Lines 17, 18, and 19 describe two similar phenomena: lightning on the prairie and waves crashing on the sea during a storm. Though they occur in locations that are distinctly different, the two have large, violent motion and loud sounds in common, making them both reasonable causes for terror. In describing the waves as “cathedrals of stormy seas,” the poem once again draws a parallel between natural and human-made phenomena. Cathedrals are considered awe-inspiring because they are so large. Their construction was a feat that
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is especially impressive because they were built in a preindustrial age when large structures were rare. To see them crashing down would indeed be terrifying. Rogers compares each wave crash to such an event. In line 21, the poem uses the unusual phrase “appropriately helpless” to describe why some people feel that such events constitute the greatest grandeur. This indicates a human tendency toward self-effacement, since the people described in this line feel that it is correct that people should focus on their weaknesses.
Lines 22–25 By contrast, lines 22–25 describe the feeling of assurance that can be gotten from looking at the sky on a calm, starry night. The crashing waves are contrasted with the peaceful surface of a lake. If a person is looking up at the sky, it seems like a ceiling. But, if a person is looking at the stars as reflected in the lake, the sky then seems like a cellar. Viewing this situation does not make people feel hopeless but “magnanimous”—that is, courageous and generous.
Lines 26–29 The last stanza begins with what the speaker of the poem would choose as the greatest grandeur. Once again, it is phrased as a contrast: it is both “dark emptiness” and “the most singularly glorious gift.” That gift is the unpredictability that occurs because of the passage of time. Though some might view emptiness as a frightening prospect, this poem presents it as an opportunity.
Lines 30–37 Lines 30 through 37 are filled with contrasting ways that people could make use of time. Like much of Rogers’s work, this poem takes a fairly amoral stance: that is, the speaker is not concentrated on what should happen, but only on what could. The “processions” described in lines 30 and 31 are frightening because they imply ritualized violence, with people carrying torches, but then they are followed by a similar image of a nonthreatening parade of horses. Silly, clownish mimes are contrasted with serious chorus singers in black. Silver teapots are contrasted with stone pottery. Formal dances are contrasted with folk dances. The pastime of whittling is contrasted with the mournful grief of wailing.
Lines 38–41 The poem returns in the end to its amoral stance by noting that the greatest grandeur allows
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Media Adaptations • A compact disc of Pattiann Rogers reading twenty-one of her poems from her book Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981–2001 was recently recorded and is available by emailing
[email protected] • The author’s own web page, “The Poetry World of Pattiann Rogers,” can be found at http://www .mindspring.com/~pattiann_rogers and includes links to upcoming readings and publications with which the author will be involved. • Pattiann Rogers reading her poetry is available on a ninety-minute audiocassette from the radio program New Letters on the Air (1994), produced by the University of Missouri–Kansas City. • A video of Rogers reading her poetry in 1993, the year that “The Greatest Grandeur” was published, and talking with Michael Silverblatt is available from the Lannan Video Series. It is distributed by Small Press Distribution, Inc., of Berkeley, California. • Rogers is one of several poets on the 1998 video recording Why We Write. Filmed at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 1997, this tape includes a discussion about the role of women in poetry. It is distributed by Films for the Humanities. • The Cortland Review online literary magazine has posted a feature at http://www.cortlandreview .com/features/99/10/rogers.htm that features “A Day in the Life of Pattiann Rogers,” written by the poet in 1999.
room for both blasphemies and pieties. Rogers is very specific about avoiding any claim that she might have the right sense of behavior and, instead, celebrates the fact that so many different behaviors and beliefs belong in this world because of the possibility that is presented by time. While any definition of God should be comprehensive, covering all things in reality, the poem states that reality is large
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Topics for Further Study • Research the peculiar habits of the goanna, and write a detailed description of its defensive dance, which the poem describes as graceful. • The end of the poem mentions “10,000 definitions of god and more.” Research different religions, and make a list of ten or more such images of God. • Examine some animal or some natural phenomenon in depth, and explain to your class the truly awe-inspiring things about it that are not apparent to the naked eye. • Assign members of your class to groups to debate which is the greatest grandeur: snow, rain, or sunshine.
and others are as focused as the quirky motions of a tiny lizard. Whether they are frightening or comforting, intimidating or emboldening, the things of nature are allowed to speak for themselves in this poem. Each case shows that powerful emotions can come out of paying close attention to nature, and, in each case, the lesson learned is that nature is just an indicator of the grandeur of the universe. The images used in the poem’s last stanza are drawn from social interaction, not nature, but they still emphasize nature’s influence. The most obvious of these is that the processions of men referred to in line 30 are not just said to be carrying torches but “burning cedar knots”: attention is brought to bear on the natural source of the torches, right down to the type of trees they come from. Likewise, the rest of the stanza, though talking about articles made by humans, makes a point of mentioning that they are made of silver, crockery, tangerine and almonds and wood. The point seems to be that even when one finds grandeur in human achievement, one still must recognize that humans cannot stand apart from nature.
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enough to encompass ten thousand definitions of God “and more.” The last four words of this poem create a sort of geometrical pattern. The word “never” starts and finishes this phrase, and the two words in the middle are similar in sound, sharing both the initial “f” and the “l” sounds in the middles. This last phrase is bisected, for effect, by the line break.
Themes Nature and Its Meaning The main focus of “The Greatest Grandeur” is the ways in which humans use their observations of nature to lead to conclusions about religion. The poem gives examples of things that people think are signs that there is a divine order beyond what is obvious. These examples are all derived from nature. Some are traditional signs of godly order, such as the peaceful feeling caused by stars over a lake on a clear night or the intimidating violence of a rolling thunderstorm. Others are specifically modern examples, such as the motion of electrons around an atom. Some are as open as the desert,
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Divinity is a word that is often used to describe godlike qualities or characteristics. In its title, this poem identifies the divine, although not necessarily any one concept of God, as its theme. Like “divinity,” “grandeur” is a word that is often associated with God. A key point to this poem is that grandeur is elusive, meaning different things to different people at different times, but there are some awe-inspiring events that tend to put people in mind of the divine. Scenic vista, scientific complexity, the moods of nature, and the accomplishments of humanity are all indicators of grandeur, but the poem concludes that none of them is in itself complete. The single best indicator of God, according to this poem, is the “void” of the immediate next moment. This is the one thing that can contain all of the varied examples that it brings up, as well as the “10,000 definitions of god and more” that people have thought up. By recognizing the grandeur in so many different things and then finding that time contains all of those varied things, the poem is able to accept that people can see divinity in all things and that they still do not add up to grandeur.
Future After examining all of the possibilities, this poem decides that the greatest thing about this universe is that there is more to come. This is not exactly an optimistic viewpoint, but it comes close to
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optimism in the way that it looks forward to the future. A purely optimistic viewpoint would state the assurance that the future will be good; “The Greatest Grandeur,” however, does not take sides in the judgment of good and evil but, instead, rejoices that the future is big enough never to be filled. Whereas the physical images that the poem offers are often broad in scope, the future offered here is described in terms of one moment after another. The poem is not interested in future hours, years, and centuries. The view that it takes is not one of judging future outcomes, just of appreciating the fact that future events begin, or can begin, at any moment. In much the same way that the poem shows equal respect toward events that are the opposite of each other, it also shows little regard for future events, focusing instead on the wonder of the fact that they can occur at all. To give this idea full impact, the poem places this hope at the end, preceding it with the wide range of things that have already come before, to stretch readers’ beliefs about what is possible.
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with regard to the reader. When the narrator is not present, it is referred to as an “omniscient narrator”; a distinct voice might be identifiable, but the poem does not draw attention to it. In a case like this, the narrative is not considered omniscient but is speaking from one person’s distinct point of view. The “me” of the poem is presumably the author, and the entire poem is read as a monologue by the author.
Alliteration “The Greatest Grandeur” does not use rhymes at the ends of lines as many poems do, but it still takes advantage of similar sounds in the language to tie its ideas together. Instead of rhymes, which are words that have similar ending sounds, it uses alliteration, which is the repetition of similar initial consonant sounds. This can be found frequently throughout the poem, from the repeated g in “greatest grandeur” to the t’s of “translation of tenacity” to the p’s in “the perfect contrast it provides” to the g’s in “glorious gift.” This technique helps to make the poem, which is written in free verse, feel more measured, more structured, giving readers a better sense of the author’s controlling hand.
Style Structure Overall, “The Greatest Grandeur” does not have a very strict structure. There is no particular set length for each line, no standard rhyme scheme, and no consistency in the lengths of the stanzas. What it does do, though, is follow the structure of a logical argument. Each of the first four stanzas begins with a statement that tells readers that it is just putting forth some of the argument but not the whole thing. There is a temporary feeling to the statements “Some say” and “And some declare” and “Some claim” and “others,” indicating that the poem is not willing to accept these standards, and in fact, it is not. The final stanza contains the interpretation of the greatest grandeur that the poet accepts, and it is presented as if it is the summary of the all of the ideas that were previously suggested.
Monologue For the most part, this poem is told directly to the reader, with no personality given to the narrator. In the fifth stanza, it becomes apparent that there actually is, in fact, a specific person narrating these events. The second line of the last stanza ends with “seems to me,” and that one two-letter word changes the position of the narrative voice
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Historical Context Rogers first published “The Greatest Grandeur” in 1993. The poem, like most of her poetry, represents an attempt to transcend traditional religious views, to look at the natural world and find in it guides that can help one attain spirituality. At the time that this poem was published, the search for spirituality outside the tenants of traditional religions was on the rise as a commercial force in American society. This social phenomenon, which reached its peak in the mid-1990s, was broadly referred to as the New Age movement. It is difficult to define the New Age movement with any precision. For one thing, its origins are uncertain. Some people relate its rise to the spiritual void left by 1960s counterculture skepticism, while others cite anxiety about the coming millennium as being the main force. Another problem in defining it is that, like most social movements, the term was used by different people for different things, with many serving their own interests. In the end, the fact that the term has fallen out of use is not as much an indicator of changing religious beliefs as it is of the overwhelming mockery that was visited on its adherents. New Age philosophies
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have gone on to survive under other names, whereas the term “New Age” has turned into little more than a comic punchline. The defining factors of New Age philosophy are an inquisitiveness about other world religious experiences and a desire to find religious experience through science and nature. Often, New Age followers were people who had found themselves unable to derive a meaningful experience from mainstream Christianity or Judaism and had turned their curiosity to Eastern religions, such as Hindu mysticism and Tibetan Buddhism. Rather than becoming converts to these faiths, they adapted various practices from them, creating an independent religion with each person’s particular mixture. For instance, transcendental meditation, a derivative of Hindu beliefs, was a fad in the 1970s and became a precursor to the New Age movement. Chanting was another common practice that was derived from several different non-Western religions. Obscure beliefs of lesser-known cultures, such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Guaani of South America, were introduced to American audiences. According to a 1994 Roper poll, 45 percent of all respondents said that meditating gave them the feeling that they were in the presence of something sacred. Cynics dismissed the use of selective aspects of other religions as a sign that New Agers were indulging in superficial curiosity, rather than in true religious experience. Another aspect of New Age culture was the use of methods that sounded scientific but rejected the findings of traditional science. Shamanism, herbalism, reflexology, aromatherapy, and aura reading all were explored as methods to deal with human troubles that ranged from nervousness to serious diseases. One particularly popular New Age form of science was the belief in the healing power of crystals, which were treated as cures, as good luck talismans, and as icons as powerful as religious icons had been considered by traditional religions. At the more mystical extremes of the New Age movement was the belief in communication with other forms of life, either from the realm of the dead or from one’s own past experiences. The resurgence of belief in reincarnation during the 1990s is attributed, in large part, to the writings of Shirley MacLaine, the famous actress whose five books throughout the 1980s sold more than eight million copies and spun off to a five-hour miniseries in 1987 about her spiritual awakening. The hope or belief that one can contact those who have died is a persistent belief that has shown itself
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throughout history, back to the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece. The last time that mediums for contacting the spirits of the departed were this popular with mainstream Americans was at the end of the nineteenth century, nearly a hundred years earlier, when the Theosophical Society, formed by the famed Russian spiritualist Madame Blavatsky, attracted members of high society with such traditional carnival tricks as levitating tables and “spirits” knocking on walls. The term “New Age” quickly fell from use by the end of the 1990s. Cynics mocked its adherents for being zealous about alternatives to traditional science and religion that they did not even fully understand. It became increasingly harder to accept New Age beliefs after considering the greed factor: fortunes could be made by mediocre musicians, by healers with worthless herbs and rocks, and by mediums who adapted phony tricks, if they packaged their products as alternative spiritual beliefs. The caricature of the New Age zealot, chanting and babbling about various poorly understood religious concepts, only to be cheerfully swindled, became society’s norm. Though the New Age movement began from many of the same curious impulses that make “The Greatest Grandeur” a powerful poem, its adherents took their curiosity too far, molding their own religions out of their rejection of other religions.
Critical Overview In a short time since the 1981 publication of her first book, The Expectations of Light, Rogers’s name has become practically synonymous with poetry that gracefully appreciates the modern scientific view. For instance, in a 1994 review discussing a book in which “God’s Grandeur” appeared, Publishers Weekly noted that her poems “strongarm us with poetic gymnastics, blending scientific theory with luscious poetic rhythms.” More recently, Rose Marie Berger, an assistant editor at Sojourners, noted in a 2001 review that over the course of six poetry collections “Rogers builds a word-bridge between the highly specialized scientific mind and the human heart.” Berger draws attention to the fact that “In the world of literary academia, Rogers is known for her vast knowledge of natural science and physics.” Rogers’s reputation for combining science with poetry is not just limited to the relatively small world of academic writing. Pamela Miller, writing
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in the “Entertainment” section of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, brought the poet to the attention of a wider and more general audience in an article about National Poetry Month in 2001. According to her, Rogers’s “layered, lyrical work is a brilliant wedding of science and faith and a celebration of their offspring, mystery.” Rogers is so well known for bringing science into contemporary poetry that her peers can refer to this trait casually, as Thomas M. Disch did when, reviewing a book by another writer, he mentioned in passing that a character created by C. K. Williams “is one among literally hundreds of characters whom he has imagined as intensely as Pattiann Rogers imagined her redspotted toads.”
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As specific as the images that it uses, as clearly rendered and poetically woven together as they are, the poem’s ultimate goal is to dismiss all of reality, finding nothing of this world worthy of the title ‘greatest grandeur.’ ”
Criticism David Kelly Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature. In this essay, Kelly questions Rogers’s reputation for finding religion in nature, concluding that, in this poem at least, she finds religious experience only by going outside of the natural world. Pattiann Rogers is a poet with a reputation for using observations of the natural world to tie together science and religion, two fields of inquiry that often are found to be contradictory. Her ability to see the world clearly and capture it in words is clear, as is her skill at raising questions. What is not so clear, however, is the assumption that vividly rendering the physical world and approaching it with a religious attitude can necessarily produce poetry that finds religion in the world. In fact, an examination of one particular poem, “The Greatest Grandeur,” makes this connection less than certain. Reading this poem carefully and observing how it works, one is led to the conclusion that Rogers is not finding religious grandeur in the things of the world, but in spite of them. The theory that a poem like “The Greatest Grandeur” links the physical world with God comes from its close, reverent observations of the things of nature and the things of humanity. But, the poem is a description, not an explanation, of the world. In terms of how or why things are the way they are, it actually does the opposite of explaining. It tears down familiar understandings, reducing them to hearsay. The reason that this is not obvious is that Rogers’s tone resembles that of ac-
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tual inquiry. The poem makes quite a few strong cases for the idea that heavenly grandeur can be found here on Earth, among the things that one can experience. In the end, though, all of these various cases are dismissed, and the “greatest grandeur” is found to be something that is not actually here, something that is not attainable, a phantom that can never be known. All things are said to have grandeur, but the poem does not find greatness in any of them. The greatest grandeur is found to be in the eternal void, “the dark emptiness contained in every next moment.” One reason that readers and critics tend to think of Rogers’s work as finding religion through science is that she has a way of presenting a poem such as “The Greatest Grandeur” in a style that resembles a logical syllogism or mathematical equation, but it is actually more a declaration. It has elements of an equation to it, if one accepts without thinking about it that “Some say,” “And some declare,” “Some claim,” and “Others” will total up to the conclusion that is reached in the final stanza. Despite a superficial resemblance to mounting evidence, though, there is no string of causality running through the poem. The poem is not claiming that the dark emptiness it reaches in its conclusion occurs because of all of the examples previously presented as evidence, but in spite of them. The poem is structured, in fact, like the Declaration of Independence. That document begins by addressing a situation already in progress with “When in the course of human events,” and “The Greatest Grandeur” starts with “Some say.” The
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Declaration of Independence goes on to list one charge against the king of England in much the same way that Rogers goes on to list one piece of evidence after another of the divine presence in the natural world. The Declaration of Independence and the poem both draw their own conclusions in the final paragraph. The major difference is that the Declaration of Independence is a list of outrages that are meant to stir up strong negative emotions, convincing readers that the various acts it describes are intolerable. The poem, on the other hand, makes each of the scenarios that it examines as a candidate for the greatest grandeur seem quite reasonable. Rogers makes each alternate choice seem as compelling as it can be. One way that she does this is through the use of vivid details, to let readers tap into what memories they might have in order to experience what might be the greatest grandeur. The objects that she chooses are rendered in detail, and they each represent a wider category that people have considered in the eons-long quest for godliness. Representing the animal world is the ancient, complex goanna, which is obscure to most American readers and the sandpipers, whose flight could seem like random soaring until it is expressed, as it is in the poem, in mathematical terms. Representing landscapes is the vast, mysterious desert. Atomic rings represent the considerable parts of the world that are only experienced through scientific exploration; a violent storm at sea stands for all that is intimidating in nature; stars above a calm lake symbolize all that makes humans comfortable. In each case, Rogers provides specific details, but whole areas of philosophy are implied. Things like the goanna’s purple tongue, the distant hills beyond the desert, or the hay fields that (specifically) seven sandpipers circle, could be found to limit an image to one unique occurrence, but instead they serve to make these specific details universal. Each possible “greatest grandeur” is presented in its best possible case, making each at least seem to be conceivably the grandest. As with the poem’s structure, Rogers does not contrast her own chosen candidate, the dark emptiness, with weak opposition but instead makes each of the alternatives plausible. The poem’s language, like its structure and imagery, presents a fair case that grandeur can be found in the physical world. At the very least, it gives as much craft to the idea of grandeur found in nature as it does to its preferred solution to this question, that grandeur is found in the intangible idea of time’s passing. Descriptions, already intelligently rendered, are tied together throughout the poem with the poetic device of alliteration, as
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strings of words start with similar sounds and then keep those sounds repeating. For example, the goanna’s tenacity is not only told about, but the punches of the hard t sound in “translation into tenacity” drive the concept home. Likewise, with the rolling, liquid r’s in “ridge of rain,” the contrast to the desert’s dry heat, and the airy, sibilant s that snakes its way through “seven sandpipers” and onto the next line, with “bisecting,” “arcs,” and “pitches.” This technique continues into the final stanza, where the poem piles up more and more things that do not qualify for the title of “greatest grandeur” because they are too much of the earth. Repeating sounds does give readers a feeling of the weight and substance of the things being discussed, but that weight and substance are exactly what prevent each of these things from earning the title “greatest.” The poem only breaks from its smooth style in the last line, an abrupt end that indicates the incompleteness of experience and leaves readers unfulfilled. This is not a poem about what is, but rather about what is not. As specific as the images that it uses, as clearly rendered and poetically woven together as they are, the poem’s ultimate goal is to dismiss all of reality, finding nothing of this world worthy of the title “greatest grandeur.” Rogers uses the physical world to make her point that grandeur can be found in an imagined world. She plays ideas about nature against each other, eliminating each other until all that is left is the supernatural. This is why so many aspects of “The Greatest Grandeur” cancel each other out. Bright, dry desert is contrasted with dark, rainy hills; bone is contrasted with grace; electron rings with birds’ swoops; dread is given equal balance against serenity. Overall, the aspects of nature that dominate the first four stanzas are balanced against human concepts presented in the fifth. If no aspects of earthly reality can be found more significant than their opposites, then a stalemate is reached. The greatest grandeur must then be that which does not exist. The poem could go for pure idealism but instead stays near the area of reality, declaring that greatness is found in things that will come into being, even though there is no proof that they are going to. The greatest grandeur is potential. This is not a new philosophical position. It is the basis of existentialism, which rejects the past in favor of what is to come, and in particular the Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard, which made the choices of every next moment the basis for recognizing humans’ ethical responsibility. In her essay “Twentieth-Century Cosmology and the Soul’s Habitation,”which is
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about the place of the spirit in the modern human understanding of the physical world, Rogers found the two contradictory: “Any effort to investigate the universe,” she wrote, “whether through science or literature, involves making a cut in the universe, interrupting its wholeness and unity, and therefore disrupting and ignoring the interconnectedness of all things.” Even by her own reckoning, there is no real way to combine the physical world with a human understanding of the physical world. This is no reason to quit trying, and it is not to say that anyone can do it better than Rogers: all that it says is that it is inaccurate to say that her poetry finds religion within nature.
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When a poet has established an unmistakable and vibrant pattern of style or theme in a single work, he or she can usually get away with a little dabbling outside the mold by the end.”
Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on “The Greatest Grandeur,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Pamela Steed Hill Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. In the following essay, Hill examines Rogers’s method of using lists to enrich both the language and meaning of her work, as evidenced in this poem. The simplest, most efficient way to saturate a poem with crisp, vivid imagery is to fill it with lists of concrete objects, aptly modified, of course, with good adjectives. Pattiann Rogers is a master of this technique, and she explains why it appeals to her in a 2002 interview with staff writer Alice R. O’Grady of the Chautauquan Daily: “You can tell from my poems I love lists. Walt Whitman did, too. I had somebody tell me once—and I think it’s true—when you start a list, it doesn’t matter what it’s of, it turns out to be a celebration, an affirmation.” As the title suggests, Rogers’s poem “The Greatest Grandeur” is replete with celebration and affirmation, made so because the poet stuffed it chock-full of descriptive nouns, adjectives, and verbs, fired-off in lists from start to finish. While many poems falter in the overkill of such relentless imagery, this one succeeds because of the connections within the lists—the reasonable and appealing transitions from one image to the next that save the poem from hodgepodge and discord. The first stanza suggests the importance of connections in describing the “magnificent translation” of the goanna’s lumbering lizard body into the gracefulness of a “reptilian dance.” One does not need to be familiar with the large Australian lizard, or even to have ever heard its name, to picture the action taking place in this first item on the list. The phrases “reptilian dance,” “purple-
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tongued,” and “tenacity into bone and grace” are enough to bring the scene to life and to convey the grandeur of a wild animal in its natural environment. From the lizard in nature to the environment itself, the poem shifts to its second item, now describing “an expansive desert” with the same lush language that animated the goanna. The desert is “solid rust-orange rock,” but Rogers does not stop there; instead, she draws a link between the tangible and the intangible—the tangible desert is “like [intangible] dusk captured on earth in stone.” The transition here is splendid, setting up the next shift, this time to the “blue-grey ridge of rain” that provides a colorful contrast to the orange desert. While one usually thinks of hot, dry sand as the polar opposite of rainy weather, the seeming contradiction works here because the parts are held together with colorful images. Once again, the connection is made through explicit visual stimulation. Sight is not the only sense that gets activated by this poem, for one cannot see “the harmonics of shifting / electron rings”—at least not until they are imitated in the “complex motion of seven sandpipers / bisecting the arcs and pitches” of coming and going in the invisible air. Obviously, electron rings and birds are unlikely pairs on a list, but when readers understand that the movement of one is reflected in the movement of the other, the link is not only reasonable but fascinating. So too is the easy blend of things that make one “feel dwarfed / and . . . helpless” and things that make one feel “assured / and . . . magnanimous.” The sense of hearing is stimulated with this part of the list, from “lightning peals on prairies” and “collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas” to the “serenity . . . / of stars” and “placid lakes.” Grandeur, it seems, knows no
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What Do I Read Next? • An overview of Pattiann Rogers’s career can be found in Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981–2001, published by Milkweed Editions in 2001. • The poem “God’s Grandeur” was likely an influence on “The Greatest Grandeur.” Written by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Catholic poet and Jesuit priest, the former poem is available in almost any collection of Hopkins’s poetry, including the current Dover Thrift Edition named “God’s Grandeur” and Other Poems, published in 1995. • Rogers is included with other poets who examine nature, such as A. R. Ammons, Thomas Lux, and Jorie Graham, in Verse & Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics (1998), edited by Kurt Brown. • Nineteenth-century essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson is considered to be a key figure in American transcendentalism, a philosophic and literary movement that examined how all things in nature reflected the general course of the universe. His most influential work is available in Modern Library’s The Essential Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2000).
specific category of definition, embracing opposing thoughts and things as much as those that naturally complement one another. When the speaker in the poem finally gets around to proclaiming her own definition of grandeur, she supports it with ever-increasing lists to provide concrete examples of her interpretation. Finding magnificence in the “dark emptiness” of “every next moment” may seem a dubious glory until she explains that the grandeur comes about in the freedom to fill the void of time with whatever one chooses—from “men bearing burning / cedar knots” to “10,000 / definitions of god” and everything in between. Those middle items mentioned are worth taking a close look at because they drive
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home the importance of lists with strong descriptors and good connections. The vivid scenes portrayed with “parades of blue horses, belled and ribboned,” “tumbling white-faced mimes,” and “black-robed choristers” make for effective poetics on their own, but the seeming disparate items are actually linked, again, by colors—blue, white, and black—and by the fact that each describes a type of entertainment. The next possible voidfillers shift from drink and food containers—“silver teapots or kiln-dried / crockery”—to food itself—tangerine and almond custards.” But, the items that follow present an interesting twist in this roster of examples, now presented with rapid-fire speed. After all, what does almond custard have to do with “polonaises” and “polkas,” and what do Polish dances have to do with “whittling sticks” and “wailing walls?” At this point, it is safe to say nothing because at this point the poem does not need it. When a poet has established an unmistakable and vibrant pattern of style or theme in a single work, he or she can usually get away with a little dabbling outside the mold by the end. In “The Greatest Grandeur,” Rogers is consistent throughout nearly the entire poem in making believable connections among the otherwise variant places, things, and events she uses as subjects. So, in the last few lines, if the links present a greater challenge or if they are nonexistent, there is still no loss in the work’s meaning or strength. In fact, this poem’s overall presentation is actually enhanced by the sudden string of dissimilar images that draw it to an apt conclusion: the void of the next moment is “never fully / filled, never.” The quickness of movement from polonaises to polkas to whittling sticks to wailing walls and, finally, to blasphemies, pieties, and definitions of god suggests an urgency to name as many ways to fill the “dark emptiness” as possible—all the while recognizing that the list of possibilities is endless. The final three items mentioned in the speaker’s list of what grandeur means are obviously much different from the very visual objects that precede them. Cedar knots, horses, teapots, custard, sticks, and walls may all have properties of visibility and other physical senses, but they are overshadowed by the immensity of “all / invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000 / definitions of god and more.” The shift to such abstract, unobservable items does not deter the list’s cohesiveness; rather, it serves to show the accelerating, never-ending progression of the definitions of grandeur. It attempts to portray the entire scope of
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possibilities—while one man’s grandeur is a parade of horses, another’s is devotion and faith; while one woman finds magnificence in the voices of a choir, another finds it in contemplating God. As the poem’s final thought makes so clear, regardless of what one chooses to fill his or her next moment with, there will always be something different to fill the next. It is certainly true that a poet could use fewer words and fewer visual examples to describe the profusion of life’s grandeur. Consider the powerful imagery of William Carlos Williams’s tiny masterpiece, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which contains only sixteen words. In this short poem, Williams defines the grace, beauty, and grandeur of nature, of rural living, and of simplicity itself. This muchanthologized poem uses only one image yet still evokes the same sense of awe and the same crisp vividness as “The Greatest Grandeur,” which uses more than a dozen. Still, it is not necessary to try to make a case for one over the other because the only real difference is quantity, not quality. Rogers simply prefers the bond created through making intriguing connections and, as she notes in the Chautauquan Daily interview, through lists that become a celebration and an affirmation of whatever subjects they involve. In the end, she shows how many topics can really be just one—even if their individual premises are as varied as a dancing, purpletongued goanna and a sky full of stars reflecting off a peaceful lake. Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “The Greatest Grandeur,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Sources Berger, Rose Marie, Review of Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981–2001, in Sojourners, Vol. 30, Issue 15, September 2001, p. 61. Disch, Thomas, Review of Poetry Chronicle, in Hudson Review, Summer 1995, pp. 339–49.
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Miller, Pamela, “Poetry: From Layered and Lyrical to Short and Surreal,” in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, April 22, 2001, p. 14F. O’Grady, Alice R., “Rogers Reads Poems about Nature, the Two Immensities, a Mouse and God,” in the Chautauquan Daily, The Chautauquan Institute, 2002, http://www.ciweb.org/daily_rogers.html (last accessed January 2003). Review of Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 241, No. 35, August 29, 1994, p. 68. Rogers, Pattiann, Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981–2001, Milkweed Editions, April 2001. —, “Twentieth-Century Cosmology and the Soul’s Habitation,” in The Measured Word: On Poetry and Science, edited by Kurt Brown, University of Georgia Press, 2001, p. 11.
Further Reading Guillen, Michael, Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics, Hyperion Press, 1996. Guillen examines the subject of math from an artistic standpoint, bringing out the beauty embedded in such equations as Newton’s universal law of gravitation and Faraday’s law that connects electricity to magnetism. Irmscher, Christopher, The Poetics of Natural History: From James Bartram to William James, Rutgers University Press, 1999. Irmscher traces the historical development of naturalists in American history from 1730 to 1868. This is well before Rogers’s time but provides an interesting context. Midgley, Mary, Science and Poetry, Routledge, 2001. The point of English philosopher Midgley’s book is that science and poetry share the same goals but are too often isolated from one another. Williams, M. L., “Knowers and Makers: Describing the Universe,” in The Measured Word: On Poetry and Science, edited by Kurt Brown, University of Georgia Press, 2001, pp. 14–23. This essay and other essays in this collection examine the relationship between scientific inquiry and artistic inspiration, looking at the ways in which the two are dependent on each other.
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The Last Question Dorothy Parker 1928
“The Last Question,” published in Dorothy Parker’s 1928 collection Sunset Gun and reprinted in The Portable Dorothy Parker, is a poem that greatly appealed to the sensibility of the 1920s through its complex tone of world-weariness and its almost fatalistic acceptance of the dangers brought on by a new love affair. The poem was almost shocking in its day for its frank acceptance of female sexuality and an unsentimental depiction of a relationship that looks doomed from the outset. Parker used her own celebrity as a writer to become a sort of role model for young women of her time. Though the poem appears fairly conventional in its use of rhyme, rhythm, and repetition, its theme reflected the spirit of the flapper generation that came to womanhood immediately after World War I. This generation exulted in new liberties and the breaking away of old customs. There are costs, however, to throwing off the old certainties, and this poem reflects those costs, showing touches of despair and self-destructiveness. The poem is rebellious without being revolutionary. It tries to subvert the old rules of romance by flouting them; it shows a witty and sardonic woman’s love affair, but it does not propose any specific cure for the dangers of the liaison. It does not suggest that there is any way to remake human relationships in a feminist mold.
Author Biography Dorothy Rothschild Parker was born in 1893 in West End, New Jersey, to Eliza Marston Roths-
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child, a Scottish Protestant who died shortly after Dorothy’s birth, and J. Henry Rothschild, a wealthy Jewish garment manufacturer. Parker felt shame concerning her mixed ethnic and religious background and later stated that she would write an autobiography if only to entitle it Mongrel. Parker was sent to the exclusive Miss Dana’s school in Morristown, New Jersey, after being expelled from the Blessed Sacrament Convent in New York, where she had received a classical education. In June 1917, she married Edwin Pond Parker II, a high-society, heavy-drinking stockbroker. During the 1920s, when Edwin was overseas on two years of military service, Parker became well known in New York literary and theatrical societies as a member of the Algonquin Round Table, which included writers Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Franklin Pierce Adams, and George S. Kaufman, among others. This group met regularly for lunches and afternoons of drinking and verbal banter at the Algonquin Hotel and became famous when newspaper columnists began reporting their activities and conversations. Parker became an often-quoted (and misquoted) member of the Round Table, gaining notoriety for her sardonic wit. She also gained favorable recognition as the pseudonymous literary critic “Constant Reader,” appearing in the New Yorker’s book review column from 1927 to 1928, and occasionally thereafter. Her literary reputation rests largely on the poetry and short stories she wrote during the period of 1926–1938, including “Big Blond,” which won the O. Henry Award for best short story in 1929. Heavy drinking, depression, and numerous love affairs punctuated Parker’s personal life. She had an abortion and attempted suicide in 1923 (the first of three attempts) and was divorced from Edwin Pond Parker II in 1928. Parker’s most enduring relationship was with her second husband, actor Alan Campbell, whom she married in 1933, divorced in 1947, and remarried in 1950. Together, they collaborated on sixteen film scripts, their most notable effort being A Star Is Born, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Despite her success, Parker disliked what she considered Hollywood superficiality, and her association with left-wing political groups caused the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) to investigate her as a possible Communist subversive during the 1950s. Finding it increasingly difficult to write because of ill health, Parker published only an occasional book review during the 1960s. She died in 1967 and willed the bulk of her estate to civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Poem Summary Stanza 1 As one might expect from a poem entitled “The Last Question,” this is a poem that poses a number of questions and concludes with one. This poem is very brief, almost epigrammatic. Unlike the epigram, however, which relies for its success on a pithy, witty, concise statement of some interesting or surprising observation, this poem alternates between questions posed and questions answered. Since the poem is only eight lines long, two brief quatrains, the task of summarizing it is relatively easy. It is a poem that seems to be spoken in two voices. One voice asks questions and one answers them. The first two words of the poem are repeated, “New love, new love.” This repetition emphasizes each word. What is important in this poem is the newness of the relationship. “Love” might also be expressed as “lover,” but the word “love” functions as a name. The speaker of the first line is addressing her lover, asking where he will lead her. It is worth noting that in this poem it is the new lover, presumably male, who will do all of the leading. Men lead and women follow according to the old rules of romance. This poem works through hints, through things that can be inferred but that are not stated. Though these hints
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Media Adaptations • Dorothy Parker: Selected Stories (1995), read by Elaine Steich and distributed by Penguin Audio books, gives an overview of some of Parker’s best-known stories in an entertaining format. • Lauren Bacall Reads “Big Blond,” (1995) from Durkin Hayes Publishing features the famous actress reading Parker’s short story. • Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Campbell Scott and directed by Alan Rudolph for Fine Line Features, is available in videotape and DVD and features contemporary actors and actresses dramatizing the life and times of Dorothy Parker and her Round Table friends and acquaintances.
are quite clear, they accumulate inevitably to produce a mounting tone of anxiety. Asking where a new love may lead is, one must suppose, generally a pleasant prospect. Yet, in this poem, there is more than a hint of anxiety, an intimation immediately validated by the response. The key terms in the second line are “narrow” and “crooked.” Instead of promising openness in all its manifestations, such as openness of possibility, openness of spirit, openness to growth and change, the respondent emphasizes its opposite, narrowness. Likewise, “crooked” is a synonym for “dishonest” or “deceitful” or “devious.” There is little promise in the opening interchange. The second exchange of question and answer does not bring reassurance. The speaker of the first and third lines, who may safely be inferred to be the poet herself, asks how her new love will “slake” and “feed” her. Clearly, a thirst is slaked by water or other liquid, and hunger is fed through food. Metaphorically, though, the poet is talking about the satisfaction of other desires. What desires might these be? Though one possibility is that these are sexual desires, the poem becomes more poignant if these are understood as representing other desires that the speaker needs to have satisfied. As they are presented in the guise of food and drink,
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these desires are to be associated with personal or psychological nutrition. The answer to the second question is rather sinister. Instead of promising his beloved all sorts of comfort and nourishment, the new love offers only “bitter yellow berries,” which are unappetizing and perhaps poisonous, and “a sharp new wine” which may, indeed, prove to be intoxicating, but which is not desirable or appetizing. In only four lines, Parker has presented two questions, each of them an appeal for guidance or support, and the replies indicate that this guidance and sustenance will not be forthcoming. At this point in the poem, the questioner seems to have accepted the ideology of romance that literature and culture have presented as appropriate for women. The poem would like to subvert this ideology, but it will ultimately, because of its brevity and fatalism, prove incapable of offering anything to replace it.
Stanza 2 The second stanza marks a subtle shift, one that the casual reader might not notice. It begins as the first stanza does, with “New love, new love.” This parallelism simultaneously emphasizes two seemingly contradictory aspects of the poem. The phrase gives a repetition of form and reiteration of the same kind of question that has been asked already on the one hand, and it also signifies a new beginning, a new approach, or an evolving attitude in the poem. The speaker asks if she will be forsaken. The last word encapsulates all the fears of the previous stanza. It is the fear of being jilted, dumped, dropped, and disregarded that causes the speaker great anxiety. Again, the passivity of female gender roles emerges. Parker wrote in a period in which women might signal their availability to men in a number of indirect ways, but they were forbidden by the mating practices of their time to take the initiative and actually state their desires. Consequently, a woman who was forsaken in love had to pull herself together and wait around for another suitor to find her attractive. Parker’s biographers recount that she was not at all passive in her amorous relationships, that perhaps she was less conventional in her own life than this poem seems to be. If so, this disconnect between biography and poetry may indicate several interesting things. First, it shows the limits to which a reading audience in 1928 could be taken, and the boundaries of good taste that should not be transgressed. Parker’s poems were mildly shocking in their time; moralists sighed and fumed, but there was nothing they could do about these poems except signal their disapproval. Though censorship existed and was sometimes harshly employed, this poem is not
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at all obscene, and the censors of the time would have had no grounds for action. Second, the contradictions between Parker’s own love life and the more sedate and conventional constructions of the poem worked subversively, rebelliously, to call attention to the insecurity of women in their love affairs. There are two speakers in this poem, a woman and a man, and all the sympathy lies with the woman. Third, any challenge to contemporary sexual mores was implicit. Parker invokes no alternative ideology. But then, this is only an eight-line poem, and it limits itself to expressing anxiety and frustration, so it may be unfair to expect it to do more. The ambiguities multiply, introducing new possibilities. In response to the plaintive inquiry about being forsaken, the masculine voice of the poem gives a response that, on first glance, seems to be the hardhearted response of a man who is in emotional charge of the relationship, expressing his intention to go on to other conquests while leaving the lady behind. And, indeed, this line, like the second and fourth lines, is italicized, lending further weight to the interpretation that all three are spoken in another voice. But, the question of who will sigh begins to arise with this line. It is not absolutely certain that the man will not be the one to be left behind, and in this uncertainty resides all the woman’s power. In fact, she may be the one to dump him. Such a possibility would have seemed quite daring and exciting to young women of the 1920s. Finally, the last question indicated by the title is spoken. Interestingly, this is a double question. The last question ambiguously means that it is enjoyable to sleep in the arms of one’s new love, but “slumber” also represents a lack of awareness that may lead to bitterness and pain. Likewise, “awaken” is used both literally and metaphorically. The word represents a growing consciousness of the woman’s power to leave the man if she chooses. The final line brings the poem to an ambiguous and unsettling conclusion. On the one hand, there is clear evidence that the woman will be the one with the broken heart. Many of Parker’s other poems have similar themes. If love freely given outside the bonds of matrimony became fashionable during the 1920s, at least in upper-middle-class East Coast urban centers among educated sophisticates, it also became important for someone like Parker to write knowingly of love’s bruises, and of its power. One of the liberating possibilities is that a strong, thoroughly modern woman might leave the man sobbing in her wake. Perhaps such an outcome is unlikely, but it is at least possible, and this complex blend of self-pity and self-assertion was itself
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an intoxicating sharp new wine to the reading public of the Roaring Twenties.
Themes Anxiety One of the most evident themes in “The Last Question” is its expression of anxiety. This is clearly the burning question of one who is embarking on a brand-new love affair, one that, along with its presumed joys, also seems to have more than its share of anxious moments. The speaker looks to the future and inquires about where she will be taken. The response is not promising. Something vaguely menacing comes out through this line. The way is not straight and narrow, but crooked and narrow, and the crookedness of the path implies some kind of treachery. The poet goes on to ask about how she is to be supported by her new lover, how she is to be fed, and how her thirst is to be slaked. Clearly there is metaphor working here; she is not asking about lunch and dinner, but about emotional support. Again the response comes, menacingly. Bitterness in nature is associated with poison, and, just as this love is new, so is the wine that will quench its thirsts. Unfortunately, new wine is not considered to be of high quality.
Passivity A major aspect of the first six lines is the speaker’s passivity. The new lover is the one who is expected to lead, to satisfy hunger and thirst, and to be faithful. The speaker is led, fed, and, perhaps, forsaken. This passivity is stereotypically feminine, and the passivity of the speaker contrasts with the sinister remarks of the lover, to create a tone of foreboding anxiety compounded by passive inability to take action. Parker’s poems frequently show a tough, cynical, world-wise woman who does not believe her own words, who longs for love though she knows intellectually that it is unlikely or impossible. This passivity helps to create tension in the poem, as well as a foreshadowing of tragedy to come. To know that an unacceptable outcome is arriving, and to be able to do nothing about it, is cause for great frustration. And yet this speaker seems committed to her new love, at least for the moment, and so is consciously doing things that she herself regards as against her own interests.
Reciprocity It is significant that the poem is in the form of a dialogue in which questions are asked and
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Topics for Further Study • Find a book or website that contains quotations from Oscar Wilde, and write a short poem that uses his witty lines as a concluding line or few lines in the manner that Dorothy Parker wrote her poems. • Dorothy Parker began her career writing reviews in a regular column. Locate a columnist whose work you appreciate, either in a newspaper or on a website. Collect several columns, and write a column in which you try to imitate that person’s style. • Write and perform a short skit in which one character uses wit or puns to put down a second person in the way that Dorothy Parker did. • At the same time Dorothy Parker was becoming famous, a group of outstanding AfricanAmerican writers and composers were involved in the Harlem Renaissance. Write an imaginary dialogue between Dorothy Parker and Langston Hughes or another member of the Harlem Renaissance. • Research the twenties in America, paying special attention to the role of women. Write a short essay in which you explain why Dorothy Parker appealed to young women of her generation.
immediately answered. The masculine figure is responsive, to some extent. This call-and-response reciprocity parallels the relationship that is shown here, a relationship of questions never satisfactorily answered, of emotional needs that are not met, and of hopes for a future that, from the start, will never be fulfilled. The feminine speaker seems sentimental and helpless, and the masculine respondent appears tough and unsympathetic. The diction is somewhat old-fashioned, with a word such as “awandering,” which was not contemporary in 1928 but hearkens back to the language of the earlier English ballads. In this interchange, the woman speaks plainly, and the man speaks in the language of archaic poetry. He hearkens to an old tradition,
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whereas, until the last two lines, the speaker is quite straightforward. There is a back-and-forth movement in the poem, yet it is not one of equality.
Barrenness The poem deals with a love that appears destined to be fruitless in the most literal sense. The relationship has no direction, no emotional nourishment, and the poem promises that one of the partners should be heartbroken in time. There is no imagining the creation of a new life, whether a child or a career or a shared life experience. The affair is assumed to be bleak and barren. Parker never had any children, having had a miscarriage with her one pregnancy when she was in her forties. Why would one enter into such an affair? The joys of new love are not mentioned here. It is a poem of weary sophistication and the deadening, coarsening experience of having had too many new loves. It warns about the cost that casual relationships may exact on a woman’s soul.
Ambiguity Finally, the poem is ambiguous in at least two different ways. First is the ambiguity of the male voice. As mentioned above, the lover says things that are implicitly threatening. He does not directly tell her that she is the one who will suffer, but the inference is easily made. The second ambiguity is found in the last line. The thrust of the first three questions and their response indicates that the man will leave the woman, but this last question opens the possibility that it will be she who leaves him. Parker often ends her poems with an ironic reversal. This poem does not appear to have such a reversal, but upon reflection it becomes apparent that the “Last Question” of the title is in fact the woman’s rejoinder to the man. She is tough enough to take on a dangerous liaison, and she recognizes that she may be hurt, but she is also strong enough and resourceful enough to dish out a little emotional pain if it comes to that. The poem is alternately self-pitying and assertive. It is this complex contradiction that is at the core of a number of Parker’s poems.
Style Rhyme This poem is very conventional, consisting of two four-line stanzas, or quatrains. A stanza is the verse equivalent of a paragraph, and the quatrain is one of the most commonly used stanzas. The rhyme
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alternates, with the first and third lines of each stanza rhyming, and the second and fourth likewise rhyming. The rhyme in the first stanza falls on accented single-syllable words, which is known as masculine rhyme. In the second stanza, the words “forsaken” and “awaken” rhyme on two syllables, which is referred to as double rhyme. Rhyme on an unaccented syllable is known as feminine rhyme, and in this poem is only used in conjunction with the double rhyme. In this poem, the rhyme is unexceptional. It is not surprising, nor is it totally predictable.
Meter Perhaps a more interesting point to make about this poem’s style relates to its meter. Meter is the repetition of rhythm in a line. A meter is known by two words, the first is an adjective that describes the pattern of rhythm known as a foot, and the second is a noun that describes the number of times that pattern is repeated. The meter of this poem is generally trochaic hexameter, with some significant exceptions. The first line of each stanza is in trochaic pentameter. The trochee is a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that goes DA-da, with the stress on the first syllable. It is the inversion of the morefamiliar iamb, which goes, da-DA. For example, “Robert” is an example of a trochee, and “Denise” is an example of an iamb. Yet one must remember that the pattern is independent of individual words; instead, the pattern of sound is what is carried on. This poem is very rhythmical, but it is far from metrically perfect. The first line, “New love, new love, where are you to lead me?” is an example of trochaic pentameter. Its rhythm goes like this: DA da DA da DA da DA da DA da. Nowhere else in this poem is she this close to her meter. Instead, she feels free to add an extra foot in the second line, or an extra syllable, filled by the word “and” in the line, “How are you to slake me, and how are you to feed me?” Such metrical irregularities are acceptable, and indeed occasionally necessary, but Parker is not strong at meter. Critics compared her unfavorably with her contemporary, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who honed her work into metrical precision. Yet the brevity of the form, its repetition, and its strong though slightly uneven rhythm make it memorable.
Historical Context Technological and Social Changes Parker achieved early fame during a period of American history often referred to as the Roaring
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Twenties. The United States had emerged victorious from World War I and was alone among the victors in not being exhausted and stunned by huge losses of their young men in battle. The mobilization for the war had further stimulated American industry and had employed, however briefly, many young women. The return of the veterans, women’s suffrage, and the rapid technological and social changes of the period led to major experimentation in literature and lifestyles. The newly invented medium of radio broadcast jazz, the younger generation’s preferred music, through the airwaves. Automobiles came within the reach of middle-class Americans and gave greater mobility and freedom to those who bought Henry Ford’s machines, which continued to decline in price as the decade progressed. Although Prohibition was the law of the land and the sale and production of alcohol were outlawed by Constitutional amendment, many young, creative, and talented people openly defied the law, buying bootlegged liquor and consuming it at parties that shocked the older generation. Prosperity went on year after year, leading to a belief that the good times would continue indefinitely. It was a time of both optimism and cynicism, in which new ideas and new technologies and new styles of literature coexisted with new styles of fashion.
Modernism and Fame The cultural life of the decade was dominated by modernism. American writers flocked to Paris, where they wrote books that were eagerly read by a large and literate audience. In this era before television, reading was a large part of many people’s lives. Even the newspapers would publish poems, and many magazines included short stories, creating a large market for this genre. Novelists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were acquaintances of Parker’s when they returned periodically to the States. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot wrote poetry in new forms, rejecting the diction and rhyme of their predecessors. In music, jazz appealed to both the intellectuals and the mass market. African-American composers and performers contributed to the nation’s cultural life in live performances and through phonograph recordings and radio airtime. Among Parker’s circle in New York, an attitude of sophistication and cynicism was in vogue. Meanwhile, those outside the intellectual elite flocked to movie theatres and fostered the development of the motion picture industry and the growth of movie idols such as Rudolph Valentino and Mae West. Sports gained a larger place in American cultural life than in previous years, with
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Compare & Contrast • 1920s: New technologies such as radio, the automobile, and motion pictures enhance communication and build a national community. Today: New technology such as the Internet, wireless communications, and broadband information technology enhance communication and help create a global community. • 1920s: Women are able to vote for the first time, though they do not yet find themselves in places of political influence. Today: Women are represented at all levels of state, local, and federal government except the presidency. Women are in the Congress, the Cabinet, and the Supreme Court. • 1920s: African-American writers, composers, and performers flock to New York City, leading to the Harlem Renaissance, the first sustained literary and artistic movement of African Americans in a predominantly segregated society. Today: African-American writers, musicians, actors, and entertainers are among the highest-
the new media lauding such heroes as Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey. The new mass media made accomplished people into celebrities, and the hardbitten, hard-drinking men and women who wrote and loved and talked about all of it became public figures almost as much for their lifestyles as for their art.
Feminism and Parker’s Appeal to Women Parker’s literature reflected many of the social changes that characterized the young century. Young women of her generation wore their hair bobbed and their dresses short, smoked cigarettes and were far more open than their parents’ generation in discussing human sexuality. The ideas of Sigmund Freud, often in watered-down, popularized form,
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paid members of their professions, appealing to all racial groups. • 1920s: Jazz music permeates the culture of young adults by means of the radio, phonograph records, and live performances. Today: Hip-hop, rap, techno, and other musical forms are disseminated through Internet file sharing, CDs, and live performances. • 1920s: Books by famous modernist authors such as James Joyce are banned in several American cities and cannot to be shipped in the U.S. mail. Today: Except for some types of pornography, government-sanctioned censorship is a thing of the past. • 1920s: The stock market rises, and prosperity leads to an atmosphere of optimism and risktaking, which changes after the stock market crash of 1929. Today: Economic exuberance of the last decade of the twentieth century is replaced by anxiety as the stock market plunges after the turn of twenty-first century.
percolated through society, and human relationships, and indeed human identity, were seen through the prism of sex. Women had gained the vote, and many middle- and upper-class young women had benefited from a high level of education, particularly in the liberal arts. In an age in which opportunities for women were opening up somewhat but were still quite limited, many highly intelligent women went into the teaching profession, earning an independent income, albeit modest, and spending much of their time devoted to reading and writing. In an atmosphere of prosperity and rapid change, the divorce rate soared, and women began to assert their rights to equality in all matters, including equality in relationships with men. Though the majority of people remained conventional, the innovators of society more and more frequently
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included women who refused to abide by traditional standards. It was this social milieu in which Parker’s stories and poems were rapidly acclaimed for their wit and irreverence and an attitude in which toughness and confidence were mixed with vulnerability and tenderness.
The Question of Values Many of the writers and creative artists of the twenties, in their rejection of the Victorian values of their parents, came to question all values. They seemed to be nihilists and hedonists who believed in nothing but pleasure and the joys of company, drinking, laughter, and love affairs. In the years afterward, many of the participants in the cultural and literary life of the period looked back on the twenties as a time of insubstantial and shallow pleasures. The fall of the stock market in 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression put an end to the extravagant spirit of the twenties. Suddenly, responsibility, prudence, and concern with social values took center stage. Yet the decade produced more than its share of art and literature, and its protagonists looked back with fondness on the excesses of their youth, whereas others, such as Parker, lived on, moving farther and farther from the moment of her bright and promising youthful fame.
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sion.” The tastes of the times changed, and Parker’s wit and verse seemed linked to a vanished lifestyle and to insubstantial concerns. Parker gave up poetry after her third volume, Death and Taxes, turning to well-paid Hollywood hack work in the 1940s. Her income was enhanced, but her reputation declined as her troubles with alcohol worsened. Gill remarks that “A protracted life-in-death is all the more striking in the case of writers who make a reputation in youth and then live on into age.” Parker has recently reemerged into public view. One reason for this new acceptance is her feminism. Parker wrote in a time in which women writers were seldom taken seriously, and in which women struggled to attain equality with their male peers. This struggle parallels the eternal antagonism between men and women. As Debra Beilke, writing as recently as 1996, said of the writer’s endurance, “Dorothy Parker’s serio-comic depictions of the tensions between the sexes and the agony of love are as relevant for today’s readers as they were for those of her own time.”
Criticism Frank Pool
Critical Overview Parker’s critical reception has undergone several vicissitudes since she gained her first fame in the 1920s. In her heyday, Parker was celebrated and well known. As her life went on, she faded from public view, dying in virtual anonymity in 1967. She was as famous for her wit and her life as for her work itself. W. Somerset Maugham, writing in the book Dorothy Parker in 1944, said, “She seems to carry a hammer in her handbag to hit the appropriate nail on the head. She has a rare quickness of mind.” That quickness, in poetry, in prose, and in the anecdotes of her life among the Algonquin Round Table, propelled her to notoriety. A reviewer in the New York Times Book Review in 1927, found Parker’s poetry to be representative of her generation, saying “it is flapper verse. And as such it is wholesome, engaging, uncorseted and not devoid of grace.” Yet, as Brendan Gill explained in his 1973 introduction to The Portable Dorothy Parker, “Mrs. Parker’s reputation suffered . . . from the fact that the milieu that was her natural subject matter . . . underwent a sudden and overwhelming change during the Depres-
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Pool is a published poet and teacher of advanced placement and international baccalaureate senior English. In this essay, Pool relates Dorothy Parker’s short poem to poetic traditions and to the social and sexual standards of the 1920s. Dorothy Parker’s poem “The Last Question” is exceedingly short, consisting of only eight lines. Such brevity, while characteristic of the poet, is nevertheless daunting to the reader who encounters the poem in isolation. It is quite clearly a love poem with an edge of worldly experience tempering the joys of a new love affair. Parker’s poem, brief as it is, touches on the sense of wariness toward a new lover that reflects a kind of sophisticated and hardwon knowledge; it also may be understood through its connections to poetic tradition, the biography of the poet, and the relationship to the evolving social and sexual standards of the 1920s. The poem is one written in two voices. One of those voices, presumably that of the poet, asks questions, and the other, presumably a male lover, responds in italicized lines. It is a call-and-response poem, one in which the masculine voice gives ambiguous and sinister replies, implying that the love will end badly and that the poet will be hurt by the
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Conventional in form and modernist in sensibility, with a voice both self-absorbed and selfpitying, tough and yet vulnerable, Parker’s poem is best understood in its relationship to her life, to poetic traditions, and to the social and sexual milieu in which it was published.”
affair. In reply to questions about where he is to lead her, how he is to feed her, and if he will forsake her, his replies are not at all promising. Then the poet asks the last question, the one for which there is no evident response. The poem is not metrically perfect, having between five and as many as seven accented syllables in lines that alternate between iambic and trochaic without ever setting up a strong pattern. The diction, like many of Parker’s poems, is quite simple, but in this poem she does not use contemporary slang and highly informal diction to humorous effect, primarily because this poem is not intended to be funny or sarcastic. The poem was published in Parker’s second book of verse, Sunset Gun, in 1928. By that time, Parker was quite well known as a member of New York’s literary elite, notable for her quips and acerbic reviews and put-downs, for her quick wit as well as for her fashionable sophistication in matters of women’s independence, particularly sexual independence that reflected the spirit of the time. As Arthur F. Kinney says of an earlier poem, “The New Love,” this poem is also “essentially negative, its wit grounded in a rueful attitude, self-deprecation, and a world-worn cynicism.” The poet is aware of danger and is flirting with self-destruction, yet she appears to be ready to continue a dangerous relationship. Implicitly critical of herself for her inability to find a stable and satisfactory lover, the poet seems to be a particularly self-aware moth who con-
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sciously swoops and circles around the flame of her never-to-be-satisfied desire. Rhonda S. Pettit, in a recent feminist work on Parker titled A Gendered Collision, states that “More often than not, the human bonds in Parker’s poems fail to hold.” The poet’s own life appears to be intimately connected with her work. Edmund Wilson, writing in 1927 in the New Republic of her first collection of poetry, says that her poems “have the appearance of proceeding, not merely from the competent exercise of an attractive literary gift, but from a genuine necessity to write.” Kinney and Pettit and Brendan Gill, among others, have recognized in Parker’s poetry the influence of A. E. Houseman. This poem is a dialogue that manifests what Kinney calls “dialogic unsettledness” and that hearkens to the question and response structure of a poem such as Houseman’s “Is My Team Ploughing?” in which the voice of a dead man asks questions of his living friend, who seeks to reassure the departed that all is well up until the last stanza in which the friend implies that he has taken up with the dead man’s girl. The concluding lines of “The Last Question” appear to be less ironic than they in fact are. Although it seems that the lover is warning the poet against an affair because he is crooked, not supportive, and inconstant, it is also true that the poet herself might soon be the one to leave her lover and that he might be the heartbroken one “when dawn comes by.” This is the kind of tough independence that Parker promoted in her public persona. In reading this poem, one must remember that Parker, unlike, say, Emily Dickinson, was a woman of considerable public acclaim, having written for major New York newspapers, been friends with leading literary lights, and, due to her wit and outrageous remarks, like Oscar Wilde before her, famous in great measure simply for being herself. Every poet creates for himself or herself a series of masks or persona. The word “persona” comes from the ancient Greek of the tragedies and is the word for mask, or, fittingly, the thing that sound comes through. Most poets, Dickinson excepted, seek fame, and Parker was famous while still young. She was only thirty-five when “The Last Question” was published, and she had by then won quite a reputation as a daring and sophisticated writer. As Brendan Gill says in his introduction to The Portable Dorothy Parker: These verses, which became something of a national rage, were thought to be strong stuff; brusque, bitter, and unwomanly in their presumed cynicism. They gave the average reader an impression of going recklessly far in asserting a woman’s equal rights inside a sexual relationship, including the right of infidelity.
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Parker seemed to be a spokeswoman for her generation of young women, a newly liberated group of would-be sophisticates who smoked cigarettes, listened to jazz, drank prohibited gin, and made out in automobiles. During the Great Depression and World War II and the Cold War that followed, these traits fell into disrepute, only to resurface in different garb during the 1960s. The great personal irony here is that Parker, who wrote of suicide and cynical love, fell from public view and lived on in obscurity until her death in 1967. Nevertheless, she was a popular poet at a time in which poetry was printed in newspapers for thousands of readers to see. Some poets write, imagining the fame that is to come; others, such as Shakespeare, seem to take their fame for granted; others, such as Parker, write to the adulation of masses of readers. When the subject of one’s poetry is one’s own life and experiences in love, it is a constant high-wire act to maintain both the fame and the poetry. In fact, Parker wrote one more book of poetry after Sunset Gun; it was titled Death and Taxes. Parker then abandoned the genre in favor of movie writing in Hollywood, short stories, and a number of plays. As mentioned previously, numerous commentators find the influence of Housman in Parker. Brendan Gill says, bitingly, that “Her true literary mentor was that forbidding male spinster, A. E. Housman, who with the help of high intelligence, classical learning, and an exquisite ear, contrived to turn a reiterated whining into superior poetry.” Others mention her relationship to Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was the most popular female poet in America during Parker’s early career. Kinney has traced the influences farther back, to the ancient Roman poets Catullus and Martial and Horace. Roman literature is seldom read nowadays, but in the early twentieth century, Latin, along with its poets, was a standard subject for intellectually ambitious young people. Catullus is alone among major Roman poets in writing personal lyric poetry of urban consciousness, and Martial is well known for his satire. Kinney also finds affinities to Horace in Parker’s work: “Structurally Horace’s Satires are like Parker’s, and often begin with a hyperbole, develop by antithetical ideas, end with a surprise, a twist.” Rhonda Pettit places Parker’s poetic works in the context of nineteenth-century American poetry and especially foregrounds her role as a woman poet. Referring to the poem “Now at Liberty,” Pettit remarks that it “follows, without mockery of form, a nineteenth-century style used by Thomas Hood in which conventional sentiment is countered by parenthetical phrases expressing an opposite
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feeling.” We find the same antithesis in “The Last Question,” in which concerns for protection and guidance and sustenance are countered by cryptic and darkly ambiguous responses. If the last lines of the poem do not have the biting turn and wit characteristic of other Parker poems, they smolder intensely and quietly, hinting of sorrows to come. Conventional in form and modernist in sensibility, with a voice both self-absorbed and self-pitying, tough and yet vulnerable, Parker’s poem is best understood in its relationship to her life, to poetic traditions, and to the social and sexual milieu in which it was published. Source: Frank Pool, Critical Essay on “The Last Question,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Mary Potter Potter, a writer of fiction and screenplays, teaches writing at the University of San Francisco. In this essay, Potter explains how Parker uses mock-serious language, poetic meter, and a series of questions and answers to beg the somber final response to her poem. Upon a close reading of Dorothy Parker’s “The Last Question,” a few carefully crafted elements rise to the surface of what looks like a simple poem. In the first stanza, the first two lines introduce the two speakers in the poem: the narrator and a lover in dialogue with each other. Asking a simple question, the narrator sounds like an innocent in the land of love: “New love, new love, where are you to lead me? When the lover answers, however, archaic words like “marks” and “crooked” call attention to themselves, making the line an omen, for the road ahead of the two lovers will not be easy. In the third line, the narrator asks again, but this time the tone of voice is changed: two short questions make it insistent. The repetition of the phrase “new love” harks to a convention of love ballads in British Romantic poetry as do the lines that rhyme at the end according to a regular scheme, abab. Another example of love poetry, the light lyric was also often sung; Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time” (1674) is a well-known verse of this sort. While love was a common theme in such ballads and poems, the path in front of young lovers was more often sunny, strewn with flower petals rather than the crooked path that Parker describes for the new lovers in her poem. In this way, Parker is mocking the earnestness of such poetry and the
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poetic sophistication, for she breaks the rhythm for effect in a few significant places.
In a matter of a few brief lines, Parker has debunked not only the convention of the love poem, but romantic love as well.”
sincerity of love itself. To an even greater degree, the second query ridicules romantic love. It pointedly inquires how the narrator is to be slaked, revealing that Parker’s narrator is not new to love, for “slake” refers not only to thirst, but also to sexual desire. In this line the narrator is also concerned about the body’s basic need for food. Therefore, her narrator is wise to what is at stake in love, not merely emotions, but sex and survival. In a matter of a few brief lines, Parker has debunked not only the convention of the love poem, but romantic love as well. Answering the narrator with frankness, the lover promises sour fruit and “sharp” wine, a dark, cruel answer indeed. Although Parker once called her verse dated, some contemporaries, such as Somerset Maugham believed that “perhaps what gives her writing its peculiar tang is her gift for seeing something to laugh at in the bitterest tragedies of the human animal.” Thus, in the first stanza, after Parker establishes both a pattern of question-and-answer and the conventions of love poetry, she plays on them with irony and wit appropriate to her time. Just as she knew that red roses and bottles of wine accompany lovers when they meet, she knew that love poems were once written using a specialized poetic vocabulary, or diction, like Herrick’s “Old Time is still a-flying,” (from “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”) so she inserts a carefully placed “a-wandering” in the second stanza to both satirize the old poetic form and very cynically comment on modern love. As with her diction and the pattern of questions, the poet also sets her rhythm and rhyme in motion in the first stanza. While lines rhyme at the end according to a straightforward abab scheme, the meter is more complicated. Using traditional metric scansion unearths another layer of Parker’s
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In the second line, the trochaic meter runs unevenly against the rhythm of the first, affecting the crookedness of the road ahead of the two lovers, its descending rhythm emphasizing the negative consequences of the lover’s answer. Furthermore, in the fourth line, the penultimate word, “new,” in a strong, spondaic foot, breaks the rhythm, emphasizing the sharpness of the last idea in the stanza, the pain that is to come to these new lovers. Interestingly, the second stanza is the metric mirror of the first; that is, until the narrator figuratively is “awakened” in the penultimate line, and the punctuation, the dash, breaks the train of thought as well as the metrical pattern established in the first stanza, putting an end to the questioning. Thus, the poet intensifies her use of each of the poetic devices she has chosen to tell her lovers’ brief tale. In this stanza, Parker’s narrator asks a third question that is a rhetorical because, in the case of the bitter experience of love in the first stanza, the answer is yes, yes, the narrator will be forsaken. Yet the narrator asks it, transforming her question into a querulous complaint; but when the lover responds, it is without admitting who will be guilty of “a-wandering,” or straying. So, Parker’s narrator will suffer, and the choice of the word “one” creates a kind of ambiguity that adds another form of cruelty to the others in the first stanza. Perhaps this ambiguous response gives the narrator pause to think, for the next line brings a halt to the persistent questions before resuming the questioning. The narrator sounds confused because before an answer comes, another question follows. Beginning the line with a question shifts the emphasis to the first syllable of the line, breaking the metrical pattern established in the first stanza, and emphasizes the word itself, so that the narrator demands an answer from the lover who gave a vague answer in the previous line. But, because the lover is not allowed to answer, the narrator’s voice is isolated for even more poignant effect, a voice that alone asks the last question. Playing on another theme common to love poetry, Parker touches on time in her last answer, as the lovers’ affair is to be as brief as one night, yet her choice of the metaphor of sleep and her diction, “dawn comes by,” more effectively depicts the human condition. The sun rises and sets each day, and human beings passively watch it come and go, just as they do love. It is because Parker abandons the pattern of question and answer
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between the lovers, for two questions asked in quick succession, that the mock-seriousness of the poem is dropped and the poem’s last lines become very serious, indeed. Brendan Gill, in his introduction to the 1973 edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker, writes that, taken together, her titles sum up her life. He continues Parker’s ironic two stanzas stand as a testament to love in any age, in any century. By her deft play with a series of questions, mocking poetic diction, and poetic meter, she tells us that when love ends, someone will always be left with a broken heart in his or her hands. Source: Mary Potter, Critical Essay on “The Last Question,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Lynn Z. Bloom In the following excerpt, Bloom gives an overview of Parker’s verse and concludes that Parker’s best work remains the short, witty verse for which she is best known. Parker’s poems are highly restricted in scope and in depth. Although they become more technically versatile and controlled, Parker’s subjects, personae, points-of-view, and major techniques remain constant throughout her work. Parker’s poetry, like her short stories, treats love, loneliness, and death. Loneliness and death, however, are usually variations on the motif of romantic love—exploited or exploitive, feigned, unreciprocated, betrayed, denied, abandoned. The relations between men and women in both her poetry and fiction are fleeting, false, and inevitably painful: “Scratch a lover and find a foe.” In Parker’s restricted milieu, women, as epitomized by her narrative personae, are doomed to unhealthy emotional dependence on men whose indifferent fickleness drives these females to the despair i plied in the macabre titles of Parker’s books. Love relationships are bound to be superficial and ephemeral, based as they are on “dust-bound trivia” (“The Searched Soul”), appearance (eyes “slant and slow,” hair “sweet to touch”—“Prophetic Soul”), and youth. If lovers swear their devotion is “infinite, undying,” one or both is bound to be lying (“Unfortunate Coincidence”). The woman is more likely to be the victim of her passion, however, for “Woman lives but in her lord; / Count to ten, and man is bored” (“General Review of the Sex Situation”). Lovers are numerous, faceless, interchangeable: “I always get them all mixed up” (“Pictures in the Smoke”).
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Contemporary reviewers recognized Parker’s poetry for what it was. . . . Yet the public enjoyed her poems, and her books were best-sellers.”
Most of Parker’s poems are presented from the point of view of a female persona who plays one of two typical roles. In one guise she is an abandoned lover, “brief and frail and blue” (“Sweet Violets”), smarting from the sense of unworthiness and the pain of rejection, trying to cope with her dismay and despair. Sometimes, in playing this role, she is weighted down by her “heavy freedom” (“Prisoner”) and eager to give away her heart, “the wretched thing,” “now to that lad, now to this” (“A Portrait”). At other times she despairs over her lost love, “screaming to die with the dead year’s dead” (“Willow”), or she imagines herself dead, lying “cool and quiet,” finding death a tranquil relief for the heart “that pain has made incapable of pain” (“Testament”). But the grave is not necessarily a quiet place, for she threatens to return as a ghost to haunt her former lover (“I Shall Come Back”). This persona is not convincing, partly because of the conventional language and stale images in which Parker presents the subject, partly because of its divergence from her own view of life as expressed in other contexts. Parker in the 1920s seemed as inconstant as the men whose fickleness her poetry condemns. In 1925 she had an affair with playwright Charles MacArthur, followed by affairs in 1926 with tobacco heir Seward Collins and in 1927 with businessman John Garrett. In 1928 she began a liaison with bisexual actor Alan Campbell which was to last the rest of her life; they were married from 1933 to 1947 and remarried in 1950. Always a hard drinker, she attended what Kinney calls innumerable “lavish and frenetic” parties, where her boisterous and abrasive manner made her a lessthan-welcome guest. On hearing one hostess described as “outspoken,” Parker rasped, “Outspoken by whom?” Parker’s public persona, however, give credence to the other narrative personality in her poetry, a
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wise-cracking, savvy, jaded female who knows “it’s always just my luck to get / One perfect rose” instead of “one perfect limousine” (“One Perfect Rose”). Worldly wise, she can also recognize the earmarks of a predatory male (“who murmurs that his wife / is the lodestar of his life”—“Social Note”), her own inconstancy (“I loved them until they loved me”—“Ballade of a Great Weariness”). She mocks virginity (“Parable for a Certain Virgin”), scorns sedate society (“Inseparable my nose and thumb”— “Neither Bloody nor Bowed”), and will eagerly engage “in fun and such” until 3 A.M.—for “I shall stay the way I am / Because I do not give a damn” (“Observation”). The hallmarks of this persona are “laughter and hope and a sock in the eye” (“Inventory”). Like the men Parker’s melancholy persona laments, this worldly wise persona is bound to be “spectacularly bored” with a constant lover (“On Being a Woman”). If she ever succumbs to sentiment, such as preferring one who is “sudden and swift and strong” to a wealthy wooer, she undermines it with a cynical punch line—“Somebody ought to examine my head!” (“The Choice”). She relishes the calculated insult (“I turn to little words—so you, my dear / Can spell them out”— “Little Words”) as much as the imagined deaths of her adversaries, shot with a “shiny gun” (“Frustration”)—and sometimes, even the longed-for deaths of her lovers (“I wish somebody’d shoot him— “Love Song”). The two personae are intermingled in Parker’s books of poetry, but the cynic prevails, partly because of Parker’s stylistic techniques. Once conditioned, readers expect a witty riposte or a slangy word (“here’s my strength and my weakness, gents”—“Ballade at Thirty-Five”) to shift the poem from seriousness to satire, as indeed it often does. Though anticipated, the slang startles, as in “Coda” (“For art is a form of catharsis / And love is a permanent flop”), and provides laughter in what might otherwise have been serious contexts. Even if Parker meant some of her poems to be taken seriously, as individually they might be (“How shall I be mating . . . Living for a hating—Dying of a love?”—“The Dark Girl’s Rhyme”), the flippant, cynical persona and her satiric or ironic language establish the prevailing comic tone of Parker’s collected verse. Moreover, the language of the poetry that purports to be serious is predictable, anachronistic (“what shallow boons suffice my heart”), and banal: seas are “stormy,” rain “drops softly,” “withering flowers” denote an absent or lost lover; the rejected maiden is “a-crying,” or “sleeping
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chastely,” or mourning “whenever one drifted petal leaves the tree.” Thus Parker’s poetic techniques— far more distinctive and striking in comic than in serious poetry—reinforce the impression that the verse is more an exercise in verbal wit than the interpretation of an authentic emotion or experience. Parker’s lyrics, all short, are written primarily in simple iambic quatrains or couplets (“Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses”— “News Item”). Although she occasionally experimented with ballads, sonnets, and other forms, her poetry on the whole lacks the formal complexity, structural finesse and variations, and metaphorical ingenuity that add interest and stature to memorable love poetry by John Donne, William Shakespeare, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Parker’s contemporaries, Elinor Sylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Kinney has favorably compared Parker’s use of meter and line to Horace, Martial, Catullus, and Heinrich Heine, among others; he embeds Parker’s work in a classical tradition. Although she may have read these authors, the more immediate influence on her verse appears to have some from the Algonquin Round Table. The verses of Parker and Franklin P. Adams (author of such whimsies as “Give me the balmy breezes! ... / Wind on my cheek and hair! / And, while we’re on the topic, / Give me the air.”) exhibit control, compression precise diction, and an irreverent fondness for puns, which perhaps are all one can expect of light verse. Contemporary reviewers recognized Parker’s poetry for what it was, with Louis Kronenberger predicting, “she will survive not only as the author of some firstrate light verse but also as a valuable footnote of the Twenties, out of whose slant on existence that light verse sprang.” Yet the public enjoyed her poems, and her books were best-sellers. In the 1920s Parker collaborated with the Algonquin wits on an ill-fated Broadway revue, Chauve-Souris (1922), and in 1924 she and Elmer Rice wrote Close Harmony, a predictable comedy of adultery, also short-lived. In the 1930s and 1940s Parker also collaborated, sometimes with Alan Campbell, on several film scripts, including A Star is Born (1937), Smash Up (1947), and The Fan (1949), based on Lady Windemere’s Fan (1892), by Oscar Wilde. With her film collaborator Ross Evans she wrote a play, The Coast of Illyria (1949), about the tortured lives of Charles and Mary Lamb—a failure in its only production, a three-week run in Dallas. Another play, with collaborator Arnaud d’Usseau, was The Ladies of the Corridor (1953), three case studies of life-in-death among elderly women. Although George Jean Nathan named it the
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best play of 1953, other critics disliked it, and it closed after a six-week Broadway run. Parker’s intermittent alcoholism and progressive writing anxiety (she procrastinated on assignments for months at a time) made her later work sporadic and unreliable; only rarely did the glimmer of her former wit illuminate its somberness. She will nevertheless remain known as a writer of comic verse, to which applies the judgment she herself made of the performance of a famous actress, who “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.” Her best verse succeeds within this restricted compass. Source: Lynn Z. Bloom, “Dorothy Parker,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 45, American Poets, 1880–1945, First Series, edited by Peter Quartermain, Gale Research, 1986, pp. 303–05.
When she dwells lugubriously upon the plight of the spurned woman, rather than wrench from sorrow some momentary triumph in mordant wit, Parker falls back upon the polite jargon of Housman and Millay at their worst.”
Thomas Grant In the following excerpt, Grant examines the various influences on and styles of Parker’s poetry. Parker’s scathing wit was likely sharpened by the two years she spent under pressure at Vogue forced to dream up witty lines to decorate the years’ changing fashions. But the epigrammatic clarity and precision of her style was forged, as Arthur Kinney has shown, from her study and imitation of classical Latin poets begun at Miss Dana’s school and perfected by her reading of classical imitators among her contemporaries. Roman wit suffuses her own, abundantly demonstrated in her poetry. From Catullus, by way of Housman, she learned to express the disappointment of love in deceptively simple, conversational, yet elegantly polished and succinct songs that at their best strike the reader as both unabashedly confessional and ironically distanced in tone. Hence, “Summary”: Every love’s the love before In a duller dress. That’s the measure of my lore— Here’s my bitterness: Would I knew a little more Or very much less!
From Horace, by way of the Horatian imitations of Eugene Field and F. P. Adams, she learned to contrive cocky but concise mock odes that build upon initial hyperboles and end with an ironic flourish, such as in “Godspeed”: Oh, seek, my love, your newer way; I’ll not be left in sorrow. So long as I have yesterday, Go take your damned tomorrow!
From Martial, by way of the English epigram tradition, she learned the severely compressed
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economy of hyperrestricted form, as shown in “The Flaw in Paganism”: Drink and dance and laugh and lie, Love, the reeling midnight through, For tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)
From them all, she learned wry Roman resignation, a deeply pagan sense of man’s, and woman’s, limitations. And from other female poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie, both steeped in the Roman poets, she acquired fluency in longer forms, such as the sonnet, and, through their work, found her own personal voice. Hence, “On Being a Woman”: Why is it, when I am in Rome, I’d give an eye to be at home, But when on native earth I be, My soul is sick for Italy? And why with you, my love, my lord, Am I spectacularly bored, Yet do you up and leave me—then I scream to have you back again?
These classical and modern influences pervade Parker’s collections of poetry, beginning with Enough Rope (1926). This slim volume was a sensational best-seller, especially for a book of poems. Throughout, she shows herself to be technically accomplished in several poetic modes: the lyric, the Horatian ode, ballade, ballad stanza, sonnet, epigram, and even epitaph. A classicist, she seems to relish the challenge to adhere to the requisites of traditional form. Her prevailing subject is love’s labor’s lost (or threatened loss) usually examined at
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Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get One perfect rose.
What Do I Read Next? • Frederick Lewis Allen’s informal history Only Yesterday, published originally in 1931 and reprinted often since, is a wonderfully informative and easily read account of the era. It should be available in most libraries. • Arthur F. Kinney’s Dorothy Parker, Revised (1998) is highly informative, with biographical and critical insights. There is also a previous, unrevised volume, published in 1973. • Since Parker’s life and reputation were a big part of her fame, looking into a biography sheds light on the writer. Marion Meade’s biography, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (1988) is an easy read. • The Portable Dorothy Parker (1973) is a standard collection that includes short stories, poetry, and newspaper reviews written by Parker. This is probably the best single-volume source of her work, and it is easy to locate. • Rhonda Pettit’s A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker’s Poetry and Fiction (2000) may be harder to locate, but it gives a good overview of a feminist approach to Parker’s work and connects it with nineteenth-century traditions in women’s literature. Pettit’s book avoids trendy literary jargon but is a serious, scholarly effort.
Although a man of limited sensitivity is politely but justly abused, as well as the speaker herself for foolishly awaiting his overtures—that curtailed refrain damns with faint praise—Parker is really attacking the sentimental proprieties which hold the speaker, as well as all women, in her proper place. Hence, she knowingly mimics the cloying cliches that embalm true affections: “deephearted, pure, with scented dew,” “My fragile leaves . . . “—the trite “language of the floweret” which decorates florist shop missives and greeting cards. The speaker’s wish for a more functional gift (“one perfect limousine”) nicely betrays the transparencies of her suitor’s polite evasions, just as the poem itself burlesques trite romantic lyrics. The subtle enemy of love is hollow conventions hypocritically preserved in insincere expressions. In “Unfortunately Coincidence,” the enemy is the seductive vocabulary of vows: By the time you swear you’re his, Shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying— Lady, make a note of this: One of you is lying.
In “Comment,” it is the luring promises of songs: Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song. A medley of extemporanea; And love is a thing that can never go wrong; And I am Marie of Roumania.
Sometimes, Parker succumbs herself to romantic cliches, as in “A Well-Worn Story,” which seems only to be itself well-worn—the posture affected, the cadences mechanical, the images sentimental: Together we trod the secret lane And walked the muttering town. I wore my heart like a wet, red stain One the breast of a velvet gown.
the moment when initial disappointments have for the woman passed into rueful, self-deprecating humor, as in “One Perfect Rose”: A single flow’r he sent me, since we met. All tenderly his messenger he chose; Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet— One perfect rose. I knew the language of the floweret; “My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.” Love long has taken for his amulet One perfect rose. Why is it no one ever sent me yet One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
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When she dwells lugubriously upon the plight of the spurned woman, rather than wrench from sorrow some momentary triumph in mordant wit, Parker falls back upon the polite jargon of Housman and Millay at their worst. Parker’s second slim volume, Sunset Gun (1928), was nearly as popular as her first. She continued to experiment in traditional forms, including a daring cycle of epigrams, “A Pig’s-Eye View of Literature,” a sort of barnyard glance up at the classics. Lesser luminaries naturally inspire the truer lampoon:
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Upon the work of Walter Landor I am unfit to write with candor. If you can read it, well and good; But as for me, I never could.
She continues, too, her well-informed assault upon empty vows and false promises peddled in popular songs and whispered in attentive ears. In “Theory,” a weary woman knocks her head for the dumbness of her heart: Into love and out again, Thus I went, and thus I go. Spare your voice, and hold your pen— Well and bitterly I know All the songs were ever sung, All the words were ever said; Could it be, when I was young, Someone dropped me on my head?
In “For a Lady Who Must Write Verse,” Parker attacks vacuous but facile poets: Let your rhymes be tinsel treasures, Strung and seen and thrown aside, Drill your apt and docile measures Sternly as you drill your pride.
Parker can be deeply reflective too; when she writes about the dichotomy between the claims of the heart and those of the head her wit becomes startlingly metaphysical. The exquisitely wrought “Interior” echoes Emily Dickinson, save for the final line: Her mind lives in a quiet room, A narrow room, and tall, With pretty lamps to quench the gloom And mottoes on the wall. There all the things are waxen neat And set in decorous lines; And there are posies, round and sweet, And little, straightened vines. Her mind lives tidily, apart From cold and noise and pain, And bolts the door against her heart, Out wailing in the rain.
The wailings of Enough Rope diminish in Sunset Gun, but so too does the cockiness, the disarming whimsy, the wry skepticism. By the time Death and Taxes (1931), Parker’s sadness had given way to bitter cynicism, that of a mind which had settled for the only certainties, the two of her title. In “Cherry White,” the humor, such as it is, is macabre: I never see that prettiest thing— A cherry bough gone white with Spring— But what I think, “How gay t’would be To hang me from a flowering tree.”
She continued, however, to experiment with traditional forms, including another cycle of epi-
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grams, all shadowed by a funereal title, “Tombstones in the Starlight.” The best retain a glimmer of saving wit, as in “Sanctuary”: My land is bare of chattering folk; The clouds are low along the ridges, And sweet’s the air with curly smoke From all my burning bridges.
The wit fades in “The Lady’s Reward” as the cocky smirk resolves into a despairing grimace: Never serious be, nor true, And your wish will come to you— And if that makes you happy, kid, You’ll be the first it ever did.
Parker continued to linger over grief, despair, and death, too close to her own experience, as her stories better revealed. When she published her three collections of poetry in one volume in 1936, with some deletions and five additions, she entitled it with the aptly funereal phrase, Not So Deep As A Well—from Mercutio’s sardonic quip (Romeo and Juliet, act 3). In an article written in 1937, Parker disagreed with the belief “that ridicule is the most effective weapon”; as she put it, “there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.” Ridicule, so exquisitely phrased in her best poetry, was her sharpest weapon against proper manners and hypocritical observances; but the acerbic personae who speak her mind also know they are not superior to the dumbest of either sex. In that knowledge, wit becomes a defense, first against pain and then against despair. The contradictions inherent in being a bright woman vexed by a heart yearning for what the mind must mock gives uncommon subtlety to her verse and distinguishes her poetry from the glut of flapper verse of the 1920s. Her technical skill in translating classical forms into a modern idiom and the complexity of her wit prompted Arthur Kenney to call Parker “the best epigrammatic poet in our country, in this century.” Source: Thomas Grant, “Dorothy Parker,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 11, American Humorists, 1800–1950, Part 2: M–Z, edited by Stanley Trachtenberg, Gale Research, 1982, pp. 371–74.
Sources Beilke, Debra, “Parker, Dorothy,” in Feminist Writers, edited by Pamela Kester-Shelton, St. James Press, 1996. Gill, Brendan, “Introduction,” in The Portable Dorothy Parker, Penguin Books, 1973, pp. xvi, xviii.
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Housman, A. E., “Is My Team Plowing,” in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair, W. W. Norton, 1973, p. 98. Kinney, Arthur F., Dorothy Parker, Revised, Twanye’s United States Author Series, No. 701, Twayne Publishers, 1998, pp. 92, 103. Maugham, W. Somerset, Dorothy Parker, Viking Press, 1944, pp. 11–18. Miller, J. Hillis, “Narrative,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Letricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 66–79. Parker, Dorothy, The Collected Poetry of Dorothy Parker, Modern Library, 1959, p. 141. Pettit, Rhonda S., A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker’s Poetry and Fiction, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000, pp. 95, 112. Review of Enough Rope, in the New York Times Book Review, March 27, 1927, p. 6. Wilson, Edmund, “Dorothy Parker’s Poems,” in New Republic, Vol. XLIX, No. 633, January 19, 1927, p. 256.
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Further Reading Abels, Jules, In the Time of Silent Cal: A Retrospective History of the 1920s, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969. Although not primarily concerned with literary events, this book provides a basic understanding of the social, political, and technological changes of the period of Parker’s early fame. Frewin, Leslie, The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker, Macmillan, 1986. This is one of several good biographies of Parker’s life and works, well-suited for an interested beginner. Parker, Dorothy, The Collected Poetry of Dorothy Parker, Modern Library, 1959. This single volume contains selections from all of Parker’s collections and shows her development as a poet over a number of years. —, Sunset Gun, Sun Dial Press, 1941. This is Parker’s second collection of verse. It contains “The Last Question,” which can be seen in its original context.
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Midnight Verses “Midnight Verses” is a late poem by Anna Akhmatova, who is considered one of Russia’s most important poets of the twentieth century. Akhmatova came to fame immediately upon the publication of her first collection of poetry in 1912. She was recognized for her powerful and moving love poetry, which explained little, and instead relied on concrete imagery. Her literary career was disrupted by the Russian Revolution; soon after taking power, the government of the Soviet Union sought to suppress those writers it deemed to have a political viewpoint that did not support Communism. For years, Akhmatova could not publish her poetry. She did not even dare write it down, because writers were commonly sent to jail for things they had written. Until the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Akhmatova was virtually unheard of outside the Soviet Union. With a thaw in the Soviet government’s policy, Akhmatova’s fame spread across the world in the 1950s and 1960s. She traveled to Italy and England to accept awards, and was twice a nominee for the Nobel Prize. The short poems comprising “Midnight Verses” were written over the years from 1963–1965, shortly before Akhmatova’s death. “Midnight Verses” was first published in her book The Flight of Time (1965). It is currently available in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova (2002).
Anna Akhmatova 1965
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instead, she recited poems to her friends, who remembered it and recited it to others. During World War II, Akhmatova’s poems were allowed into state-sponsored publications. After the war, her work was banned again, and Akhmatova lived in poverty until 1953, when Joseph Stalin, the dictatorial premier of the Soviet Union, died. The poems Akhmatova had written over her long lifetime gained her an international reputation. She was a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958 and in 1965, and she traveled to England, one of her few trips away from Soviet Russia, in 1965 to receive an honorary Ph.D. from Oxford. The short poems comprising “Midnight Verses” were written over a period of time from 1963–1965, shortly before Akhmatova’s death. They were first published in her book The Flight of Time, which was published in 1965. Akhmatova died in 1966 in Leningrad (St. Petersburg).
Anna Akhmatova
Poem Summary In Place of a Dedication
Author Biography Anna Akhmatova was born on June 23, 1888, in the Russian town of Bolshoy Fontan, near the resort town Odessa. Her real name was Anna Andreyevna Gorenko: the pen name she used was her grandmother’s. She began publishing her poetry in 1907. The first person to publish her poetry was Nicholas G. Gumilyov, who was himself a major Russian poet of the early twentieth century, one of the founders of the influential Acmeist movement. Akhmatova and Gumilyov were married in 1910: they were intellectually well matched but emotionally distant and ended up divorcing in 1918, after having one son. Meanwhile, Akhmatova had become a famous literary figure in Russia after the publication of her first book, Evening, in 1912, and her fame continued to grow. The Communist party, which took control over Russia in 1917, had Gumilyov executed for treason in 1921. Akhmatova was considered antiCommunist, and as such, her works were banned by the government from 1925 to 1940. During those years, she had a few scholarly works published, but her poetry could not be written down for fear that it would be used against her politically;
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“Midnight Verses” begins with a brief introductory piece that establishes the mood of the poem’s speaker and puts readers in the mood for what is to follow. The first two lines concern the speaker’s relationship to vast stretches of nature. Visually, readers are shown open vistas of the ocean’s waves and entire forests, but not any individual person. In the second line, the relationship to the sky is an uneasy one: the sky is presented as being enamel, which gives a hard coating to cookware and pottery, while the speaker is said to be “sketched onto” it. The speaker is thus seen in the clear sky, but is not a part of the sky. The last two lines of this introduction establish the emotional situation that the poem is to deal with: the difficulty of being separated from a lover, which is, though bad, still not as bad as a casual meeting with that person.
Elegy Before the Coming of Spring The first stanza of this section introduces the poem’s overriding theme of death, using the imagery of snowfall, of silence, and of night. The intoxication of the second line indicates the illogical feeling watching the snow brings out in the speaker. In line three, the poem mentions Ophelia, who, in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, is driven to suicide when Hamlet abruptly spurns her. By bringing her
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up, Akhmatova establishes a link between death and love. The second stanza of this poem refers to the impending death of the speaker’s lover. The intimacy of love is captured by the phrase “the one who appeared only to me.” This lover, though, is not fully focused on the poem’s speaker, as death is spoken of as someone he is engaged to marry (“betrothed to”). The emotional distance between them is highlighted by the fact that he has already said goodbye, thereby ending their relationship, but still has remained with the speaker after their connection is severed.
First Warning The speaker recalls how often death has played a role in her life, and how it has made her withdraw into herself. The first line of this section—“What is it to us”—poses a question that is never answered, raising the type of mystery that is characteristic of Akhmatova’s poetry. The best that she can do to address this mystery is to examine the things that she does not have to offer her lover. She is not a dream, a delight, or paradise (a reference to heaven, or the ultimate comfort upon death). The “wreath” referred to implies death by giving readers the visual image of the veins that surround the center of an eye. The speaker thus acknowledges her own aloofness from her lover, her inability to connect.
Through the Looking Glass Death is again personified here, as it was in the first section, as the lover of the poet’s lover. In this case, it is given physical characteristics of youth and beauty that make it a formidable competitor. As a result, both people find that their lives revolve around their suppressed knowledge that death is nearby, never really mentioning it but becoming more and more fearful. The final four lines of this section consider the implications of this sublimated knowledge of death. It is considered an “infernal circle” because of the way that it interferes with their relationship. In the end, though, Akhmatova considers the possibility that it is not the relationship that is real and being interrupted, that love holds some broader truth that goes beyond matters of life and death.
Thirteen Lines This segment of the poem deals with the lover’s death. This poem’s attitude toward death is the opposite of the one that is normally expressed. Death is described with positive, beautiful images, such as freedom, a rainbow, sunlight, song and wine.
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Media Adaptations • A video about the poet’s life, The Personal File of Anna Akhmatova, is based on her diaries and the memoirs of Lidiya Chukovskaya. It was produced in Russian by Semyon Aranovitch in 1989 and adapted to English by Maryna Albert in 1991. It is in Russian with English subtitles and is available from the Video Project division of Act Now Productions. • In 1998, Akhmatova’s poetry was adapted to a stage play called The Akhmatova Project, created and directed by Nancy Keystone. The Critical Mass Theatre Company of UCLA staged the project. The play’s web site at http://www .akhmatovaproject.com/page2.html provides full background and links to web sites consulted.
The only thing that disturbs the speaker about death is that it is her job, or fate, to contradict death with her writing. She is the “assassin of that divine word,” a phrase that shows her job to be destructive and death to be the will of God. She says that, despite her desire as a writer to analyze the “blessed moment” of death, she “almost” managed to honor it with silence.
The Call This segment of the poem concerns the speaker’s plans to work the death of her lover into her artistry. She shows a guilty feeling about the act of writing, as if she is taking advantage of her lover, who will be found “guilty without appeal” because he cannot defend himself from how she portrays him. Having once been part of her life, he will be remembered only for the way that he is portrayed in her poetry, and the speaker of the poem shows here that she is aware of her responsibility to his memory. The last line of this section, which makes a connection between death and silence, approaches the situation as a self-fulfilling prophecy: it says that the lover’s death will be equated with silence,
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while readers know, from “Elegy Before the Coming of Spring,” that the poet actually has established this relationship throughout this poem.
The Visit at Night While the previous section referred to how the poet will invoke the memory of her dead lover, this section addresses the ways in which the lover’s presence will come into her consciousness without being invited. The third line implies that the lover will come into her mind through art, particularly the music of eighteenth century Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi. The dead lover will read the palm of the poem’s speaker: while this is generally a way of telling the future, the poem says that it will actually reveal nothing new, but only “the same miracles” that have always been there. The poem does not predict death to be a way of finding freedom, as it is often thought to be. The dead person will be wracked with anxiety and will thus be pulled away from this visit, “into the icy waves,” an echo of the first line of “In Place of a Dedication.”
And the Last At the end of the poem, Akhmatova once more personifies death, and draws its connection between artistic inspiration and grief. The first stanza talks about how death watched the poem’s speaker and her lover from above, how they looked upon it (or “her”) not as a cause for joy, but as something to fear. The second stanza refers to the ironic stance that the lovers took toward death: when they were able to focus on it with their rational minds during the day, they smiled on it, and saw it as a natural object like a bird or a flower. At night, though, their unconscious minds feared it, and the thought of death strangled them. In the third stanza, death awaits, pressing against sleepless pillows. Regardless of all of the justifications that have been made in the dead lover’s eulogy, death comes to the poem’s speaker, night after night, and, instead of offering the comforting words that a poet can make up to ease any desperate situation, it “murmurs some accursed lines.”
In Place of an Epilogue This brief section, outside of the “story” of the poem, reflects on the way that lovers think alike. Rather than dreaming different dreams, neither of them was able to escape the dream of impending death. In the last line, this poem about death resolves with a warm and positive image, which compares death, once it finally does arrive, to spring’s arrival.
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Themes Death This entire poem represents a reflection on death: on the people who have been lost to the poem’s speaker, and the impending death of someone close to her. Death is presented in several different ways. After the section called “In Place of a Dedication,” the poem jumps immediately into portraying death as silence with the imagery of snow falling among trees. This stanza ends with death personified as a silence that sings to those who are aware of it. Later in the poem, in the third section, death is presented as a young, beautiful woman, who is competing with the poem’s speaker for her lover’s attention. It is always present between them, always in the room with them. Even when they are apart, they are both aware of it. The last sections of the poem deal with awareness of death after it has occurred. The poet wonders what she will say about the now-dead lover in section 5, “The Call.” In the section following that, she considers how the memory of the lover will return to her when she least expects it, such as when she is listening to music. In section 7 she tries to look at death, not as it is expected to be or as it is in memory, but as it really is: instead of being glorious or horrific, it “murmurs some accursed lines.” Death is, in the end, unintelligible, not because it is mysterious but because it is inarticulate, and just vaguely hostile. Overall, this poem takes a position that death is a positive part of nature. This is evident in the way that section 1 presents dying as spring, the time traditionally associated with life, following the snowy winter of worrying about the coming of death. Akhmatova returns to this idea in the final section, “In Place of an Epilogue,” which shows death as a dream that both the poet and her lover experienced, presenting that dream as “powerful \ As spring’s arrival.” In this way, “Midnight Verses” both acknowledges the depths of human fear about death and also accepts it as a positive ending place, just as the spring positively resolves the winter.
Language and Meaning The speaker of this poem openly acknowledges her job as a poet, even when it does not necessarily mean that her job is a morally correct one. In “The Call,” she is somewhat sardonic about the fact that she is certain to use her lover’s death in
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her poetry, aware that he is sentenced to such a fate “Because you came close to me, \ If only for a moment...” Although this section makes the poet seem opportunistic, there is other evidence that only a poetic understanding of an event as important to the human psyche as death can make the terrible knowledge that it is becoming bearable. In several places, the poet refers to herself as an observer, as in “In Place of a Dedication,” where she describes herself as being everywhere, looking down on the earth “sketched on the sky’s enamel,” or in section 2 where she describes her eye in detail as it takes in the facts. The poem is a struggle between the meaning that language can give to life and an event like death that defies meaning. In “Thirteen Lines,” death is symbolized as “the word,” and dying is pronouncing “the word.” This makes a direct relationship between the act of dying and the act of creating meaning by turning something into language. This moment of simultaneously capturing reality through language and dying is shown to be a moment of liberation, of escaping from captivity.
Reconciliation Much of what holds the nine parts of this poem together is the poet’s desperate struggle to reconcile the sorrow and mystery of a loved one’s death with the need to go on with her own life. She sees death as a sexual competitor, as a looming threat, and as a final triumphant liberation, but the poem conveys her sense of frustration because she can only know what it is like vicariously, by observing its effect on someone else. In the later sections she describes what life will be like after her lover’s death: how she will try to make sense of it in her work, how he will come to her again in the night, through music, when her consciousness is not as guarded. After trying different ways of looking at death, of understanding it and accepting it, the poem ends by noting its power. Ironically, the struggle to reconcile with the idea of death is made pointless because it is an inevitable force whether one reconciles one’s mind to it or not.
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Topics for Further Study • Research the Acmeists, the literary group that Akhmatova helped to found when she was young, and show how a modern poem fits or does not fit the Acmeists’ theories. • The section “The Visit at Night” refers to someone who has gone, who has returned to the poem’s speaker through a Vivaldi adagio. Listen to a piece by Vivaldi while taking notes, and then write a short sketch of the person that it makes you think of. • Choose the lyrics for a piece of music that you like, then write a dedication and an epilogue to go along with it. • Choose one of these seven poems to represent in a painting or drawing, or go out with a camera and photograph some scene that you feel would be an appropriate portrayal of one of these poems.
ence that neither the speaker of the poem nor her lover can ignore. The title of this section links death to the speaker, making a connection between her younger self and the death that looms ahead in old age. In “And the Last,” death is described as “looming above us,” in the way that the poem’s speaker described herself as being in the sky in “In Place of a Dedication.” The poem is concerned with the ways that death is unknowable. In the attempt to explain death it not only turns this concept into a person, but gives it characteristics of the person that the poem’s speaker knows best—herself.
Point of View
Style Personification Death is presented in several different ways in this poem. One of the more striking images of death is when it is shown as a pretty young woman in “Through the Looking Glass.” Here, death is a pres-
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Poetry often relies on the first person point of view as a way of giving a personal, emotional tone to the telling of the poem. The first person is the use of “I” or “me” in describing the action, and Akhmatova uses this device consistently throughout the poem. Readers generally assume that the first person narrator is similar in background and circumstance to the poet, even though many poets
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Compare & Contrast • 1960s: The Soviet Union and the United States are competitors for the allegiance of smaller countries around the world. The “Cold War” between them is most evident in the civil war in Vietnam, where the Northern Communists are backed by the Soviets and the South is supported by the United States. Today: The United States is the one remaining superpower. The Soviet Union disbanded in 1991, and most of its countries have adapted capitalist economies. • 1960s: Writers in the Soviet Union live in fear that they will be punished for writing things that the government finds inappropriate. In 1964, for instance, influential Russian poet Joseph Brodsky is sentenced to five years of hard labor for writing “gibberish.” Today: Russian writers openly participate in the international literary scene without fear of reprisal.
• 1960s: The Soviet Union revels in its technological superiority, having sent the first manmade satellite into space in 1957. Americans, having been surprised by the satellite’s existence, struggle to gain superiority in the space race by working to put a man on the moon. Today: Technology from the former Soviet countries is generally considered backwards, hampered by government policies that stressed political subservience over success. • 1960s: American cities are torn apart by protests and race riots, as black Americans, tired of waiting for the equality promised a hundred years ago at the end of the Civil War, lash out. Today: Ethnic tensions create violent situations in many former Soviet Union countries, as various ethnic groups that were forced to live together by the Soviets lash out against those whom they see as intruders.
will create a persona with which to hide their true feelings.
Historical Context
This poem also uses the second person form of address, speaking to an unidentified “you.” Like the first person, the second person often helps to certify the authenticity of the emotions that hold the poem together. Readers feel that they have come into a circumstance in which the principle characters already know each other and take their relationship to one another for granted. The second person form of address requires readers to imagine what the other person is like from the details of the poem, with no other information. In this case, readers can sense the emotional connection between the two main characters from the fact that “In Place of a Dedication” says that a meeting between them would be more difficult than “separation,” a word that would not be used if this strong emotion were hatred. The fact that there are two people, with a strong bond between them, lets Akhmatova explore her subject in more depth, within a social situation.
Stalinist Repression
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Akhmatova wrote “Midnight Verses” during a “thaw” in the Soviet Union’s stance toward its country’s artists. For much of her adult life, she had been unable to write poetry, and had stood by watching friends and relatives jailed and executed because of their political views. When Akhmatova began publishing in 1912, Russia was a relatively open society with a severely unbalanced economic system, with severe wealth for a few and economic suffering for most. The Russian Revolution of 1917 transferred the country’s power to a communist system aimed at economic equality. In 1921, Russia became part of the newly-formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Soviet Union ruled its citizens with complete authority over all social and cultural activities. A secret police force was established in the early 1920s to find any citizens who opposed the gov-
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ernment and have them arrested. Artists whose work was not approved as being supportive of communist ideals were suppressed. Some, like Akhmatova, were simply forbidden publication; others’ like her son Lev, spent decades in prison camps in freezing climates in Siberia; still others, like Akhmatova’s first husband Nikolai Gumilev, were executed as traitors. These totalitarian policies, first begun under Vladimir Lenin, were expanded in 1924 when Lenin died and Joseph Stalin assumed power.
The Cold War Stalin’s reign over the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953 is considered one of the cruelest and deadliest in modern history, rivaling those of Hitler and Pol Pot. It is estimated that 43 million Soviet citizens were killed by the government during his reign. Since the Soviet Union was closed to the West, estimates about its activities are rough at best. The term “Iron Curtain” came into use after World War II to describe the way that this huge country was shut off from the rest of the world. By the time that “Midnight Verses” was published in 1965, the Soviet Union was considered one of the world’s two “Superpowers,” competing to sway other countries over to a communist way of life while the other superpower, the United States, promoted capitalism. The competition between the two was called “the Cold War” because, unlike a “hot” war, there was never any direct fighting between the two opponents. In the post-Stalin era, the Soviet government allowed artists more freedom, and some Soviet literature was allowed to leak out through the Iron Curtain. In 1957, when Russian novelist Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the government deemed the book to be unflattering to the Soviet cause and therefore made Pasternak refuse the honor. But, the very fact that a Soviet writer’s work had been available to capture worldwide attention showed that the government was softening its grip on artists. In 1964, while Akhmatova was writing this poem, there was a coup d’état in the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev, who was associated with the country’s policy of stern defiance of American threats during the Cold War (including the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis, during which the United States and Soviet Union came close to firing nuclear weapons at each other) was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev’s rule was marked by an increase in Soviet interaction with the outside world. While previous Soviet regimes had tried to isolate the country and suppress its citizens, Brezhnev tried to form bonds and to make the world understand and
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admire Soviet culture. The government of the Soviet Union still kept strict control over the lives of its citizens until it was disbanded in 1991, but the 1960s marked the start of a new internationalism.
Critical Overview Anna Akhmatova was considered to be an important figure in Russian poetry after her first book was published. The love poems in her first book, Vecher (Evening) (1912), explored the subject of love from all angles, giving, according to Russian critic Leonid I. Strakhovsky, “all the things that everyone might feel and understand, though perhaps less deeply and personally than the poet.” Strakhovsky, in his 1949 book about Akhmatova and her contemporaries, Gumilyov and Mandelstam, went on to note that years of inactivity had not changed her much despite having been silenced by the Soviet government for fifteen years. “Her voice was now reduced almost to a whisper and her eyes were dimmed as she looked at the present through the mirror of the past,” he wrote of her 1940 collection, “But her mastery was still the same.” The Times Literary Supplement, reviewing her Selected Poems soon after her death, similarly captures the “whisper” image, noting that that book “ranges from whispers to anguished screams, from personal happiness to the most acute personal distress. It is lyrical, modest, feminine, narrow in tone and form.” As years have passed, and her poetry has become more widely published in the West, Akhmatova has come for many to stand as the quintessential female Russian poet. As such, she is seen as a link between classical, pre-twentieth century poetry and poetry that is being written today. In part, this view is connected to her circumstances, with government suppression freezing her career in its prime, making her a poet of both youth and old age, while many of her contemporaries never made it to old age but died in government prisons. “Anna Akhmatova’s personality was phenomenal,” Nilokai Bannikov explained in a journal article celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of her birth. “It was not given to any woman in Russian poetry before her to express herself with such convincing, lyrical power, to speak out so independently that her voice added once and for all a special—Akhmatovan— note to the art of the Russian poetic word.” The extreme circumstances of her life are unavoidable in considering the literary worth of her poetry, and
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critics, who generally find no fault with her writing, tend to focus on how her unusual story made her able to speak for a whole generation of Russians.
Criticism David Kelly Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature. In this essay, Kelly looks at Akhmatova’s poem without connecting it to the events of her life. It is very rare to find a discussion of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova’s work without a corresponding discussion of her life story. This is entirely understandable. Her life was fascinating, especially to American readers who would find its events difficult to imagine within the scope of their own experiences. Akhmatova was a poetic sensation at a young age, so popular that, while she was still in her twenties, a party game based on her poetry was played in fashionable parlors in St. Petersburg, with contestants trying to guess what would follow a line of her poetry read aloud. Then, for years that would normally have represented the apex of a literary career, her voice was silenced by the Soviet government, only to re-emerge after the 1953 death of Joseph Stalin. Her life, therefore, offers scholars an easy dichotomy of “before” and “after,” neatly laid out for study. It is a fascinating life story, drawing readers to it as much as the clenched density of Akhmatova’s poetry blocks readers out. There is a natural temptation to fill the hole in the middle of her literary career with biographical information, and from there, to expand the facts of her life with the hope that they might explain all unknown factors in her work. Akhmatova’s life story is so compelling that people naturally want to attach it to anything with her name, particularly her poetry. If there ever were a case for studying a poet’s work in relation to the person’s life, hers seems to be the one. There is, however, at least one school of thought that questions the appropriateness of introducing any information into poem analysis that comes from outside of the words that actually appear on the page. This way of thought holds that the author’s life, fascinating though it may be, has little relevance to the content of the poem. Whether produced by Anna Akhmatova in her twilight years or by a high school dropout trying a first poem, a poem is or is not a work of art, and so these critics hold that knowing
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too much about an author’s life is just a way of giving in to irrelevant distraction. This lack of context makes poetry like Akhmatova’s difficult to cope with, since it wipes away clues that ease understanding, but it also affirms the poem’s value as an artistic piece. A poem like Akhmatova’s “Midnight Verses,” for instance, makes more sense to the casual reader who supplements the facts that are immediately apparent with the knowledge that it was written late in Akhmatova’s lifetime, that she had seen most of her peers die violent or mysterious deaths and was at the time watching the ranks of those who were left be thinned out by old age. Others can be more specific, guessing at the identity of a real-life person represented as “you” in the poem. The true test of the poem’s strength, however, is in how well it can speak to human existence without being tied to the experiences of any one particular human. The imagery should contain enough clues in the ways that it all interrelates for readers to walk away from the poem knowing what the writer wants them to know. “Midnight Verses” is, in fact, a poem that seems to be challenging readers to read it within its own context. It is a poem about death, mournful in every line, crippled by the fact that the speaker is willing to admit to competence in almost all cerebral activities except for dealing with permanent loss. The overall structure is fragmented, a stylistic arrangement that always raises the question of how any one part relates to the others. The poems that comprise it may have been written separately, but the fact that they are presented together means that the author wants readers to question their differences as well as their similarities. Also, the isolated sections come in two different levels of significance: in addition to the main sequence of poems, numbered one through seven, there are the introductory and concluding segments that are both part of the poem and at the same time outside it. Add to this the levels of repetition and nuance in Akhmatova’s use of imagery, and there turns out to be enough to ponder about this poem without ever thinking about the circumstances it came from. Among the many ideas in “Midnight Verses” that refer to other parts of the poem are the three central ideas of silence, overview, and the unstoppable march of time. These are represented, roughly, by forest, sky, and the waves, the three images that open up the section called “In Place of a Dedication.”
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The forest first appears in connection with silence in “Elegy Before the Coming of Spring.” Snowstorms are not known for being particularly loud, but the one mentioned here is “hushed” by the pine trees, which block out wind and only admit silent falling snow. This idea of trees as silent witnesses to the world is revised in the fourth section, “Thirteen Lines.” Here, the trees are not pines, which are evergreen and do not go through the usual cycle of shedding leaves and blooming that deciduous trees undergo. They are birches, which are so sensitive to the passing seasons that they not only change leaves, but their bark too. Section 4, with its nondescript, generic title, is actually one of celebration, full of rainbows and sunlight and wine. The birch trees, unlike the pines, do not let snow blanket the earth under them: they provide a “sacred canopy.” The sky plays an important role in this poem because it is used to establish, in the introductory section, the speaker’s doubts about the value of her own talent. The line “I am sketched on the sky’s pure enamel” implies a sense of grandeur in that this person is looking down on the world, but it also implies that she is out of her element, an intruder who is in the sky but not really part of it. Characterizing the sky as enamel emphasizes its hardness, its protective coating, meant to hold things out, as Teflon does today. Characterizing the speaker as being “sketched” emphasizes the temporary rather than permanent, the quickness and incompleteness of her being. This is important because the same self-doubt is conveyed in “First Warning,” which ends with a focus on the eye: while watching from above seems somewhat impersonal, this eye is silent like the trees, and therefore foreboding. This cold human silence is contrasted in section 7 with death, “like a star over the sea,” circling above like a bird. The speaker of this poem reveals a complex self-image, which sees death itself as being at times more compassionate. No knowledge about Akhmatova’s difficult life is needed to see the struggle to be human that is presented on the page. The other image that repeats throughout the poem is that of waves. Though mentioned in the introductory section, that mention amounts to little, just a location that the speaker wanders past. It is not until the end of the poem, section 7, that the waves show their significance. There is no general cultural reference to the “ninth deadly wave” which Akhmatova mentions in the poem, but there is a general belief that the waves come in cycles, reach-
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The speaker of this poem reveals a complex self-image, which sees death itself as being at times more compassionate. No knowledge about Akhmatova’s difficult life is needed to see the struggle to be human that is presented on the page.”
ing their highest point with the seventh wave before starting a new round of seven again. Assuming that this is the point of reference, then the ninth wave would be one that is well past the apex, twice removed from the height. As a metaphor for life, this would indicate old age, an assumption borne out by the fact that the whole poem speaks rather freely of impending death. Waves might not mean exactly the same thing in every place where they appear in the poem, but they do have an essential characteristic of carrying one away toward death. For instance, it is possible that the final lines of section 6 might not refer to age, but the “icy waves” they refer to are definitely a sign of dying. The way Akhmatova used imagery in her poetry left gaps in meaning: she presented solid, tangible images, but did not explain their relationship to one another. From the rough fit of the seven poems and ancillary matter in “Midnight Verses,” readers can assume that she meant there to be places where the images did not dovetail with one another, but instead suggested each other or reminded readers of things brought up in other sections, making their effect a result of feelings, not a result of intellectual consideration. When a poem does not provide a complete picture, there is a temptation to fill in the missing parts with information from the author’s life. With poetry like this, though, a better approach is to listen a little closer, to trust that the similarities and inconsistencies are there for a good reason. Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on “Midnight Verses,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
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Diane Andrews Henningfeld Henningfeld is a professor of English at Adrian College where she teaches poetry, literature, and critical theory and writes widely for a variety of educational publications. In this essay, Henningfeld examines Akhmatova’s use of imagery and allusion in developing the themes of isolation and loss throughout her poem. Although she was born in the last year of the nineteenth century, Akhmatova is in every way a child of the twentieth century. Her poetry placed her at the center of the modernist movement as it developed in Russia, and her life encompassed some of the most difficult, invigorating, and brutal years of Russian history. Akhmatova’s life, like her verse, frequently reveals the paradoxes of living in the twentieth century. Although widely acknowledged as one of the greatest of all Russian poets, Akhmatova and her work nonetheless remained largely inaccessible to Western readers until the last years of the twentieth century. A leader of the acmeist movement (acmeism is a movement in poetry that arose as a response against symbolism, rejecting both symbolism’s ornate style and interest in mysticism) in poetry, Akhmatova was at the heart of a literary revolution. Yet the political revolution in her country ended up silencing her for decades. A final paradox is that Akhmatova’s poetry, so much a product of its time, is often analyzed biographically rather than poetically. That is, critics often look to Akhmatova’s life and to the historical time in which she lived as their sole means of analysis. This approach often overlooks the literary value of her work. As David N. Wells notes in his book, Anna Akhmatova: Her Poetry, “The biographical fallacy is one into which Akhmatova’s critics have fallen all too easily: her work is important as literature through its ability to generalise experience and to move the reader by the power of language.” It is not a surprise, therefore, to find that most critics reading “Midnight Verses” make much of the connection between the poem cycle and a visit to Akhmatova by Isaiah Berlin, an important British scholar and diplomat, in 1945; in the notes accompanying The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, Roberta Reeder states that “Of the seven poems in this cycle, four refer to the meeting with Isaiah Berlin.” The encounter figures large in Akhmatova’s poems, letters, and prose, as evidenced by her ongoing inclusion of Berlin in her poems, even twenty years after her last sight of him. This may
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be partially due to the increasingly harsh restrictions on the poet and on the poet’s son by the Soviet government after her meeting with Berlin. However, while this meeting may underpin many of the poems of the cycle, and while any reader of the poems ought to be familiar with the relationship between Akhmatova and Berlin, the poems themselves are more than echoes of a past visit. They also function as literature, as Wells argues. “Midnight Verses” is a poem that, through image and allusion, delves deeply into the themes of isolation and loss. In an article in New England Review, Roberta Reeder describes Akhmatova’s lyrics as “short fragments of simple speech that do not form a logical coherent pattern. Instead, they reflect the way we actually think—the links between the images are emotional, and simple everyday objects are charged with psychological associations.” Thus, the reader finds the poems of “Midnight Verses” fragmented, lyrical, oblique, and highly allusive, always referring to something or someone just out of the reader’s sight. Akhmatova embeds images and allusions throughout the poem, both through her use of epigraphs and metaphor. Opening the cycle, for example, she uses lines from an earlier poem cycle, “Poem without a Hero,” as an epigraph: “The mirror dreams only of the mirror, / Silence watches over silence . . .” This epigraph introduces several important images including the mirror, dreams, and silence, images that Akhmatova uses repeatedly across a career that spanned some fifty years. Indeed, the image of the mirror is so significant in Akhmatova’s poetry that Reeder chooses to call her biography of the poet in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova “Mirrors and Masks: The Life and Poetic Works of Anna Akhmatova.” The use of the mirror in “Midnight Verses,” therefore, is of great importance. In the first place, a mirror offers a reflection of whatever object or person is in front of it. Although the mirror is a flat surface, it fools the eye in its representation of reality, forcing the viewer to experience depth and dimension where there are none. The common expression, “look into the mirror,” reveals this illusion. Quite literally, one cannot look “into” a mirror at all; one can only look at a mirror’s flat surface. In the second place, while a viewer might believe that a mirror cannot lie, in truth, all that a mirror can do is lie. For example, in producing an image, a mirror distorts reality in multiple ways: the image is always reversed and the image is never the
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same size as the object being reflected. That Akhmatova introduces the poems of “Midnight Verses” with such an image suggests that the reader might consider the connection between poem and mirror. Like a mirror, a poem would appear to reflect some reality; in this case, a midnight visit from Isaiah Berlin. Yet, the epigraph warns the reader that like a mirror, a poem can obscure what it seems to reveal. “Midnight Verses,” after all, is not the meeting itself, but rather an allusive representation of that meeting. As Reeder writes in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, “Though often inspired by real events or emotions, her poems may mask more than they reveal. Akhmatova warned against scrutinizing her lyrics for insight into her thoughts and feelings: ‘Lyric verse is the best armor, the best cover. You don’t give yourself away.’” Further, the mirror’s dreaming offers another point of entry into the poem. A dream, like a mirror, is a reflection of reality, not reality itself. That the “mirror dreams only of the mirror” suggests an arrangement that sometimes happens in hotel bathrooms, where one mirror reflects the image from another, into infinity. Looking into mirrors so situated is a dizzying experience for viewers as they see reflections of themselves repeated endlessly before them. Again, which of the reflections is the “true” reflection? Like a mirror, or a poem, a dream seems to reveal something important to the dreamer, but its meaning is masked with image, symbol, and illusion. Furthermore, in dreams, the dreamer sometimes engages in a relationship with another person that has no basis whatsoever in reality. Upon awakening, however, the dreamer has all the emotional feelings for the other person that a real relationship might engender. Again, a poem may provide the same kind of response. In Wells’s words, a poem of literary value allows the reader to “generalize,” or apply, the emotional experience of a poem to his or her own life. Here again, however, the emotion a reader feels when reading a poem is like the emotion created in a dream; while it seems real, it is, upon analysis, a reflection of emotional content embedded in the poem by the poet. Such thinking leads to an understanding that mirrors, dreams, and poems connect readers to themselves, the poet, and the reading community. In truth, mirrors, dreams, and poems also can isolate the viewer, dreamer, or reader because each of these experiences is, in itself, a solitary one. Akhmatova returns to the image of the mirror and dream in the second section of the poem, “First
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Yet, if a person is only a reflection of what others see, or of what she sees when she looks at the mirror, where is the core of her being? Living in a mirror, therefore, suggests not only the loss of love, but also the loss of self.”
Warning.” She writes that she has “lived in so many mirrors.” What does it mean to live in a mirror? Surely nothing “lives” in a mirror. Akhmatova seems to suggest that she is nothing but reflection, that she is what others see. She writes a few lines later of “an eye that conceals in its depth, / In its anxious silence, / That rusty, scratchy little wreath.” In these lines, she seems to be connecting the eye with the mirror. When a person looks into another’s eyes, the person sees his or her own face reflected back. Yet, if a person is only a reflection of what others see, or of what she sees when she looks at the mirror, where is the core of her being? Living in a mirror, therefore, suggests not only the loss of love, but also the loss of self. The third section of the poem also uses the image of the mirror in its title, “Through the Looking Glass.” In titling this poem, Akhmatova alludes to Lewis Carroll’s famous story of Alice who falls into her mirror only to find a mad world where nothing is as it seems. Biographical critics suggest that the “young beauty” in this section is one of Nikolay Punin’s mistresses, as Reeder reveals in her notes to the translation of the poem. While this may be so, it is also possible to read the “she” of the poem as the mirror itself, and by extension, the poem. When the speaker and the person to whom she speaks are together, the “beauty” does not leave them alone, just as a mirror continues to reflect the couple. Line six reveals, “I generously share my flowers with her.” The mirror would “share” the flowers by reflecting them. Indeed, it would look as if the flowers were actually in the mirror itself, almost as if the speaker had
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What Do I Read Next? • All of Akhmatova’s poems are available in one exhaustively researched volume, The Collected Poems of Anna Akhmatova. The expanded edition, published by Zephyr Press in 1998, was translated by Judith Hemschemeyer and includes notes by Roberta Reeder and a memoir by Akhmatova’s friend Isaiah Berlin. • One of the most comprehensive biographies of Akhmatova is Roberta Reeder’s Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet, published in 1994 by St. Martin’s Press.
of Fire: Selected Poems (1999), translated by Richard McKane and published by Anvil Press. • The epigraph from “Elegy Before the Coming of Spring” comes from French poet Gérard de Nerval’s poem “El Desdichado.” A selection of the stories, essays, and poetry of Nerval, who has been compared to the novelist Marcel Proust, is available in Selected Writings (1999), published by Penguin.
• The poetry of Akhmatova’s mentor and first husband, Nicholas Gumilyov, is available for the first time in decades in the collection The Pillar
• Akhmatova wrote openly about her life in the essays collected in My Half Century: Collected Prose (1992), published by Ardis Publishers. The book includes diary entries and sketches of other writers.
given the flowers to the mirror. The mirror, then, opens the passage to an alternate reality both visible and real to the people in the room. The section closes with the telling lines. “We know something about each other, / Something horrible. We are in an infernal circle. / But perhaps, this is not us at all.” The “infernal circle” is the trap of the mirror: as the couple looks into the mirror, it reflects their images back to them, and so on, and so on, to such an extent that the couple cannot at last be sure of what is the reality and what is the reflection. This “infernal circle” prevents the lovers from knowing truth; isolated as they are from truth and life, they only can see illusion and death. Likewise, the poem itself, while reflecting the image of the couple, may actually hide what it seems to reveal. After all, “perhaps this is not us at all.” As the poem continues, images of dreams become increasingly connected with isolation and death. In the fifth section of the cycle, “The Call,” dream is metaphorically compared to disappearance and then to death, which is a “sacrifice to silence.” It is tempting here, as throughout “Midnight Verses” to equate this silence to the silencing of Akhmatova’s own poetic voice by Stalin’s regime. Certainly, for a poet, the silence of erasure (much like disappearance, for that matter) is a kind of
death. It is also possible, however, to read this poem apart from the biographical detail and as a meditation on the isolation and loss that is necessarily a part of life. In the final section, “In Place of an Epilogue,” Akhmatova returns to the image of dream, although at the last possible moment, she turns the notion of “dream” away from death and loss. The place “where dreams were formed” has not stored “enough different dreams” for the “us” of the poem, resulting in the speaker and addressee seeing “the same dream.” In writing about another of Akhmatova’s poems, “The Wild Rose Blooms,” Wells argues that “it is the function of poetry in linking past, present which is predominant.” This assessment might well be applied to this final section of “Midnight Verses.” Surely, the place where dreams were formed is in the past, in the early moments of a relationship between the speaker and addressee. When the two see the same dream, it must occur after the formation of the dreams and their placement in memory, in some overlapping juxtaposition of time. In the final line, in the closing breaths of the poem, Akhmatova asserts that the dream “was powerful / As spring’s arrival.” Thus, Akhmatova turns her recurring image away from the thick isolation and silence that has surrounded the cycle
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to this point, and instead links the dream with the arrival of spring, a metaphor for rebirth and ongoing life. Further, while the earlier sections of the cycle focus on separation and departure, these final lines introduce the possibility of union (“we saw the same dream”) and arrival. It is as if she must herself go through the looking glass, through the dream, through the poem, to create a future that is as powerful and inevitable as spring itself, that asserts the supremacy of life over death, and of beauty over despair. Source: Diane Andrews Henningfeld, Critical Essay on “Midnight Verses,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Sam Driver In the following essay, Driver provides historical and social contexts for Akhmatova’s poetry, positioning the poet within the greater canon of Russian literature. Anna Akhmatova occupies a position unique in the history of modern Russian poetry. An establish poet before the revolution, she continued her active creative life well into the mid-1960s, and after the death of Pasternak, Akhmatova was the last remaining major link with what had been one of the great ages of Russian poetry. Her early career was closely associated with Acmeism, a poetic movement which defined itself in opposition to Russian symbolism, stressing craftsmanship in poetry and affirming the significance of this phenomenal world in contradistinction to the abstract “Other World” of the Symbolists. Akhmatova’s early work was perceived as exemplary for the new movement, and achieved a remarkable popular and critical success. The reading public welcomed the clarity, accessibility, and almost conversational style of her brief, fragile love lyrics, especially after the mystifications and abstractions of the Symbolists. The critics recognized and appreciated Akhmatova’s innovations, her technical accomplishment, and the extraordinary compactness of her verse. By the publication of her fifth book in 1922, an “Akhmatova style” in Russian poetry was widely recognized. As a matter of conscious artistic choice, Akhmatova limited her early themes in large part to love, to poetry, and to her homeland. Settings for the predominant love theme are typically drawn from what has traditionally been thought of as the woman’s world: home, interiors, garden, details of decor, and dress. Simple enough in themselves, the images evolve in sum into a complex symbolic system. The otherwise spare and laconic poems are en-
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The reading public welcomed the clarity, accessibility, and almost conversational style of her brief, fragile love lyrics, especially after the mystifications and abstractions of the Symbolists.”
riched, moreover, by a matrix of images drawn from Russia’s cultural history: folk motifs, the old partriarchal life, Orthodoxy, the great cities of Russia. Related to this matrix, and just below the surface of the worldly love lyrics, are the old Orthodox themes of conscience and remorse, sin and retribution, repentance and self-abnegation. It is such themes that developed in the later major works to an extraordinary power and dignity. Although Akhmatova maintained a remarkable stylistic consistency throughout her career, it was as early as 1924 that her beloved friend and fellowpoet Mandel’shtam noted a “sharp break” in Akhmatova’s work: “The voice of self-abnegation grows stronger in Akhmatova’s poetry, and at present her poetry approaches becoming one of the symbols of the greatness in Russia.” Mandel’shtam’s words were prophetic for Akhmatova’s longer works like Rekviem (Requiem), Poema bez geroia (Poem without a Hero), and the “Northern Elegies.” In the dark years of official disfavour and persecution that followed her former husband’s execution, Akhmatova continued to write, but except for a brief respite during World War II she was not permitted to publish any original poetry. Many of her poems were lost in those tragic years; during the worst of them, many were burned by the poet herself. For a long time, Akhmatova did not dare even to set new poems to paper: the more important ones were committed to memory by her friends and thus preserved. As works from this period began to appear in the 1950s, it was clear that Akhmatova had undergone an amazing growth and development. The
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poet emerges as a preserver and continuator of a poetic culture older and broader than the one of her current reality. In the longer works, the poet stands also as conscience and judge for a society suffering under the cataclysms of wars and revolution. Requiem is an epic lament for a Russia in the grip of Stalinist Terror. Poem without a Hero is a retrospective of Akhmatova’s own world from Petersburg in 1913 to the nightmare of World War II and beyond. It is her judgement on an age and also her retribution for her own suffering. By the time she added the last touches to the poem in 1962, Akhmatova had become for Russian poetry the very symbol of moral rectitude and artistic integrity in the face of intolerable personal hardship and official persecution. Along with some of the shorter poems, these masterworks stand as tribute to one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century. Source: Sam Driver, “Akhmatova, Anna,” in Reference Guide to World Literature, 3d ed., edited by Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast, Vol. 1, St. James Press, 2003, pp. 14–16.
Marjorie Perloff In the following excerpt, Perloff lauds Akhmatova as a standout female poet who resisted the force of history and the pressure of gender expectations from interfering with her work. [The Complete Poems of Anna Akhamatova], a bilingual edition, with extraordinary notes, biographies, photographs, illustrations, and facsimile pages, would be a bargain at twice the price. The poems themselves, of which more in a moment, are framed, in Volume I, by a Translator’s Preface, in which Judith Hemschemeyer, herself a poet, provides valuable comments on Akhamatova’s prosody and stylistic habits, and by the editor Roberta Reeder’s 160-page critical biography of the poet, which could easily have been published as a separate book. Then in Volume II, there are further biographical memoirs, this time by Isaiah Berlin and by Akhamatova’s protégé, the critic Anatoly Naiman. At the back of Volume II, following a group of 200 uncollected lyrics (some of Akhmatova’s most brilliant poems, reproduced from V. M. Zhirmunsky’s 1976 Leningrad edition), there are detailed and scholarly notes on the poem and a full bibliography. The production job (the arrangement is chronological, the Russian on facing pages, with the fascinating photographs, lithographs, and drawings giving a very full picture of Akhamatova and her circle from childhood to old age, interspersed throughout) seems to me quite simply stunning.
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For some reason, Akhamatova’s poetry had never really penetrated my consciousness as had Khlebnikov’s or Mayakovsky’s or Pasternak’s. I knew English versions of some of her famous poems like “I Visited a Poet . . .” (to Alexander Blok) and “The Tale of the Black Ring,” but found her seemingly straightforward lyrics on love and sorrow and death too direct and “simple” to have the appeal that, say, Khlebnikov’s complicated linguistic experiments had for me. But reading Akhamatova in these new translations (on the whole, excellent in capturing the poems’ visual layout, tone, and sound quality—at least so it seems to a novice in the Russian language like me), in the light of Reeder’s fascinating account of the poet’s life had made me a total convert. Akhamatova’s poetry uses very little figuration; it is primarily heightened natural speech presented in straightforward syntax in the rhythms of folk song and dolnik (a poem with a fixed number of syllables, usually with a complicated rhyme scheme and echolalia). But, like Goethe’s lyric, which it very much resembles, Akhamatova’s is occasional poetry whose strength lies in capturing, by means of delicate verbal adjustments, the exact emotion of a particular moment. Here is a poem of 1915, dedicated to the critic and connoisseur N. V. Nedobrovo, a man with whom Akhamatova shared a great deal but with whom she was not in love: There is a sacred boundary between those who are close, And it cannot be crossed by passion or love— Though lips fuse in dreadful silence And the heart shatters to pieces with love. Friendship is helpless here, and years Of exalted and ardent happiness, When the soul is free and a stranger To the slow languor of voluptuousness. Those who strive to reach it are mad, and those Who reach it—stricken by grief . . . Now you understand why my heart Does not beat faster under your hand.
If the English version cannot quite capture the rhythmic quality of the original, with its intricately sounded four-stress lines and prominent rhymes (strasti / chasti; toskoio / rukoio), it does convey the poet’s startling admission that for her, love is not based on psychological or emotional communion but on “the slow languor of voluptuousness,” that without that “slow languor,” “my heart / Does not beat faster under your hand.” this last phrase seems almost hackneyed until we stop to consider what it really means. For the poet is not making the standard Romantic speech about her inability to re-
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turn her lover’s passion; she is not gently but firmly refusing his suit. On the contrary, it is while she is letting him caress her breasts and having sex with him, that she tells this close friend and ardent lover that he just doesn’t turn her on. There is a cruel, almost a brutal element in such confession, and indeed one begins to see Akhamatova as anything but the “domestic” poet (Trotsky witheringly dismissed her as a “doctor of female ailments”), she is often taken to be. Her love poems (and her best poems are love poems) run the gamut from self-abasement to intense erotic satisfaction, from contempt for a husband to pity for a former lover and shyness in the face of a new encounter, from schadenfreude at the defeat of rival to total despair at the rejection by a new love object. Indeed, the force and violence of the poet’s response to the passions leads me to a second observation. Akhamatova’s lyric is animated by an assumption that goes counter to all current feminist talk of victimization at the hands of the partriarchy, of the second-class status of women, and so on. That assumption is that a woman can be as strong and powerful as any man. Akhamatova let nothing interfere with her work, a work she refused to distinguish from life, and especially from sexual love—neither marriage (a bond under which she chafed and repeatedly dissolved) nor motherhood (she left her only child Lev in the country to be brought up by relatives), nor the extreme poverty and deprivation that came after the Revolution, nor the censorship of her work under Stalin. When World War II broke out, she gave radio speeches, mobilizing the women in Leningrad. The poet Olga Beggolts recalls, “With a face severe and angry, a gas mask thrown over her shoulder, she took on the fire watch like a regular soldier. She sewed bags for sand which were put on the trenches.” If she was not a “good” mother in her youth, she spent endless hours of her maturity trying to free her son, a prominent scholar, from arrest and exile, going so far as to write verses to Stalin so as to plead Lev’s cause. Her efforts on behalf of her imprisoned friend Osip Mandelstam are legendary. In the fifties, during the final decade of her life, when she was ousted from the Union of Soviet Writers, she earned her living translating the works of Serbian, Armenian, and Ukranian authors. At a time when many of our own poets and artists are so obsessed by the NEA debacle that they seem to have forgotten why they became poets in the first place, Anna Akhamatova provides the most luminous example imaginable of what can be done.
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Her love poems . . . run the gamut from selfabasement to intense erotic satisfaction, from contempt for a husband to pity for a former lover and shyness in the face of a new encounter . . . to total despair at the rejection by a new love object.”
And further: at a time when the “woman artist” is too often represented as a Camille Claudel (the title of a recent film), who must choose between “art” and “love,” it is refreshing to witness Akhamatova’s life-long conviction that she had to have both and that one fed the other. Indeed, if one reads straight through from Evening (1912), published when Akhamatova was only twenty-three, to the lyrics of the sixties collected in Seventh Book, the image that emerges is of a powerful woman to whom every turn presents a formidable roadblock but who not only survives but triumphs. A highly improbably tale for the twentieth century and hence doubly rewarding. Source: Marjorie Perloff, Review of The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, in Sulfur, Vol. 11, No. 27, Fall 1990, 1990, pp. 233–237.
Sources Bannikov, Nikolai, “On Anna Akhmatova: On the Ninetieth Anniversary of Her Birth,” in Soviet Studies in Literature, Vol. XVI, No. 1, Winter 1979–1980, pp. 42–46. “Lyrics of Survival,” in the Times Literary Supplement, No. 3515, July 10, 1969, p. 751. Reeder, Roberta, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet, St. Martin’s Press, 1994. —, “Anna Akhmatova: The Stalin Years,” in New England Review, Vol. 18, No. 1. Winter 1997, pp. 105–20. —, ed., The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, Zephyr Press, 2000.
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Strakhovsky, Leonid I., “Anna Akhmatova: Poetess of Tragic Love,” in Craftsmen of the World, Three Modern Poets of Russia: Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Harvard University Press, 1949, pp. 57, 77. Wells, David N., Anna Akhmatova: Her Poetry, Berg, 1996.
Further Reading Amert, Susan, In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova, Stanford University Press, 1992. A book-length examination of the poetry that Akhmatova produced in the 1950s and 1960s and the ways in which her personal struggles may have influenced it. Amert presents much of the poetry in Russian alongside English translations. Doherty, Justin, The Acmeist Movement in Russian Poetry, Oxford University Press, 1997. The first major examination in English of the acmeist movement, this book examines not only the three
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principle figures (Akhmatova, Gumilyov, and Mandelshtam), but also the minor poets who were their followers. Haight, Amanda, “1956–1966,” in Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 165–97. Haight, a leading Akhmatova scholar, examines the poet’s later years and, in particular, possible inspirations for “Midnight Verses.” Ivanov, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich, “Meetings with Akhmatova,” in Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle, compiled with notes by Konstantin Polivanov, translated from the Russian by Patricia Berozkina, University of Arkansas Press, 1994, pp. 198–214. Ivanov’s acquaintance with the poet lasted from 1958 to her death in 1966. This essay gives a sense of her life late in her career, when “Midnight Verses” was being written. Nayman, Anatoly, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, translated from the Russian by Wendy Rosslyn, Henry Holt, 1989. An old friend recalls his years of association with Akhmatova and with others of their literary circle.
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New Rule Canadian poet Anne Carson first published “New Rule” in the United States in her 2000 collection, Men in the Off Hours. Like many of her other works, this book features juxtapositions of modern people and situations with people and situations from history and ancient literature. While “New Rule” differs from this pattern, which is one of Carson’s hallmarks, the poem contains other aspects commonly associated with Carson’s work, including an unusual structure and imagery that is challenging to decipher. The poem takes place on an ice-covered, New Year’s morning in an unspecified location, when the poet uses the presence of a squirrel, with whom she has an imaginary conversation, to reflect upon a failed relationship from her past. The coldness of the setting reflects the coldness of the poet’s lost love. New Year’s, however, suggests a new beginning. Although much of Carson’s work appears to have autobiographical elements in it, and critics have noted Carson’s own failed relationships, there is no guarantee that Carson is speaking about herself. As a result, it is difficult to determine Carson’s true inspiration for the poem, except to say that her poem explores the pain of breakups. Carson should not be confused with Anne Regina Carson, an American writer. Both were born in 1950, and the former has even lived and worked in the United States, so it is easy to make this mistake. A current copy of “New Rule” can be found in the paperback version of Men in the Off Hours, which was published by Vintage Contemporaries in 2001.
Anne Carson 2000
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relationship poems like “New Rule,” which was included in 2000’s Men in the Off Hours, might have autobiographical significance. In 2001, Carson published The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in Twenty-Nine Tangoes, which won a T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry (2001). In 2002, Carson published If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, her translation of the works of the ancient Greek writer, Sappho. Carson is currently the John MacNaughton Professor of Classics at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Poem Summary Stanza 1
Anne Carson
Author Biography Carson was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on June 21, 1950. One of Carson’s high school teachers knew Greek and offered to teach it to her. Carson gladly accepted and embarked on what has become a lifelong study of the classics (Greek and Roman literature). After earning her doctoral degree from the University of Toronto in 1980, Carson taught classics at Princeton University (1980–1987). During the same time, she published her first book, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (1986), which expanded upon her doctoral dissertation. The book was also the first of many that was modeled after classical Greek literature. Over the next decade, Carson published three more books: Short Talks (1992); Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1995); and Glass, Irony, and God (1995). However, it was the publication of Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998)—a book that re-cast the legend of Hercules in modern time—which brought Carson and her unique style to the attention of many reviewers. This book won a QSPELL poetry award in 1998. Carson lives alone, having been divorced since 1980. Because of this, some critics speculate that
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“New Rule” starts by setting the scene. It is: “A New Year’s white morning of hard new ice.” The fact that the ice is new means that it has probably just arrived, perhaps through an ice storm. Right away, the reader knows that the action of the poem is taking place in winter and probably in a northern climate. The fact that the poet defines the ice as “hard” probably has some significance, since this is a statement of the obvious. In poetry, every word counts, and to make a good poem the poet must ruthlessly trim any unnecessary words. It could be that the poet just wants to help the reader visualize the setting. However, at this point, the reader cannot tell for sure. As the poem progresses to the next line, the setting gets more specific. Now, with the discussion of “frozen branches,” it is clear that the poet is, in fact, witnessing the aftermath of an ice storm, which has coated a tree with ice. High up on this tree, the poet sees “a squirrel jump and skid.” At this point, the squirrel is merely a woodland creature that has had the misfortune to be stuck on a frozen, slippery tree. However, with the third line, the poem becomes more fantastical, as the poet begins an imaginary conversation with the squirrel: “Is this scary? he seemed to say and glanced”— the line stops here, in mid-sentence, running over into the next stanza. The reader can only assume that the squirrel’s imaginary thoughts are in regards to his precarious situation in the tree. Since the poet is giving the squirrel an imaginary voice in the poem, she is personifying it, which may mean that she wishes to give the squirrel greater significance. Personification is a technique whereby poets give inanimate or non-human objects human qualities— in this case, the squirrel is given the ability to have a conversation.
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Stanza 2 The first line of stanza 2 continues the previous line: “down at me, clutching his branch as it bobbed.” When a line of verse runs over from one line to the next, either within or between stanzas, it is known as a run-on-line. Poets use this technique for many reasons. By running the text over into the next line, the poem moves faster, since punctuation marks at the end of the line—such as those found at the end of the first two lines of the first stanza—inevitably cause the reader to pause. At this early part of the poem, it does appear that Carson is using the run-on-lines to make the poem read faster. The poem moved slowly in the beginning, before she started talking to the squirrel. Now that the imaginary conversation has started, the poem is picking up speed. Besides the increase in speed, Carson is also emphasizing the idea of instability. The squirrel is “clutching his branch,” which is bobbing in the wind. The slippery branch has become an unsafe place for the squirrel, which could fall if it is not careful. The next line hints at this possibility, saying that the branch is bobbing “in stiff recoil.” Recoiling is a defensive move, so the poet is saying that the branch views the squirrel’s presence on the branch as an attack and may buck him off. This depiction of the branch’s movement as a human-like reaction is another use of personification. The poet has the squirrel finish his imaginary thought train from the previous stanza, when the squirrel said “Is this scary?” Now, the squirrel says: “or is it just that everything sounds wrong today?” Once again, at this point, the reader does not know if the poet is referring to the sound of the ice-covered branches, or if there is something else that sounds wrong. In any case, the next line mentions “The branches”—this line follows the same pattern as before and runs over into the next stanza.
Stanza 3 The first line of stanza 3 continues the previous line: “clinked.” This abrupt, one-word line finishes the poet’s description of the branches by using a technique known as onomatopoeia—the use of words whose sound expresses their meanings. In other words, when something “clinks,” like the icecovered branches in the poem, it literally makes a clinking sound. Of course, in the human world, glasses also “clink” when they are tapped together in a toast, as when two lovers toast each other with wine or champagne glasses. One could venture a guess at this point that the poem has something to do with romance, but there is not enough evidence
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yet to make a definite conclusion. In the next line, the poet notes that the squirrel “wiped his small cold lips with one hand.” Since the squirrel has just recently survived his fearful sliding ordeal without falling or getting bounced off the branch, he stops to wipe his lips. This is another sign of personification, because one usually discusses a squirrel as having a mouth, not lips, which are normally associated with humans. Even the gesture of wiping one’s lips has human connotations. When people have been through a frightful ordeal, they may wipe their lips as a nervous gesture. However, going back to the idea of love, lips are also used in the human world to depict romance. Humans kiss on the lips and love is often represented visually by a set of lips pressed into a kiss print. At this point in the poem, the reader can point to an increasing number of clues that suggest the poet may be talking about romance, yet there is still not enough evidence to make a definite conclusion. Returning to the idea that the squirrel is afraid, the concept of fear is carried over to the next line. Here, the poet gives her first imaginary response to the squirrel: “Do you fear the same things as.” Like the end lines of the last two stanzas, this line runs over to the next stanza.
Stanza 4 The first line of stanza 4 continues the previous line: “I fear? I countered, looking up.” The way that Carson chooses to break this sentence between the two stanzas seems to be deliberate. Although the entire sentence taken together forms a question to the squirrel about whether or not the animal is afraid of the same things as the poet, there seems to be a deeper meaning in this first line. Similar to the last stanza, where “clinked” was set off totally on its own to emphasize the sound of the word, this stanza uses a question mark to set off the first two words as its own question: “I fear?” The poet seems to be asking herself, not the squirrel, if she is still afraid of something. In response to this, the poet notes that the squirrel is on the move again, since the tree branch is moving: “His empire of branches slid against the air.” The use of the word “empire” places the squirrel in a position of power, since only those in power have empires. However, this empire, the domain of branches that the squirrel normally has no problem navigating, is unstable due to its slippery covering of ice. Even when the branch moves through the air, Carson says that it seems to slide, further underscoring the notion of instability. At this point, the poet has given readers many references to cold, slippery, unstable objects, so the
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reader might suspect that these images are part of some deeper meaning in the poem. Since the poet is asking herself what she fears, it is logical to assume that she might now answer herself. In fact, this is exactly what she does in the next line: “The night of hooks?” Although she could be speaking literally, it is not likely, given the context of the poem so far. If the poet was contending with actual hooks at night, it would be more like a horror story. Instead, the poet is probably using the negative idea of a “night of hooks,” to express the painful loneliness she feels at night. This interpretation fits in with the rest of the poem, since all of the cold, hard, slippery imagery could suggest loneliness and isolation, which in turn fits the interpretation that this poem may have something to do with romance. Unlike the previous stanzas, this one does not end on a run-on-line, and for good reason. The poet wants to give this line more impact. As a result, she sets it off totally by itself, further underscoring the idea of isolation.
Stanza 5 She also isolates the next line: “The man blade left open on the stair?” This line may be confusing to readers at first. Is Carson talking about an actual folding knife that was left open on the stairs? If so, why is she afraid of it? She lists it as one of the two things, other than the “night of hooks,” that she fears. Once again, since this poem does not belong to the horror genre, it is unlikely that the poet is afraid of being stabbed by a knife. Instead, the poet is probably talking about an electric razor, a type of circular “blade” that many men use for shaving. This interpretation makes sense when one looks at the remaining two lines of the stanza: “Not enough spin on it, said my true love / when he left in our fifth year.” An electric razor has spinning blades. Knowing this, one can envision the image that Carson is trying to create. The poet’s boyfriend or husband left her after five years. On his way out, he dropped his electric razor, which fell open on the stairs. The poet might have asked him if he needed it or not, prompting him to tell her that he does not, since the razor has lost most of its spinning power. In other words, it is dying, just as their relationship is dying. An unspecified amount of time later, the woman is afraid of this razor and everything it represents. By this time, the razor is most likely dead. However, the memory of it, and by extension the memory of its owner, still has the power to cut her. This is why the poet refers to the razor as a “man blade”—an odd designation for an electric razor.
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Stanza 6 At this point, readers can see without a doubt that the poet has been struggling with a bad breakup after a relationship that lasted five years, and this is why she has engaged in the imaginary conversation with the squirrel. All of the imagery of death and isolation fits the mood of the poet. She is attempting to bury her past once and for all and move on with her life. To this end, the poet now comes out of her imaginary conversation. The first two lines of this stanza read: “The squirrel bounced down a branch / and caught a peg of tears.” Dealing with one’s past is not easy, so, like the squirrel, the poet feels “bounced” around. The fact that the poet describes the squirrel’s branch as “a peg of tears” is also very telling. Visually, it is a powerful image, because when water droplets freeze on a branch, they can indeed make tear-shaped structures. However, this image is even more powerful because the poet is living vicariously through the tree; she is using the tree to help her shed her last emotional tears from her broken relationship. The last line states: “The way to hold on is”—and carries over into the final stanza in another run-on-line.
Stanza 7 The three lines of the last stanza finish the sentence from the previous line: “afterwords / so / clear.” In other words, now that the poet has successfully gotten over her past, the key to surviving her future, the way to “hold on,” is clear to her. The fact that the poet is coming to these conclusions on New Year’s morning is very significant, since many people traditionally begin the new calendar year by making a New Year’s resolution, or rule, for themselves. For the poet, this “new rule,” as the title indicates, is to seek happiness again, perhaps in love. She is casting off the hard crust of her isolation, just as the ice-covered tree will cast off its layer of ice once the sun begins to melt it.
Themes Relationships Although it is not totally clear until more than halfway through the poem, the poet is coming to terms with a relationship that has ended badly. Her boyfriend or husband has left her “in our fifth year,” but it is clear that she still has feelings for him, since she refers to him as “my true love.” One assumes that, since the female poet refers to a “night of hooks,” she is painfully alone. She is also re-
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living the death of her relationship, as the dying electric razor, or “man blade” signifies. The poem becomes a process by which the poet confronts her feelings about her lost love and her loneliness: “Do you fear the same things as / I fear?”; works through these emotions—the “peg of tears” at the end of the poem depicts the poet’s final tears shed for her lost love; and moves on with her life: “The way to hold on is / afterwords / so / clear.” To the poet at the end of the poem, the answer to her loneliness and despair is now as clear as the ice on the tree.
Seeking Guidance from Nature This revelation does not come from the poet alone. She first begins thinking about the “hard” quality of her breakup when she notices the “hard new ice” outside. Already, nature is providing the setting within which the poet will confront her past. Nature’s role increases with the introduction of the squirrel, which becomes the poet’s guide for working through her past. As the squirrel makes its way precariously down the tree, “clutching his branch,” the poet sees in the squirrel’s actions her own life and troubled past. With the squirrel as guide, the poet begins her own precarious journey down the path of her memory. When the squirrel falls off its branch and catches another one, the poet sees her own ability to jump from one branch—her old relationship—to a new one. Without the natural setting and the example from the squirrel, the poet might not have made this connection.
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Topics for Further Study • Discuss the origin and history of New Year’s resolutions, including the countries or regions that still subscribe to this tradition and any statistics regarding how many people actually keep their resolutions. • Choose one of your own New Year’s resolutions that you currently have or have had in the past. Write a short poem that depicts this resolution. • Writers often use the coldness of winter to signify a death of some kind, as Carson does in “New Rule.” Find another poem from any point in history that uses winter in this way, and compare it to Carson’s poem. • Research the worst ice storms in the United States and Canada in the last two hundred years. Plot them on a time line and write a small description for each one of them that gives the date, location, and severity of the storm. Also, write a small report on how an ice storm is created.
Starting Over Nature alone is not enough to help the poet move on with her life. The timing of her revelation is crucial, too. She addresses the problems of her past on New Year’s Day. Anything that represents the beginning of a cycle, such as New Year’s Day, has traditionally been associated with starting over. One could just as easily attach the same significance arbitrarily to any other day of the year. The poet could have decided to move on with her life on May 25 or November 7. Yet, there is a reason why New Year’s Day seems appropriate to the poet, and to so many others. Human lives are lived in cycles. Each human goes through a life cycle from birth to death. This natural cycle contains smaller cycles, such as the year, which is divided into four seasons in most places. In addition, most humans instinctively organize their lives to fit this natural pattern of cycles. For example, many people mark the passing of time in their life by their birth years. Birthdates may be celebrated annually, often with great fanfare. The same is true for cal-
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endar years. Many humans celebrate New Year’s Eve as the close of one year, before beginning another. With New Year’s Day especially, this new beginning is often marked by a promise, or resolution, to oneself to make a change. Sometimes this change is physical, such as going on a diet or getting more exercise. In the case of the poet, however, the change is emotional. She has been seeking a “way to hold on.” Now, at the beginning of a new cycle, after working through the pain of her lost relationship, she has discovered a new path to lead her to happiness.
Style Personification In order to get through her emotional ordeal, the poet attaches special significance to a squirrel, with which she has an imaginary conversation. The
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ability to talk is a human quality, so when Carson gives this quality to the squirrel, even in an imaginary sense, she is personifying it. This idea is important to understanding the poem. The poet’s boyfriend or husband is gone, so she seeks out the guidance of another male figure to take his place and give her closure. However, she is alone, and there are no human men, so the squirrel fills the role of the male. The fact that Carson is doing this becomes abundantly clear when one notes the different ways that she refers to the squirrel throughout the poem. When the squirrel first begins his imaginary conversation with the poet, the poet refers to it as a male: “he seemed to say.” This continues throughout most of the poem, as the squirrel is referred to by “he” or “his.” Normally, when people refer to a squirrel or other small animal, they do so in a gender-neutral way, saying “it.” By the end of the poem, Carson herself is also referring to the animal as “The squirrel,” in a gender-neutral way. The change is important. Now that the squirrel has served its personified purpose and helped her realize the pain she needs to address, the poet returns the squirrel to the world of animals, and it becomes an “it” once again.
Imagery The imagery in this poem is striking and helps to communicate a lot of information in a small amount of space. The economical use of words to create powerful imagery is one of poetry’s hallmarks, and this economy is evident from the first stanza. Carson uses three lines to establish many facts: it is New Year’s morning after an ice storm; the action takes place in a northern climate; the new ice is “hard,” setting up a hint about the poet’s mood that will pay off later; a squirrel is having trouble negotiating the higher portion of an icecovered tree; and the poet is starting up an imaginary conversation with this squirrel. Of course, when described this way, the composite image becomes bland and lifeless, because it is too straightforward and lacks Carson’s artful phrasing. This long-winded description also does not make the reader work to understand the significance of the image. Besides economy of phrasing, the power of Carson’s imagery is derived from the poet’s ability to depict an image fully enough to capture the reader’s attention, while leaving something to the reader’s imagination and power of deductive reasoning. She sets up little clues, like the many references to cold and slippery things, to underscore the idea of dead relationships and unstable emotions, but does not come right out and say that her
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relationship is dead or that she is working through her chaotic, suppressed emotions. One image—“The man blade left open on the stair”—is particularly brilliant in the way it makes its readers work. When one first reads the phrase, “man blade,” it is tempting to think about a knife. However, this interpretation does not make sense when viewed against the next line: “Not enough spin on it, said my true love,” since knife blades are not usually associated with spinning. However, if one thinks about a type of blade that a man tends to use, the idea of a razor emerges. Since the poet has talked about “spin,” the blade must be circular. What type of razor uses a circular blade? An electric razor. There is a reason why Carson makes her readers work hard to decipher this image; the payoff is worth it. Any reader who has gone through a breakup, regardless of whether it was from a minor relationship or a marriage, can relate to the pain of personal items that are left behind. These personal items, like the razor in the poem, can be a constant reminder of the failed relationship. Now, Carson could have written these lines differently, telling her readers outright that she is talking about a discarded electric razor. However, this would take away the power of the lines, which evoke a complex image by using a few words to tap into the shared experience of most readers.
Historical Context The Y2K Bug Carson published Men in the Off Hours early in 2000. New Year’s Day of that year, January 1, 2000, was a monumental event in human history. Actually, it was a monumental non-event. For several years before the clock ticked over to 2000, scientists and computer programmers warned the world of the potential madness and mayhem that could be caused by the Year 2000 bug, commonly known as Y2K. The problem stemmed from the technological confusion that many computers were expected to experience when trying to read the year 2000 in their coding. This problem was initially created in the 1950s, when the first computer data was stored on cardboard punch cards. Because space on these cards was limited, and since dates were used repeatedly in many computer programs, programmers made the decision to limit the year date to two digits, with the first two digits of the year implied (For example, 1957 was recorded as 57.) This practice continued into the 1990s, long
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after computer storage space, or memory, became cheap and plentiful. The problems started to surface in the early 1990s, when some computers began trying to process year 2000 dates. In some cases, the computers interpreted the date as 1900 and used this faulty information in their calculations. In others, the computers malfunctioned or shut down. With help from the mass media, this problem was hyped up, and some people thought that the world might undergo a technological armageddon. The business world spent billions of dollars attempting to make their computers Y2Kcompliant, some people moved their families to self-sufficient farms, and others simply made the decision to cancel New Year’s plans and stay home. In the end, however, New Year’s Day 2000 went off without a hitch.
Meteorological Disasters and the Environment While the Y2K Bug did very little damage in January 2000, the United States experienced one of its worst ice storms in recent history. The storm took place in January in the southeastern region of the United States, closing hundreds of roads from Georgia to North Carolina. In addition, more than half a million homes lost power. This ice storm was one of many weather disasters that had taken place in the world in recent years. In 1998 alone, the United States experienced a record seven disasters that caused more than one billion dollars of damage each. These included an ice storm in the northeastern United States in January, tornadoes and flooding in the southeast in the winter and spring, severe hail storms in Minnesota in May, a drought and heat wave in the south in summer, Hurricane Bonnie in August, Hurricane Georges in September, and massive flooding in Texas from October to November. Weather occurrences like these have received an increased amount of press lately, since some scientists believe that the repeated destruction of Earth’s environment may be playing havoc with Earth’s weather systems. The biggest fear of many scientists is that the increase in atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide may cause a global warming, which could melt the polar ice caps, induce massive coastal flooding, and cause other radical, meteorological changes. However, other scientists question whether or not there is sufficient cause for such concern.
The Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal Even the prospect of global warming paled in comparison to the media spectacle that surrounded
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the affair between President William Jefferson Clinton and Monica Lewinsky at the turn of the last century. The affair came to light during the investigation of the so-called Whitewater case—the investigation into Clinton’s Arkansas business dealings—which independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, had been working on since 1994. At the same time, Clinton was the defendant in another case, the sexual harassment suit filed against him by Paula Jones, a former Clinton staff member. During the Jones case in January 1998, both Clinton and Lewinsky denied their affair. When Starr produced evidence of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and granted Lewinsky immunity from perjury, however, she agreed to testify before the grand jury. Clinton also testified, then gave a public announcement on television admitting the affair and asking for forgiveness. Ultimately, Starr pushed for impeachment and the case was sent to the House of Representatives, where Clinton became only the second president—after Andrew Johnson—to be impeached. He was impeached on two counts, perjury and obstruction of justice. However, in 1999, the Senate acquitted Clinton on both counts.
Critical Overview In the short time since Carson’s Men in the Off Hours has been published, most critics have praised it. In a review of the book for Booklist, Donna Seaman calls Carson, “brilliant and irrepressible.” In his review of the book for The Kenyon Review, David Baker calls Carson “Canada’s most progressive poet in many decades. She is like a performance artist on paper, with that kind of adventurous chutzpah, as hyper as she is brilliant.” Ann K. van Buren of Library Journal calls the book “a cryptic narrative written in a flourishing language that invites the reader to start decoding.” This cryptic quality, which requires Carson’s readers to dig into her poems to find their meaning, is one of the poet’s many hallmarks. Steven Marks says, in his entry on Carson for the Dictionary of Literary Biography: “Movement toward meaning that partially reveals and then hides itself is the intellectual, and visceral, pleasure of her poetry.” Ultimately, most reviewers, like Barbara Hoffert in Library Journal, compare this book to Carson’s other works. Hoffert says, the book “exhibits the same intellectual rigor, polished verse, and depth of knowledge of her previous efforts.” Likewise, the Publishers Weekly reviewer says: “Carson’s
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ing throughout the work, like a rolling snowball.” Pettingell identifies two subtexts that she says run throughout the work, including “the pain of loss.” Within this discussion, Pettingell offers a brief line about “New Rule”: “the poet watches a squirrel trying to negotiate an ice-covered branch while, at the same time, she recalls her desertion by a longtime lover.” However, even though most critics do not analyze “New Rule” in detail, some discuss aspects found in much of Carson’s poetry, including “New Rule.” Marks says, “There is a strong autobiographical element in many of her poems.” Specifically, Marks notes the following: “Carson, as evidenced in her poems, has also had her share of failed romantic relationships.” However, as Marks says, one should be cautious about reading too much autobiography into most of Carson’s poems, because this element “cannot be entirely trusted for accuracy.”
A snowy winter in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with St. James Cathedral in the background
demanding style has been among the decade’s most intriguing: critics with little else in common look forward to her inimitable and argumentative poems.” When most critics speak about Carson’s challenging style and cryptic qualities, they are referring to the poet’s tendency to mix classical allusions such as Greek epics with modern-day characters and situations. This is the poet’s most widely known hallmark. As a whole, Men in the Off Hours follows this eclectic, historical pattern as well. Baker says, “Anne Carson has cranked up Canada’s largest satellite dish to play hundreds of channels at once— from Greek classics to hip comedy, Hollywood noir to self-help.” How-ever, while “New Rule” is included among many other poems that make allusions to characters and situations from both modern and ancient history, this particular poem does not share these allusions. This may be one reason why the majority of critics do not mention the poem in their reviews. In fact, one of the few critics who does mention it talks about it mainly within the context of the book as a whole. In her review of the book for The New Leader, Phoebe Pettingell says: “Carson’s latest compilation should be read as a whole, for images and concepts accumulate mean-
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While most critics favor Carson’s unusual approach to poetry, she is not universally loved, as William Logan’s New Criterion review indicates. Logan says, “The oddity of Anne Carson’s poems conceals every virtue except their originality and exposes every flaw except their contempt.” Logan says that “Carson is a great believer in blather,” and believes that “she doesn’t have many natural poetic gifts, and sometimes seems to have no gifts at all.”
Criticism Ryan D. Poquette Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette discusses the unique structure of Carson’s work and its effects on the reader. Poetry is a versatile art. Depending upon the type of poetry, poets can use a very rigid structure, a very fluid structure, or something in between. Both extremes have their advantages and disadvantages. Many traditional poets consider formal structures of poetry a challenge to the poet, since everybody is playing by the same rules, and so must strive to be creative within those rules. On the other hand, poets can achieve very artful effects with their poetry by employing unusual structures. Much of Carson’s poetry in Men in the Off Hours falls into the latter category, including “New Rule.” These unusual structures have earned Carson more than one nod
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from critics such as a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who notes Carson’s “harsh, carved lines.” However, Carson uses this structure for a very specific reason in “New Rule,” which is to underscore the struggle that the woman in the poem is having over her failed relationship. When readers examine the poem’s basic structure, they can see that it contains seven stanzas, each of which consists of three lines. This part of the structure is uniform, but the rest of the poem appears to fluctuate wildly. Each stanza is composed of both long and short sentences, which appear at first glance to be thrown together haphazardly. In addition, some sentences are played out over one or more run-onlines while other sentences are self-contained on individual lines. Could William Logan of the New Criterion be right? Are the ideas in the poem “more interesting than the poems,” as Logan believes? Or is this seemingly chaotic structure part of what David Baker of the Kenyon Review calls Carson’s “adventurous chutzpah?” Upon closer examination of “New Rule,” it appears to be the latter; there is a definite method to Carson’s seeming madness. This method can be revealed by examining the width of the stanzas, which changes throughout the poem. While this is yet another example of fluctuations in the poem, these fluctuations follow a set pattern—the average length of the lines steadily gets shorter. The first stanza looks like this: A New Year’s white morning of hard new ice. High on the frozen branches I saw a squirrel jump and skid. Is this scary? he seemed to say and glanced
From this point on, the width of the stanzas steadily decreases, until the poem reaches the final stanza, which looks like this: afterwords so clear
This is a dramatic and uniform reduction, but what does it mean? When poets use a pattern such as the diminishing overall stanza width, they generally do so deliberately to achieve one or more effects. In this case, Carson is forcing her readers to speed up. Just as the run-on-lines cause people to read through the poem faster, so do the shorter lengths of the stanzas. This increase in speed mimics the squirrel’s movement down the tree. In the beginning, the squirrel is high on the tree, jumping and skidding on the branches. However, as the poem progresses, the branches come alive, bobbing, sliding “against the air,” and otherwise reacting to the squirrel’s movements, causing the
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The stanzas jut out in the middle and recede in the beginning and end of the stanza, just as a tree-branch tip juts out of a tree.”
animal to fall—“The squirrel bounced down”—and hang onto a branch lower in the tree. This descending structure forces the speaker herself to let go and fall. In the beginning, the woman does not state outright what is bothering her. At the top of the poem, the top level of her consciousness, she is on stable ground. She has probably tried not thinking about her past relationship for a while and has buried the breakup deep in her memory. This allows her to live her life in a stable fashion. She is just like the squirrel, who is initially stable at the top of the tree, before the poem begins and the squirrel tries to move. When the poet begins her imaginary conversation with the squirrel, she jumps around the topic of her past, just as the squirrel jumps and skids on the branches. She has the squirrel seem to say “Is this scary?” when she is the one who must face her fears. Slowly, through her imaginary conversation with the squirrel, the woman descends through her own consciousness and faces the pain of her past, while the squirrel descends through the tree and faces the danger of falling. Eventually, the poet reaches the truth of her problem, which she states outright: “my true love / when he left in our fifth year.” At this point, she dismisses the squirrel from the conversation and reaches her decision to move on with her life. One more aspect of the poem’s structure draws attention to itself. Besides diminishing in width, most of the stanzas in the poem also follow another pattern, which one can see in the first stanza. Here, the first line is one of the longest in the poem. This is followed by a line that is even longer than the first line, which is then followed by a line that is slightly shorter than the first line. If each line of this stanza is assigned a length of short, long, or medium, then the line pattern would read as follows—medium / long / short. This same pattern is evident everywhere except in the last two stanzas.
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Once again, when poets use a repeating pattern like this, it is generally done so deliberately to achieve one or more effects. In this case, Carson is using this medium / long / short pattern to shape the stanzas like tree branches. To visualize this better, one can think of this pattern more simply, as in / out / in. The stanzas jut out in the middle and recede in the beginning and end of the stanza, just as a treebranch tip juts out of a tree. This odd structure makes sense, given the other structural aspects of the poem. The poem has wide stanzas at the tip, like the wide top of some trees. At the bottom, the last stanza is very thin in comparison, like a tree trunk. Throughout the poem, the squirrel descends the tree, the poet goes deep inside her consciousness, and, through the innovative structure, the reader is brought along for the ride. In the last stanza, at the end of the poet’s journey into her consciousness, at the end of her conversation with the squirrel, at the end of the squirrel’s journey to the bottom of the tree, at the trunk of the tree itself, the poet and reader reach the resolution point—where everything becomes “clear.” She has used the imaginary conversation with the squirrel as a mental crutch to take her deep inside her consciousness and get her thinking about her past. She has taken the plunge, fallen into her past, and reached the bottom. Now, she has literally reached the root of her problem and can fall no longer. She must put her bad relationship to rest and make a “new rule,” a resolution to live life anew. In fact, it is curious to note that Carson spells the first line in the last stanza, “afterwords,” not “afterwards,” as the context of the poem would suggest. “Afterwards” means something that takes place at a later time, or subsequently. An “afterword,” on the other hand, is an epilogue, a concluding section that finishes off a literary work, a play, or a work of music. If one were to replace the word “afterwords” with “epilogues,” the multi-line sentence would read as follows: “The way to hold on is / epilogues / so / clear.” In the poem’s context, this does not make sense. Instead, it appears that Carson is punning off of “afterwords.” She has just gone through an imaginary conversation with a squirrel, which has helped her to clarify and work through the pain from her broken relationship. If one inserts a space in between “after” and “words,” then the sentence reads: “The way to hold on is / after words / so clear.” In other words, after her imaginary dialogue with the squirrel, the path leading out of her pain is now clear. Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on “New Rule,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
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Sheri E. Metzger Metzger teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico and is an adjunct professor in the university honors program. Metzger is also a professional writer and the author of several reference texts on literature. In this essay, Metzger discusses Carson’s poem and her decision to recycle ideas and words from an earlier poem into this work. “New Rule” is a lament for lost love. This is a topic that Carson has dealt with before in her earlier poetry and, indeed, Carson even repeats lines from her 1995 poem, “The Glass House” in “New Rule.” “New Rule” uses a short seven stanzas of verse to capture the narrator’s grief at losing her love. The poem explores the inhuman pain at such a loss, the narrator’s awareness of what has been lost, and her ultimate understanding that her life has been inexorably changed. These topics are also true of her earlier 1995 poem, but while Carson does choose to draw upon a previously published poem, there is no sense of repetition involved in “New Rule.” Carson effectively retranslates language into new meanings, and in doing so, she demonstrates the versatility of language in her poems. “New Rule” opens with the sense of coldness and the image of winter. There is the “hard new ice” of winter’s storm, against which Carson has added a daring squirrel, who jumps and skids along the icy branches. The squirrel moves without hesitation, as the narrator is no longer capable of doing. Instead, the poem’s narrator projects her own fears onto the squirrel, as she asks, “Is this scary?” Her own life has become scary, and it is inconceivable that other living things can move without fear. A few lines later, the narrator asks, “Do you fear the same things as / I fear?” For the narrator, the fear is “the night of hooks,” the memories that come in the darkness of night to drag her back into some grief. Like metal hooks, with their cold steel that chills, these hooks of memory are sharp. They pierce her mind, stirring a powerful grief in her heart for what has been lost. Early in the poem, it is not clear what memories the narrator fears. However, the images of winter, the cold frozen earth, represent death, the death of an earlier period of growth and life. For the narrator, it is the death of love captured in winter’s frozen landscape. The squirrel is alone, isolated as the narrator is isolated, a single being against the frozen New Year’s morning. It is not until the fifth stanza that the narrator finally provides evidence of what it is she fears, when the reader learns that the narrator is recovering from the loss of her lover.
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In the fifth stanza of “New Rule,” Carson finally mentions the man who has left her. He tells the narrator that he is leaving because their relationship lacked something—“Not enough spin on it,” he tells her. There was not enough excitement, as he leaves “in our fifth year.” In the narrator’s grief at her loss, she notes the squirrel’s “cold lips.” Were her lover’s lips equally cold? Or is it the narrator’s lips that have become cold in the absence of her lover? The narrator refers to her lost lover as “my true love.” So, it seems clear that she has ventured forth on a cold New Year’s morning, the representative end of the holiday season and the year, still wrapped in the pain of her loss. The “peg of tears” that the narrator hopes the squirrel will catch acknowledges the loss of her lover and her grief. “The Glass House” captures the narrator’s grief over a lost relationship, in fact the same relationship that is the subject of “New Rule.” In the earlier poem, the narrator’s grief is reflected against other relationships: the relationship between mother and daughter and the relationship of a favorite author (Emily Brontë) and her reader (the narrator), who reads Brontë’s novels, as a way to understand grief and find some small bit of solace. In “The Glass House,” winter is ending; the ice is giving way to spring, while in “New Rule,” the narrator is still in the depth of winter and in the depth of her pain. In the latter poem, Carson refashions her depictions of the winter and changes the meaning of the poem. In the 1995 poem, winter is on the moors, but it is soon to give way to spring, as the “ice has begun to unclench.” In “New Rule,” Carson situates her poem in the darkest days of winter, with only the squirrel to represent a living thing. Adam Phillips suggests that in Carson’s poetry, the narrators “are always discovering something in themselves that doesn’t seem quite human.” In “New Rule,” that something within the narrator is the squirrel, whose actions mirror what the narrator is feeling. The narrator’s mother and favorite author, her foils from “The Glass House,” have been replaced with a squirrel, but still, there is the same urge to find meaning. The narrator continues to look outside herself for answers that are mirrored in others. The continuity between the 1995 poem and the 2000 poem is established, but Carson never resorts to mere repetition to make the poems work. Carson’s conception of originality can be seen in her efforts to rewrite a long poem like “The Glass House” and use it to create a short, fragmented poem like “New Rule.” The second poem still creates new meaning without simply repetition.
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In ‘The Glass House,’ winter is ending; the ice is giving way to spring, while in ‘New Rule,’ the narrator is still in the depth of winter and in the depth of her pain.”
Winter moving into spring, as it does in “The Glass House,” brings with it a hope for the coming season of growth, but the first days of January, as they are depicted in “New Rule” are still some distance from the reprieve of spring. More than just the repetition of icy winter is captured in the “New Rule.” In the 2000 poem, the words, “Not enough spin on it, said my true love / When he left in our fifth year” echo Carson’s earlier poem, “The Glass House,” where, in telling of her painful break-up, the narrator relates that there was “Not enough spin on it, / he said of our five years of love.” Again, the mere repetition of these five words offers very different glimpses into the narrator’s pain at her loss. In the 1995 poem, the narrator relates that upon hearing these words, “I felt my heart snap into two pieces.” In the 2000 poem, the narrator’s attention immediately moves back to the squirrel, but only as he catches “a peg of tears.” The grief is still present, but the images have changed, have been reinterpreted years later against a different background, and the narrator is no longer solely focused on herself; she can now see beyond, even if only to see that a squirrel can catch her tears. To understand how Carson uses language to reinvent poems it is necessary to know something about her other work—her teaching. Although Carson would prefer that her readers know nothing about her personal life, what is known is that she teaches classical Greek and Latin literature at McGill University in Montreal. In her interview with Ken Chen, Carson emphasizes, that she “would prefer to talk about other things than Anne Carson.” Carson points out that readers have no idea what Homer looked like, and so his appearance cannot distract the reader from the work. If readers do not know too much about her personal life, they cannot
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What Do I Read Next? • Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangoes (2001) uses a collection of poems to explore her ambiguous feelings about a troubled and adulterous marriage.
1904–1962 (1994) includes all of the poet’s works, which are arranged and displayed according to the poet’s original directions.
• Carson’s Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1995) examines loss and longing as they relate to both life and love. As in “New Rule,” the book includes invented dialogue between the poet and others. Like most of her other works, these other characters are generally figures from history or mythology.
• The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change (2002), by Paul Andrew Mayewski and Frank White, documents the icecore drilling on the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1998. This experiment has given scientists clues about the history of Earth’s climate over the past 110,000 years, including information about the current fluctuations in climate.
• The unusual, artistic structure of “New Rule” is one of the poem’s strongest features. However, Carson’s structures look conventional compared to some of the fantastic poetic structures of e. e. cummings. E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems
• In Rick Moody’s novel The Ice Storm (1994), several troubled relationships in a small neighborhood in the 1970s come to a head during an ice storm. The book was adapted into a film by the same name in 1997.
be distracted by information about the author that may be extraneous to her poetry. Though it might be tempting to search in Carson’s poems for evidence of her own life, a clear understanding of her poetry best comes from studying the words. However, the information about Carson’s teaching does provide a clue to her poetry, especially in understanding her use of language. About her choice to use certain words, Carson draws from her experience with classical literature. For example, an original Greek or Latin text may be translated into English, but the translation is never, and can never be, exactly the same document as in its original language. When a word is translated from an ancient text, the meaning may be changed, since often there is little or no equivalency between certain words or ideas between languages.
you’re navigating in language, you think of words that way, as small living objects that have to be accounted for.
Carson’s experience of translating from Greek into English and back into Greek again is something that Carson uses in writing poetry. Carson told Chen that Being a translator makes you think about words as objects that you carry around and put down in sentences . . . what the translation does is that it forces you back into the original space of the words, so when
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Every word that Carson chooses is placed in the poem for a specific reason. She chooses to repeat lines, as she has done in the two poems discussed earlier, because with each “translation” of the word, the meaning shifts slightly. Chen observes that Carson’s poems are “an intermingling, not just between rhetorical forms, like poetry and prose, but of present with past, form with content, and four thousand years of history with her own identity.” This intermingling of time is what Carson does when she takes lines from “The Glass House” and reapplies them years later in “New Rule.” The intermingling of form and content is also seen very clearly in “The Glass House” and “New Rule.” In these two poems, Carson uses verse format to change meaning. For example, “The Glass House” is a long narrative poem, and in fact, it reads very much like a novel. There is a continuity to the stanzas, and each divided section of the poem can be read as a verse paragraph. This is not the case with “New Rule,” which is very fragmented. This more recent poem is not linear, not
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chronological in any way. Instead, “New Rule” is disjointed and fragmented. Like Sappho’s recovered pieces of poetry, it sometimes appears as if Carson has lost words. The ease with which readers can approach “The Glass House” is completely missing when they read “New Rule.” The topic is the same; many of the words and phrasing even echo the earlier poem, but Carson reaches back to Sappho for verse format. Sappho also wrote of love and broken hearts, and as Chen suggests, Carson intermingles a four thousand year old past with the present to demonstrate that broken hearts have not changed in their ability to be devastated. What is the “new rule” of the title? Adam Phillips says of Carson that “she writes with a terrible lucidity about these scenes of disentanglement.” The breaking of rules and the breaking of hearts lie at the center of her poem. In Carson’s 1995 book, Plainwater, she says that “the first rule is the love of chance.” Of course, love is based on chance, the chance meeting or the chance word that inspires immediate attraction. Phillips says of rules that they are “a form of love, but a love for an intermediate object. Rules are broken to be made.” These are new rules formed from a lost love. Perhaps the narrator should be as fearless as the squirrel, scampering across the icy branches and oblivious to any danger. The narrator can imitate the squirrel’s fearlessness, ignore the danger, take risks, forget for a moment the loss of her “true love.” Perhaps instead, the “new rule” is to let go. In the poem’s last lines, the narrator laments that “The way to hold is / afterwards / so / clear.” The squirrel shows no fear and never feels the need to hold tight. Did the narrator hold too tight? Did the man leave because the narrator was too afraid? The poem does not provide all the answers. Carson leaves it to each reader to find the meaning of the words. Just as when she translates Homer’s poems or Sappho’s few remaining fragments from Greek into English, the meaning of Carson’s poem may also be translated into something new as each reader brings her/his own experiences to the poem’s words. Source: Sheri E. Metzger, Critical Essay on “New Rule,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
John Robert Colombo In the following essay, Colombo discusses the range of Carson’s readership and the peculiar, postmodern facets of her poetry. “The Canadian writer Anne Carson is among the most interesting of contemporary English-language
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poets.” So wrote Olive Reynolds in the Times Literary Supplement. The front cover of Carson’s book Autobiography of Red offers an encomium from Michael Ondaatje: “Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today.” Carson’s books of prose and poetry are issued by major publishing houses in New York and London; she and her work are profiled and praised in leading newspapers and literary magazines; and she has held a series of academic fellowships and received a number of major literary awards. Yet Carson has received little appreciation in her native Canada. As Richard Teleky wrote in the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1997), “That a writer of Carson’s importance should be almost unknown in her own country attests to the eccentricities of contemporary Canadian literary culture.” The lapse is odd and inexplicable (like much of the poet’s work). Carson was born in Toronto, holds three degrees from the University of Toronto, and since 1988 has been a professor of classics at McGill University in Montreal. She has no Canadian publisher, and it was not until the appearance of Autobiography of Red that the country’s reviewers and critics took notice of her unique achievement. “Anne Carson is the real thing,” Rachel Barney wrote in the National Post, “but just what thing it is hard to say.” Perhaps the best way to discuss the “real thing” is to describe the idiosyncratic books she has published to date. Certainly reviewers and critics delight in doing so. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (1986) is a critical study of Sappho that examines sexual desire, poetry, and the Greek alphabet. Short Talks (1992) is a chapbook collection of prose poems (with a discussion of prepositions as among the world’s “major things”) later included with essays in Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1995). Prose and poetry are also integrated in Glass, Irony, and God: Essays and Poetry (1995). She contributed “The Glass Essay” to the anthology Wild Workshop (1997), which also features other long poems by Kay Adshead and Bridget Meeds. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998) is not a novel but rather a free verse narrative about a winged red monster named Geryon as described by the Greek poet Stesichoros (who introduced the antiheroic mode to literature), reimagined and set in the main in the 1950s. Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Delan (1999), a book of literary criticism, compares and contrasts the ancient Greek poet Simonides and
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Carson shares with Ashbery the technique of the free association of words and phrases to segue the reader from meaning to meaning in the general direction of whatever overall meaning may be present.”
the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, who lived in Paris and wrote in German. Men in the Off Hours (2000) is a relatively straightforward collection of poems. The poems, however, are not straightforward, but clipped and curious. Indeed, they are replete with contemporary and classical references to Lazarus, Catherine Deneuve, Thucydides, and Virginia Woolf, among others. Reading Carson’s writing, whether prose or poetry (or more likely a combination of the two), brings to mind the experience of reading poetry of John Ashbery. Ashbery’s writing has no subject matter per se (it makes no statements ad hoc), but it offers the reader the expression of one poet’s remarkably refined sensibility and seemingly unlimited range of reference. Carson too writes out of her sensibility, but the writing has been made pungent, rather that seasoned, with learning. Her temperament, like Ashbery’s, is decidedly postmodern in the sense that there is no continuity except what is provisionally imposed by the sensibility. Ashbery’s style has been described as “languagebased”; Carson’s is based on commentaries and fragments of information form the past and the present. Ashbery delights in shifts in levels of language and popular references, whereas Carson enjoys displays of erudition. If Ashbery sounds smug, Carson sounds cocky. An instance of her tone is her amusing statement about the Greek poet Stesichoros: “He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” The sentence is meaningless, but it is not senseless; it makes one giggle along with the poet. An instance of her showy use of
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scholarly practice is writing appendixes A, B, and C to a narrative poem then perversely placing them before rather than after the narrative itself. Carson shares with Ashbery the technique of the free association of words and phrases to segue the reader from meaning to meaning in the general direction of whatever overall meaning may be present. In the introduction to “Short Talks,” included in Plainwater, she writes Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else . . . You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.
The passage makes incremental sense, but whether the sense of it adds up to more than a sensitivity to suggestive phrases is anyone’s guess. Many of her effects are subtle indeed. Here is a couplet from “One Man Town” from the same collection: It’s Magritte weather today said Max. Ernst knocking his head on a boulder.
What is surprising about those lines is the period that unexpectedly appears following the painter’s given name, Max. Who is Max? Oh, Max Ernst the artist. Is his full name Maxwell? The reader is sidetracked, buffaloed. The poet is quick on the uptake. Here are sentences from the introduction to “The Anthropology of Water” from Plainwater: Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried.
Anne Carson is certain to have an influence on how academic poets write, read, and teach poetry in the future throughout the English-speaking world (and even in Canada). It is hard to imagine that there exists a wide public for her writing, yet her erudition, imagination, spirited nature, and cultural sensitivities guarantee her an elite reading public. One wonders what literary delight she will dream up next. Source: John Robert Colombo, “Carson, Anne,” in Contemporary Poets, 7th ed., edited by Thomas Riggs, St. James Press, 2001, pp. 152–53.
Sources Baker, David, Review of Men in the Off Hours, in the Kenyon Review, Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring 2002, pp. 150–67.
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Carson, Anne, “The Glass Essay,” in Glass, Irony and God, New Directions, 1995. —, “New Rule,” in Men in the Off Hours, Vintage Contemporaries, 2001, p. 12. Chen, Ken, “Interview with Anne Carson,” in Satellite, Vol. 1, Issue 1, October 1999. Available online at http://www .readsatellite.com/culture/1.3/carson.chen.1.3.1.htm (last accessed January 2003). Hoffert, Barbara, Review of Men in the Off Hours, in Library Journal, Vol. 126, No. 7, April 15, 2001, p. 102. Logan, William, “The Way of All Flesh,” in the New Criterion, Vol. 18, No. 10, June 2000, pp. 63–70. Marks, Steven, “Anne Carson,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 193, American Poets Since World War II, Gale, 1998, pp. 46–53. Pettingell, Phoebe, Review of Men in the Off Hours, in the New Leader, Vol. 83, No. 1, March–April 2000, pp. 34–35. Phillips, Adam, “Fickle Contracts: The Poetry of Anne Carson,” in Raritan, Vol. 16, No. 2, Fall 1996, pp. 112–19. Review of Men in the Off Hours, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 247, No. 6, February 7, 2000, p. 70. Seaman, Donna, Review of Men in the Off Hours, in Booklist, Vol. 96, No. 13, March 1, 2000, p. 1190. Van Buren, Ann K., Review of Men in the Off Hours, in Library Journal, Vol. 125, No. 3, February 15, 2000, p. 168.
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Further Reading Abley, Mark, The Ice Storm: An Historic Record in Photographs of January 1998, McClelland & Stewart, 1999. In the poem, Carson depicts an ice-covered tree, the product of an ice storm. In this book, Abley collects more than two hundred photographs of the massive ice storm that hit the United States and Canada in 1998. Abley provides textual description for the photos, which he collected from fifty-four photographers and nine newspapers. Gray, John, Mars and Venus Starting Over: A Practical Guide for Finding Love Again after a Painful Breakup, Divorce, or the Loss of a Loved One, HarperCollins, 1998. Gray, the bestselling author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, continues his exploration into the different thought and emotional processes of men and women. In this book, however, Gray focuses on how both men and women can move on after they have lost someone through a breakup, divorce, or death. Kallen, Stuart A., ed., 1990s, America’s Decades, Greenhaven Press, 2000. Although Carson is Canadian by birth, she has spent a significant portion of her life in the United States. This book examines the major cultural trends of the 1990s in America, including family and education; gender and race conflicts; and technology, medicine, and the environment. Long, Kim, Squirrels: A Wildlife Handbook, Johnson Books, 1995. This illustrated handbook examines the facts and folklore of squirrels, including their behavioral traits, the environments in which they are found, and their place in ancient mythology.
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Song of Reasons Robert Pinsky 1984
Readers unfamiliar with Robert Pinsky’s poetry may find his “Song of Reasons” a bit daunting because of its rambling prose, mixture of subjects, and historical allusions to remote people, places, and events. Yet this poem is very typical of Pinsky’s style and themes and, more importantly, very typical of what has made him one of the most renowned poets of latter twentieth- and early twenty-first-century American poetry—among scholars and fellow poets, at least. That said, his work should still be considered accessible to anyone interested in pursuing it, and this poem is a good place to start. One first needs to understand that what it is about is more abstract than concrete and that the clue to its overall theme is in the title. The poem is essentially about looking for the reasons that things are the way they are. Whether it is why an old song makes listeners both sad and happy, why an ancient Jewish noble family was allowed privileges by Christians at Notre Dame, or why Pinsky’s own daughter finds such comfort in reading the daily newspaper’s “Question Man” column, each of these seemingly unconnected events must have a reason for occurring, but perhaps not one that can be pinned down. The challenge in reading “Song of Reasons” is to determine if the poet’s “song” really offers any “reasons,” and, if so, what they are. This is a clever, somber, and provocative work all at once, with its odd parts held together by the development of one thing leading into another, making an apparent disjointed poem cohe-
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sive after all. “Song of Reasons” is included in Pinsky’s The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966–1996, published in 1996.
Author Biography Robert Pinsky was born on October 20, 1940, in Long Branch, New Jersey, a former resort town along the Atlantic coast whose slow decay would figure into much of Pinsky’s autobiographical poetry later on. He grew up in what he terms a “nominally orthodox” Jewish family, well respected in the community, but with as many secular activities as religious ones. Both parents attended synagogue only on high holy days. As the oldest son, Pinsky was required to go to synagogue every Saturday to attend a three-hour orthodox service in which he listened to the elders chant prayers in Hebrew, a language he did not understand. This experience, too, would figure into his future work as a poet. In 1961, at the age of twenty-one, Pinsky married Ellen Jane Bailey. The following year, he received his undergraduate degree in English from Rutgers University. He enrolled for graduate studies shortly afterwards at Stanford University, earning his Ph.D. in 1966. In the mid and late 1960s, he began publishing poems in various prestigious journals, but his first collection, Sadness and Happiness, did not appear until 1975. Since then, Pinsky has published seven books of poems, including The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966–1996, which won the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Pinsky is also noted for his critical work and has published four volumes of criticism, including The Sounds of Poetry, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His 1984 poetry collection History of My Heart, which includes the poem “Song of Reasons,” was chosen for the 1984 William Carlos Williams Prize awarded by the Poetry Society of America. His most recent works include the poetry collection Jersey Rain, published in 2000, and a new volume of critical essays, Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry, published in 2002. Perhaps one of Pinsky’s greatest honors was being selected U.S. Poet Laureate in 1997, a post he held through 2000. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly online journal Slate and teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.
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Poem Summary Lines 1–2 The first word of “Song of Reasons” is a direct tie-in with the title. Opening with the word “Because” implies that the poem may be full of answers and explanations as to why things are as they are, but one does not have to read very far to find that this is not the case. Instead, the first word gets attached to a sudden shift of key in an old Italian repertoire favorite, popular among opera singers. When the pitch in the “little tune” becomes higher, Pinsky claims that “everyone feels / A sad smile beginning,” but who “everyone” is and what role nostalgia plays at the outset of the poem is not clear.
Lines 3–6 The second half of line 3 begins a new sentence, but it starts with the word “Also,” linking it to what has already been said. Apparently, the human reaction evoked by “Come Back to Sorrento” is a “customary” one, but the reason for it is “forgotten” just like the reason that “the Dukes of Levis-Mirepoix,” an old French noble family, are allowed to ride horses into “the Cathedral of Notre Dame.” Even though he has just claimed the reason is forgotten, Pinsky still offers a possible explanation for the noblemen’s privilege: their
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reason for being the way it is. Note that the poet says some reason, suggesting an uncertainty as to what it really is.
Media Adaptations • In 1997, Pinsky presented nine poems as part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s “Autumn Saturday” series. This presentation was part of a digital recording, produced by the series Body Language: An Afternoon of the Arts. Pinsky’s reading lasts approximately one hour. • A video recording, with an introduction by Bill Moyers and a reading by Pinsky, is available from Public Affairs Television, Inc., recorded in 1999. Pinsky is featured on Sounds of Poetry, Vol. 2.
ancestors “killed heretics in Languedoc”—an area of southern France known for its revelry in good food and wine as much as for being the birthplace of troubadour romantic poetry. Getting rid of sinners apparently earned the dukes favor with the Church.
Lines 7–8 Line 7 throws a new twist into the already odd depiction of the dukes, for now “they are somehow Jewish,” which would seem to negate their privileges at Notre Dame, but to offset that, they “claim / Collateral descent from the family of the Virgin Mary.” In other words, they explain their Jewish link to Christianity by saying they share a common ancestor but are descended from a different line.
Lines 9–12 Line 9 begins with the word “And,” and line 10 ends with the word “too,” both implying a connection to what has been said previously. Here, the shift is from the Dukes of Levis-Mirepoix to “the people in magazines and on television” who also have “some reason” for being who they are and looking how they look. Pinsky offers specific examples of how even the most intricate details have a “history” that brought them to where they are today. From the “angle of [the celebrities’] furniture” and “every nuance of their doors” to the “shapes of their eyebrows and shirts,” each feature has a
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Lines 13–14 Line 13 continues the idea of each thing having its own “history / Or purpose” and then describes those purposes as “arcane,” or mysterious, “as the remote Jewishness of those far Dukes,” leading the poem back to the subject of lines 4–8. Perhaps the twists and turns of the poem so far are summed up best in the phrase “great half-crazy tune,” which also lends itself well to the irony that infuses the entire work, including the title. The song of reasons—logic, rationale, explanation, and so forth—is characterized as half-crazy—illogical, nonsensical, and just plain silly. The obvious contradiction here is a strong hint that beginning this poem with the word “Because” was only playful deception because real reasons are hard to come by. One other point to note about line 14 is the use of the word “tune” again, tying Pinsky’s “song” to the “little tune” of “Come Back to Sorrento.” While the latter is described as “little,” the poet calls his own “great.”
Lines 15–19 The next shift in the poem is to Pinsky’s daughter who “has learned to read” and especially enjoys the newspaper’s “The Question Man” column, a person-in-the-street type of article in which normal, everyday people reveal personal favorites or experiences. Typical inane questions concern one’s “Most Romantic Moment,” “Family Hero,” and “Worst Vacation,” but Pinsky also tosses in a topic that most current newspaper editors would likely find offensive or, at least, politically incorrect. Asking for one’s “Favorite Ethnic Group” may not be realistic today, but the subject does connect to the earlier dubious blending of Jewish dukes descended “from the family of the Virgin Mary.” Pinsky’s daughter also enjoys the photographs of the column’s people “next to their answers,” and line 19 ends by emphasizing her pleasure in the simple, routine article: “She likes it.”
Lines 20–21 These two lines present a possible reason that the little girl finds “The Question Man” column so attractive. There is something comforting about finding “exact forms” in an “ordinary” morning, something “indomitable,” or unconquerable, about the charm of expected, routine events, even if it is something as common as “the names and occupa-
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tions” of the people featured in the newspaper. This is another irony in the poem, considering that its motley selection of topics and the blending of them into a stream of quirky connections represent anything but “exact forms.”
Lines 22–23 These lines reinforce the idea of the goodness of simple routine, as Pinsky compares his daughter’s fascination with an uncomplicated news article to a “bedtime story in reverse.” Most children’s stories involve fanciful and fabulous accounts of unusual characters and places, but his daughter is content with the “unfabulous” Question Man, as well as the unfabulous “day that she enters out into,” happy to greet it in her routine manner, “businesslike as a dog / That trots down the street.”
Lines 24–26 The final lines of the poem string together images that glide from one to another like phantasmagoric scenes in a dream. A dog trots down the street, the street becomes “sunny pavement, plane trees . . . a flow of cars” that become “throaty music,” returning the poem to the song allusion that began it. All these images, as the last line claims, are “Like the animal shapes that sing at the gates of sleep”—shapes that come and go, fade in and fade out, with no reason that is readily evident.
Themes Reasons and Nonsense Pinsky chose the title of this poem for a reason, but what is it? Does the “Song of Reasons” really offer any? If not, why not? These questions may seem as jumbled and nonsensical as some readers find the poem itself, but sorting through them leads to the discovery of an important theme in the work— how reasons and nonsense are sometimes hard to distinguish from one another and how they often work together in spite of apparent contradictions. Most writers choose their titles carefully, some trying to make them alluring in order to attract readers and others simply naming a piece after whatever the subject actually is. There is no reason to suspect that Pinsky was any less careful in titling this poem, and its name is sober enough and easy enough to accept as appropriate for what the work is about. But what it is about is not so easy. Themes are not meant to confuse, but to stimulate thought, and “Song of Reasons” is a good
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Topics for Further Study • Choose a popular song that you believe has had a particular impact on listeners for a long time. Explain why the song is so influential and what kind of effect it has on the audience. • Of all the possible noble European families, why do you suppose Pinsky chose the “Dukes of Levis-Mirepoix” to mention in this poem? What is it about their history that may have made them the right or wrong choice? • Is there a particular newspaper column that you read on a regular basis? If so, tell why it is so intriguing and how you often feel after reading it. • Choose one of the purported “reasons” from “Song of Reasons” and discuss how it offers an explanation of something. Could the reason have more than one interpretation and, if so, what are some other possibilities?
stimulator. Take a close look at its supposed reasons, from the obvious to the not so obvious. It begins with the simple premise that a song’s pitch “comes back higher” because of a change in key midway through it. This cause-and-effect sequence is so blatant that it seems hardly worth noting. In the next scenario, a family of noble dukes “are permitted to ride horseback / Into the Cathedral of Notre Dame” because they “killed heretics in Languedoc seven centuries ago.” This reason is a bit murkier and made even more so by the dukes’ claim to be “somewhat Jewish,” a reason, in those days, that they would not be in Notre Dame. Next, “the people in magazines and on television” also have reasons for being the way they are, but this time Pinsky does not identify any. Instead, he leaves them “arcane” and “remote,” offering neither a sensible nor nonsensical explanation. In the final scenario, Pinsky’s daughter likes reading “The Question Man” in the newspaper because there is comfort in its routine simplicity, much like the routine simplicity of her normal day. The reasoning here makes sense, but it is not as straightforward
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as a song changing pitch. Neither is it as convoluted as Jewish dukes in Notre Dame claiming “Collateral descent from the family of the Virgin Mary.” While all these images may take some time and effort to sort through, in the end, they provide a good look at the relationship between seemingly opposite properties—opposites that often work together to create a diversified whole.
Making Connections A second important theme in this poem is the desire to make connections between unlike events— large and small, past and present, cosmic and personal. Pinsky uses the techniques of blending images into one another and forcing common bonds among odd companions to accomplish his goal. Start to finish, a motley assortment of people, places, and things march through the poem to the same beat: an old opera tune, an even older French family, television and magazine personalities, the poet’s own daughter, a newspaper article, a dog, a city street, and, finally, dream images. Much of Pinsky’s work explores the relationship between the history of the world and the history of the individual, drawing from each the patterns of movement that eventually converge. The Dukes of LevisMirepoix, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and the region of Languedoc all share a significance in the larger realm that moves forward into the personal realm of a child’s fascination with ordinary people in the newspaper. A concrete connection is unnecessary when the deeper bond is made through a shared “indomitable charm,” at once both satisfying and inexplicable. The “change of key midway in ‘Come Back to Sorrento’” moves forward into the “animal shapes that sing at the gates of sleep,” just as the “remote Jewishness of those far Dukes” shares its history with present-day television celebrities, both possessing “purpose[s] arcane.” The “businesslike” dog connects to the street, which connects to its pavement, which connects to the traffic that travels on it. The idea here is that the world is made up of crossing paths—of large and small histories, people and things that do not exist in isolation, but, in fact, share the inexact, “throaty music” of the universe.
Style Discursive Lyric Poetry Checking a few dictionaries for the word discursive, one may find such definitions as rambling,
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covering a wide range of subjects, or moving from topic to topic without order. But most dictionaries also include a secondary definition, noting that discursive talk or thought is marked by analytical reasoning, or proceeding to a conclusion through reason. Both these meanings apply to Pinsky’s “Song of Reasons.” A more common style, the lyric, also pertains to this poem, although it may not be apparent until over halfway through. Simply put, a lyric expresses subjective thoughts and feelings, which Pinsky works his way into at line 15, when the topic suddenly switches to his daughter. Obviously, “Song of Reasons” covers a wide range of topics—from Italian music, French history, and Judaism, to TV stars, a child reading the newspaper, and a city street. Knowing only that, one could assume the poem must ramble incoherently, and, even after reading it, some would say that that is a valid assumption. But the second meaning of the word “discursive” plays a more important role in the poem’s style—for Pinsky uses analytical reasoning and a careful blending of diverse subjects to reach a unified conclusion. Rambling, yes, but with a purpose. The movement from seeming incoherence into reasonable development is accompanied by the movement into poetic lyricism, as well. The topic first appears fairly objective with an account of historical events and comments on the irony of religion and the features of remote television and magazine personalities. But when Pinsky states, “A child has learned to read,” the poem becomes more subjective and expressive of his personal take on events—whether those events are as close by as his daughter’s daily routine or as distant as the Dukes of Levis-Mirepoix.
Historical Context Pinsky’s exploration of the interplay between public and private history and the connection of both to present-day life is well-documented. A wellknown comment on the state of affairs within his own country—and within his own life—appears in his 1979 publication of a book-length poem called An Explanation of America. In this book, he divides the country into three main areas as indicated by the section titles: “Its Many Fragments,” “Its Great Emptiness,” and “Its Everlasting Possibility.” When History of My Heart appeared five years later, the majority of its poems reflected the culture and society of the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which Pinsky was writing. America was still a
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Compare & Contrast • 1980s: Francois Mitterrand is elected president of France, becoming the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic. A popular leader, Mitterrand wins re-election in 1988 and becomes the longest-serving president in the history of France. Today: The elimination of Socialist leader Lionel Jospin in the first round of the presidential election in France is the biggest political shock to any liberal democracy in western Europe since the end of the Second World War. As a result, voters from several parties unite to elect “Rally for the Republic” candidate Jacques Chirac, in order to soundly defeat far-rightwinger Jean-Marie le Pen in the final round.
who become nearly as popular among young viewers as the videos themselves. Today: MTV has greatly reduced its airing of music videos in favor of more regular programming with such shows as “The Real World,” “The Osbournes,” and “Road Rules.” As a result, much of the glamour and flash of its TV personalities have been replaced by the documenting of so-called “real people.” • 1980s: Violence re-ignites between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel in an Arab-Israeli war. Israel invades Lebanon, moving into West Beirut and ousting PLO forces.
• 1980s: MTV is launched on cable television, featuring around-the-clock music videos and impertinent, flashy “video jockeys” (or “V-Jays”)
Today: The battles rage on in the Middle East, with terrorist attacks and military strikes, costing the lives of hundreds of both Israeli and Palestinian citizens. People of all faiths seek an end to religious and political violence all over the world.
nation of contradictions, still a fragmented land of both great emptiness and everlasting possibility. The most dominant American figure of the 1980s was Ronald Reagan, president for nearly the entire decade and symbol of the country’s retreat to conservatism after the liberal, anything-goes 1960s and 1970s. But if Reagan embodied the traditional values and old-fashioned politics of rightwing fundamentalists, he did so in spite of the obvious contradictions that racked both sides of the conservative/liberal divide. Some say his training as an actor carried over into his performance as president, which made him one of the most popular of recent presidents, even though many of his policies were economically and socially devastating to some groups. With Reagan’s supply-side economics, society saw its largest transfer in history of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy. The phrase “the rich get richer” was given new life, as the restructuring of tax codes allowed the wellto-do more disposable wealth, and Wall Street responded with one of the greatest bull markets ever. On the surface, America looked healthy and pros-
perous, but in reality less than 1 percent of workers were doing extremely well, and some faltered to new depths of poverty and despair that rivaled that often found in developing nations. While the wealthy took advantage of the latest medical technology, such as laser surgery, gene therapy, and artificial insemination, skyrocketing medical costs left even middle-class Americans without basic health benefits and retirement security. Although the American dream of home ownership and a comfortable living was still at least superficially alive in the 1980s, in reality, the number of homeless people grew an estimated 25 percent per year, and school-age children living in the streets turned to violence and drugs in record numbers. While many Americans held staunch beliefs about the rights of citizens to bear arms, in reality, hand gun sales, both legal and illegal, boomed, resulting in the United States having the highest incarceration rate in the world. The cultural arts in the 1980s also experienced much fragmentation and contradiction, with both blurred lines and great rifts between what some
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called pornography and some called art, what some said was freedom of speech and others decried as anti-American and anti-God behavior. The idea of freedom in a democratic society is held dear by all citizens who believe in it, but what freedom means is not agreed on by all. Affirmative action, gay rights, and feminism were already a part of the culture by 1980, but artists of the decade such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Robert Mapplethorpe took dead aim at religious and political fundamentalists with art addressing such issues as the AIDS epidemic, abortion, homosexuality, and hero-bashing in a male-dominated society. As a response, conservatives rallied to denounce public funding of the arts, and museums and arts councils across the country felt a serious blow. These titfor-tat moves, of course, did not originate in the 1980s, nor did they end in 1990, but the decade of Reaganomics and old-fashioned values was the perfect setting for escalating them. All the while, even the most conservative right-winger and the most liberal left-winger would both claim the title of “true American,” and, ironically, both would be correct. In the same vein, Pinsky’s land of fragments and great emptiness is an accurate description—and so is the notion of everlasting possibility.
Critical Overview Pinsky’s election to the post of U.S. Poet Laureate in 1997 is a testament in and of itself to his critical reception. His work has been well received— from his first published collection, Sadness and Happiness in 1975, through his most recent work, but mostly by other established poets and scholars in the field. While readers in general may find his style somewhat jumbled and his subjects too erudite, these are the same aspects of his work that well-seasoned critics find so appealing. In a review for The Hollins Critic titled “Proving Irony by Comparison: The Poetry of Robert Pinsky,” which came out shortly after the publication of History of My Heart, critic Charles Molesworth says Pinsky “manages to be personal without being confessional, sophisticated without being glib, and knowledgeable without being world-weary or cutely playful.” About History of My Heart, Molesworth goes on to say that Pinsky’s “poetic language has many of the best features of good prose, as its connections and complexities flow from a straightforward approach to his subjects.” Ten years later, in an article for Salmagundi, called “Robert Pinsky
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and the Language of Our Time,” critic James Longenbach says, “Pinsky’s is a poetry of acknowledgement, and its power grows from his deep awareness—sometimes wariness, sometimes worship—of the literary linguistic, and the historical precedents that continue to design his life even as he writes today.” Logenbach’s notion that Pinsky writes in the “language of our time” may befuddle some readers who would say just the opposite is true. Whatever one’s opinion, however, no one can deny Pinsky’s success as one of America’s most highly regarded contemporary poets.
Criticism Pamela Steed Hill Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. In the following essay, Hill examines Pinsky as both a scholar’s poet and a general reader’s poet, focusing on his declared determination to be both. When Pinsky handed over the title of United States Poet Laureate to his successor, Stanley Kunitz, in 2000, Pinsky was the first Poet Laureate to have held the position for three consecutive years. While Kunitz was a couple of generations older than Pinsky, his own successor to the post, Billy Collins, the current U.S. Poet Laureate, is a direct contemporary of Pinsky’s. Both have long-term ties to the northeastern area of the country, as Pinsky was born in New Jersey in 1940 and now teaches in Boston, and Collins was born in New York in 1941 and still lives and teaches in New York. Both poets also write critical material, and both draw from poetic themes based on popular American culture, mixed with personal commentary and political pitches. So why has Collins enjoyed an audience of both general readers and literary scholars, while Pinsky is critically acclaimed but stands accused of going over the heads of average poetry readers? Perhaps it is more a matter of style than erudition—more a form of presentation than of addressing different subjects. Pinsky himself does not aspire to be too lofty for a popular audience and makes that intention clear in an interview with critic Harry Thomas and others, published in TriQuarterly in 1994. When asked about the role of history and culture in the language he uses, Pinsky says, “I would like to speak and write a language that does not deny either my lower-middle-class child-
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hood or all the books I’ve read.” The question, then, is whether a poem like “Song of Reasons” reflects more his humble beginnings or his eventual education and scholarship. One unfortunate aspect of this poem is simply its layout. The difficult material comes first, setting up a kind of language roadblock to the rest of the poem for readers who are too turned off by its beginning to make it to the end. Understandably, not many students today—or members of the general public, for that matter—have ever heard of a little Italian opera song called “Come Back to Sorrento.” That in itself should not preclude Pinsky’s use of it in a poem, but he does not spend enough time with the “little tune” to offer even a clue as to its meaning or significance in this part of the poem. Instead, his subject quickly switches to the just-as-obscure topic “the Dukes of LevisMirepoix.” Again, it is safe to assume that the average student, including those majoring in history, and the average person on the street, are not familiar with this royal family nor with a place called “Languedoc,” which figures into the LevisMirepoix history for at least seven centuries. Readers who make it this far into the poem, and are in doubt that what they are reading makes any sense whatsoever, have their suspicions confirmed when the subject switches yet again to an even more convoluted notion. Now Pinsky introduces religion into the mix, though even that is not as simple as it seems. Are the dukes Christians or Jews or both? Why are they riding horses “[i]nto the Cathedral of Notre Dame?” More importantly, what difference does it make? These questions are not easy for anyone to answer, particularly someone who has picked up this poem to read for pleasure or for a bit of personal enlightenment. It is hard to be enlightened when the words themselves leave one completely in the dark. In the TriQuarterly interview, Pinsky is asked to talk more about his essay titled “Responsibilities of the Poet,” particularly his notion about a poet’s needing to “transform” a subject for the reader. His response is, in part, “Bad art does what you expect. To me, it’s not truly a poem if it merely says what most intelligent, well-meaning people would say. . . . I don’t mean to say that one is on a quest simply for novelty. . . . Your job [as a poet] is to do something that the reader didn’t already have.” What Pinsky means is that tossing random, odd words onto a page simply for the sake of randomness and oddity does not make a good poem, or, for that matter, any kind of poem. However, trying to get a message across—even a commonplace
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In some cases, it is even preferable to respond with emotion over intellect, as too much analysis and too much demand for clarity can rob one of a good chance just to consider something different.”
or unremarkable message—in a fresh, creative manner, using strange images or unusual language, should be the goal of the poet. Pinsky demonstrates his point with a non-poetic example, comparing the plot and characters of the renowned Russian novel Anna Karenina to those of modern-day soap operas. What gives the book a much “loftier reputation” than the TV shows is that its author, Leo Tolstoy, had a “powerful individual imagination” and was “a great, particular transformer” of language. His subjects may be as common as love affairs, money, power, adultery, and other such stuff commonly seen in soap operas, but his presentation of these subjects turns them into art. Pinsky’s intention is to do the same with his poetry. In “Song of Reasons,” Pinsky uses a mixture of both odd and commonplace subjects and addresses them with a blend of both scholarly and humble language. Placing the more easily understood images in the latter half of the poem seems almost an attempt to clarify, if not excuse, the more difficult beginning. From the far reaches of European history and ancestral religions, the topic narrows to the daily routine of a little girl reading her favorite column in the newspaper. The shift implies that even the more scholarly musings can share a space alongside the simple delights of a child and that both have “reasons” worthy of seeking out. No thought and no behavior operates solely in isolation but, rather, evolves, blends, shifts, and becomes something else. This is how “Song of Reasons” can move so effortlessly from a song to a noble family, from the Cathedral of Notre Dame to Languedoc, from the Virgin Mary to “the people in magazines and on television,” and from the “great half-crazy tune” of itself to its author’s daughter reading “The
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Question Man.” Attempting to understand one notion independent of any other is a common mistake that readers make. Pinsky’s motive, as well as his result, is based on connections—the past with the present, the remote with the familiar, the universal with the personal, and, yes, his lower-middle-class childhood with all the books he’s read. The answer to the question posed earlier— whether this poem reflects the poet’s humble beginnings or his eventual education and scholarship—is, simply, it does both. While it may take a well-educated, highly skilled poet to successfully work Italian opera, French history, Judaism, and Christianity into his poem, it takes only a man of simple pleasures and fatherly love to write: “A child has learned to read, and each morning before leaving / For school she likes to be helped through The Question Man / In the daily paper.” Now the reader can breathe a sigh of relief. Now, one can say, “I get that.” This sentiment is perfectly understandable, but it should not be thought of as a reason to dismiss the poem’s more challenging parts. Instead, note how all its parts complement one another, helped by the smooth transitions from topic to topic, even when such shifts would seem to necessitate awkward leaps and confusing blends. Pinsky rolls right along as though the subjects just naturally go together. In the TriQuarterly article, he talks about written works that contain things “both recognized and strange” and goes on to say that “Somewhere in that recognition and strangeness lies your job as an artist.” But why would a poet feel the need to go to such lengths—to force together such odd components and make them seem natural—when he would probably have a greater general audience if he did not? Is there an advantage? Pinsky would likely say yes. Granted, he runs the risk of turning some readers off by mixing so many “recognized” images and events with so many “strange” ones, but his work has proven over and over that the same technique is both intellectually stimulating and rewarding for those who pursue its quirky connections to the end. Sometimes a reader may be left with only a feeling of understanding the poem’s message, as opposed to having any real cognitive comprehension of it. And that’s okay. In some cases, it is even preferable to respond with emotion over intellect, as too much analysis and too much demand for clarity can rob one of a good chance just to consider something different. “Song of Reasons” is a good example. Even if a reader never understands what “Come back to Sorrento” has to do with anything else in the poem, or who the “Dukes of Levis-Mirepoix”
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were and whether they were Jewish or not, one can still appreciate the movement of the poem—its curves and connections and constant flow. A grasp of what it all means may come later, but, meanwhile, there is much to be said about a poem whose scholarly parts may furrow the brow but whose humble parts can bring a smile of familiar recognition. Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “Song of Reasons,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Barry Goldensohn In the following essay, Goldensohn hails Pinsky as “one of the most sophisticated technicians of his generation and perhaps one of its finest poets,” examining the range of Pinsky’s reach into the larger literary culture through his work in poetry and prose. If there is a consistent ground rule for Robert Pinsky’s poems, early to late, it is that apparent simplicity is the invitation to troubling complexity. It is an attractive movement of the mind, finding exceptions to simple rules, unexpected textures to smooth surfaces, division and ambivalence to simple feelings. And the strategies are abundance, surprise, and variations on a theme. In “Poem about People,” the first poem in his first book, Sadness and Happiness, what begins as genial and compassionate people watching— Balding young men in work shoes And green work pants, beer belly And white T-shirt, the porky walk Back to the truck, polite; possible To feel briefly like Jesus, A gust of diffuse tenderness . . .
—turns to a friend’s painful divorce and then to a movie clip that in turn leads to a burning vision of desperate personal shame— . . . the sensitive Young Jewish soldier nearly drowns Trying to rescue the thrashing Anti-semitic bully, swimming across The river raked by nazi fire, The awful part is the part truth: Hate my whole kind, but me, Love me for myself.
It is not a predictable sequence. The most ambitious poems in the book are meditative sequences—“Tennis,” the title poem “Sadness and Happiness,” and “Essay on Psychiatrists”—that are in the form of theme and variations. The last includes comic social scenes,
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satire, a discussion of Pentheus and Dionysus as psychiatrists, and Yvor Winter’s defense of madness in poets, and it concludes that we are all psychiatrists fumbling our way between stars. It is a poem designed to make psychiatrists uneasy, being itself uneasy about their claims to power over the secret life. Predictably, psychiatrists might say that jealousy for their mastery of the sexual secret underlies the poem. An Explanation of America is just that. Its classical antecedent is not the Juvenal-Johnson-Lowell “Vanity of Human Wishes” but rather Horace’s Epistle I, xvi, written from his Sabine farm, which Pinsky translates as part of his text. It is philosophical discourse, not satire. The poem is addressed to his oldest daughter, much of it quite genuinely so, for the mode of address is not merely a trope in some of the poem’s very challenging passages. The daughter is often a real presence in the poem and appears to be too iconoclastic, intelligent, and searching to be satisfied with easy answers. She is a critic of “that tyrant and sycophantic lout, the Majority,” and the speaker says, . . . Political Science bores you, You prefer the truth, and with a Jesuit firmness Return to your slogan: “Voting is not fair.”
A sense of the poem’s complexity and uneasiness of feeling is implicit in the following list: I want for you to see the things I see And more, Colonial Diners, Disney, films Of concentration camps, the napalmed child Trotting through famous news film in her diaper And tattered flaps of skin, Deep Throat, the rest.
This is not an American free of cruelty, nor with the last entry is the monologue to the daughter easy about domesticated sexuality. The explanation is not tidy or even terribly analytic. It is impressionistic, rather, and concludes with a sense of America as dreamlike—“So large, and strangely broken, and unforseen.” Pinsky’s commitment to discursive poetry is seen in his next book, History of My Heart, in which he adopts his method defiantly in the face of the dominant approach to his subject, which is the shaping of his feelings. Instead of confession or epiphanies of the atomistic ego or intimations of moral instructions that thwart childhood narcissism, Pinsky offers explanations that are complex, ironic, and allusive. In the title poem of the volume history becomes family mythmaking in his mother’s fantasy of meeting Fats Waller, which was drawn from a movie, in the way language creates experience in an account of a first sexual tryst (“To see eyes melt-
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This motif [of unity] is woven throughout the new poems, many of which deal with the city as the figure for the multiplicity and ‘numerousness’ of the soul.”
ing so I could think This is it, / They’re melting!”), and in a cluster of images we are presented with the overarching erotic revery that Makes the one who feels seem beautiful to the beholder Witnessing the idea of the giving of desire—nothing more wanted Than the little singing notes of wanting—the heart Yearning further into giving itself into the air, breath Strained into song emptying the golden bell it comes from, The pure source altogether out and away.
It should be clear that the explanatory and discursive mode has not eliminated lyricism. It has in fact restored to the lyric the modes of discourse that have been rare in the twentieth century. The strategy is continued in the remainder of the book. In “The Unseen,” set in a tour of a concentration camp, Pinsky addresses the absent God: O discredited Lord of Hosts, your servant gapes Obediently to swallow various doings of us, the most Capable of all your former creatures—we have no shape, We are poured out like water, but still We try to take in what won’t be turned from in despair.
This is not cold exposition but rather intelligent discourse about the heart’s history in history. In his poem “The Cold” Pinsky retrieves this fashionable, exhausted word and moves the philosophical cold outdoors as weather, where it belongs: Or like me, working in a room alone, Watching out from a window . . . . . . not having been out in hours I come up close idly to feel the cold, Forgetting for a minute what I was doing.
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The Want Bone refers not a phallic image but to an oral one, the dried mouth bones of a shark, an emblem of its desire to live. It is death longing for life and love, food and family. In the poems of this book pastiche and assemblage have joined the technique of variations on a theme to produce deliberate derangement of the apparent subjects and greater tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces. We find an explicit celebration and savoring of the richness of words and of their anarchic history. There is more play with language than in previous books, and Pinsky has adapted stories of Jesus’ childhood from the Apocrypha and embroidered the story of the prophet Daniel. In a prose section Jesus, in the form of a ciclogriff, befriends Isolde to learn about love. Tristan is a violent bard, however, and Jesus cannot save Tristan or Isolde, who is boundlessly committed to him. We see it coming, but the charm is in the telling. This is the book of a poet approaching fifty who is determined to expand his art. Pinsky maintains his sense of the well-shaped line, stanza, and poem. He strays far from the iambic but never entirely moves out of its range. His rhymes, typically off-rhymes, are inventive and formal without being insistent. The volume shows him to be one of the most sophisticated technicians of his generation and perhaps one of its finest poets. The new poems in The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966–1996 extend his mastery, and the book contains poems that may well become American classics. Particularly effective is “Avenue,” a poem central to a sequence about cities, and an elegy for Elliot Gilbert called “Impossible to Tell,” which is built around two jokes. This is a new and daring type of elegy, and I like to imagine the author of “Lycidas” being thrilled by its rightness. The new poems in the volume are not a random assortment. In a note to “Avenue,” with reference to an explanation of Yom Kippur as the day of “at-one-ment,” Pinsky says, “All, one: a play of unity and diversity that in turn makes me think of the fragmented, plural American city, held together visibly by words, by the signs and spoken or sung syllables of its streets, where all our ‘they’ is somehow ‘one.’” This motif is woven throughout the new poems, many of which deal with the city as the figure for the multiplicity and “numerousness” of the soul. It is the interwoven web of our humanity in which the matrix of Charlie Parker, Pushkin, Sax (the inventor of the instrument), and the sax-playing Pinsky is united in “Ginza Samba.” Pinsky’s vision (and is it right to speak of it using this term) has a lot of the philosophical playfulness
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of Borges mixed with the air of the historical menace of Milosz. Pinsky includes “The Rhyme of Reb Nachman,” a poem composed for a Halloween celebration, among his selection of translations and a poem by Milosz, “Incantation,” among his own poems. The latter is explained, at least in part, by the fact that his translation of “The World” was rejected by Milosz as not being sufficiently subordinated to the Polish, as being an English poem in its own right. It is an odd situation but entirely appropriate to the overlapping boundaries Pinsky’s new work celebrates. Like all of his previous books, Jersey Rain reflects Pinsky’s determination to expand his art. The move in this case is toward a high style, a solemnity, a high seriousness in the Arnoldian sense. It was not that Pinsky did not demonstrate this quality before, but earlier it was accompanied by a subversive metaphysical wit, for example, the jokes in his elegies and his sly satirical flashes. Such qualities are rarer in this book. The move is similar to what is seen in a number of important American writers, for example, Eliot, Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, and Hemingway, late in their careers. The poems are still rooted in Pinsky’s vernacular strength that flourishes in delicate tension with his formality, which is itself subtle and not selfassertive. For this reason it can be missed by young, infatuated readers, just as they may not notice the loosened formality of Yeats, Bishop, Lowell, or Stevens. Consider the lines that conclude “Autumn Quartet,” a birthday poem: Among the epic bravos, a civic man. The centaurs showed him truth in fabulation, In every living city the haunted ruin.
The reach is impressive, seeing Odysseus as artist, explorer, and destroyer, the latter usually reserved for Achilles. And Odysseus takes his place in a row of heroes that include Lincoln, Washington, Leopold Bloom, and Jackie Robinson. “Ode to Meaning” is an elegy with no jokes. Its reach is straightforwardly metaphysical, and its tone and music are elevated. The poem begins with— Dire one and desired one, Savior and sentencer
—and concludes with— If I Dare to disparage Your harp of shadows I taste Wormwood and motor oil, I pour Ashes on my head. You are the wound. You Be the medicine.
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The meaning invoked here has become deeply interwoven with death and its meaning. The poem is very different from the improvisational and digressive prose piece “An Alphabet of My Dead,” one of the few works in the collection that points backward toward Pinsky’s earlier work. It is nostalgic and full of a sense of real loss, but it lacks the grief-driven desperation for meaning of the “Ode to Meaning.” It is this latter quality that characterizes the book. Pinsky’s translation of The Inferno of Dante is the most idiomatic and vigorous adaptation of terza rima in English. His strategy of using consonantal rhyme in place of exact rhyme has enabled him to avoid much of the artificiality of earlier translations and to approximate Dante’s famous compression. In fact, he is so successful that Dante’s tercets seldom last three lines in Pinsky’s English, and the direct link in Italian between syntax and stanza structure is abandoned. Unlike the original, almost all of Pinsky’s tercets are enjambed. Among Pinsky’s other books is The Sounds of Poetry, a guide to prosody for students that focuses on accents and sound patterns without scansion or the customary classifications of accentual-syllabic poetry. The starting point is vocal reality rather than traditional prosody, although a discussion of meter and the sounds it explains runs throughout. The books restricted, however, and gives way to a nontechnical empirical approach. In effect, Pinsky is paraphrasing technical prosody for technophobes at the same time that his sustained attention to sound reveals patterns that were not attended to before. Someone looking for connections between Pinsky and his graduate school mentor, the important and charismatic Yvor Winters, would strain to find them. Pinsky is a poet-critic, and the priority of poetry is important. Early in his career he lost Winters’s tone of fastidious, moralistic criticism that did not suffer opposition gladly, and he has restored Winters in the long poem “Essay on Psychiatrists,” what survives of the influence in Pinsky’s poetry is a philosophical coldness and certitude in only a few early poems. Pinsky’s criticism likewise has grown free of Winters’s influence. It is urbane and international and lacks the odor of orthodoxy. Pinsky has taken his elevation to the poet laureateship of the United States with deep seriousness, and he has taken on the task of establishing a record of the “best-loved poems” of the American people, of a fluid and dynamic vernacular canon. His approach is to exclude the customary canon shapers, the poets and scholars, in order to
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discover a popular, demotic consensus. This is part of a somewhat quixotic overall project of recovering or defining the historical memory of a pluralist culture of improvised traditions, one that is separable from the commercial project of pop culture. In addition, Pinsky’s presence on the Public Broadcasting System’s Newshour every week has made poetry present to a wide audience. Source: Barry Goldensohn, “Pinsky, Robert (Neal),” in Contemporary Poets, 7th ed., edited by Thomas Riggs, St. James Press, 2001, pp. 951–54.
Ernest Suarez In the following essay and interview with the poet, Suarez discusses the position of Poet Laureate and Pinsky’s “Favorite Poem Project.” In his second term as poet laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky expanded “The Favorite Poem Project,” which he had started the previous year. Pinsky first thought the project would include 100 people, some of them well known but most of them coming from a cross section of the American public. Individuals would be audio- and videotaped reading their favorite poems, with the project becoming part of the bicentennial celebration of the Library of Congress. The program has ballooned into Pinsky’s major undertaking as laureate. Pinsky now plans to choose 1,200 people to read their favorite poems on audio- and videotape. The two hundred video recordings are to represent the nation’s bicentennial in the year 2000, and the one thousand audio tapes are to commemorate the millennium. Pinsky feels that the recordings will form “a record, at the end of the century, of what we choose, and what we do with our voices and faces, when asked to say aloud a poem that we love.” In contrast to the Library’s Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, Pinsky’s project is not centered on professional poets. Pinsky claims that people’s bodies instinctively react when reading a poem aloud. The act of reading the poem “engages the mind and the body in a genetically primary sensation that involves a column of air in the trunk and the production of syllables. The sensation causes comfort and alertness. Thus the individual body, no necessarily even the individual artist, can be a medium for art.” He is “convinced that this video and audio record of many Americans reading aloud poems they love will have a lot of value for our country: as a record of where we stand, as a model for education in the future, and as testimony to the possibly neglected state of the culture we already have.”
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Through the annual reading series, laureates collectively have brought more than two thousand writers to read for the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature.”
The poet laureate is appointed by the librarian of Congress annually, with the term running from October to May. The position—which was called consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress until 1986—was founded in 1936, when Archer M. Huntington endowed the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress. Archibald MacLeish, who then served as librarian of Congress, made the consultant a yearly appointment, with the provision that it was possible to serve more than one term. As laureate, Pinsky receives a $35,000 annual stipend. The laureateship is intended to provide the appointee with the freedom to create a special project. The previous laureate, Robert Hass, created the “Watershed” conference, uniting novelists, poets, and storytellers to speak about the relationship between writing, community, and nature. James Dickey videotaped noted poets reading their work. Joseph Brodsky championed placing poetry in hotels, supermarkets, and airports. Gwendolyn Brooks started poetry workshops for elementary school children. The laureate also gives a reading of his or her verse and presents an annual lecture, which the library publishes. Through the annual reading series, laureates collectively have brought more than two thousand writers to read for the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature. In 1997 Pinsky delivered a lecture titled “On Digital Culture and the Individual Soul” at the library. For his inaugural lecture, which was held in the Montpelier Room on 9 October, Pinsky claimed that “The first and main thing about digital culture is that it is a part of history. It smells of us. It is human. We made it. It is an outcome.” He wants to approach the “new cultural developments through the lens of poetry,” stressing that the “computer is an extension of po-
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etry. Poetry is a technique developed by this animal, the human—a fairly useless animal. It has no claws, no hide, no real teeth and it doesn’t run fast, but it is clever and it looks around a lot. For survival it developed forms of communication evolved for the purposes of memory, for the effective storage of important information and the transmission of that information accurately and effectively from one person to that person’s peers.” Pinsky, who was the poetry editor for The New Republic in the 1980s, currently edits poetry for Slate, a weekly Internet magazine. He believes that computers can convey information much as storytelling bards once did through poems. Computers can convey mass art and culture, because “an image of Michael Jackson singing with brilliant cinematography is reproduced and duplicated tens of thousands of times and it can spread all over the globe very rapidly . . . The medium for mass art is by its nature highly duplicable. I do not deplore or applaud it, but I am trying to understand it. My idea of body piercing is that it is not a revolt against parents, it is a revolt against one’s own childhood, the Electra winky-gahinky action figure. American 12-and-13-year-olds hunger for something that’s no likely to be in the Sears Roebuck catalog. The individual soul loves mass art but we become jaded. Sometimes I just turn off the TV and reach for a copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.” He relishes the opportunity to deliver his message because “It is appropriate for a poet to be attached to a place of memory because poetry is an ancient way of enhancing memory, a means that predates writing. . . . The Library of Congress is the greatest house of memory in the world. There is more human striving recorded and cataloged in this institution than there has ever been anywhere.” A professor of creative writing at Boston University, Pinsky was awarded the Leonore Marshall Prize in 1997 for The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966–1996. His other volumes of verse include Sadness and Happiness (1975), An Explanation of America (1979), History of My Heart (1984), and The Want Bone (1990). The Academy of American Poets gave Pinsky’s verse translation Inferno of Dante (1994) the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and in 1996 he received the Poetry Society of America’s Shelly Memorial Award. His essays are collected in Landor’s Poetry (1968), The Situation of Poetry (1977), and Poetry of the World (1988). His new book is A Brief Guide to the Sounds of Poetry (1998).
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On 26 June 1998 I met with Pinsky in his suite of offices at the Library of Congress, where we discussed his recent work: Suarez: Your essay “Poetry and the World” addresses poems that deal with the court, things having to do with the world. But in that essay worldly things imply the metaphysical. Pinsky: I was reacting to the weary, worn-out idea of poetry and politics. I was trying to come at the same material in a different way. And one of the ways you would define the distinction between the worldly and the political is that the worldly encompasses and implies the metaphysical realm as well as the realm of interaction of power and people. Suarez: How does this operate within your own poetry? Pinsky: To put it as simply as possible, for a long time I have tried to look around me. At a certain point early in my career, I realized I had actually made more than one attempt at writing about the personal things that had concerned me from my childhood on. Introspection is an important part of a work of art for me. But my next ambition as an artist was to look around me and to try and think what things seemed important and manifest in my life and the lives of other people who had not yet made their ways into poems. So, I try to absorb what I think and see and feel a great deal that does not immediately remind me of something by Rimbaud, or Allen Ginsberg, or John Donne, but seems significant. Suarez: How does this concept operate within recent poems of yours, such as “The City Dark,” “Ginza Samba,” and “Avenue”? Pinsky: “Avenue” is an attempt to include details of retail, of the life of the agora. Very often the word “marketplace” is entirely pejorative, when in fact the marketplace or the agora is the common place where we come together and meet one another. And “Avenue” is an attempt to find a suitably flexible and complex way to see that marketplace, rather than sentimentalize it and ignore the capitalistic nature of it. I did not want to denounce it in a stock or stereotypical way, but rather try and approach it without egotism. The poem uses a lot of hovering pronouns, so it is not me on the avenue, but me trying to catch the life of the avenue. “Ginza Samba” is horizontal in space. I suppose you can say it is vertical in time. It tries to look again at all the transactions between souls and the worldly historical world—enslavement, sale of a human being, abortion, marriage, mastery of a musical instrument—and see them in their ugliness
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and beauty and all the other qualities they have. ’The City Dark”: is probably the most traditional of the three poems. It is an attempt to write something that does what those two poems do, but with more of the familiar rhetoric of a nature poem. I’m trying to look at the city as you would a mountain or a lake and to feel the bars, the glitter of the mica in the concrete pavement, and to feel the city the way you might feel natural beauty. Suarez: You mention the hovering pronouns in “Avenue.” Were you trying to interject a Whitmanian consciousness into the poem? Pinsky: I think that is a fair description of the poem. And, shifting rapidly amongst “he,” “we,” “I,” and “you” was a way to get there by a different route, to see if you could discover a different reality by using a different path to get there. Suarez: Why that particular decision? Pinsky: It’s hard to say. A lot of these thing are intuitive, but one gets impatient with structures: the structure of I do this or I did that. That is a familiar structure. It’s like tapping the kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope is quite interesting at one stage, but if you look at it a long time, sooner or later you want to tap it. Or if you play a tune at one temp. you might suddenly decide to try it in another temp. I believe that musicians sometimes just transpose the tune in order to make it sound a little different. Most musicians even improvise so the music can take a different form. Suarez: Are you saying that the decision was a sonic one? Pinsky: All decisions in poetry are sonic. All poetry comes through either the ear or the voice. Suarez: As you are saying, all poetry is sonic, but at the same time, you are applying language which is rational in one way or another. Pinsky: Yes, you are making a decision with your voice; you are writing with your voice. You’re trying it out to see how it sounds. And you can rationalize music too. You can say the harmonic structure indicates that certain notes would be played in certain ways in order to remind you of where you are. You can rationalize all those things. You can look at a tune, or some great chorus in the tune, and make up a reason why there is a flat nine. There is a rational explanation for it all, but you have to try it out with your ear. Suarez: What’s the relationship between the sound and the subject matter? Pinsky: In a word, the relationship between sound and subject matter is art. That is the whole
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art: managing to get the emotions to be expressed by the actual sounds you are making. Sometimes, sounds like “ah” are there, but in the right context, an “ah” or “oh” can mean quite a lot. It can sound stupid or it can sound great. Source: Ernest Suarez, “Robert Pinsky Reappointed Poet Laureate,” in Dictionary of Literary BiographyYearbook: 1998, Gale, 1999, pp. 292–94.
Charles Molesworth In the following essay excerpt, Molesworth explores how “Song of Reasons” is like a “nursery rhyme we sing a child to sleep by, covering up the narrative or logical holes with false totality and sweet song.” In his third and latest book of poetry, History of My Heart, Pinsky leaves the epistolary style and epic subject of An Explanation of America to return to the scale of the intimate lyric. In doing so he gives vent to an attitude that is in part confessional, but he never relinquishes the moral and public tones of the previous book. This mix of private and public stands apart from the work of most contemporary poets, and does so in part by reversing certain obvious and hidden features of American poetry. First, Pinsky willingly makes clear his wanting to connect the large patterns of fate with his homebound destinies. There are several poems here (“The Street,” “Song of Reasons,” “The Figured Wheel,” chief among them) that juxtapose large historical or even cosmic figurations against Pinsky’s personal feelings and memories. Many poets, of course, invoke or hint at larger patterns of significance, but do so glancingly or only with protective irony. On the other hand, what Pinsky conceals or at least underplays is the tendency of the lyric to fondle its own metaphoric energies, to become intoxicated with its own tropes. (This is especially true in American surrealist poetry.) Pinsky does sometimes make his trope quite obvious, as in “The Figured Wheel,” but just as often his comparisons, analogies, inversions, and closures exhibit an understatedness that can make some of the lyrics seem off-hand, almost apologetic. To illustrate this latter point, let me quote the second two-thirds of “The Questions,” a poem about the people the poet met, or rather half-met, in his father’s office, where hearing-aids and glasses were dispensed and where the tissue and mystery of everyday social reality were first clumsily deciphered by the son. After recalling some of the customers in a detail that occasionally reads as if it came from prose fiction (“The tall overloud
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old man with a tilted, ironic smirk”), he suddenly realizes a depth of feeling for them, and his compassion is soon tested by a self-correcting irony. Notice, too, how the issue of abstract charity, in the form of the nun, settles in against the particular identities of a child’s first roster of adults: Why do I want them to be treated tenderly by the world, now Long after they must have slipped from it one way or another, While I was dawdling through school at that moment—or driving, Reading, talking to Ellen. Why this new superfluous caring? I want for them not to have died in awful pain, friendless. Though many of the living are starving, I still pray for these, Dead, mostly anonymous (but Mr. Monks, Mrs. Rose Vogel) And barely remembered: that they had a little extra, something For pleasure, a good meal, a book or a decent television set. Of whom do I pray this rubbery, low-class charity? I saw An expert today, a nun—wearing a regular skirt and blouse, But the hood or headdress navy and white around her plain Probably Irish face, older than me by five or ten years. The Post Office clerk told her he couldn’t break a twenty So she got change next door and came back to send her package. As I came out she was driving off—with an air, it seemed to me, Of annoying, demure good cheer, as if the reasonableness Of change, mail, cars, clothes was a pleasure in itself: veiled And dumb like the girls I thought enjoyed the rules too much In grade school. She might have been a grade school teacher; But she reminded me of being there, aside from that—as a name And person there, a Mary or John who learns that the janitor Is Mr. Woodhouse; the principal is Mr. Ringleven; the secretary In the office is Mrs. Apostolacos; the bus driver is Ray.
The “Mary or John” comes with the echo of the surname “Doe,” so in a sense this is anyone’s
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remembrance of those first names, the ones that originate our sense of social interaction and, in their later recall, summon the sources of affection and puzzlement, as we realize both how we cared for such people and how little of their adult identities were ever, in fact, revealed to us. I find this a very moving poem—more than a “touching” one—and for me the quiet casualness of the last five words has a surreptitious eloquence about it. As for the other point, the connection of large patterns and personal feelings, this is well displayed in “The Street,” which begins with a description, half mythical, half historical, of the street through which the funeral procession of the Emperor’s child is conducted. From this we move to Pinsky’s childhood street, “Rockwell Avenue,” where he watched as his neighbors all rode “the vegetable wave of the street / From the John Flock Mortuary Home / Down to the river.” Here there’s one incident singled out, as a betrayed husband throws his shoe at the adulterer’s car being driven away with the wife inside. Somebody returns the shoe to the man: But the man had too much dignity To put it back on, So he held it and stood crying in the street: “He’s breaking up my home,” he said, “The son of a bitch Bastard is breaking up my home.” The street Rose undulant in pavement-breaking coils And the man rode it Still holding his shoe and stiffly upright Like a trick rider in the circus parade That came down the street Each August.
Here the simile leads us into an ironic bathos drawn from popular culture. But we recall the pomp of the Emperor burying his dead child, and so we see the husband between two perspectives, one ironic, one compassionate. Of course there is irony in the pomp of the Emperor which we are likely to see as misplaced and melodramatically excessive (“Slaves throw petals on the roadway”), but Pinsky gives the husband his own dignity, however tattered and helpless, as he is caught in a public display not of his own making. But the poet makes the most of it. The personal scale of grief is measured, proven by, the juxtaposition with the public, “state” ceremony, and there is dignity and fatuity in both. The metaphor in the poem works on the surface by equating the two streets, but of course it is also the grief of the two men and the mechanics of emotional display that are truly the poem’s metaphoric center. In a sense, this metaphoric
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. . . the affection of the speaker for the child saves the poem, for it is here that the lyric impulse is truest.”
transformation is hidden (or perhaps completely transparent), so the poem reads in part like a fairytale, in part like a story by, say, Ann Beattie. But it combines the richness of each into a blend of its own, a blend that welcomes the comparison of large, abstract notions of grief with specific instances of it. Co-incidentally, the poem reminds me of Randall Jarrell’s “Nestus Gurley,” where the everyday and the world-historical are brought into a juxtaposition at once ironic and compassionate. I don’t mean to suggest that all of Pinsky’s poems are judiciously measured through a grid of perfectly balanced irony and compassion. Indeed, at least two of the poems in History that are most memorable, “Song of Reasons,” and “The Unseen,” face considerable challenges of tonal balance. The first of these uses a structure similar to “The Street”: it begins with two perspective that look at first to be totally abstruse, a change of key in the song “Come Back to Sorrento” and the right of certain French noble family, the Levis-Mirepoix, to ride their horses in Notre Dame. The theme of the poem is how any “history or purpose arcane” that is used to explain odd facts or relations in the world manages to be both “businesslike as a dog / That trots down the street” and as phantasmagoric as “the animal shapes that sing at the gates of sleep” in our childhood. The song of reasons is just that: a lyric finesse of the rational, a way of charming and disarming the ineradicable inexplicable facticity of events and the way they express human nature. The Levis-Mirepoix have their extraordinary privilege because they “killed heretics in Languedoc seven centuries ago,” and yet “they are somehow Jewish” and claim “collateral descent” from the Virgin Mary. It is a reason, and it isn’t a reason. The girl in the poem (apparently Pinsky’s daughter) loves the part of the daily newspaper called “The Question Man,” that column of manin-the-street responses to such inane questions as
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What Do I Read Next? • Jersey Rain (2000) continues Pinsky’s tradition of careful crafting, but in language that is both simple and passionate. He addresses the items of popular culture and the events of everyday life in a way that makes the commonplace unusually attractive. This book has been well received and is worth reading. • Billy Collins, named the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2001 and a contemporary of Pinsky’s, has won favor among both critics and the general American public. His collections have broken records for poetry sales, and his readings are usually standing-room-only. Helped by frequent appearances on National Public Radio, Collins is one of the nation’s most popular poets ever. His collection Nine Horses (2002) appeals to both scholars and general readers alike.
“Your Worst Vacation?” or “Your Favorite Ethnic Group?” Again, people have reasons for such heartfelt responses, and the reasons even have a history— every heart has a history as well as reasons it knows and knows not of—but the “Song of Reasons” can not offer any reason why all this should be so. Pinsky’s irony appreciates the bizarre humor of claiming descent from the Virgin Mary, and his compassion appreciates the way the child’s favorite newspaper feature steadies her world: “The exact forms of the ordinary . . . show / An indomitable charm to her.” But the aesthetic charm of the poem, its ability or luck in finding a fact such as that of the Levis-Mirepoix on which to build its wry playfulness, means it cannot give or challenge any final explanation. In one sense this is only fair, as the lyric mode is not charged with providing philosophical certainty or rigorous logic. Finally, I think, the affection of the speaker for the child saves the poem, for it is here that the lyric impulse is truest. The poem is like a nursery rhyme we sing a child to sleep by, covering up the narrative or logical holes with false totality and sweet song (“and down
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• The title of Gil Mann’s publication exploring Judaism in twentieth-century America says it all: How to Get More out of Being Jewish Even If: A. You Are Not Sure You Believe in God, B. You Think Going to Synagogue Is a Waste of Time, C. You Think Keeping Kosher Is Stupid, D. You Hated Hebrew School, or E. All of the Above! (1998). Obviously, Mann has a sense of humor, but he also presents intriguing ideas and explanations that readers of any faith may find appealing. • History scholars will appreciate James Buchanan Given’s thorough account of a not-too-common subject in Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (1997). This book examines everything from the Inquisitors and their “technique of punishment” to the role of social stress in maintaining political power in this area of southern France.
will come baby, cradle and all”). This, too, in an oblique way is a poem about nominalism, about the refusal of certain facts to yield to classification or clarification, to offer their “indomitable charm” on any but their own terms. But there is another poem in the book whose rhetorical authority is even more challenged: “The Unseen.” The obvious point must be made at the start that no poem about concentration camps can be without flaw. Just to attempt the subject, especially in a short lyric of over fifty lines, shows moral courage or artistic aplomb beyond the ordinary. Luckily for us, Pinsky has both. So when I question the poem I do so only on the highest level. Briefly my point is this: the stance at the end of the poem is accusatory, not towards the Nazis only and obviously, but toward the Godhead, the “Lord of Hosts.” But can such an accusation stand? Ordinarily such accusatory rhetoric is the privilege (if that’s the right word) of mystics and rationalists. The “regular believer” cannot claim the depth of experience or the alternative ontological grounds by which to challenge the deity. (That Pinsky
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speaks as a Jew to a deity imaged in Christian terms alters this argument only slightly, I think.) If I’m right in this, then Pinsky’s speaker (to use that old-fashioned literary convention) must base his rhetorical authority on being a rationalist (he clearly is no mystic in the poem), and not a regular believer. But the compassion of the closing lines is not a rationalist’s compassion; it’s that of a believer. Thus Pinsky must somehow combine the ironic scepticism of a rationalist and the compassionate acceptance of a believer. To my mind he doesn’t fully succeed, though that he nearly does so is enough to make the poem gripping and memorable. It begins almost casually, with a feeling of modernist sang-froid masking deep uncertainty: In Krakow it rained, the stone arcades and cobbles And the smoky air all soaked one penetrating color While in an Art-Nouveau cafe, on harp-shaped chairs,
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prophet. Especially in the five words that begin the last line, the poet doesn’t flinch from an almost stately, judgmental eloquence. Here we must accept that God’s love is dark, perhaps even evil. The human judges the divine at great peril, whether within or without the suppositions of religious faith. If said by a believer, these lines are truly awesome. If said by a rationalist sceptic, they are misdirected, since the real fury of the poem should then fall on the human criminals and not the divine shadow they did or did not evoke to cover their bestiality. We realize this poem was written by a post-Holocaust Jew and so if we detect in it an “unsteady” mix of rationalist scepticism and fervent compassion, we can hardly be surprised. Beyond this, I’ll say no more on the subject. Source: Charles Molesworth, “Proving Irony by Compassion: The Poetry of Robert Pinsky,” in Hollins Critic, Vol. XXI, No. 5, December 1984, pp. 1–18.
We sat making up our minds to tour the death camp.
The ironic details here—the harp-shaped chairs, the Art-Nouveau—soon give way to a grim facticity as the speaker confronts the “whole unswallowable / Menu of immensities.” During the tour of the camp everything takes on a “formal, dwindled feeling.” (A sure instance of emotional rightness.) The speaker remembers a childhood game where he dreamed of killing the Nazi butchers, and his reverie is broken when he arrives at “the preserved gallows / The Allies hung the commandant, in 1947.” In a sense the human vengeance ends at this point in the poem, a little past half-way. The remaining five tercets deal with the speaker’s realizing that he doesn’t feel “changed—or even informed” (he’s obviously come to terms with it in some way before the tour), but also realizing he must accept his own attempt to “swallow” the fact of this unbelievable crime. He fights his own despair, and the poem directly addresses the “discredited Lord of Hosts” with these words: but still We try to take in what won’t be turned from in despair: As if, just as we turned toward the fumbled drama Of the religious art shop window to accuse you Yet again, you were to slit open your red heart To show us at last the secret of your day and also, Because it also is yours, of your night.
That is a ponderous “as if” and it saves the poem from being ruined by declamatory excess, but it still doesn’t remove the language from the realm of the prophetic. By looking into the heart of God, Pinsky invokes a context that can only be that of a
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Sources Longenbach, James, “Robert Pinsky and the Language of Our Time,” in Salmagundi, No. 103, Summer 1994, pp. 157–77. Molesworth, Charles, “Proving Irony by Compassion: The Poetry of Robert Pinsky,” in the Hollins Critic, Vol. XXI, No. 5, December 1984, pp. 1–18. Pinsky, Robert, History of My Heart, Ecco Press, 1984. Thomas, Harry, et al., “A Conversation with Robert Pinsky,” in TriQuarterly, Vol. 92, Winter 1994–1995, pp. 21–37.
Further Reading Pinsky, Robert, Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry, Princeton University Press, 2002. This prose publication is a little book on a very large subject. In it, Pinsky addresses the notion that poetry is a dying art with a dwindling audience, especially in American culture. Pinsky argues that just the opposite is true—that poetry is actually a reflection of and comment on the major themes at the heart of a large democracy. —, An Explanation of America, Princeton University Press, 1979. In this book-length poem, Pinsky examines the culture and history of the United States in an attempt to explain the nation’s good points and bad points to his daughter. His assessment is at times negative, at times positive, and always candid. In the end, Pinsky appears to be more optimistic than not.
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—, The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions, Princeton University Press, 1976. In these essays, Pinsky addresses differences in traditional and contemporary poetry and concludes that there are not as many as would be expected. He finds a need for presenting the human soul in a seemingly “soul-less” world in all kinds of poetry and defends his beliefs with fresh, fairly accessible prose. Thomas, Harry, et al., “A Conversation with Robert Pinsky,” in TriQuarterly, Vol. 92, Winter 1994–1995, pp. 21–37. In this conversation with several interviewers, Pinsky comments on a variety of topics, from the art of translating poetry into English and the role of Judaism in his life to the influence of Eastern philosophies and the importance of history in his work.
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Spring-Watching Pavilion It is believed that Ho Xuan Huong wrote “SpringWatching Pavilion” sometime in the late 1700s or early 1800s in her native Vietnam. Her poems were copied by hand for almost a century, and were originally published in Vietnamese in a woodblock edition in 1909. However, they were not published as type until 2000, when John Balaban translated them into English and published them in the United States in Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong. This publication was historic for many reasons. It was the first time Ho Xuan Huong’s poems had been published in the United States and it was the first time they had been published in English. Perhaps most importantly, Balaban and his publisher included versions of the poems in both English and Vietnamese, as well as the original version in Nom—the nearly extinct ideographic Vietnamese script in which Ho Xuan Huong wrote her poetry. Spring Essence was the first publication in history to print Nom as type, and its publication was lauded by scholars, popular readers, and even President Clinton, who commented on the cultural importance of the book at his own historic visit to Vietnam in 2000.
Ho Xuan Huong 1909
Ho Xuan Huong was an eighteenth-century concubine known for her provocative poems, which challenged the Confucian authority of her time. Some of her poems, like “Spring-Watching Pavilion,” also criticized her country’s institutionalized religions, in this case Mahayana Buddhism. This poem depicts the poet seeking solitude in nature, where she realizes that it is nature itself, not
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any organized religion or other construct of the human world, which holds the key to the search for nirvana. A current copy of “Spring-Watching Pavilion” can be found in the paperback version of Spring Essence, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2000. One should note that, in Vietnamese, a person’s surname is listed first. In other words, Ho Xuan Huong’s last name is Ho, not Huong. This entry preserves that style, and will refer to the author as Ho throughout the rest of the entry. Finally, to simplify the difficulties of rendering the tones of the Vietnamese language into English, accents and diacritical marks have been dropped.
first husband after he successfully completed a difficult piece of poetry that she assigned to him. However, many scholars debate the details of the legend, and some scholars even question whether Ho ever really existed. These scholars believe that Ho’s poetry was written by others who were too scared of persecution to write under their own names. Even for those scholars who do believe in the existence of Ho, there is no consensus on which poems can be attributed to Ho. If Ho did exist, many scholars believe that she most likely had died by the 1820s.
Poem Text Author Biography Many scholars believe that Ho, whose name means “spring essence,” was born sometime between 1775 and 1780, in a village near present-day Hanoi, in North Vietnam. Unlike the records of Western nations, Vietnamese records at this time are sketchy at best, as are the factual details of Ho’s life, many of which are derived from her poetry. Scholars believe that Ho was a concubine—a second wife, lower in stature than the official, first wife. Many women were concubines during this time, since the dowry and wedding rules were too complex and expensive for all women to become official wives. Ho was a rarity in Vietnam, where the patriarchal rules of Confucianism often prevented women from receiving the same education as men. Even when women did receive classical educations, there were few accomplished poets, especially ones that received the immediate fame that Ho did. Ho’s poetry itself was a rarity. Her poems challenged male authority and included double entendres, or ambiguous meanings, that were distinctly sexual in nature. This writing style was shocking and dangerous for a woman in a Confucian society, since Confucianism forbade depictions of the erotic. Despite her irreverent writing, Ho was saved from persecution by her poetic talent—which has always been highly prized in Vietnam. Ho also criticized the institutionalized religions of her time, as she does in “Spring-Watching Pavilion.” Despite the lack of facts about Ho’s life, she has enjoyed a rich legend, which has been passed down for centuries. According to this legend, Ho’s father died early, at which point her education stopped, and she lost her marriage prospects. The legend also says that Ho ran a tea shop in what is now modern-day Hanoi and that she married her
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A gentle spring evening arrives airily, unclouded by worldly dust. Three times the bell tolls echoes like a wave. We see heaven upside-down in sad puddles. Love’s vast sea cannot be emptied. And springs of grace flow easily everywhere.
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Where is nirvana? Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.
Poem Summary Stanza 1 “Spring-Watching Pavilion” starts with Ho’s description of “A gentle spring evening,” which is immediately contrasted with the idea of “worldly dust.” Ho is referring to worldly dust in a metaphorical way. A metaphor is a technique where the poet gives an object a secondary meaning that does not normally belong to it. Ho does not literally mean that the spring evening is “unclouded” by dust; she means that the “dust” of humanity—the aspects of the human, material world—is not present in this spring evening out in nature. Although Ho does not state it in explicit terms, the fact that “worldly dust” is not present to cloud the evening points to the fact that the poet is out in nature, away from her village or city. This worldly dust is negative, because it, unlike the spring evening, is “clouded.” Worldly dust could stand for many negative aspects of the human world. When this poem was written, sometime during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, Vietnamese society was very unstable, having experienced many civil wars and colonization attempts, so the dust could be referring to this political instability. However, it is more likely that she is referring to organized religion, since the
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term, “worldly dust,” specifically belongs to Mahayana Buddhism.
Stanza 2 This peaceful structure and mood is jarred in the second line not only by the abrupt, shortened sentence structure, but also by the sound of the “bell tolls,” whose “echoes” come from the village or city “like a wave.” The use of the word “like,” identifies this part of the sentence as a simile. Like a metaphor, a poet uses a simile when he or she wants to indicate that one thing has a secondary meaning. However, unlike a metaphor, which says that something “is” something, similes are less direct, saying that something is “like” or “as” something. In this case, Ho is saying that the echoes are traveling from the village or city to the countryside like a wave. The tolling of bells could be meant to represent more than one thing. First, they could be representing the sounds of one of the aforementioned wars. Communal bells have often been used to warn of impending danger, such as an invasion. If one interprets the poem as an indictment of the human wars of Ho’s time, then the echoes that come into the countryside “like a wave” can represent the waves of soldiers that are advancing on the city or village. As a result, heaven can only be seen “upside-down in sad puddles,” because the strife of war drives a wedge between the human world and heaven, or nirvana. As a result, only reflections of heaven can be seen, not heaven itself. However, since Ho has already informed the reader through the use of the term, “worldly dust,” that she is commenting on Mahayana Buddhism, she may also be referring to the echoes from the kind of bells used by Buddhists after their religious ceremonies. A bell has long been considered a divine instrument, and for many societies has symbolized the contact between heaven and earth. The bell itself is a human object, made on earth, but the musical harmony it produces is representative of the harmony of the celestial world. Out in nature, away from the poet’s village or city, these bells are far enough away to be mere echoes. This fact is significant. Ho is setting up the second half of the poem, by distancing the sound of the bells, a symbol of organized religion, from the nature that the poet is experiencing. As with the war interpretation, the puddles that the poet looks into are sad, because organized religion can only offer a pale, sad reflection of heaven, not nirvana itself.
Stanza 3 After setting up the inferiority of the human world in the first two stanzas, Ho turns more com-
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pletely to nature, discussing “Love’s vast sea” and “springs of grace.” Once again, Ho is using metaphorical language. She is not literally describing a sea that is full of love or springs—natural bodies of water that issue from the ground—that are made of grace. However, she is using the image of the sea to talk about the lasting power of love, which “cannot be emptied.” Likewise, grace, a religious term that means divine assistance freely given to humans, flows “easily everywhere,” because the divine is present here in nature. This is a surface interpretation, which could stand on its own. However, the lines take on a much deeper meaning for those who know more about Mahayana Buddhism. Mahayana Buddhists believe that one can find divine assistance from bodhisattvas, Buddhists who have achieved nirvana but who have chosen to remain in the human world. In their striving for kindness and compassion, bodhisattvas guide other humans to the correct path for reaching nirvana. When viewed in this context, “Love’s vast sea” and “springs of grace” represent the loving and compassionate vow of bodhisattvas to save other humans, which is as eternal as the sea. Since Ho is equating the natural symbols around her with the eternal guidance of the bodhisattvas, she is indicating that she is in a holy place. In this natural place, “springs of grace flow easily,” since this place is removed from the “dust” of the human world.
Stanza 4 With this revelation, Ho asks herself—and her readers—“Where is nirvana?” As she has increasingly demonstrated throughout the poem, it is not likely that nirvana will be found within the “worldly dust,” which can cloud one’s vision. Whether one views this dust as the human strife of war or the distant echoes of the organized religious ceremonies, it does not matter. Following either will only lead to a pale reflection of heaven, which appears “upside-down in sad puddles.” Instead, like the “gentle spring evening” that the poet is enjoying, the answer is in nature itself. It is only when the poet retreats to nature that she envisions the love of the bodhisattvas in the sea and springs around her. As a result, she concludes of nature that “Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.” In other words, Ho does not totally rule out the fact that a Buddhist might find nirvana while in the human world. After all, she says that nirvana is in nature “nine times out of ten.” However, these are not great odds, so she is saying that it is highly more likely that a person will find nirvana only when he or she leaves the worldly dust behind and communes with nature.
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Topics for Further Study • Although Ho did not agree with many of the practices of organized Buddhism in her time, she did hold to its main precepts. Create a twocolumn chart comparing the main beliefs and practices of Buddhism with any other religion of your choice. Choose a famous Buddhist from any point in history and write a short biography about this person. • Find another poet, from any point in history, who is known for his or her use of double entendres in poetry. Read a representative poem from this person and compare the hidden meaning in it to “Spring-Watching Pavilion.” Compare the cultural circumstances that encouraged each poet to place hidden meanings in their poetry. • Not many concrete details are known about Ho’s life. Taking the few details that are known, create your own version of Ho’s life story. Imagine that you are Ho in the eighteenth century and write a journal entry about what your daily life is like. • Find a work or art from any medium that you think expresses the main themes of “SpringWatching Pavilion,” and which could serve as a companion art piece in a gallery. Discuss your reasons for choosing this piece of art, referring to techniques specific to your particular art medium, where possible.
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the descendant of the original Buddhist teachings, and says that the only way a person can achieve nirvana is to follow the path of Buddha, an ancient prince. For Theravada Buddhists, this path must be followed alone, without assistance. Mahayana Buddhism, the type of Buddhism referenced in the poem, offers more options for its followers. Mahayana Buddhism says that its followers can receive guidance from bodhisattvas, Buddhists who have achieved nirvana but have stayed in the human world to guide others. The poem contains many ideas central to Mahayana Buddhism, including “worldly dust,” which refers to the perishable world, and “Love’s vast sea” and “springs of grace,” both of which refer to the bodhisattvas’ attempts to save others and show them the way to nirvana.
Nature versus the Human World The poet comes out to enjoy the “gentle spring evening,” and get away from the human world. These two opposites, nature and the human world, comprise the two different options that Ho describes in the poem. From the beginning, nature is depicted in positive terms, while the human world is depicted in negative terms. Nature, as represented by the spring evening, is “unclouded by worldly dust.” In this sense, the words “worldly dust” are used in a negative manner to express the murky effect that the human world can have on the search for nirvana. The human world only “clouds” this search.
Organized Religion Ho considers the organized religions of her time part of the worldly dust that clouds humanity. Organized religion, represented by the “bell tolls,” only provides a flawed reflection of heaven, which the poet sees “upside-down in sad puddles.” If the echoes of the religious bells that she hears coming from the village or city were truly the way to find nirvana, then the puddles would not be sad. Nature, not organized religion, is the key to nirvana “nine times out of ten” cases, says Ho.
Nirvana The main theme of “Spring-Watching Pavilion” is the search for nirvana, a state of eternal bliss and understanding. At the end of the poem, Ho indicates that she has found it, or at least has found the way to find it: “Where is nirvana? / Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.” The search for nirvana is the primary focus of Buddhism, a religion that says the only way to achieve nirvana is to transcend the human, perishable world by eliminating the desires of the self. Theravada Buddhism claims to be
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Style Lu-Shih A lu-shih is a type of poem that was originally practiced by Chinese poets in classical times and which was borrowed by Vietnamese poets like Ho. A lu-shih is similar to the Italian sonnet—which itself has been borrowed by many poets writing in English. Like the sonnet, which consists of four-
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teen lines and which requires poets to adhere to a system of rules, the lu-shih is a rigid form of poetry. Lu-shihs, like “Spring-Watching Pavilion,” always have eight lines, and each line always has seven syllables. Unfortunately, in Balaban’s English translation, the syllable structure is one aspect that is sacrificed. Instead of seven syllables per line, each line in Balaban’s version contains anywhere from seven to twelve syllables. In addition, in a lushih, rhymes generally occur at the end of the first, second, fourth, sixth, and eighth lines. This unyielding structure made lu-shihs a challenge to poets, but Ho would often exceed these requirements. Once again, the rhyme scheme of her original version of “Spring-Watching Pavilion,” and of the lushih form in general, is lost in Balaban’s English translation. For example, the first two lines end with the words, “arrives” and “dust,” respectively, in the English version. In fact, in Balaban’s English version, the lines do not have end rhymes.
Symbolism A symbol is a physical object, action, or gesture that also represents an abstract concept, without losing its original identity. Symbols appear in literature in one of two ways. They can be local symbols, meaning that they are only relevant within a specific literary work. They can also be universal symbols, meaning that they are based on traditional associations that are widely recognized, regardless of context. “Spring-Watching Pavilion” includes the latter. In the first line, Ho sets the stage by talking about a “gentle spring evening.” Spring has long symbolized a rebirth, since it follows winter, which traditionally represents death. In this rebirth, the poet makes reference to many bodies of water, such as a “wave,” “puddles,” the “sea,” and “springs.” Water is also traditionally associated with birth and creation. The combined effect of these two creation symbols underscores the religious theme of the poem, and gives the reader the sense that the poet is experiencing a new beginning. In this case, the poet has traveled to the countryside, where she realizes that nature is a better way to experience nirvana than the worldly ways of men, including institutionalized religion, which is represented by the “worldly dust” and the “bell tolls.”
Historical Context The Importance of Water in Vietnam In “Spring-Watching Pavilion,” Ho makes several references to water. In addition to their sym-
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bolic meanings, the many water references underscore Vietnam’s water-based geography, climate, and lifestyle. Vietnam is a wet country, featuring many lakes, rivers, streams, and other bodies of water. This wet climate is ideal for growing rice, which has always been Vietnam’s main agricultural product. Rice is planted in wet paddies, shallow basins that hold the rice seeds. During the summer rainy season, floods of water carry nutrients from upland down to the paddies, nurturing the rice seeds. However, this process requires a delicate balance of irrigation. If the paddies receive too much water, they can overflow, washing away the seeds. If the paddies receive too little water, they can experience droughts. Both extremes can be destructive to the rice crop, which most Vietnamese peasants rely upon to survive. Unfortunately, Vietnam has always been a land of extremes, most notably in its precipitation. The rainfall in Vietnam fluctuates so wildly that it is hard to compute an average rainfall, as scientists do in other areas of the world. This erratic rain pattern has always been especially dangerous in areas like the Red River delta in North Vietnam, where Ho lived. The Red River delta is situated below the mountainous backcountry of North Vietnam. Since the mountains deflect most of the rain, the flow of the Red River can become dangerously high when the rainy season is particularly wet. Historian Joseph Buttinger says, in his 1972 book, A Dragon Defiant: A Short History of Vietnam: “Steadily increasing human efforts to reduce this danger—going back to the earliest periods of Vietnamese history—have still not entirely succeeded in taming the Red River.”
Vietnamese Government and Agriculture Since Vietnam’s populace depended heavily on its agricultural production in Ho’s time, any problems were blamed on the country’s leadership. While this is often true in other human societies, in Vietnam, these accusations had a religious justification. Although Vietnamese citizens followed many different religions, the country itself was ruled by those who believed in Confucianism, which stated that the country’s emperor, known as the Son of Heaven, was appointed by heaven. Although the emperor was not divine himself, he provided the link between the human world and heaven. While this may seem to be an enviable position for exercising power, the emperor was held accountable for disasters, which usually were related to agriculture. Anytime natural occurrences like the aforementioned floods happened, they
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Compare & Contrast • Late 1700s–Early 1800s: Western nations, most notably France, escalate their efforts to colonize Vietnam. During the Tay-Son Rebellion, Nguyen Anh (Gia Long) enlists the help of French soldiers to reclaim his family’s throne. However, when his successor, Minh Mang, expels the French from Vietnam, the relation between the two countries changes. Today: In 2000, President Clinton makes a historic visit to the southeast Asian country of Vietnam, where he advocates stronger relations between the two countries. Clinton is the first American president to visit Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War. • Late 1700s–Early 1800s: Vietnamese citizens subscribe to many different religions, including Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. However, Confucianist leaders often regulate the other re-
were viewed as a sign of heaven’s disapproval of the emperor.
Religious Control and Corruption In the poem, Ho talks about “worldly dust,” a reference to the world of man and its impure struggles. In Ho’s time, this worldly dust included institutionalized religions, such as Mahayana Buddhism. The Confucianist leaders feared that Buddhism’s emphasis on independent and unregulated thought and action could undermine the power of the government. As a result, the Confucian government attempted to control the Mahayana Buddhists by requiring monks and priests to take state-sponsored religious examinations to receive their ordination. In addition, the government set quotas for the number of clergy allowed in certain temples; paid the salaries of certain clergy and named temples after them to gain their allegiance; and forced the temples to perform rituals for dead government soldiers. For these reasons, Ho did not believe that organized religion held the key to finding nirvana. John Balaban says, in his introduction
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ligious groups to prevent them from undermining or opposing the Confucian government. Today: Although Vietnam is often identified with Buddhism and Confucianism, it still maintains an impressive diversity of religions. Communist leaders, essentially atheist and secular as a group, often regulate the country’s religious groups to prevent them from undermining or opposing the Communist government. • Late 1700s–Early 1800s: In Vietnam, flooding, particularly during the summer monsoon season, can be destructive to the agriculture—and thus the livelihood of villagers. Today: Although Vietnam has embraced technology in many ways, the country is still highly dependent upon its agriculture for survival. In 1999, Vietnam experiences some of its worst floods in years.
to Spring Essence: “she saw corruption in the religious institutions of her time and cast some of her wickedest slurs on venal, lazy, or decadent clergy.” However, Balaban also notes that, while she did not believe in institutionalized religion, she still followed the Buddhist precepts, as noted by her discussion of bodhisattvas in the poem.
Critical Overview In the short time that Spring Essence has been in print, many critics have given the book good reviews. Sam Howe Verhovek says, in his 2001 review of the book for the New York Times: “The book has drawn glowing reviews on both sides of the Pacific and was mentioned by President Bill Clinton in a toast during his trip to Vietnam.” Much of the attention for the book has not centered on the poetry itself, although this book does mark the first major publication of Ho’s poems. Instead, the book has been hailed for its groundbreaking
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achievement in linguistics, namely its typographic representation of Nom—the nearly extinct Vietnamese ideographic script that Ho used to write her poems. The Publishers Weekly reviewer in 2000 says, “It’s the backstory more than the actual English renderings of these poems that has been generating pre-pub attention for this title.” This pre-publication attention was also encouraged by a huge media campaign by Copper Canyon Press, the small literary press that published Spring Essence. This included “Nine Times out of Ten: John Balaban and the Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong,” a critical essay—written by Michael Wiegers, Copper Canyon’s managing editor—that was published in the prestigious American Poetry Review. However, despite the fact that many reviewers focus on the book’s background, some critics do address the poems themselves. Donna Seaman says, in her 2000 review of the book for Booklist: “But all such historic concerns pale in the presence of Ho Xuan Huong’s saucy voice, vital imagery, and nimble, teasing, sexy, and wise protestations and philosophical observations.” Seaman says that these poems “transcend time, geography, and culture with startling directness, relevance, and verve.” Likewise, Verhovek notes that the “poems are often good for a laugh and many have not-so-hidden sexual imagery.” Verhovek also likes other, less overt poems, which “use timeless natural images and simply sound beautiful, both in Vietnamese and now in Mr. Balaban’s translations.” Not everybody gives the English translations glowing praise, however. The Publishers Weekly reviewer notes that “the translations, as tightly wound as they are, won’t bear repeated perusals.” This reviewer also comments on the book’s racy cover, which features a topless woman with her face covered. The reviewer says, it is a “lame, bare-breasted attempt at titillation.”
Criticism Ryan D. Poquette Poquette has a bachelor’s degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette discusses the effects of translation on Ho’s Vietnamese poem. Some of the most famous poetry in history was written in a language other than English. For example, Homer’s epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were originally written in Greek, but their translated versions have inspired writers and read-
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A Vietnamese villager walks along the countryside outside of Hanoi
ers for thousands of years. Despite this fact, there is always the danger that something will be lost when a poem is translated from one language into another, especially if the two languages use radically different systems of writing. In Balaban’s translation of “Spring-Watching Pavilion,” he does lose certain aspects of the poem, while others remain intact through the translation process. For examining how much of the poem has been retained through the translation process, it helps if one looks at the poem from the outside in. That is, examining the greater structure before moving on to the specific meanings of individual lines and stanzas. When one compares the Vietnamese and English versions of “Spring-Watching Pavilion,” as they are printed in Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, they appear to be very similar. Both are composed of eight lines, which are broken up into four stanzas of two lines each. In addition, the sentence structure is the same, with periods at the end of lines two through eight. However, the Vietnamese version is a true lu-shih, since it has seven syllables in each line and it features end rhymes on lines one, two, four, six, and eight. Balaban’s English version does not have a consistent syllable count and does not feature end rhymes.
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It would be a tragedy if the world was deprived of the work of poets like Ho, simply because a translator was afraid that he or she might not get it totally right.”
Although structure is important to poetry, it is not the only aspect of poetry that determines the identity of a poem. Good poetry is also based on meaning. Unfortunately, translating Vietnamese poetry into English is a tricky business. As Balaban notes in his introduction, Vietnamese is a tonal language, in which the meaning of a word can change just by pronouncing it in a higher or lower tone. Balaban says, “With a music of pitches inherent in every poem, an entire dynamic of sound— inoperable in English—comes into play.” Ho is a clever poet, and she often uses these tonal changes in skilful ways to create a double entendre, or hidden meaning, in her poems. This second meaning is almost always sexual, which is one of the reasons that Ho has enjoyed such a strong reputation from the eighteenth century until today. In her own time, when the male, Confucianist authorities banned sexual discussions, writing about sex was very dangerous. By embedding these sexual meanings within the subtle use of tonal changes, Ho was able to create two different poems, a surface poem about one subject, and a hidden poem that had a second, sexual meaning. Although most readers, including the Confucianist government leaders, could read into these second meanings, Ho’s poetry was subtle and clever enough for her to avoid being persecuted for writing outright obscenities. English, on the other hand, is not a tonal language. When English-speaking people pronounce a word in a higher or lower pitch, it generally just indicates a person’s accent, mood, or style of speech. As a result, when a translator tries to render Ho’s multifaceted tones in English, something is inevitably lost. In addition, if the translator tries to compensate to better communicate the original, Vietnamese meaning, he or she can run into prob-
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lems. Balaban says, again in his introduction, “one of the many dangers for a translator of Ho Xuan Huong is driving any poem too far toward one pole of meaning.” Unfortunately, some reviewers feel that this is exactly what Balaban did in Spring Essence. In her 2000 article about the book for Publishers Weekly, Bridget Kinsella says: “In the English translation it is easier to see the double entendres that are part of Xuan Huong’s style.” Likewise, in his review of the book for the New York Times, Sam Howe Verhovek notes that many of the translations of Ho’s poems “have not-sohidden sexual imagery.” The opposite appears to be true for “SpringWatching Pavilion,” in which the hidden meaning seems to be totally lost in translation. To visualize this, it will help to reproduce the Vietnamese version of the poem: Em ai, chieu xuan toi khan dai Lang lang chang bon chut tran ai. Ba hoi chieu mo chuong gam song. Mot vung tang thuong nuoc lon troi. Be ai nghin trung khon tat can. Nguon an muon truong de khoi voi. Nao nao cuc lac la dau ta? Cuc lac la day, chin ro muoi
In his discussion of “Spring-Watching Pavilion” in the endnotes section of Spring Essence, Balaban discusses the hidden meaning in this particular poem. Balaban says, “Huong is punning tonally off ai.” As Balaban notes, Ho uses this word in various ways, including strategically placing it so that, when it is combined with other words in the lines below it, the vertical reading gives the poem a hidden meaning. Balaban notes the example of lines five and six, in which the second word on each line, “ai” and “an,” respectively, “can be read vertically as one word, ai-an, meaning ‘love.’” Ultimately, Balaban says that Ho’s many clever tonal manipulations make it seem “as if compassion is spreading throughout the poem. Dust and dissolution engender love.” In other words, in the surface poem, Ho is discussing the necessity of returning to nature to find nirvana. While readers can see that Ho is separating herself from the human world by secluding herself physically in nature, the hidden meaning is more direct. As the poem progresses, and Ho retreats from the human world, compassion grows. Taking this idea to its logical end, the total retreat from the “dust” of the human world results in physical death, which is represented by the term dissolution, or decay. It is only here, in death, that love is engendered, or procreated. Ho is saying that humans must die before they can be born into true
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love, which could be understood as nirvana. These kind of tonal manipulations are impossible to reproduce in English, so Balaban is not able to retain this exact message. So far, it looks like Balaban has been able to save very little of the original meaning. Given this fact, why should English readers think that they are reading most, if any, of Ho’s original poem? The answer is imagery. No matter what structural or tonal changes have been lost, the poem retains Ho’s original imagery. One of the most powerful aspects of poetry is in its use of images. This poem employs two main types of imagery—natural and man-made. The poem begins with the mention of “a gentle spring evening” in the first line. As the poem continues, the reader sees that the natural images dominate the poem, indicating the poet’s preference for natural religion over the man-made variety found in institutionalized belief systems like Mahayana Buddhism. Most of the natural images are related to water. The poet describes “bell tolls” that echo “like a wave”; heaven is viewed “upside-down in sad puddles”; love is depicted as a “vast sea”; and grace exists in “springs” that “flow easily everywhere.” Like Vietnam itself, this poem is very wet. When poets use such blatant imagery, it is usually intentional. In this case, Ho’s reasoning becomes clear when one examines the traditional symbolism of water. In general, water is a symbol for life or creation, and is often associated with femininity, since humans are born from a woman’s fluid-filled womb. Because of this, the poem takes on strong overtones of creation. In addition, the vastness of the sea, the largest body of water found on the earth, represents cosmic infinity, where everybody originates and must eventually return. Collectively, these images emphasize the cyclical role of nature in life, death, and the search for nirvana. This is powerful imagery in any language. In the end, while it was impossible for Balaban to retain Ho’s tonal manipulations, he has preserved her imagery. This imagery is ultimately the most important part of Ho’s poem, since “SpringWatching Pavilion” is a poem that is based on nature, and nature does not change regardless of the language in which it is depicted. Verhovek says of the poems in Spring Essence: they “use timeless natural images and simply sound beautiful, both in Vietnamese and now in Mr. Balaban’s translations.” In his introduction, Balaban makes readers fully aware that his translation “almost certainly contains inevitable errors of provenance as well as errors that are purely of my making, a foreigner.”
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However, this ultimately is not important, because Balaban’s translations, including his translation of “Spring-Watching Pavilion,” still retain enough important elements to make them worth reading. This is why Balaban notes that, while he was “swimming in waters way over his head” during his translations, he was still “cheered by shouts from Vietnamese standing on the far shore.” While it is certainly the goal of any translation to accurately communicate all aspects of a poet’s message, this goal is not always attainable. It would be a tragedy if the world was deprived of the work of poets like Ho, simply because a translator was afraid that he or she might not get it totally right. Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on “SpringWatching Pavilion,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Kate Covintree Covintree holds a bachelor’s degree in English and is currently pursuing a master of fine arts in writing at Emerson College. In this essay, Covintree examines various ways to interpret specific lines in the text in relation to the search for nirvana. Written during a time of political turnover and upheaval in her home country of Vietnam, Ho Xuan Huong’s poem, “Spring-Watching Pavilion,” found in the collection Spring Essence, captures a calm moment of serenity. In this poem, Ho discusses the discovery of enlightenment in the midst of an environment where such discovery could seem impossible. John Balaban has translated the poem from its original into English. In his poetic translation, Balaban has attempted to maintain the flavor of the original poem while making it easier to comprehend for the English reader. Fortunately, as Balaban explains in the Introduction to Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, Ho was a master “in composing two poems at once, one hidden in the other” that would appeal to both the common people and the aristocrats. Balaban includes footnotes to many of the poems to help the English reader discover the second or hidden poems. Still, there are many lines and ideas in the poem that could be interpreted in various ways. Though it is difficult to know which of the interpretations is correct, it is interesting to observe the variety of possibility and the impact the different readings have on the understanding of the text as a whole. In the fourth line of her poem, Ho writes, “We see heaven upside-down in sad puddles.” This line can be interpreted in a few ways. With the statements of “worldly dust” and the “bell” that tolls
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Like a bodhisattva, as the author of the poem she knows where she wants to take her reader. She is the guide for the type of understanding and nirvana the reader will get from her work.”
three times, Ho has brought images into her poem that could be seen as elements of the city. When put in combination with these noisy and dirty images and when the line has been translated to “sad puddles,” it is easy to interpret this line to mean that if the poet were to view heaven in this environment, it would be distorted by the bustle and busyness of the city. This would not be heaven at all, only a “heaven upside-down” and therefore a hell. In this interpretation, the line is in the context of the village and city that has been left behind. But, this line can be read differently. To see heaven upside-down in a puddle is to encounter the reflection of heaven while still on earth. Perhaps the puddles are not in the city, but just outside the pavilion where the poet is making her observations. By the fourth line in the poem, the reader already knows that the current evening is “gentle” and “unclouded.” To see heaven in this environment is to find peace in the unexpected. Perhaps this glimpse of heaven is what helps the poet come to the final conclusion about nirvana, that “Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.” With this last line, Ho places the reader immediately in a place of spiritual enlightenment. How can a reader determine which interpretation is more accurate? Since this poem is a translation, it can be helpful to return to the original text. In his Introduction to Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, Balaban includes a literal translation of the poem, “Spring-Watching Pavilion.” In the literal translation, the fourth line reads, “one puddle mourning water turned over heaven.” In this translation, a new possible image comes forth—a view of heaven covered over by a puddle. Here, it becomes unclear as to which noun is turning. Is it
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the water turning or heaven? Perhaps it is the water that propels heaven to turn and become visible to the poet and then the reader. It is also possible that the heaven of this line could simply be the earth near the pavilion that has been covered over by a puddle from a spring rain. Both of these ideas would still support the idea that heaven is present in the here and now. This explanation, however, does not fully clarify why the puddle would be in “mourning.” If the puddle is personified, or given human attributes, that allow for the puddle to show emotion, why would Ho choose sadness? Perhaps, because in this line, heaven is covered over, and therefore still inaccessible. Heaven is still just beyond reach. By focusing on this word, the reader would again have found support for the first interpretation, that this would not be heaven at all, but only a “turned . . . heaven.” It is then good to look at the following line that says, “love’s vast sea cannot be emptied.” In the literal translation it reads, “sea love 1,000 immense cannot splash out shallow.” With the addition of this line, heaven becomes connected with the vast sea of love. In this way, the water that covers over heaven is indeed love, and the combination of love and heaven “cannot splash out.” These two things will always exist in this moment. Though one may not always recognize their presence, they cannot dissipate. “Nine times out of ten,” heaven will be available. In both Balaban’s literal and poetic translations, symbols of water are ever present. This water is a symbol of a life force that flows freely and unhalting, through the observations of the poet. The bell rings in “waves,” and “springs of grace flow.” She freely plays with the images of water and uses them to help the reader think about nature, creation, and life. The original text of this poem was written in Nom, a native Vietnamese language that was not often used. In this version, her choices of word placement and rhyme add new dimension to her poems. In addition, she demonstrates a keen skill with the lu-shih tradition and creates poems with definite rhyme and meter. A lu-shih is a classical Chinese poem that follows a strict form of eight lines of seven syllables with end rhymes at the first, second, fourth, sixth, and eighth lines. In the Chinese tradition, there are also strict rules of the ways tones will fall in the lines. Though much of this is lost in translating Ho’s poem to English, other subtleties remain. One such example is the use of the word “spring” in this poem. In the title, “Spring-Watching” could mean a pavilion that faces a natural spring, or it
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What Do I Read Next? • Vietnam’s landscape and culture have inspired many of the country’s current writers. In Vietnam: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (1996), John Balaban and Nguyen Qui Duc compile more than fifteen stories by Vietnam’s best writers. Most of the stories are organized by five geographical sections: Hanoi, Rivers, Ho Chi Minh City, Dalat, and Villages.
• Today’s Vietnam has a rich and diverse culture. Culture and Customs of Vietnam (2001), by Mark W. McLeod and Nguyen Thi Dieu, offers a detailed overview of Vietnamese geography, history, religion, literature, art and architecture, cuisine, and other cultural aspects. The book also includes a chronology of important historical events, a glossary of Vietnamese terms, and a bibliography.
• Much can be learned about a culture by examining its classic stories. Children of the Dragon: Selected Tales from Vietnam (2001), by Sherry Garland, is a children’s book that collects six of these classic stories, including one that examines the legend of the monsoon rains. Garland discusses each tale in its specific historical and cultural context.
• Poetry has always occupied a place of honor in Vietnam. In An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems: From the Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries (2001), Huynh Sanh Thong and Sanh Thong Huynh include poems from both wellknown and obscure poets and address many topics relevant to Vietnamese culture and history, including religion, art, politics, and war.
could define the season in time when the poet is making her observations. “Xuan” is the Vietnamese word for spring. It is also part of the poet’s name. In the entire collection of poems edited and translated by Balaban, this is the only poem with the poet’s own name in the title. By including her name in the title, Ho has given herself a direct place in her poem. In Balaban’s poetic translation, the word spring returns in both the first and sixth lines. In the first line, “spring” appears to describe the season in time, while in the sixth line, the word is used like a natural spring or wellspring. Because this word is also the name of the poet, each time it is used, it carries the additional weight of the presence of the poet in the poem. The line “springs of grace” could suddenly also refer to Ho’s personality. The continual repetition of the word “spring” adds to the authoritative and confident voice of the poet and the poem.
words in line five and two words in line six form two new words: “áI-ân,” which means love and “nghìn and muôn” which means vast. In the endnote to Spring Essence, John Balaban interprets these new words to show that “compassion is spreading throughout the poem.” This all encompassing compassion helps support the ideas of nirvana being present in poem and in the current world. Throughout the poem, Ho includes images and ideas that stem from Mahayana Buddhism such as “worldly dust” and the images of the vast sea of love and grace. Though Ho followed Buddhist precepts she was not inclined to support organized religion. According to the introduction to Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, Balaban reveals that Ho “saw corruption in the religious institutions of her time and cast some of her wickedest slurs on venal, lazy or decadent clergy.” This poem is clearly filled with Buddhist ideas and beliefs but intentionally absent from the piece is a traditional clerical guide. In Mahayana Buddhism, there are members of the community called bodhisattvas who have already achieved nirvana, but remain on earth to guide other followers. As Balaban explains in the
To help the reader understand other devices that Ho used in the poem, “Spring-Watching Pavilion,” Balaban provides an endnote to the poem that examines some of the Nom words in a different manner. Instead of reading the words from left to right, he reads them from top to bottom. Suddenly, two
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endnotes of his translation of Ho’s work, “the bodhisattvas vow to save all sentient beings and [strive] for karuna—kindness or compassion—one of the Buddhist ‘perfections.’” When reading words from lines five and six vertically, the reader learns that compassion is one of the main ideas Ho wants to include in the poem. In addition, if the reader follows the second interpretation of the fourth line, the interpretation that says that heaven is being reflected for the poet, then Ho herself can be seen as someone acting in the manner of a bodhisattva in this poem. She has seen nirvana and now cannot remain passive while others are unaware of the beauty already around them on earth. She is actively making others aware of the heaven and compassion that surround them on earth. Like a bodhisattva, as the author of the poem she knows where she wants to take her reader. She is the guide for the type of understanding and nirvana the reader will get from her work. Because of her own mixed and critical feelings for organized religion, Ho has taken her own claim to spiritual enlightenment and brought the reader along for the journey. It is a journey absent of organized religion, but not revelation. Ho is a master of word play. One of the greatest strengths of her poems is her use of double entendre to bring multiple meanings to her poems. All the confusion about the fourth line may have been part of an intended ambiguity. The contradiction allows for reflection and possibility. The ability to expand the meaning of her poem through the creation of vertical reading also helps provide the poem with depth and greater understanding. She is intentional about her words, from “dust” to “spring.” She demonstrates enlightenment, both as a poet and as a spiritual guide. All of these various pieces to her poem and poetics only increase the intensity of the epiphany at the end of the poem so that “Nirvana is here nine times out of ten.” Source: Kate Covintree, Critical Essay on “Spring-Watching Pavilion,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Sources Balaban, John, “Endnotes,” in Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, translated and edited by John Balaban, Copper Canyon Press, 2000, pp. 128–29. —, “Introduction,” in Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, translated and edited by John Balaban, Copper Canyon Press, 2000, pp. 9, 11, 14. Buttinger, Joseph, A Dragon Defiant: A Short History of Vietnam, Praeger Publishers, 1972, p. 9.
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Huong, Ho Xuan, “Spring-Watching Pavilion,” in Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, translated and edited by John Balaban, Copper Canyon Press, 2000, pp. 114–15. Kinsella, Bridget, “Ancient Poems Find Printed Page,” in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 247, No. 44, October 30, 2000, pp. 27–28. Review of Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 247, No. 39, September 25, 2000, p. 108. Seaman, Donna, Review of Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, in Booklist, Vol. 97, No. 3, October 1, 2000, p. 313. Verhovek, Sam Howe, “From Woodcuts to Bytes for a Vietnamese Poet,”in the New York Times, March 15, 2001. Wiegers, Michael, “Nine Times out of Ten: John Balaban and the Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong,” in the American Poetry Review, Vol. 29, No. 5, September 2000, p. 6.
Further Reading Barnes, Thomas J., Tay Son: Rebellion in 18th Century Vietnam, Xlibris Corporation, 2000. This book examines the Tay-Son rebellion, which took place in Vietnam from 1771 to 1802. Many scholars believe that Ho was born during this conflict, which dominated Vietnamese life and politics. The book is written in the style of a historical novel and examines the effect of the rebellion on Vietnamese people. Smolan, Rick, ed., Passage to Vietnam: Through the Eyes of Seventy Photographers, Against All Odds Productions, 2000. In this book, seventy photographers from fourteen different countries provide glimpses into modern Vietnamese life. Since many of the photos depict the Vietnamese people against the country’s ancient landscapes, the book can help readers envision the scenery that Ho’s nature poems were based upon. Steinberg, David Joel, ed., In Search of Southeast Asia, Praeger Publishers, 1971. This book examines the development of the countries in modern Southeast Asia, including Vietnam. It includes a detailed section on the religious and political life of Vietnam in the eighteenth century. The book also includes several maps, in-depth notes for each chapter, and a comprehensive bibliography. Williams, Paul, Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices series, Routledge, 1989. This book offers a good introduction to the beliefs and practices of Mahayana Buddhists. Williams examines the history of Mahayana Buddhism (a form of Buddhism practiced in Vietnam), discusses current trends, and includes several references for further study.
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Temple Bells Die Out “Temple Bells Die Out” is a haiku that was written by the Japanese poet Basho¯, who is credited with developing the haiku form from a light humorous verse based on word play into an evocative, philosophical statement. Basho¯ used descriptions of common scenes from nature to make allegories about life. “Temple Bells Die Out” was written between 1686–1691, a period in which Basho¯ wrote his most renowned haiku. Written in a style which Basho¯ both developed and favored, the haiku has only seventeen syllables and often contrasts two objects with no apparent similarities. In “Temple Bells Die Out,” Basho¯ contrasts the sound of bells ringing through the evening with the smell of flower blossoms. His description of the transient sound of the bells and the enduring fragrance of the flowers suggests the disparate aspects of life which combine to give it form.
Matsuo Basho¯ 1686
Author Biography Little information exists about Basho¯’s early life. The son of a low-ranking samurai, Basho¯ is generally believed to have been born in 1644 in the Iga province of Japan. Basho¯ became a page to, and formed a close friendship with, Todo Yoshitada, a young samurai two years his elder. Yoshitada shared Basho¯’s intense interest in haikai, a form of long poem from which haiku derives. Intending to become a samurai himself, Basho¯ acquired the
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samurai name Munefusa, but he abandoned his training when Yoshitada died unexpectedly in 1666. Scholars believe both grief over his friend’s death and apprehension about a new, less amicable master led Basho¯ to abandon his career as a samurai. Some also include an unhappy love affair as a factor that hastened his departure, although others consider this theory a fabrication of Basho¯’s early biographers. What Basho¯ did during the next several years is unknown, but he is believed to have lived for some time in Kyoto, which was then the capital of Japan, studying philosophy and poetry. Basho¯’s poetry was published in at least four anthologies between 1667 and 1671. He moved to Edo (present-day Tokyo) in 1672 and began to write under the pseudonym Tosei. His reputation as a haiku master steadily increased in Edo, and he began to attract a large following of disciples, who supplied him with a small hut in which he could write and teach. A banana tree, exotic to Japan, was planted in front of the hut and pleased the poet so much that he took for his writing name “Basho¯,” the Japanese word for “banana plant.” After about eight years, Basho¯ increasingly felt a sense of purposelessness and spiritual disquiet after achieving artistic and material success. Consequently, he began the study of Zen Buddhist med-
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itation and embraced an ascetic lifestyle. Seeking an exercise in spiritual and artistic discipline, in 1684, Basho¯ undertook a pilgrimage on foot across the Japanese countryside. Although this journey proved to be physically trying for him, for the remainder of his life, Basho¯ continued to make pilgrimages, visiting religious and secular sites, disseminating his ideas on haiku to fellow poets, and often begging alms for subsistence. His accounts and haiku recollections of these travels, especially The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, are considered his most accomplished and lasting literary works. When he was not on a journey, Basho¯ secluded himself in remote huts in the wilderness, until 1691 when he returned to Edo. Finding himself again besieged by followers, Basho¯ struggled with a spiritual conflict between his religious desire to transcend worldly affairs and his poetic avocation, which focused attention upon himself. Basho¯ left Japan in 1693 to escape this conflict, but he returned the following year to begin a series of travels along the country’s Pacific coast. That spring, his health forced Basho¯ to stop in Osaka, where he died of a stomach ailment in the summer of 1694.
Poem Text Temple bells die out. The fragrant blossoms remain. A perfect evening!
Poem Summary Line 1 In the haiku” Temple Bells Die Out” Matsuo Basho¯ describes dusk as an observer sitting in a Japanese garden might have experienced it. In line 1 the poet describes the sound of the bells ringing from a nearby temple. They chime out and then echo leaving silence to envelop the evening.
Line 2 In line 2, however, the fragrance of the cherry blossoms, in contrast to the sound of the bells, remains in the night air. The contrast between the two apparently dissimilar objects is complex. The first is a sound, the second a smell. The sound of the bells lasts a short time, the blossoms and their perfume linger.
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Line 3 In line 3 Matsuo Basho¯ unites the two images, claiming that they are part of one larger whole. Although dissimilar they each function to produce “a perfect evening.” At one level Matsuo Basho¯ describes a peaceful seemingly perfect evening, a common scene that many of his readers would have themselves experienced. However, he uses this scene to illustrate the way in which all aspects of life must play their individual roles and yet unite to create a perfect whole.
Themes Nature Haiku often contains “season” words, called kigo, that signify a time of year. Japan was an agricultural society in the seventeenth century, and its people were attuned to changes in the seasons and the rhythms of nature. Most of the kigo in Japanese haiku refer to plants. The “fragrant blossoms” tell readers it is spring or summer, evoking a sense of vitality and well being, and the feeling of being one with nature, both essential features of Basho¯’s haiku.
Knowledge Haiku often change a person’s understanding or recognition of life by describing ordinary events or objects in new ways. Basho¯ accomplishes this in his poem by juxtaposing the fading sound of bells ringing and the sensation of fragrant blossoms. Both of these images were familiar to seventeenthcentury readers. The relationship of the first image to the second suggests concession. So, if the two lines were written as prose, there would be a concessive subordinator, as such: “Although temple bells die out, the fragrant blossoms remain.” Reconstructing the haiku this way suggests the poem is commenting on the natural cycles of life and death. One thing dies, but another lives. However, there is no causal relationship between temple bells dying and blossoms remaining fragrant; they both “happen” in the same instant, and in this way are part of the same eternal moment, perfect in themselves, and perfect, like the evening. Basho¯’s concept of sabi is also evident in the poem. Sabi refers to the speaker’s awareness of the evanescence of all things. Not only is this idea depicted in the image of temple bells dying, a metaphor for their diminishing volume, but also it is present in the image of fragrant blossoms re-
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Media Adaptations • The video Haiku: Short Poetry of Japan (1982) introduces the history of haiku and explores the life and poetry of Basho¯. It is available from the Statewide Educational Resources, Office of Statewide Partnerships, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2800 Grove Avenue, Richmond, VA 23221–2466. • In 1983, Big Sur Tapes released Poetry East and West, a two-volume set of audiotapes of Robert Bly reading his own poetry and the poetry of Basho¯, Pablo Neruda, Caesar Vallejo, and the ancient Taoists. The tapes can be purchased by writing to Big Sur Tapes, P.O. Box 4, Tiburon CA 94920.
maining, for the reader knows that even these blossoms will fade in time. The image of “evening” similarly evokes sabi, for it highlights the fact that all “perfect” moments are transient, like life itself.
Religion “Temple Bells Die Out” evokes the sensation of loss, even as it suggests that the very idea of possessing anything is an illusion. By focusing on his perceptions rather than himself, Basho¯ illustrates the importance of selflessness in haiku and in life. Literature was a kind of religion for Basho¯, who studied Confucianism, Taoism, and Shintoism, and was also a student of Zen Buddhism. In haiku, Basho¯ saw a way to live. He called this the way of elegance, which had its own set of values, the primary one being to elevate life to an art form.
Style “Temple Bells Die Out” is written in haiku, a Japanese form of poetry. The modern haiku consists of three lines with a total of 17 syllables. The first and third lines consist of five syllables and the second line is comprised of seven syllables. Although
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Topics for Further Study • Where is the speaker standing or sitting in relation to the blossoms and the temple bells? Write a short essay situating the speaker, speculating on what he was doing before and after the bells rang. • In groups, compose a poster depicting Basho¯’s poem and hang it in your classroom. • Write a haiku that “updates” Basho¯’s haiku by describing things that are unmistakably contemporary. Read it to your class and discuss its imagery. Compare yours with others in the class. • Research the history of Zen Buddhism and prepare a short presentation on it to deliver to your class. • Write a short description of your idea of a perfect evening and then exchange yours with a classmate’s. In pairs, discuss the differences and similarities and what your description suggests about the things that you value. • Research Basho¯’s and Zen Buddhism’s influence on Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and present your research to your class for discussion. Consider issues such as Zen’s appeal to writers living in the 1940s and 1950s in America.
haikus are short, they are challenging to write. Their very brevity requires the poet to be efficient and selective with word choice. Japanese haiku, like “Temple Bells Die Out,” use images of nature to consider larger messages about life and spirituality.
Historical Context Edo Period in Japan The Edo Period in Japan lasted from 1600 to 1868, beginning with Tokugawa Ieyasu’s founding of the shogunate at Edo, now Tokyo. Tokugawa Ieyasu was named Shogun by the emperor. A shogun is a supreme military leader, and a shogu-
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nate is the period during which respective shoguns reigned, and the place where they established their reign. Edo shogunate was Japan’s last. It was preceded by Kamakura shogunate and Muromachi shogunate. Tokugawa Ieyasu revolutionized the way Japan was governed by eliminating the feudal system, establishing a military government in Edo, and encouraging trade with the Dutch and English in the early part of the century. However, in 1635 Shogun Iemitsu, Tokugawa Ieyasu’s successor, forbade traveling abroad and limited trade to the port of Nagasaki, so Japan traded only with the Chinese and Dutch. Shogun Iemitsu was fearful that foreign influence would destabilize Japanese society. Despite the isolation, however, the Japanese economy thrived, and along with it, Japanese art and literature such as kabuki, ukiyo-e, and haiku, which many historians claim originated with Basho¯. An increase in urban education and the development of the merchant class helped to create a readership and distribution system for much of the new literature. The Edo itself was defined by a rigid class system, with the samurai at top, followed by artisans, farmers, and merchants, and a code of behavior dictated daily life, from such details as what one could wear to whom one could marry. In the mid 1670s, Basho¯ lived in Edo, where he studied Zen Buddhism under the priest, Butcho, and edited a collection of poetry called The Seashell Game. During this period, Basho¯ cultivated students who, like himself, had also dropped out of samurai society, the highest class in Japanese society. Literary historians believe Basho¯ wrote “Temple Bells Die Out” between 1686–1691, when the poet traveled through the northern provinces of Honshu, gathering material for Narrow Road to the Interior, a travelogue of poetry and prose. The ban on Western literature was lifted in 1720, and by the end of the eighteenth century, the Edo shogunate had begun its decline. The financial system was deteriorating because of ongoing natural disasters such as famine and because of the government’s harsh taxing of farmers, who rioted in response. The merchant class began to exert more power, while the status of the samurai class continued to erode. The merchants were consolidated in cities, especially Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto. In 1700, Edo had a population of more than one million, while Osaka and Kyoto had about 400,000. A decline of morals and an increase in corruption marked the second half of the Edo period, but the government continued its ban on contact with foreigners. It was not until 1853 that the Tokugawa government finally relented and opened a few of its ports to an American,
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Compare & Contrast • Seventeeth Century: Japan bans foreign books and isolates itself from the rest of the world.
• Seventeeth Century: The Tokugawa shogunate oppresses Western religions.
Today: Japan is an economic world power, and Tokyo is a cosmopolitan city.
Today: Western religions are practiced in Japan, which has developed a society tolerant of many belief systems.
• Seventeeth Century: Tokugawa Ieyasu is the most powerful man in Japan and in 1603 is appointed Shogun by the emperor. He establishes his military government in Edo (Tokyo), and Tokugawa shoguns rule Japan for more than 250 years. Today: Japan has a representative democracy, but its government is dominated by one party— the Liberal Democratic Party.
Commodore Perry. The Tokugawa shogunate fell in 1868 as American warships cruised off the coast of the country, and as an angry nationalist movement rose up against the shogunate. With Emperor Meiji restored to imperial power, America had access to a huge new market for its goods.
Critical Overview Critics agree that Basho¯ is primarily responsible for developing the modern style of haiku. Some scholars, like Makoto Ueda in his Matsuo Basho¯, claim that Matsuo Basho¯ is the greatest haiku writer. In Japanese Literature, Roger Bersihand writes that Basho¯ “made the entertaining epigram into delicate poetry, which suggests rather than expresses an idea, using simple, evocative touches under which is often a profound symbolism.” However, critics agree that Matsuo Basho¯ developed his style of poetry throughout his adult years and that his later poetry is notably superior to his earlier efforts. Critics note two distinct characteristics of poems like “Temple Bells Die Out” which were written between 1686–1691, generally considered the period during which Matsuo Basho¯ wrote his best
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• Seventeeth Century: Buddhism is practiced throughout Japan, but is little known in the West. Today: Buddhism is becoming increasingly popular in western countries such as the United States, as an increasing number of people seek an alternative religion.
haiku. First, Matsuo Basho¯ developed the idea of sabi or loneliness in his poems. Matsuo Basho¯’s poems are not crowded with descriptions of people and urban life. Rather, they center on the relationship of some small aspect of nature to the larger whole. As Makoto Ueda states in his Matsuo Basho¯ : “[t]o realize that all living things are evanescent is sad, but when one sees a tiny creature enduring that sadness and fulfilling its destiny one is struck with a sublime feeling.” This is the mood that Matsuo Basho¯ is attempting to portray. Secondly, critics note Matsuo Basho¯’s propensity and talent for depicting two dissimilar objects in contrast. And yet, as Makoto Ueda points out in the same book, there is “an implied communication” between the objects in “Temple Bells Die Out.” Only through the comparison which forces the reader to reconsider the nature and relationship of the objects is the “hidden interrelatedness” discovered.
Criticism Chris Semansky Semansky is an instructor of literature whose writing appears regularly in literary journals. In
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Whether the speaker is outside or inside, however, is beside the point in Basho¯’s haiku, for Basho¯’s aim was to dissolve the distance between himself and what he perceived—to become one with the object.”
this essay, Semansky considers the imagery in Basho¯’s poem. Basho¯’s haiku does not lend itself to the strategies that literary critics often use to interpret a poem. For one thing, it is short, very short, and for another it is not full of the figurative language and irony of many western poems, which often require the unpacking of allusions and metaphor. However, Basho¯’s technique, of creating haiku by juxtaposing images from ordinary life with seemingly nothing in common, complicates the act of representation while attempting to simplify it. By writing little, he leaves out much. The Westernized version of kaiku, or hokku, as it was called when Basho¯ practiced, is composed of three lines, which contain five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. Sometimes the haiku contains one image and sometimes two or more, which are juxtaposed and presented with no comment or explanation to link them. This is Basho¯’s technique in “Temple Bells Die Out.” The imagery here is concrete yet generalized. The fading sound of bells provides an aural image, and the adjective “temple” provides readers with a visual image that also resonates with ideas of ritual and ceremony, which was important in Buddhist Japan. Buddhism was introduced to Japan around the sixth century, and the next two hundred years came to be known as the golden age of Japanese arts and crafts. During this time, numerous sculptures of Buddha were cast and placed in the large temples around Japan. As a Zennist, Basho¯ visited many of these temples during his wander-
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ings, and often slept in the rooms they provided for travelers. The sound of ringing temple bells would have been very familiar to him. Also during this time, huge bells were constructed by metalworkers, which were often as impressive as the sculptures. For example, the bell of Todaiji Temple in the city of Nara was made from 33.9 tons of copper and 1.6 tons of tin. To sound them, the bells were hit with a large wooden mallet. But the fading sound might also be that of smaller bells such as those used in Esoteric Buddhism. Practitioners of this form of Buddhism used a set of five Kongo bells, each symbolizing the five main Buddhas of Esoteric Buddhism, also called the Five Buddhas of Wisdom. Devotees would place the bells in front of the Buddha and ring them during their practice. In his presentation of Basho¯’s writing, The Essential Basho, Sam Hamill notes that haiku contain a kake kotaba, or “pivot word,” which is like a double entendre—a word or phrase that has more than one meaning. The pivot word in Basho¯’s poem might be “bells,” which signifies both the object of the ringing and the shape of a flower’s blossoms. Hamill also notes that some forms of literary criticism are of little use in reading Basho¯, but suggests, “surface and core may be useful terms for establishing a necessary dialectic” because “they provide frames of reference.” Read this way, the surface of Basho¯’s poem is the sensory details themselves—the ringing and the fragrance, the details of the ephemeral world. The core is the relationship between the details, the recognition that all sensory experience is illusory, transitory, and that all things perceived, however dissimilar, are part of a greater whole. Evening and perfection are both abstract terms and a fitting “summary” and interpretation of the preceding images. Linking the sound of bells with the smell of fragrant blossoms and evening suggests that the speaker is outside. The second image is also concrete because it appeals to the sense of smell. However, “fragrant” is a vague adjective. Readers do not know if the fragrance is from a specific plant, such as cherry blossom or rose, or if it is a combination of fragrances from various kinds of blossoms. There is also a flower popular in Japan, a purple iris that is called “temple bells;” this fact adds another association for the contemporary reader of Basho¯’s poem. Whether the speaker is outside or inside, however, is beside the point in Basho¯’s haiku, for Basho¯’s aim was to dissolve the distance between himself and what he perceived—
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to become one with the object. Once this is accomplished, the words come naturally. In his introduction to Basho¯’s, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Nobuyuki Yuasa quotes Basho¯ ’s explanation of his composing process: Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord . . . when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural—if the object and yourself are separate—then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.
The work of haiku, then, comes before the act of writing, during the writer’s meditation on the subject. A successful haiku cannot be written without the proper attitude and stillness of mind. Basho¯’s technique of leaving the self to become one with the object perceived is similar in some ways to the object of the surrealists, who worked more than two hundred years later. Surrealists also wanted to jettison the conscious self in composing poetry, but instead of being motivated by teachings of Zen Buddhism, they were motivated by Freud and his theories of the unconscious. Imagist poets such as Ezra Pound, practicing in the early twentieth century in the west, owe a debt to Basho¯ and to haiku in their own poetic program. Indeed, critics often refer to Pound’s wellknown poem, “In a Station of the Metro” as being haiku-like in its juxtaposition of images. For contemporary readers of Basho¯, haiku are like photographs. “Temple Bells Die Out” tells a story and provokes thought, but much is hidden. When viewers look at a photograph, they rarely think of the photographer; instead, they focus on the subject of the photograph. Basho¯’s haiku has the same effect. In eliciting subjective responses from its readers, the poem’s images lead them to places they have not been to before. Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “Temple Bells Die Out,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Frank Pool Pool is a published poet and teacher of advanced placement and international baccalaureate senior English. In this essay, Pool identifies four approaches to the understanding of Basho¯’s haiku. Some students will approach a haiku with delight, and others with despair. A haiku is a tiny fragment that distills a moment’s observation. The
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haiku (plural is also haiku, following Japanese linguistic practice, in which plurals of nouns are not distinguished grammatically in most situations) represents the world’s briefest and most concise poetic form, and, depending on the reader’s personality, it may strike one as, respectively, trivial, portentous, enigmatic, insightful, sensitive, profound, witty, or perversely nonsensical. Several characteristics of the haiku make problems of interpretation even more acute. Haiku are highly compressed and grammatically incomplete, even in the original Japanese. They contain ambiguities, puns, and evocative diction. A bewildering variety of English translations can result from the same poem. They are often responses to natural phenomena, but they also relate to the poet’s psychological or social situation at the occasion of their composition. They are often embedded in contexts, both social and literary, often being written on festive occasions, and also are sometimes found embedded in the context of other literary works, such as Basho¯’s famous travel journal Oku-NoHosomichi. Furthermore, they may employ images that have conventional meanings and connotations that are utterly unknown by the reader who has not studied the Japanese culture and language in some depth. Allusions abound in a type of literature that English-speakers have hardly heard of, much less read. Exotic social customs and unknown holidays are mentioned, and readers need explanations and footnotes to understand the connection between images. Finally, haiku illustrate several kinds of thinking that are often unfamiliar, such as the importance of Buddhist thought and the expression of a Japanese aesthetic that is compelling but unusual. Yet, despite all these obstacles, English translations of Japanese haiku, as well as haiku composed in English, have inspired and stimulated many people, among them not only famous writers and formidable scholars, but also many who are sensitive perceivers and perhaps practitioners of this brief but demanding poetic form. A haiku can demand that its interpreter take one of several critical paths toward understanding it. The term “critical paths” is used in a deliberately ambiguous sense in this essay, because a critical path is both the method used by a critic, and it is also the determining approach to one’s comprehension of the poem. There are four paths toward understanding a haiku. These are generally applicable ways to all literature, but they are particularly clear in addressing a haiku. The first path is to understand the language of the original. The second path is to know the contexts of the poem. The third
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To understand Basho¯’s haiku, a perceptive reader needs to take the images and see where they lead.”
path is to comprehend the mind of the poet. The fourth path is to respond to the images of the poem. The first path is to understand the language of the original. Basho¯’s haiku in Japanese reads as follows: Kane kiete Hana no ka wa tsuku Yuube kana.
In Japanese, it would be written as one line; these line breaks are intended to show the natural pauses between the first five, the next seven, and the last five onjin, which very roughly correspond with syllables in English. Daniel C. Buchanan has translated this haiku as follows: Temple bells die out. The fragrant blossoms remain. A perfect evening!
The last word in the poem is known as a kireji, or “cutting word.” These words are, in effect, audible punctuation that indicate such things as emphasis or probability or completion. “Kana” usually occurs at the end of a haiku and is used to convey the author’s wonder at a scene or event. In other words, it is the rough equivalent to the exclamation point that Buchanan uses. The first phrase, literally, means “bell / is extinguishing.” There is no temple overtly present; this is an assumption on the part of the translator. “Kane” means “bell” or “gong,” and it is certainly reasonable to associate them with temples in the seventeenth century, but notice that Buchanan chooses to present an image, which, though quite plausible, is not necessary. Problems of translation abound and are irreducible. Makoto Ueda, in his book Matsuo Basho, does not refer to temple bells, but simply to “chimes.” On the other hand, the word “hana,” which literally means “flower,” is conventionally associated with the cherry blossom. In Japanese, a “hanami” is an expedition to look at cherry blossoms, not plum blossoms or peach blossoms. Ueda’s second line of
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his translation is, “cherry fragrance continues.” Buchanan, who was born in Japan in 1892 and spoke, read, and wrote in Japanese, was certainly not an inadequate translator. Clearly, he understood that “hana” means “blossom” but unless qualified with another noun the word denotes “cherry blossom.” For the poetic purpose of his translation, which works out to have five, seven, and five English syllables per line, he has chosen to spend his precious syllables emphasizing the fragrance of the blossom, and in using the articles “the” and “a” to produce a natural effect in English. Finally, the last line literally says, “evening / !” and could be rendered not only as “A perfect evening!” because perfection is implicit, not expressed, but also as Ueda’s straightforward “Evening dusk.” The upshot of taking the first path toward interpretation is a reminder, in the first place, just how speculative any translation of a Japanese haiku must necessarily be. Japanese words mean more, and perhaps sometimes less, than an equivalent English term. Taking this first path requires language study beyond the experience of most casual readers of haiku, but it is essential to grasp what the poem actually says in the original. Perhaps the best strategy for a student unable or unwilling to study Japanese is to locate several different translations of Basho¯ and to compare them. Fortunately, there are a number of English translations available. The second path is to know the contexts of the poem. To do this, a student must know something about the development of haiku and its formal rules, and it is important to understand something about the distinctive aesthetic sensibilities of the Japanese. Donald Keene, in a delightful and accessible book, The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, gives a concise history of Japanese poetry. Though recapitulating his chapter is beyond the scope of this essay, it is important to remember that there are cultural and gender factors involved in the development of Japanese poetry and haiku. First, it must be remembered that China was the great civilization of Asia; the Japanese borrowed and adapted many things from China, including its writing system, modified for use in Japanese, a language wholly unrelated to Chinese. The Chinese language was a prestigious language, much as Latin was in medieval and renaissance Europe. Scholars and aristocrats wrote in Chinese, including poetry. But women were not educated in Chinese writing. Among the upper classes, a good number of women were literate in Japanese. Much Japanese poetry is love poetry. For a number of reasons, the Japanese adopted extreme brevity in their poetry. The haiku
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What Do I Read Next? • Robert Aiken’s Taking the Path of Zen (1985) presents complex ideas with simplicity, describing the practice, lifestyle, rationale, and ideology of Zen Buddhism.
• Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism without Beliefs (1997) provides an accessible introduction to the principles and values underlying Buddhism, without the accompanying religious dogma.
• In 1996, Stone Bridge Press published Basho’s Narrow Road, which includes Hiroaki Sato’s annotation and translation of Basho¯’s description of his five-month trip through the interior of Japan in 1689.
• Mark Epstein’s Thoughts without a Thinker (1995) considers psychotherapy through the lens of Buddhism.
• In 1966, Penguin Classics published Basho¯’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, which contains five travel sketches written by Basho¯ towards the end of his life. Most of the sketches consist of linked prose and poetry.
is the ultimate in brevity. The haiku form, once called hokku, was the opening section of a collaborative linked verse called renku. Basho¯ took this form, which had to some extent degenerated into ribald punning verse, and put it to his own uses. He used the poetic form as an instrument in his own wandering life, in his search for Buddhist enlightenment. Keene identifies the four most important characteristics of Japanese aesthetics as suggestion, irregularity, simplicity, and perishability. These qualities are employed in the service of love and also in the service of Zen Buddhist spirituality. Because of their choice to limit their poetry to brief forms, the Japanese eschewed many possibilities, instead focusing on the significance of a brief, spontaneous insight. Keene says, “Most Japanese poetry written before the twentieth century is devoid of intellectual and social concern, though it beautifully captures emotional states and the poets’ perception of nature.” To take the third path of interpretation is to try to understand the mind of the writer. Most students trying to interpret a work of literature will intuitively identify a work’s meaning with the intention of the author. This is a commonsense approach, but it has its flaws. Anglo-American literary crit-
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• In his classic novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974), Robert Pirsig’s narrator, Phaedrus, uses a cross-country motorcycle trip with his son to question and explore the values of twentiethcentury America and to probe the limits of rational analysis.
ics of the middle twentieth century, influenced by the logical positivism then current among philosophers, coined the term “intentional fallacy” for the error of judging the quality and meaning of a work in regard to the author’s intention, expressed or implied, in writing it. Not all work has a clear and obvious intent. Sometimes it is clear that a poet may, for example, call men to rally around their king and their country or teach a moral lesson or pronounce some other didactic message. But poetry such as Basho¯’s, is often autoletic, which means that it is non-didactic and has no purpose or intention to do anything in the world. That said, it is possible to understand much about Basho¯ through his mind and writings and the stories his contemporaries told about him. Basho¯ lived in the seventeenth century. A great deal about the man is clarified through his biography and by a recognition of his typical themes. Ueda and others have identified the term sabi with Basho¯. “Sabi” means “loneliness.” This loneliness is expressed both in Basho¯’s life and his writing. He spent many years wandering around. It is true he visited people; he was not a hermit, but there was a deep apart-ness about the man. What seems to have been most important to Basho¯ is a desire for
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Buddhist enlightenment, or satori. This is a state of sudden awareness. D. T. Suzuki, in his book Zen Buddhism, gave the following as characteristics of satori: irrationality, intuitive insight, authoritativeness, affirmation, sense of the Beyond, impersonal tone, feeling of exaltation, and momentariness. Zen Buddhism values spontaneity and an immediate and clear perception of reality and a cleansing of the mind of too much rational thought. It is apparent that many of Basho¯’s haiku deal with the oneness of man and nature. Higginson quotes Basho¯, saying, “In writing, do not let a hair’s breadth separate yourself from the subject. Speak your mind directly; go to it without wandering thoughts.” This haiku works through images and indirection, not through categories and logic and explanation. Basho¯ heard the sound of the bell die away, and he smelled the fragrance of cherry blossoms, and it was a glorious spring evening. And that is all, and that is the such-ness of the world. The fourth path toward interpretation is the easiest path, and as such, the most misleading, the most likely to lead one to be either lazy or overly inventive. To understand Basho¯ ’s haiku, a perceptive reader needs to take the images and see where they lead. The first three paths are rigorous approaches to understanding. But there is more to haiku than understanding. Like satori itself, it can be talked about, but words do not lead to insight. Still, as a poem, this one has words and images. Basho¯ evokes the faint reverberations, the overtones and undertones, of a bell. Perhaps it is a temple bell, perhaps in a very old shrine, expressing a kind of permanence. And the tones die away. What remains is the fragrance of the cherry blossom. The cherry blossom is the emblem of impermanence. The cherry blooms for only three days. All over Japan, people plant cherry trees for those three glorious days in spring. It comes every year, this constantlyrenewed impermanence. One evening in the seventeenth century, a man who had sharpened his mind by not categorizing, who had sharpened his language through concision and indirectness, who had wandered homeless throughout his country, heard a bell’s tone evaporating. But the flowers’ aroma still surrounded him. He knew the flowers would fall soon, but not quite yet. He exalted in the glory of the evening. He shared the moment that is all moments. It is a poem of transience and permanence. Ueda, in his book, Basho and His Interpreters, quotes Abe Yoshishige regarding a different haiku, but that speaks equally to this, “The poem has captured a moment in which eternity manifested itself in tranquility.”
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Source: Frank Pool, Critical Essay on “Temple Bells Die Out,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
P. T. Harries In the following essay, Harries traces briefly the course of Basho¯’s literary prowess as the poet worked within and manipulated tradition Japanese literary styles. Basho¯ is recognized as one of Japan’s greatest literary figures. He transformed haiku from a somewhat frivolous pastime into a serious art form and he remains to this day its greatest exponent. He was in addition a seminal critic and teacher. Though he himself produced only a few works of criticism, many of his critical opinions and comments are preserved in the voluminous notes and accounts of his pupils, particularly Mukai Kyorai and Hattori Doho. Such is the importance of his critical percepts and the example of his poetry that no writer of haiku from his time to the present has been able to escape his influence. In Basho¯’s own day the haiku was regarded not as a form in itself but as the first stanza (the hokku) of a longer poem consisting of up to a hundred linked stanzas written by two or more poets taking turns. Much of Basho¯’s effor was given to this type of composition, known as renku or haikai no renga, and it was in this field tha the showed his greatest superiority, for he was an unrivalled master at the subtleties of linking stanzas and controlling the changes of pace, mood, and theme, which are the essence of this extremely demanding form. Basho¯ was also a skilled prose writer. He was as meticulous in his prose as in his verse and virtually forged a new style, in which he integrated prose and poetry to an extent never before achieved. In addition to his few critical commentaries, he produced haibun, which are short occasional essays written in the haiku spirit, and travel journals. His Genjuan no ki [Essay on the Unreal Dwelling] is a moving apologia for his life and is generally considered the finest haibun ever written. His travel journal Oku no hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) is his most famous work and one of the masterpieces of Japanese literature, in which he displays his mastery of prose style together with a sure command of form and the highest skill at reshaping events into art. Basho¯’s greatness lies not only in his technique but in the depth of his probing of life. To him art was a way of life, a search for religious truth, which was to be found in nature: and this search led to continuous development, giving his work a variety
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that can appeal to all types of reader. Following his move to Edo, his style changed from refined and often artificial wit to genuine humour in more mundane subjects; and on settling at his Basho¯ hermitage he continued this trend towards greater simplicity, objectivity, and description, creating a style of his own. The years of his wanderings saw his creative peak in the style of sabi (“lonliness”), in which nature, usually in its most insignificant forms, is shown quietly fulfilling its often bleak destiny. In his final years he turned to karumi (“lightness”), an obscure term that seems to imply a more contented attitude of acceptance and less tension within a poem. To some, this step was retrograde, but however it is judged, it shows Basho¯ developing and striving to the end to perfect his art in the light of his philosophy of life.
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To [Basho¯] art was a way of life, a search for religious truth, which was to be found in nature: and this search led to continuous development, giving his work a variety that can appeal to all types of reader.”
Source: P. T. Harries, “Basho¯,” in Reference Guide to World Literature, 3d ed., edited by Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast, Vol. 1, St. James Press, 2003, p. 96. —, Matsuo Basho, Twayne Publishers, 1970, p. 56. Yuasa, Nobuyuki, “Introduction,” in The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, by Matsuo Basho¯, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa, Penguin, 1966, p. 33.
Sources Bersihand, Roger, Japanese Literature, Walker, 1965, p. 115. Buchanan, Daniel C., One Hundred Famous Haiku, Japan Publications, 1973, p. 16. Hamill, Sam, ed., The Essential Basho, Shambhala, 1999, pp. ix–xxxi. Higginson, William J., with Penny Harte, The Haiku Handbook, Kodansha International, 1985, p. 10. Keene, Donald, The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, Columbia University Press, 1988, pp. 6, 57. Pound, Ezra, “In a Station at the Metro,” in The Norton Introduction to Literature: Poetry, edited by J. Paul Hunter, W. W. Norton, 1973, p. 98. Suzuki, D. T., Zen Buddhism, Doubleday, 1956, p. 106. Ueda, Makoto, Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, compiled, translated, and with an introduction by Makoto Ueda, Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 141.
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Further Reading Keene, Donald, Travelers of a Hundred Ages, Henry Holt, 1989. This collection of essays comments on a number of Japanese diaries, including Basho¯’s. Ueda, Makoto, Basho and his Interpreters, Stanford University Press, 1991. Ueda provides selected haiku of Basho¯ and commentaries on them by various critics. —, Matsuo Basho, Kodansha International, 1970. Ueda provides an accessible and detailed introduction to Basho¯’s life and writing in this lively study. Yasuda, Kenneth, The Japanese Haiku, Rutland, 1957. Yasuda uses Western literary aesthetics to discuss the aim and method of haiku.
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To an Unknown Poet Carolyn Kizer 1986
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“To an Unknown Poet,” was first published in Michigan Quarterly Review and subsequently appeared in Carolyn Kizer’s 1986 collection, The Nearness of You. It is included in a section of poems called “Friends,” which contains numerous poems about, and dedicated to, other poets. In the poem, Kizer, a much decorated and PulitzerPrize winning poet, ironically compares the successful life of a much-decorated poet with the life of an unsuccessful and struggling poet. Kizer wrote the poem shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize for her collection Yin: New Poems. In simple, straightforward language, the speaker addresses a poor poet who comes to visit her, making excuses for why she does not have time for him, and then later telling him about an award she is about to receive. Her response addresses issues including the place of poetry in American society, the role of the poet, and the nature of literary fame. Kizer’s poem appeared at a time when more poetry is produced and published—in print, on the web, etc.—and more poetry readings are given than perhaps at any other time in American history. It also comes at a time when, even though an increasing number of people hunger for literary recognition, fewer and fewer people read poetry or even attend poetry readings. The gulf between “known” poets and “unknown” poets widens daily, but even those known are known by only a few.
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Author Biography Carolyn Kizer has fashioned her career as a poet by being part of the very institutions that poets once loved to criticize: the government and the university. The only child of activists Benjamin Hamilton, a lawyer, and Mabel Ashley Kizer, a union organizer who held a doctorate in biology, Kizer was born December 10, 1925 in Spokane, Washington. She was raised in a heady and rich learning environment. Diplomats, artists, poets, and intellectuals frequently visited her parents, and her house was filled with books, paintings, and various art objects, in many ways resembling the house of the speaker in her poem, “To an Unknown Poet.” Mabel Kizer poured her energies into her daughter’s development, encouraging her artistic inclinations. It was not until after her mother died, however, that Kizer recognized the influence her mother had on her. After Kizer received her undergraduate degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1945, she took graduate courses at Columbia University and later took graduate courses at the University of Washington, where she studied under the poet Theodore Roethke. Like her mother, Kizer was an organizer, founding the influential journal Poetry Northwest in 1959 and editing it until 1965. She was the first director of literary programs for the National Endowment for the Arts and served as a State Department specialist in literature in Pakistan during 1964 and 1965. In addition, she was the director of a number of creative writing programs through the 1970s and 1980s. A much sought-after teacher, Kizer has taught at numerous universities, including the University of Washington, Princeton University, Columbia University, Ohio University, and at Iowa University’s Writer’s Workshop. When she was only 17, Kizer published her first poem in the New Yorker. Her first collection of poetry, The Ungrateful Garden, appeared in 1961 and established her reputation as a poet of uncompromising vision. No romantic, Kizer focused on nature’s brutality and indifference to human beings’ existence. It is what it is, her poems emphasized. Future volumes of poetry addressed the idea of gender roles and women’s place in a changing society. Kizer is adept at composing both formal and free verse poetry. Kizer’s other poetry collections include Cool Calm & Collected: Poems 1960–2000 (2000); Harping On: Poems 1985– 1995 (1996); The Nearness of You: Poems for Men (1986); Yin: New Poems (1984), which won a Pulitzer Prize; and Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women (1984). Her criticism
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includes Picking and Choosing: Essays on Prose (1995), and Proses: Essays on Poems & Poets (1993). Kizer has also published a collection of translations, Carrying Over: Translations from Chinese, Urdu, Macedonian, Hebrew and French-African (1988), and edited a number of anthologies. Apart from the Pulitzer Prize, she has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Frost Medal, the John Masefield Memorial Award, and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award. Kizer is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.
Poem Text I haven’t the heart to say you are not welcome here. Your clothes smell of poverty, illness and unswept closets. You come unannounced to my door with your wild-faced wife and your many children. I tell you I am busy. I have a dentist’s appointment. I have a terrible cold. The children would run mad through our living room, with its collected bibelots and objects of art. I’m not as young as I was. I am terrified of breakage.
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Media Adaptations • Sound Photosynthesis has released an audiocasette titled Carolyn Kizer: Reading Her Poetry. Tapes can be ordered by writing to Sound Photosynthesis, P. O. Box 2111, Mill Valley, CA 94942–2111. • In 1977, The Writer’s Center released the audiocassette An Ear to the Earth, which compiles two public readings by Kizer. Cassettes can be purchased by writing to The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda MD, 20815–6006.
tionally, it has meant that the identity of the person is not known, as in, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Kizer, however, is using it to mean that the poet does not have a reputation—that he is one of the many millions of poets who write but receive little or no public recognition for their writing. The speaker characterizes the poet through her description of his clothes and his impolite behavior (he comes “unannounced”). She makes excuses for why she cannot entertain him, which are all lies. The speaker characterizes herself through her description of the things she has in her house, the “bibelots and objects of art,” precious ornaments and such. The last line of the stanza can be read two ways. “Breakage” can literally mean that she is afraid of the children breaking her delicate possessions; it can also mean that she herself is “terrified of breakage”—breakage of her soul, breakage of her own moral obligations.
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It’s not that I won’t help you. I’d love to send you a box of hand-milled soap; perhaps a check, though it won’t be enough to help. Keep in mind that I came to your reading: Three of us in the audience, your wife, myself, and the book-store owner, unless we count the children who played trains over your wife’s knees in their torn jeans and had to be hushed and hushed. Next month I am getting an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The invitation came on hand-laid paper thick as clotted cream. I will travel by taxi to 156th Street, where the noble old building, as pale as the Acropolis, is awash in a sea of slums. And you will be far away, on the other coast, as far from our thoughts as Rimbaud with his boy’s face and broken teeth, while we eat and drink and congratulate each other in this bastion of culture.
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Stanza 3 In this stanza, the speaker details her own success as a poet, mentioning the award she will receive, and the quality of the paper on which the invitation is printed. The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters is the most prestigious literary organization in America and one which Kizer herself received an award from in 1985. Membership in the exclusive organization is limited to 250.
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Poem Summary Stanza 1 In the first stanza of “To an Unknown Poet,” the speaker plays on the word “unknown.” Tradi-
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In this stanza, the speaker attempts to show that she is thoughtful and considerate by claiming that she would help the poet. She notes that she came to the poet’s reading, indeed that she was the only other adult at the reading apart from the bookstore owner and the poet’s wife. She mentions this detail as a way of proving her support for the poet. The mention, again, of the children and wife helps to characterize the poet’s poverty and his utter lack of reputation or readership.
Stanza 4 The speaker notes how she will travel to receive the award. She compares the building in which she will be honored with the Acropolis, a hill in Athens widely regarded as the most important site in the city for its cultural and historical significance. Called “the sacred rock,” Acropolis hill is home to the Temple of Athena Nike and the Parthenon, the latter of which remains the international symbol of ancient Greek civilization. By likening the “noble old building” to the Acropolis,
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and then locating it “in a sea of slums,” the speaker is also figuratively describing her position in relation to the sea of poor, unknown, and uncelebrated poets who will never receive an award or recognition for their writing. The Academy is located at 632 West 156th Street, Manhattan, in the center of Harlem. The last four lines of the poem return to describing the “unknown poet” of the first two stanzas. Addressing him, she says that the participants in the awards ceremony will not be thinking of him, but will be consumed with their own selfimportance, enjoying themselves “in this bastion of culture.” Her description of Rimbaud, a nineteenthcentury French poet known for his wild and hallucinatory images, who was rejected by the literary establishment, emphasizes the pathetic desires of the unknown poet.
Themes Privilege and Entitlement In a way, “To an Unknown Poet” is a sustained critique on the power of privilege, and entitlement for those poets who have made a living at their craft. To receive an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, as the poem’s speaker does (and as Kizer herself has), is to have achieved one of the highest degrees of recognition possible for poets in America. It often means that publication and teaching jobs will come much more easily, if they have not already, and that the committees who dole out grants and award money for government and private organizations will look more favorably on any application a winner might submit. Indeed, the fact of having received such an award most likely means that a winner has been a member of those very committees, as Kizer has, having served as the first director of the Literature Program at the National Endowment for the Arts and as a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets.
Class Social class is determined often as much by taste as it is by education and wealth, or the lack of. Kizer’s poem highlights the difference in class between the speaker and the “unknown poet,” by describing their respective possessions and family. The speaker’s house contains “bibelots and objects of art,” suggesting that she values, and can afford to buy, precious things. The poet, on the other hand,
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Topics for Further Study • Compare the attitude of the speaker in “To an Unknown Poet” with the attitude of the speaker in “Promising Author,” a poem which is also in The Nearness of You. Write a short essay exploring what the two poems tell you about the nature of competition in the literary world. • Rewrite Kizer’s poem from the point of view of the unknown poet, and then read the poem to your class. After the reading, explain the choices you made in rewriting the poem. • Over the course of the semester, go to at least three poetry readings in your area. You can find listings for readings in your local paper or the paper for the local college or university. Evaluate the readings in terms of the quality of the work read, the reading ability of the poet, and the atmosphere of the place. Present your findings to the class. • Two popular publications for poets and writers are AWP Chronicle and Poets & Writers. Review a copy of each publication at your local library or bookstore (you can also find them on the World Wide Web), taking notes on how they characterize literary culture. Share your findings with the class. • Kizer mentions Rimbaud, a French poet, near the end of her poem. Find a copy of Rimbaud’s poem, “The Drunken Boat,” and read it to your class. Next, read one of Kizer’s poems to the class. Discuss the differences in tone, word choice, and worldview between the two poems.
has a “wild-faced wife” and “many children” who wear “torn jeans,” and gives poetry readings that literally no one attends. The speaker figuratively links him with the “sea of slums” that surrounds the Acropolis-like building where she is to receive her award. By underscoring the differences in class between the speaker and the unknown poet, Kizer uses the divisions within the literary world as a metaphor for the social injustices of America. It is
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not only unsung poets whom Kizer wants to remind readers to remember, but also all those who are not as well off as others, through no fault of their own. Through caricaturing a successful poet, Kizer feeds the prejudices of some, who see all poets as pretentious and elitist, while simultaneously courting the sympathy of those who can respect a person who pursues his art out of passion rather than a desire for fame.
Distance Kizer uses the idea of distance both figuratively and literally in her poem to highlight the gap between the haves and the have nots. First, the speaker emphasizes the distance between her success, and the failure of the unknown poet, through her condescending descriptions of his struggles, and the self-congratulatory descriptions of her achievements. She also emphasizes the distance in age, noting, “I’m not as young as I was,” and then comparing the unknown poet with Rimbaud’s “boy’s face and broken teeth.” Though she never explicitly says it, the speaker is envious of the unknown poet’s youth. When she travels to New York City for her award, she notes her distance from the poet, who remains on the West Coast, and the fact that he is “far from our thoughts.” Ironically, by noting this, she suggests just the opposite, that he has remained in her thoughts.
Style Irony At its most basic level, irony is saying one thing while meaning another. Kizer uses a persona, her speaker, who is condescending, though seemingly well-intentioned, to criticize the attitude of writers who consider themselves superior to others. By listing what she has done, or would do, to help the poet, who obviously is not well off, the speaker attempts to assuage her guilt and prove that she is a moral person. Readers, however, can see through her rationalizations and in the end despise the speaker while feeling sympathetic for the unknown poet.
Address Throughout the poem, the speaker addresses the unknown poet in a conversational tone, calling him “you.” Details of the poet’s visit to the speaker’s house aside, the unknown poet in this poem is representative of unknown poets everywhere. In this
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way, the address of the poem is an apostrophe. An apostrophe is a figure of speech in which the speaker addresses someone as if he were physically present, but is not. Apostrophes are often used to address abstract ideas as well, for example when Thomas Hardy addresses love in his poem “I Said to Love.”
Details Details are the small things, the particulars that make up a whole. Kizer uses details to characterize the speaker and the unknown poet, showing readers their emotional lives by depicting their surroundings. Kizer provides details of what is in the speaker’s house to illustrate her rarefied tastes, and she provides details of the unknown poet’s family and poetry reading to illustrate his struggle.
Historical Context 1980s and Poetry In the 1980s, three “styles” of poetry captured the attention of critics and the poetry-reading public: narrative poetry, new formalism, and language poetry. Although narrative poetry literally has been around since before the Greeks, it re-emerged in the 1980s as a response to the predominance of the lyric and to the increasing level of abstraction in poets such as John Ashbery. Proponents of narrative poetry, such as Robert McDowell, called for poetry based in the real world that was accessible to a wider audience. A manifesto published in The Reaper, a literary journal of narrative and formal verse founded by McDowell and Mark Jarman in 1981, called many of the poets of the day, “navel gazers and mannerists.” McDowell and Jarman wrote: “Their poems, too long even when they are short, full of embarrassing lines that ‘context’ is supposed to justify, confirm the suspicion that our poets just aren’t listening to their language anymore.” McDowell urged poets to write about subjects other than themselves and to write artfully, but to be understood. Above all, he urged them to return to storytelling, the language of the tribe. After a century of free-verse poetry, and a few decades of the highly ironic fixed-form verse of Richard Wilbur and others, the United States also saw the comeback of formal verse during the 1980s. Writers such as Molly Peacock, Timothy Steele, Brad Leithauser, and William Logan gave new vitality to old forms, working in sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas, among other verse forms. Published in The New Criterion, a journal founded
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Compare & Contrast • 1980s: Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, and Bob Perleman criticize academic poets and poetics, arguing for a new kind of poetry that would foreground language’s materiality and be more political and experimental. They came to be known as “language poets.” Today: Bernstein and Perleman, and many others associated with the language school of writing, teach in universities and colleges. • 1980s: The Los Angeles Times announces that it will review fewer books of poetry, and many critics begin penning essays announcing that poetry in America is dead. Today: Many of the same arguments regarding the irrelevance of poetry that were heard in the
by Hilton Kramer, who took the name from a journal edited by T. S. Eliot, many of the new formalists were derided as country-club poets and literary lackeys of the Right. The work of the new formalists is highlighted in the 1986 anthology, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms. McDowell considers both new formalism and new narrative part of the “Expansive Movement,” the tenets of which are sketched out in the critical anthology, Poetry after Modernism (1991), edited by McDowell and published by his own Story Line Press. Both new narrative poetry and the new formalism were staunchly opposed to language poetry, whose writers include Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, and Bob Perelman, among others. Language writers, whose politics invariably aligned with the Left, criticized the official verse culture of the academy and argued for more abstraction in poetry, not less. For the most part, language writers championed the materiality of the word, questioned the value(s) of the lyric poem, indeed, questioned the necessity for genres themselves, and disdained the institutionalization of creative writing. It is no coincidence that language poetry emerged contemporaneously with post-structuralist theory. Its ap-
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1980s continue to be heard today. Meanwhile, creative writing programs across the country confer degrees in creative writing to an increasing number of graduates. • 1980s: Kizer wins the Pulitzer Prize for her collection, Yin: New Poems and an award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Today: In 1998, Kizer and Maxine Kumin resign from the board of chancellors at the Academy of American Poets, claiming there is a lack of women and minorities on the board and in the ranks of poets to whom the board awards prizes.
pearance was not coincidental, but symptomatic of the shift away from treating literature as an expressive indicator of universal human values, and to treating it as an always political act and a material act in itself. It is interesting to note that both Perleman and Bernstein now hold tenured posts in American universities.
Critical Overview “To an Unknown Poet” is included in Kizer’s The Nearness of You, published in 1986 as a companion volume to her 1984 collection, Mermaids in the Basement. Whereas Mermaids consists of poems for women, Nearness consists of poems for men, and includes many poems from earlier volumes, including poems written or dedicated to other poets and writers, such as Robert Creeley, Bernard Malamud, Theodore Roethke, and James Wright. The book is separated into four sections, “Manhood,” “Passions,” “Father,” and “Friends,” and Kizer’s address in this volume is more direct, her voice more personal, her style less formal. Reviewers gave the book a lukewarm reception. Anthony
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Libby, writing for the New York Times Book Review, asserts, “Despite many local triumphs, the new collection is in many ways less striking, technically and psychologically more self-conscious [than Mermaids in the Basement].” Diane Wakoski, however, praises the risks Kizer takes in this collection, in her review for Women’s Review of Books: “What this book convinces me of, finally, is that Carolyn Kizer is a poet of occasion, of person and personality.” Writing for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Elizabeth House also focuses on Kizer’s personality, noting, “Kizer has known many writers, and, indeed, she is widely esteemed as a teacher, mentor, and guide for aspiring poets.” House singles out “To An Unknown Poet,” observing the “wry humor” in the poem. Sister Bernetta Quinn also discusses the poem in her essay on Kizer in An Answering Music: Poetry of Carolyn Kizer, writing of the speaker’s “selfdisapproval” and “guilt.”
Criticism Chris Semansky Semansky is an instructor of literature whose writing appears regularly in literary journals. In this essay, Semansky considers Kizer’s representation of literary culture and academia. Kizer’s poem, “To an Unknown Poet,” is an indictment of a literary culture that is structured like the star system of Hollywood. Tens of thousands of people audition, but there is room for only a handful of stars. Those poets who do make it are invariably associated with a university or college, most often teaching in creative writing programs. Kizer herself has been a poet-in-residence at a number of prestigious schools including Princeton, Columbia, and Stanford. Indeed, the university, more than any other institution, provides the impetus for poets to produce and to publish poems. Although literary journals and magazines rarely pay for poetry, it is a form of academic capital. For poets and writers in academia, publications win them tenure and promotions. Colleges and universities provide creative writing classes for credit, and students flock to them, often believing that they will be the next Raymond Carver or Carolyn Kizer. By juxtaposing the life of a successful poet (a thinly veiled version of herself) with the life of a poor, struggling poet, Kizer highlights what has become one of the most contentious issues in academia in the
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1980s and 1990s: the astronomic increase in the number of creative writing classes offered in higher education and the overproduction of graduates from programs in creative writing, graduates who themselves are seeking jobs teaching creative writing. Between 1975 and 1990 the number of American universities and colleges offering creative writing programs more than quadrupled, from 81 in 1975 to 328 in 1990. The number of colleges and universities offering bachelor of arts degrees in creative writing grew from 24 in 1975 to 155 in 1990. In the same period, those offering the doctorate degree, either in creative writing or in English with the option of a creative dissertation (a collection of poems, a novel, or a book of short stories), spiraled from 5 to 31, while master of fine arts programs in creative writing increased from 15 in 1975 to 50 in 1990, and master’s degree programs from 32 in 1975 to 140 in 1990. In addition to the proliferation of creative writing programs, the existence of hundreds of creative writing conferences, colonies and centers, many of which were founded in the last three decades, act as material support for poets plying their trade or trying to ply their trade. Some observers of this mass production of poetry and poets refer to the phenomenon as the “Pobiz.” These legions of newly-minted writers, now armed with a degree legitimating their “expertise,” have created a glut on the market and a significant rise in bitterness and resentment for those who cannot secure university positions. Though the speaker in Kizer’s poem never explicitly names the poet who visits her as a student or former student, her description of him is characteristic of the many who flock to such programs, hoping to make a name for themselves. He is “unknown” like the thousands of other creative writing students and would-be poetry stars who, ironically, help professional poets like Kizer establish their reputations by buying their books, showing up to their readings, and signing up for their classes. The boom in creative writing programs in the last thirty years is both cause and effect of the desire to achieve literary fame, and that desire is peculiarly American. In America, the university has become the place to “credentialize” writers. Very few other countries have creative writing programs, let alone courses in poetry or fiction writing. Another, perhaps unintended, irony of Kizer’s poem is that, although she is making a comment on the elitism that exists within the literary world and the academy by addressing her poem to an “un-
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known” poet, in fact, almost all poets in America are unknown, even Kizer, to the general public. Critic and poet Dana Gioia aptly sums up the situation in his essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” which appeared in The Atlantic. In the essay, Gioia notes the obscurity in which poets toil: American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.
The “residual prestige” that Gioia notes, however, does not translate into real world gain. Very few American poets have made their living through book sales alone. Even the most popular poets of the last few decades, such as John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg, worked as university professors. One of the bestselling living American poets today is Billy Collins, a university professor, whose book sales number in the tens of thousands—significant for poetry, but certainly not enough to make a living. Collins also has the added advantage of being a radio celebrity, something most other poets do not. The speaker of Kizer’s poem is also successful, and it is her success that makes the poem so poignant, for even as she attempts to accommodate the poet who comes to visit her and obviously thinks highly of her, she cannot stop patronizing him. It is important to point out the similarities between the events in the poem and Kizer’s own life. First, the collection in which “To an Unknown Poet” appears is perhaps Kizer’s most personal collection of poems, in tone and content. Though not confessional in the conventional sense of that term, the poems often incorporate events from the author’s life. For example, in 1985, the year before she wrote this poem, she traveled to New York City to receive an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, just like the speaker of “To an Unknown Poet.” Also, like the speaker, Kizer has led a privileged life. Her father was a prominent lawyer, active in liberal and civic causes, and her mother a union organizer and activist. Kizer married a prominent architect, and she herself has held a number of prestigious posts, including Director of the Literature Program for the National Endowment for the Arts, Chancellor for The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and board member of the Associated Writing Programs, an umbrella organization for creative
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The speaker resembles a bureaucrat more than an artist, who is simultaneously haunted and pleased by her own success.”
writing programs. In short, Kizer embodies the institution of creative writing, a term that increasingly is being used to replace the term “literature.” It is this very institution that she caricatures in her portraits of the unknown poet and the speaker. In her fear of “breakage,” her condescending attitude, and her high self-regard, the speaker epitomizes the stodgy, conservative, privileged eastcoast literary establishment. The speaker resembles a bureaucrat more than an artist, who is simultaneously haunted and pleased by her own success. The unknown poet is also a stereotype. The speaker compares him to Rimbaud, an icon of poetic excess, who lived a life of risk and passion. It is the latter image that many would-be poets and students are drawn to, not the former. Yet, ironically, as Kizer shows, the wild, passionate poets are not the kind who will be successful in the poetry business. They are the ones, however, who will give poetry readings that no one will attend, buy poetry books, and in general spread their enthusiasm for poetry among their friends and family. In an article for The Mace & Crown, Old Dominion University’s school newspaper, Diane Miller reports that Kizer opened her poetry reading there with “To an Unknown Poet.” “She said she wrote it to remind her not to let her success go to her head,” Miller notes. Kizer’s “reminder” to herself should be mandatory reading for both established poets and for those seeking to audition for the star system of academia. Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “To an Unknown Poet,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Alfred Corn In the following essay, Corn examines the speaker of “To an Unknown Poet,” finding similarities to Kizer herself, as well as a focus on inequities in life.
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Among possible models for the poet’s life, consider two. First, Dickinson’s solitary existence spent at a writing desk in an upstairs bedroom in Amherst, the valves of her attention closed like stone; her unmarried state, her lack of interest in travel; her writerly anonymity, rejoiced in because, instead of croaking all day to an admiring bog, she could explore the inward universe of language. Second, Octavio Paz, leaving Mexico as a young man to travel in Spain and France, forming associations with progressive poets that he meets; wide and intense erotic experience, a first marriage and then a second lasting one; eventual appointment to serve as Mexico’s ambassador to India; resignation from that post in response to violent government repression of a student; a return to Mexico to found one of Latin America’s leading literary journals, with the inevitable result that he was called on to make frequent public appearances and comment on the state of Mexican letters and politics. Carolyn Kizer’s life as a poet resembles Paz’s more than Dickinson’s. She has traveled widely, to Europe, of course, but also to China and Pakistan, as a United States cultural ambassador; formed associations with dozens of contemporary poets and visual artists, edited a poetry magazine, directed the Literature Program for the NEA, married twice, and brought up three children; served as a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets but then (along with Maxine Kumin) resigned in order to call attention to the failure of the Academy ever to name an African-American to serve in the same capacity. Part of the record of this wide spectrum of experience appears in her poems. She probably wouldn’t have been drawn to an active public life if her childhood experience had been restricted to a narrower ambit. Kizer’s memoir of those years (collected in Proses) describes a progressive upper-middle-class household, whose doors were open to many international visitors and notables including the poet Vachel Lindsay. At an early age she took her place at the dinner table with guests and participated in discussions of current topics. No one meeting Carolyn Kizer fails to notice her social ease and self-possession, traits not common among the Hamletish brood of poets. Skills acquired when she was a child have only been amplified in the fulfillment of public duties discharged during adulthood. Those skills include saving what she actually thinks, even when her statements aren’t designed to make her listeners comfortable. It’s clear that the reticence, forbearance, and self-abnegation traditionally regarded as appropriate for women hold no interest for her. She
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is aware of but not deterred by the risks incurred when a woman speaks with authority—one of the reasons why we find insights in her poems not found elsewhere. Given that she has later led her life so much in company, among family, friends, and professional associates, it naturally follows that Kizer has written more than a few poems that depict other people, a practice that sets her somewhat apart from her contemporaries. Where there is character portrayal, narrative, however brief and elliptical, must operate. Although lyric, often in “experimental” form, has been the dominant mode for poetry during the twentieth century, a few poets have maintained a narrative tradition whose origins in the West are as old as Homer. That tradition includes Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Hardy, E. A. Robinson, and Robert Penn Warren, a roster that should justify any contemporary poet’s decision to compose narratives. Carolyn Kizer doesn’t write epic or novel-length poems, though a few of her poetic sequences move into the ten-page range. Narrative and plot play a role in her work, roughly as they do in short stories—which means that these verse narratives often describe and develop characters who interact with the poems’ speaker. Like her early mentor Theodore Roethke, Kizer is mainly an autobiographical poet, and my sense is that characters in her work are modeled on actual persons, with an adherence to fact closer than is normal for prose fiction. Some of these characters are portraits of people that can be found in literary reference books. As such, they belong to what we might call Kizer’s verse memoirs. In this essay I won’t be considering love poems or elegies. Although they obviously involve representation of other people, poems in those genres, more than the character of the beloved or the deceased, take as their subject the author’s own mind. This doesn’t mean that an elegy like “The Death of the Public Servant” (which appeared in The Ungrateful Garden and again in The Nearness of You) or a love poem like “The Copulating Gods” (from Yin) fails to describe the person it is addressed to; but physical description and psychological analysis take second place in poems like these. Meanwhile, in the more objective character poems, we sense that the author wants to compose a fable, tell a story (however concise), and make a verse portrait of the nature and actions of another person. Inevitably Kizer’s own feelings come into the portrayal, otherwise she wouldn’t have been
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spurred to write the poems. Yet the first goal of these poems is to represent another person, a psychology not her own; in order to achieve it, Kizer has had to apprentice herself to the novelists and short story writers. If you turn the book upside down and look closely at the painting used for the cover of The Nearness of You, you will see a stylized, foreshortened portrait of Flaubert. Choosing that particular work for the book cover amounts to a kind of homage. In her Paris Review interview, Kizer comments that she has been influenced by Flaubert, saying, “I would put Flaubert first, not only the novels, but the incomparable letter he wrote to George Sand.” Though she has drafted several short stories, only one has been published (“A Slight Mechanical Failure,” collected in Howard Moss’s The Poet’s Story). Meanwhile, she has taken reams of notes for a projected novel without ever getting to the point of writing it. Instead, she has produced a series of poems that deal with the character and destiny of people she has known, and they are among the very best things she has written. The longest and most detailed is the poem “Gerda” (Harping On), which describes the Swedish-American nanny who looked after Kizer until age eight. The text of a traditional Swedish child’s prayer opens the poem, prefiguring the odd, hagiographical glow that surrounds this portrait of a woman who appears to have been unusually devoted, going beyond routine domestic tasks with affectionate extras like knitting sweaters for her young charge and sewing her a quilt. Kizer begins her narrative at a moment of crisis: Gerda trudging down the front walk with packed bags as she departs from the Kizer household. The grief-stricken eight-year-old (referred to throughout “Gerda” as “the child”) cries “Gerda, don’t leave!”, her “stony mother” explaining that the decision is irrevocable. Gerda has asked to have her salary raised from twenty-five to thirty-five dollars a month and been refused. Elsewhere in her writings Kizer has provided praising portraits of her parents, but, in “Gerda,” some darker touches are added: Thirty years on, her father will remark, Your mother was jealous So we let her go. Of course I could have raised her wages, Gerda ran the house! The child’s throat fills with bile As, casually, he continues: I always let your mother Decide these matters. Smug, he often used that phrase As if the abdication of his parenthood Had been a sacrifice. What did he know Of the child’s needs or passions?
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‘Bastion of culture’ is an especially damning phrase, by implication pointing the finger at those who hold shares in the corporate academy, whose very existence is posited on the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others deemed, for whatever reason, unsuitable.”
For a moment we imagine that it’s jealousy concerning the child’s father, but Gerda’s “gray bob” and steel-rimmed spectacles work against that interpretation. Instead, the mother has become jealous of the love the child feels for her nanny and seized on the excuse of the requested pay hike to dispose of her rival. The poem never terms this decision a “betrayal,” and yet the above passage establishes it as one, in word choices such as “Smug” and “abdication of parenthood” and the searing final question. Even at age thirty-eight, the narrator can say her throat “fills with bile” at this revelation, which has the power to make her revert to the earlier, vulnerable identity and again become “the child.” Kizer’s narrative method in this poem is to juxtapose several time-frames in an astute montage. Near the conclusion she recounts a tragicomic moment in young adulthood when, during a train taken at age eighteen, she uses a brief layover in Minneapolis as a chance to try to re-establish contact with her lost nanny. The plan, nursed for ten years, utterly fails when she discovers that the local directory lists column after column filled with the name “Gerda Johnson.” After several futile telephone calls, she must give up and resume her journey; she will never find Gerda again, a certainty she accedes to but cannot really accept. The poem’s final lines shift to a second-person address, the author late in life again referring to herself as “the child” and calling for her lost caretaker:
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What Do I Read Next? • Walter B. Kalaidjian’s Languages of Liberation (1989), explores the economics behind book publishing and reputation-making in the poetry world. It is an indispensable resource for those who remain mystified by why one writer is popular and another one is not. • Kizer has edited a well-received anthology, 100 Great Poems by Women (1995), which showcases both more-established and newer poets. One of Kizer’s desires is to show the range of subject matter that women address. • Kizer’s collection Yin: New Poems (1984) won the Pulitzer Prize and helped to establish BOA Editions, the press that published it. • Simon Worrall’s novel The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery (2002) features the forgery of an Emily Dickinson poem and how the discovery of that forgery leads to two people’s deaths.
Now from another life she summons you Out of the earth or ether, wherever you are, Gerda, come back, to nurse your desolate child.
If that is true, then we can begin to understand why the poet has developed so many friendships, friendships intense enough, crucial enough, to require the memoralizing that poetry can offer. This passage implies that the early trauma of Gerda’s loss has never been entirely healed. In all these relationships, Kizer hopes to rediscover some equivalent to that selfless devotion and, if only in fragments, to retrieve it. The poem’s direct address leads us to feel as readers that we, too, are being scanned for solacing remnants of the nurse’s kindly nature. To refuse that appeal is to risk seeming (or being) coldhearted. Kizer’s volume The Nearness of You borrows a Hoagy Carmichael song title to remind us, with amused irony, that the second-person pronoun is a shortcut to an intimate tone and stance toward the
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character being presented. In fact, the book contains many affectionate I-to-you poems that develop portraits of writers like Robert Creeley, Ruthven Todd, and James Wright. Equally affectionate are poems spoken directly to women friends who are not artists, for example, “An American Beauty,” from Harping On. In a few instances her feelings of solidarity with a woman friend is so strong that Kizer dispenses with either “I” and “you” and writes the whole poem in the firstperson plural. The most cheerful instances are the poems “For Jan, in Bar Maria” and “For Jan As the End Draws Near” (in Mermaids in the Basement). Along with the magisterial “Pro Femina,” Kizer’s poems to her women friends, the elegy for her mother (“The Great Blue Heron”), and the poems to her daughter (“For My Daughter” and “The Blessing”) constitute her most important contribution to that growing body of work written by women in affirmation of women. Mermaids in the Basement went so far as to subtitle itself Poems for Women, which, in my opinion, is a gallant but mistaken assertion about the probable readership for the book. Even apart from its achievements in language, imagery and form, the book has a content that will engage male readers of poetry, too— leaving out those indifferent to the experience of the gender that makes up more than half the world’s population. “Pro Femina,” by the way, holds the distinction of containing the only poem Kizer has written in the voice of a historical personage—Fanny Osbourne Stevenson, wife to the author of Treasure Island. (On the other hand, Kizer has written a number of poems appropriating personae from Greek mythology, in particular, “Hera, Hung from the Sky,” “Persephone Pauses,” and “Semele Recycled,” plus a few first-person monologues like “Exodus,” spoken by unnamed characters she has invented.) Originally written as an independent poem and published in Yin, “Fanny” was annexed to “Pro Femina” when that poem appeared again in Mermaids in the Basement. In the recent chapbook republication “Pro Femina” has now added yet another poem, “The Erotic Philosophers,” which, who knows, may eventually prove not to be the poem’s last section. Kizer’s publishing history involves selective inclusion of some of her early poems as later volumes appeared, and so purposeful is this practice that we can regard her oeuvre as a twentieth-century counterpart to Leaves of Grass: fluid, open to the production and qualification of meanings lent to it in the process of recycling and expansion. The author’s preface to this new edition
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of “Pro Femina” explains the inclusion of “Fanny” as follows:
on someone in the street, without changing. That is my subject.
“Fanny Stevenson, in my mind, stood for generations of women who selflessly served men—fathers, sons, and lovers—until their loss enabled these women to blossom as artists themselves. Before their revelation [from] their willing servitude, they found other ways of expressing themselves. In Fanny’s case it was the outdoors in Samoa, digging in the earth, planting.”
In “Promising Author” part of the alteration— part of the damage—appears in the phrase “and I cursed you back.” Negative qualities in the wouldbe-writer have stirred up a current of venom in the narrator, who can’t have failed to acknowledge the harm active in those feelings and those words, both to the addressee and to herself. When we speak violently to someone else, we also absorb the impact of that violence. Although the straw man portrayed in the poem wept for mercy at his death, no mercy was forthcoming, as the poem itself demonstrates. Penance for hard-heartedness in this poem takes the unusual form of self-disclosure without apology or special pleading: “He did that, and I said this, words I know to be wrong but will not conceal.” A troubling feature of contemporary American poetry is the self-congratulatory tone it often takes, probably a perversion of the ringing opening line of Song of Myself: “I celebrate myself and sing myself.” How many thousands of poems published have pitted a noble and brilliant “I” against an evil “they” or “he” or “she” or “you.” Kizer knows that life isn’t that simple.
Whatever the origins and scope of the poem, however its meaning is altered by inclusion in the larger work, “Fanny” fully succeeds as the verse rendering of a brilliant, high-spirited character from the history of literature, whose work would be less often read today if Kizer hadn’t called attention in her in this characterized monologue. Although a number of her poems celebrate poet friends, others—among the most compelling Kizer has written—present the writer’s profession in a harsh and even terrifying light. Early instances include “To a Visiting Poet in a College Dormitory” and “Promising Author” (both in The Nearness of You). The latter poem may or may not be a poem of failed love. Some of the details imply a brief love-affair between the narrator and the “promising author,” with his “witty, gap-toothed face / Half-ruined in a dozen shore-leave brawls, / And the straw hair and softening gut / Of a beatup scarecrow out of Oz.” The thirty-five lines of poem sketch out a kind of rake’s progress for this straw-man of letters. He marries a rich woman, whose cushy patronage, however, quickly sours and dries up with predictable results. You became glib as any Grub Street hack, Then demanded help To write the novel you never would write: As I turned you from the door You cursed me, and I cursed you back.
Nothing sentimental in this portrait of a conartist, this “you” briefly near and dear and then despised and repudiated, who “wept for mercy as you died.” What gives the poem more force than it would otherwise have is Kizer’s awareness that no bond is ever formed without affecting both parties involved, this, even if the association has to be terminated. In the Paris Review interview she said: Well, I think if there’s a major theme in my work, once we get past the love and loss of the early days, it is the impact of character upon character, how people rub against one another and alter one another. A poem of mine called “Twelve O’clock,” which was published in The Paris Review, was based on that principle of Heisenberg’s that you can’t look at a subatomic particle without altering it. Equally you cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes
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Self-inculpations can be unconscious, too, as they are in the poem “To an Unknown Poet” (from TNOY). Because the poem is written in the firstperson singular, with no name assigned to the speaker, we at first read it as autobiographical. Like Carolyn Kizer, the monologuist has extended herself to penniless aspiring artists; like Kizer, she has received a literary award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Finally, though, the equation is imperfect, and what we have instead is an ironic rendering of the consciousness of an “unreliable narrator,” not fully aware of the implications of what she says. The poem begins, “I haven’t the heart to say / you are not welcome her,” and concludes with a description of the annual awards ceremony of the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, where, at a continent’s distance from the insolvent poet and his untidy children, the speaker and her artistic associates “eat and drink and congratulate each other / in this bastion of culture.” Like a good novelist, Kizer renders this character as a mixture of good and bad qualities, not as a plaster saint or as a garishly painted villainess. The poem’s speaker is too honest to deny that the settled habits of middle age makes houseguests like the poet and his flock of unruly children unbearable. And yet she puts herself out for him, attending a reading that no one else attends, and according him a respect otherwise withheld from him. Though
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she accepts a literary award from the Academy, she registers the implicit smugness of the proceedings in lines recalling her indigent poet, a contemporary counterpart or Rimbaud, “while we eat and drink and congratulate each other / in this bastion of culture.” “Bastion of culture” is an especially damning phrase, by implication pointing the finger at those who hold shares in the corporate academy, whose very existence is posited on the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others deemed, for whatever reason, unsuitable. We might also pause to reflect on another irony at work here: Although Kizer herself has received an award like the one her speaker has been tapped for, she was not invited to become an Academy member. Just as the poem’s speaker has closed her doors to the “Unknown Poet,” Kizer was perhaps led to reflect that Academy doors have in turn been closed to her, even though her dossier (which includes a Pulitzer Prize) contains sufficient justification for membership when compared to that of may current Academy members. The poem asks us, then, to hold in mind two different instances of inequity. One has to do with a poet who, though deserving, doesn’t earn enough money to support his family, and another who has enough income to serve briefly as his patron, though she doesn’t have the forbearance or means to house him and his family permanently. She, on the other hand, is accorded only partial recognition by a cultural institution whose primary function is to honor excellence in the arts. Life isn’t fair partly because people aren’t fair, or not always. It’s a problem without a solution, as matters stand; but irremediable woe, as Frost reminded us, is one of poetry’s oldest preoccupations. I turn to one of Kizer’s most recent poems, titled “Eleutheria,” published in Shenandoah (Summer 1999) and included in Cool, Calm, & Collected. The poem tells us that the title means “freedom” and that it as the name of the wife of a poet whose own name Kizer withholds. We can guess that she is giving us a fictionalized perspective on the life of James Wright and the regrettable turn his first marriage took, though some of the details have probably been altered in the interest of producing of a more coherent poem. Entirely credible, in any case, is the rendering of the title character. Kizer says, “Once he confessed to us that he had married her / Because he believed he couldn’t do better, / Being plain and provincial.” If this is true, he pays heavily for having underrated himself and settled for Eleutheria: She becomes that most devastating of enemies, the wife or husband who despises, denigrates, and threatens his or her
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spouse: “She was no fool; she knew he wanted freedom, / So she began to threaten: ‘If you leave me, / You’ll never see your boys again.’” When the inevitable divorce comes, she lives up to the threat; not until they are grown does he sees his sons again. The poem suggests that this wound partly accounts for the depth and power of Wright’s later poems, just as that same wound may have been connected to his increasing dependence on alcohol. Yet even before the divorce he drank, and “. . . sometimes he beat his little sons / Whom he adored, pleading for quiet / So he would have freedom to write.” Careful readers will already have noticed that the word “freedom” appears in both citations above, a prompter’s cue for us to consider the concept of freedom in its relationship to the story of a man who wants to write great poems, a man overworked and underpaid as a teacher of literature. A fundamental tenet of modern aesthetics is that the artist must be granted complete freedom from any sort of censorship, internal or external. On a less exalted plane, it’s obvious that freedom to make any kind of art you choose is meaningless if you lack free time to do your work, freedom from the interruptions of noise, or freedom from the emotional crises erupting in a failed marriage. The protagonist of this poem wins free of some of the obstacles to artistic achievement, but, Kizer implies, at an enormous cost. At the conclusion Kizer describes a final meeting with Eleutheria, the occasion a poetry reading given by one of Wright’s sons: Of course by then our friend was dead, Prematurely, a victim of his hard life And that hard woman Who had given him his freedom. I discovered later that Eleutheria Had become a marriage counselor. A marriage counselor! Do we thank God for irony, or curse it When it comes too close? We are free to choose. Eleutheria.
The quality in irony we can be grateful for is laughter, even if that laughter comes only in an undertone. And the quality that we curse? Here Kizer focuses on the facts of its having “come too close” as the damnable aspect, which may mean that an ironic fate in this case is the lot of a person close to her heart, a person whose illness and premature death saddens and angers her. Yet irony may also have come too close in another sense, a more private sense, having to do with Kizer’s own fortunes as a poet. The hypothesis will have to wait until more is known about her life and its relationship to her work.
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“We are free to choose,” says the last line, which, in another context, might clang with the tinny accents of uplift. Here the statement forces us to reconsider whether the freedom required for poetry is worth the price. Apart from its role as the great liberating precondition to artistic achievement, “freedom” may also find part of its essence revealed in the metaphor of the cruel and destructive spouse, even when the spouse’s name is not Eleutheria. It may even come to mean freedom from the bonds of earthly existence altogether— Dickinson’s “the privilege to die,” which was invoked by several twentieth-century American poets in the form of suicide. Carolyn Kizer, who has expended so much effort on the cause of liberation, can’t be charged with a sentimental failure to grasp the risks that go with it. She is a moral poet, and by that I don’t mean that she is an apologist for self-denial or prudence. Instead, her persistent concern is human character, human choice, human consequences. I’m reminded of a conversation reported to me by a Mexican friend, a poet, whose father, during a family dinner, remarked, “Freedom doesn’t make men happy.” My friend’s mother (a Loyalist who left Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War) answered, “No, but it makes them men.” As opposed to subhuman creatures, she meant—just as she intended the term “men” in this sense to apply equally to women. So be it: If freedom is an indispensable precondition for all writers who aim high, let those writers read “Eleutheria” and Kizer’s other poems about poets before smashing their manacles; and let them acknowledge that serenity and contentment may not be the main result of freedom. Nevertheless, that ideal first formulated by the Greeks still glows with the promise of self-determination and the related project of artistic achievement— anyway, a beacon sufficiently alluring to how many thousands of aspirants who decide to light out for the territory. Source: Alfred Corn, “The Impact of Character on Character,” in Carolyn Kizer: Perspectives on Her Life and Work, edited by Annie Finch, Johanna Keller, and Candace McClelland, CavanKerry Press, 2001, pp. 29–39.
John Montague In the following essay, Montague provides a brief introduction to Kizer as a passionately diverse, woman poet who uses her art to explore the tensions between genders and between love and loss. Carolyn Kizer works in terms of the twinned tensions of life, those central paradoxes so directly
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One of the best woman poets around, she is profoundly committed to the process of life, however painful.”
felt by women. She poses the problem of the woman poet boldly in her remarkable “A Muse of Water”: We who must act as handmaidens To our own goddess, turn too fast, Trip on our hems to glimpse the muse Gliding below her lake or sea, Are left, long-staring after her Narcissists by necessity . . .
Mother and muse, Kizer can write tenderly of her own mother, who taught her to love nature even at its most loathsome, “a whole, wild, lost, betrayed and secret life / Among its dens and burrows.” Although she had a poem titled “Not Writing Poetry about Children,” such poems are everywhere in her work. So are cats, symbols of the female condition, as in “A Widow in Wintertime”: trying To live well enough alone, and not to dream Of grappling in the snow, claws plunged in fur, Or awaken in a caterwaul of dying.
The daring and diffidence of womanhood are celebrated in poems of companionship like “For Jan, In Bar Maria.” But Kizer’s most constant, resonant theme is love and loss, analyzed in detail in the sequence “A Month in Summer.” The work ends with a quotation from Basho¯, and it is in the fatalism of Japanese civilization that Kizer finds a refuge and an artistic remedy for her womanly woes: “‘O love long gone, it is raining in our room.’ / So I memorize these lines, without salutation, without close.” One of the best woman poets around, she is profoundly committed to the process of life, however painful. The twinned tensions of male and female are explored systematically in later volumes, including Mermaids in the Basement, subtitled Poems for Women, and its complement, The Nearness of You: Poems for Men. Here old and new commingle, while between the works is Yin, which includes two wonderful autobiographical reveries, “Running
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Away from Home” and “Exodus.” In an era when a shrill feminism threatens to tilt the scales of past injustice, Kizer’s view of the sexual universe contains polarity without hostility. With like thrift Kizer has gathered her translations in Carrying Over. Urdu, Macedonian, and Yiddish testify to the diversity of her interests, but there also are translations from the great Tang poet Tu Fu, as well as of the passionate love poems of the Chinese woman poet Shu Ting, born in 1952. Old and young, past and present, ying and yang— Kizer has kept faith with her interests over several decades, and she can say with Chaucer’s Criseyde that “I am my owne woman, wel at ese” in the dance of the dualities. Source: John Montague, “Kizer, Carolyn (Ashley),” in Contemporary Poets, 7th ed., edited by Thomas Riggs, St. James Press, 2001, pp. 641–42.
Elizabeth B. House In the following excerpt, House discusses the various stages of Kizer’s poetry career. Kizer’s literary activities include founding Poetry Northwest, a journal she edited from its beginning in 1959 until 1965; serving as a U.S. State Department specialist in Pakistan during 1964 and 1965; and directing literary programs for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1966 to 1970. She has also been poet-in-residence at the university of North Carolina (1970–1974); Hurst Professor at Washington University, Saint Louis, Missouri (1971); acting director of the graduate writing program at Columbia University (1972); a lecturer at Barnard College in New York (1972); McGuffey Lecturer and poet-in-residence at Ohio University (1975); and a professor of poetry in the Iowa Writers Workshop (1976). In 1985 she was a senior fellow in humanities at Princeton University. At the end of “The Stories of My Life,” an autobiographical section of Proses, Kizer confides the having experiences “war, love, marriage, separation, loneliness, children, the death of those I loved,” she is now “able to say with Chaucer’s Criseyde, ’I am my owne woman, wel at ese.’” The life journey that has led to this enviable state is intimately tied to Kizer’s poetry and its evolving style and subject matter. In her early work Kizer treats abstract, universal topics; typical themes are tensions between humans and nature, civilization and chaos, and the perusal of defenses people raise against pain. In later years her poems have become more personal in theme but at the same time less formal in style.
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No matter what her subject, though, Kizer never engages in the pettiness of which women writes have sometimes been accused: “stamping a tiny foot at God, whining in pentameter, dealing with only life’s surfaces,” as Roethke wrote in “Pro Femina” (part 3), Kizer emphatically rejects “the sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen . . . / when poetry wasn’t a craft but a sickly effluvium” and opts rather for writing poetry which has accurately been labeled “toughminded.” In a 1986 interview Kizer noted, “Self-pity is the most useless quality in the world; it destroys any poem that it touches,” and, indeed, Kizer faces life’s harshest realities without flinching. Especially in her fist book, and to a lesser degree in the second, Kizer seizes upon grotesque images—lice cozily snuggling in a captured bat’s wing, carrion birds devouring the last pulp of hellbound bodies—in order to test the ability of poetic form to contain terror. In later volumes she deals with more familiar landscapes, the terrors of human confrontations. In her treatments of all these unsettling topics, Kizer almost invariably maintains a tone of stoic serenity and acceptance, a philosophic stance that she has perhaps gleaned in part from her translations of oriental poetry. The calm, almost aloof tone characteristic of Kizer’s work owes itself in part of the poet’s technical skills, especially her ability to use form to distance herself from pain. Particularly in her earlier poems Kizer contains her emotions by imposing on them intricate thyme schemes or complicated French and oriental verse patterns, and most often her form-giving strategies succeed. Although William Dickey complained in his November 1961 Poetry review of The Ungrateful Garden (1961) that many of Kizer’s poems “are more concerned with the manner of their expression than with the material to be expressed,” most other critics have felt that Kizer uses her considerable technical gifts in ways that bring together form and substance. In the July 1961 Saturday Review, Robert Spector greeted Kizer as “an important new voice” and especially commended her ability to “cut savagely through all sentimental disguises.” One of the facades that Kizer most frequently explores in her first book is the assumption that humans can still be comforted by things that have traditionally given people solace. The potential sheltering abilities of government, poetry, love, and especially nature become objects of scrutiny in The Ungrateful Garden. In book’s title poem, for example, Kizer describes the folly of Midas, who, af-
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ter having his eyes scorched by reflections from flowers he has turned to gold, decides that nature is evil. Similar false conclusions about nature’s indifference as well as humans’ supposed bonds with nature are dealt with in other poems. One of Kizer’s best-known pieces, “The Great Blue Heron,” depicts nature as a concrete reality that neither cares for nor hates human beings but simply is as it is. In the first few stanzas Kizer evokes a ghostly portrait of the tattered-winged bird who first appears as a “shadow without a shadow” and then flies away on “vast unmoving wings.” By the middle of the lyric she has made clear that the heron is a harbinger of death, but she never suggests that the bird is evil. As part of nature he merely reflects the cycle of life and death that time imposes on all living creatures. Another poem, “The Intruder,” emphasizes the distance between humans and nature. Here the persona’s mother, feeling “instinctive love,” rescues a bat from her cat’s jaws. However, when she sees the “lice, pallid, yellow, / Nested within the wingpits,” the woman drops her facade of sympathy and flings the wild creature back into the cat’s mouth before washing “the pity from her hands.” In “The Suburbans” Kizer laments the substitution of “cardboard-sided suburbs” for the nature that inspired and comforted nineteenth-century poets. Poets now, Kizer suggests, cannot find inspiration in nature so easily. Bound to a culture in which domestic cats are all that remain of “tygers, mystery / Eye-gleam at night,” the modern poet must create the animals “ancient freedom in a cage / of tidy rhyme.” In the process, ultimately, poetry rather than nature becomes the writer’s final subject and solace. The poet’s “limited salvation” is found not in nature but in “the word.” If Kizer feels that nature neither comforts nor inspires twentieth-century people, at least she does not find birds, trees, or even bats actively threatening. Governments, on the other hand, do alarm the poet. The dangerous artificiality of modern governments is reflected in the elaborate, highly stylized villanelle form in which Kizer writes “On a Line from Julian”: “I have a number, and my name is dumb. / Such a barbarian I have become!” the persona cries. Kizer shows that such plights occur because governments urge their citizens to relinquish individual identity; in a cardboard society names, the most personal of words, are replaced by mere numbers. In “The Death of a Public Servant,” another uneasy poem about government, Kizer memorial-
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Carolyn Kizer is, finally, a writer to treasure. She has created poetry that will endure; at the same time she has excelled as an inspiring teacher, insightful critic, and valued friend of the arts.”
izes a Canadian diplomat who committed suicide after a U.S. Senate subcommittee accused him of being a Communist. Ideally, governments should be used to create form, not destroy it. Yet the Senate’s words of accusation end life for the gentle man whom Kizer implores, “Though you escape from words, whom words pursued, / take these to your shade: of rage, of grief, of love.” In contrast to the dearth of comfort Kizer finds in nature and government, poetry and human relationships do provide her with means for dealing with terror. In “Columns and Caryatids” Kizer endows three caryatids (female-shaped, edifice-supporting pillars) with powers to speak; the three roles the pillars assume—wife, mother, lover—are those through which women often form bonds with other people. The mother and lover find satisfaction in their ways of life, but the wife Kizer chooses to epitomize conjugal relationships is Lot’s spouse, who, as a pillar of salt, melts away under God’s derision. Even in such circumstances Lot’s wife is brave, however, and ultimately all three caryatids become emblematic both of womens’ strengths and of their entrapment in the responsibilities that society metes out to them. Conflicting facets of human relationships are also found in some of Kizer’s love poems. Many writers have found that sexual love creates bonds that protect and shelter, and in “What the Bones Know” Kizer seems to agree. Rejecting Marcel Proust’s “wheezy,” anemic ideas about love, Kizer decides “that Yeats was right / That lust and love are one.” However, the poem’s form, paradoxically, both casts doubt on and supports the lyric’s message. Apparently Kizer is not completely at ease with sex unless its wildness is tempered with
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the rigidity of form, for she uses a modified sestina stanza throughout the poem. At the same time, though, the poet uses the constricting scheme of the sestina to help affirm the life-giving properties of sex. In the poem’s first six-line stanza the word death ends the sixth line while breath is the last word in line five. Breath remains the final word in each of the three remaining stanzas, but death becomes in the second, third, and fourth stanzas the end world for lines four, three and two, respectively. Thus, as the persona hymns the power of sex, death moves farther and farther away from life and breath. Kizer expresses a similar ambivalence about the consoling power of sex in “A Widow in Wintertime.” Here the persona sees connections between her own desires and those of her philandering cat, but this also counts as part of the discipline that makes her human the fact that she tried “not to dream / Of grappling in the snow, claws plunged in fur.” In The Ungrateful Garden the only consolation that Kizer shows to be invariably effective is art. Especially in the section that she labels “In the Japanese Mode,” she demonstrates that poetry, unlike nature or governments, can unfailingly combat the chaos of life. One of the poems, “A Poet’s Household,” for example, is dedicated to Theodore Roethke, Kizer’s teacher, and consists of three tankas that extol and are exemplars of the formgiving translation of experience into poetry. Similarly, in “From an Artist’s House” Kizer celebrates the immutability of poetry, the fact that in the writer’s hands, an old compote full of withered oranges becomes “immortal / On twenty sheets of paper.” Kizer takes the title of her second book, Knock Upon Silence (1965), from the Wen Fu of Lu Chi, a third-century Chinese poet; her translation of a key passage is quoted on the title page: We wrestle with non-being to force it to yield up being; we knock upon silence for an answering music. . . .
A merging of Eastern and Western cultures, the music in Knock Upon Silence is divided into four parts: two long poems, “A Month in Summer” and “Pro Femina”; a section of Chinese imitations; and eighteen translations of Tu Fu, an eighthcentury Chinese poet. In the October 1965 Library Journal John Willingham asserted that Kizer “clearly . . . possesses one of the more impressive talents of our day.” Echoing the same view, Richard Moore wrote, “This book is a rare event. One senses in it a fully developed gift in the service of an urgent and unifying perception.”
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The only part of Kizer’s second book that critics have not unanimously praised is “A Month in Summer,” a diary of a collapsing love affair recorded in a mixture of haiku and prose. While William Jay Smith argued in the August 1966 Harper’s that this poem is the volume’s best, other reviewers sided with Richard Moore, who felt the diary to be “the weakest part of the book. . . . It is moving in places, witty in others; but there is also a tendency to be straggling and repetitive.” Some of the prose sections of “A Month in Summer” are bland, but the modified haiku are exquisite, exploring The terror of loss: Not the grief of a wet branch In autumn, but the absolute Arctic desolution.
“Pro Femina,” perhaps Kizer’s best-known work, is a satiric poem about liberated women, especially those who are writes. The piece is written in hexameters, a meter that Kizer has said she derived from Juvenal’s satires; the irony in Kizer’s selection of metres becomes clear when the poet reminds us of Juvenal’s misogyny, that he “set us apart in denouncing our vices / Which had grown, in part, from having been set apart.” In the poem Kizer first notes historical differences between the sexes (“While men have politely debated free will, we have howled for it / Howl still, pacing the centuries”), and then, while cautioning against overconcern with surface appearances, she concludes that women should maintain both their faces and their minds. To succeed in letters, Kizer says, women writers must “struggle abnormally,” “submerge our self pity” all the while Keeping our heads and our pride while remaining unmarried; And if wedded, kill guilt in its tracks when we stack up the dishes And defect to the typewriter. And if mothers, believe in the luck of our children, Whom we forbid to devour us, whom we shall not devour, And the luck of our husbands and lovers, who keep free women.
Midnight Was My Cry: New and Selected Poems (1971) contains thirty-six of the thirty-seven poems published in The Ungrateful Garden, eight poems from Knock Upon Silence, and sixteen new poems. The book received a warm critical reception. John Willingham in the November 1971 Library Journal labeled it a “distinguished volume.” Richard Howard in the August 1972 issue of Poetry praised the sixteen new poems for being “frank in their response to hope and horror alike” and for showing clear evidence of Kizer’s increasing maturity.
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The sixteen new poems differ in several ways from those in Kizer’s two earlier books. The poet’s technical elegance is as apparent in these pieces as it is in her earlier ones, but the ugly images characteristic of The Ungrateful Garden and Knock Upon Silence are not emphasized, and Kizer’s choice of subjects has altered. The concern with nature that the poet displays in the The Ungrateful Garden is replaced in these later poems by interest in contemporary social and national problems, particularly those of the 1960s. “Poem, Small and Delible,” for example, deals with antisegregation sit-ins at Woolworth’s; “The First of June Again” describes actions of American marines in Saigon; and “Seasons of Lovers and Assassins” uses blank verse to equate Robert Kennedy’s murder and the “caul of vulnerability” that surrounds even those who think they have found safety in love. Although Kizer uses new subject matter in the sixteen new poems in Midnight Was My Cry, she displays in them the same toic acceptance found in her earlier work. Ultimately, as she notes in the villanelle “On a Line From Sophocles,” “Time, time my friend, makes havoc everywhere,” both on personal and national levels. Yet even realizing this truth, she does not succumb to panic or terror or whining. Rather she summons courage similar to that which she lauds in “Lines to Accompany Flowers for Eve,” a poem dedicated to a woman who has attempted to commit suicide. Life must have value, Kizer says, for the human spirit has surprising resilience even in the face of horror. Most often when people are tempted to “buy peace” by relinquishing their lives, “the spirit rouses . . . / . . . signaling / Self-amazed, its willingness to endure,” for with courage it is possible to “live in wonder, / . . . Though once we lay and waited for death.” In 1984, thirteen years after the publication of Midnight Was My Cry, Kizer brought out two volumes, Yin: New Poems and Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women. In 1986 The Nearness of You appeared; this book, Kizer’s companion piece to Mermaids in the Basement, features “poems for men.” While Yin contains only work Kizer had not previously published in book form, Mermaids in the Basement and The Nearness of You include many poems from the writer’s earlier volumes. In contrast to earlier work, Kizer’s poetry from the 1980s is intimately linked to the circumstances of her life. Kizer’s mother and father, particularly, as well as other family and friends, become inspirations for and subjects of major new poems. Even the new offerings that are not openly about Kizer’s
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family and friends are “personal” in the sense that, rather than dealing with abstractions, the poet deals with specific historical/mythical figures as they confront human problems, Also, Kizer is less concerned with formal rhyme schemes and elaborate stanzas than she had been previously. In Chinese philosophy yin is the the female principal, supposedly the more passive, darker side of cosmic forces. In addition to “A Muse,” which is the second section of Yin, the book has three other parts: “Believing/Unbelieving,” “Dreams and Friends,” and “Fanny and the Affections.” “Believing/ Unbelieving” includes “Semele Recycles,” a modernized version of the myth of Dionysus’s mother. When Zeus appeared to her in all his glory, the original Semele promptly disintegrated; however in the “recycled” version of the myth, a stronger Semele is reunited with her lover. “The Blessing,” also in this section, was written for Kizer’s daughter Ashley and lovingly links and celebrates Kizer’s strong mother and daughter: “Child and old woman / soothing each other, / sharing the same face / in a span of seventy years, / the same mother wit.” The third section, “Dreams and Friends,” includes the poem “Antique Father,” in which Kizer describes Ben Kizer during his last illness. The poet says her stern father had been successful in “Quelling all queries / of my childhood,” and now, ironically, the man wishes “urgently / to communicate / to me” but cannot. Illness has robbed him of speech and imposed on him a “terrible silence,” not unlike the formidable quiet he used to separate himself from the poet when she was a child. The last section in Yin features “Fanny,” ostensibly a diary of Fanny Osbourne Stevenson, wife of the writer Robert Louis Stevenson. Written in hexameters and alter added as a fourth section to “Pro Femina” in Mermaids, the piece explores the role of a wife who sacrifices herself to sustain her husband’s creativity. Fanny cares for her husband in Samoa, far from the English weather that threatens his health, and in doing so she suffers trials and threats as varied as headhunters and hurricanes. The isolate woman finds her only consolation, her only creative release, ingrowing magnificent gardens. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Yin received a warm critical reception. In Poetry (March 1985) Robert Phillips labeled Yin a “marvelous book” and noted “One could never say with certainty what ‘a Carolyn Kizer poem’ was until now. Yin, her fourth collection, is her most unified, original, and personal. Now we know a
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Kizer poem is brave, witty, passionate, and not easily forgotten.” Patricia Hampl, in the November 1984 New York Times Book Review, also praised Yin and listed “A Muse” as the volume’s most striking offering. Similarly, Grace Schulman, in Poetry (November 1985), cited “Fanny,” “Semele Recycled,” and “Antique Father” as poems particularly exemplifying Kizer’s mature wisdom. Mermaids in the Basement, Kizer’s fifth book, takes its title from Emily Dickinson’s lines “I started early—took my dog— / And visited the Sea— / The Mermaids in the Basement / Came out to look at me—.” Divided into seven sections—“Mothers and Daughters,” “Female Friends,” “Pro Femina,” “Chinese Love,” “Myth: Visions and Revisions,” “A Month in Summer,” and “Where I’ve Been All My Life” the collection examines various roles, personas, and incarnations that women assume. In the Hudson Review (Summer 1985) Mark Jarman rightly judged that the “major service” of the publisher of Mermaids was “to reprint many fine [Kizer] poems that were include din now outof-print editions.” “The Intruder,” “The Great Blue Heron,” “The Blessing,” “A Widow in Wintertime,” “Lines to Accompany Flowers for Eve,” “Columns and Caryatids,” “Semele Recycled,” “A Month in Summer,” and “Pro Femina” all reappear in Mermaids. The groupings in this volume give form to the poet’s vision of yin, the feminine force. Interspersed with these reprinted pieces are several new lyrics such as “Thrall,” a poem that links two scenes; in each, the focus is a room containing “a chair, a table and a father.” As a child the poet felt estranged from her stern father, and in “Thrall” she remembers him as a man who “read for years without looking up / Until . . . childhood was over.” The poem’s second scene pictures the now aged father and his grown daughter, the poet. Again in a sparsely furnished room, she reads aloud to her father and waits “for his eyes to close at last / So [I] . . . may write this poem.” In both instances the father and daughter love each other, but their relationship is tempered and muted by a similar devotion to literary pursuits. In the preface to The Nearness of You, Kizer dedicates the book “For the men I love, especially John.” The title is taken from a song by Hoagy Carmichael and Ned Washington. Divided into four sections—“Manhood,” “Passions,” “Father,” and “Friends” The Nearness of You deals with the roles of men as viewed from Kizer’s feminine perspective. One of the most revealing pieces in the “Father” section is the narrative “My Good Father.”
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Kizer composed the essay for a member of Ben Kizer’s Study Club who wished to write a paper on her father. In her reply to the member’s queries she describes her father as a supremely intelligent person and one devoted to good causes. However, he was also a self-absorbed, aloof thinking who frightened his daughter until she was thirty. Kizer summarizes her father by concluding, “To him people were chiefly important as vehicles by which he could express his passion for abstraction, abstractions for which he gaily marched into battle, chanting his war chant: truth, justice, equity, freedom and law. How he loved the law!” The Nearness of You contains poems reprinted from earlier volumes as well as new lyrics (almost letters) dedicated to individual writers such as Robert Creeley, Robert Peterson, Ruthven Todd, Donald Keene, Bernard Malamud, Theodore Roethke, and James Wright. As this listing illustrates, Kizer has known many writers, and, indeed, she is widely esteemed as a teacher, mentor, and guide for aspiring poets. Not surprising, this role can become taxing; with wry humor Kizer titles one poem in this volume, “To An Unknown Poet.” When this new writer comes “unannounced to my door / I tell you I am busy / I’m not as young as I was. / I’m terrified of breakage.” In the November 1986 Publishers Weekly Genevieve Stuttaford noted that the poems in The Nearness of You “ring joyously in the ear and the memory” and concluded, “Kizer’s mastery, grace, charm and wit make this a perfect book.” Somewhat less sympathetic was Anthony Libby, who in the March 1987 New York Times Book Review criticized the collection but especially praised “Thrall.” In the Library Journal (November 1986) Rochelle Ratner noted that since Kizer’s poems in this volume are not dated, studying a progression of the poet’s ideas and style is impossible unless the reader already knows her earlier work. In the preface to Carrying Over: Poems from the Chinese, Urdu, Macedonian, Yiddish, and French African (1988), Kizer traces the history of some of the volume’s translations and poems and in the process emphasizes a wish for international understanding and cooperation. Frank Allen, in the Library Journal (November 1988), praised Kizer’s “carefully crafted translations” and said that the poet’s work in Carrying Over “broadens our Western self-preoccupation.” The collection contains translations of poems by Tu Fu, Rachel Korn, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Bogomil Gjuzel, Edouard Munick, Shu Ting, and others. The only Kizer poem in the
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group is “Race Relations,” a piece written for her South African friend Dennis Brutus. Composed in triplets, the poem underscores Kizer’s understanding of the chasm between experience and exposition. She confesses, “When you fled tyranny / face down in the street / signing stones with your blood,” she was “Martyred in safety / I sighed for lost causes / You bled on You bled on.” Kizer’s book Proses: On Poems & Poets, in addition to its collection of autobiographical pieces (“The Stories of My Life” and “So Big: An Essay on Size”), contains essays on various topics (for example, “The Poetics of Water: A Sermon,” which Kizer delivered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York) and an assortment of review and other pieces of literary criticism. Kizer’s subjects are as varied as Emily Dickinson, John Claire, Robinson Jeffers, and Sylvia Plath. Carolyn Kizer is, finally, a writer to treasure. She has created poetry that will endure; at the same time she has excelled as an inspiring teacher, insightful critic, and valued friend of the arts. In the foreword to An Answering Music: On the Poetry of Carolyn Kizer (1990), Hayden Carruth affirms that Kizer “wears her laurels well. . . . She combines the role of great ladies of the past with that of a responsibly liberated woman of the present, and does it magnificently. In her home in California she is arbiters, impresario, author, friend, succorer, facilitator.” Faced with the human inevitability of loss and destruction, Kizer, in both poetry and life, celebrates the joys of art, friendship, family, and good works. Undoubtedly, she has earned a secure niche in American letters and made lasting gifts to the world’s store of truth and beauty. Source: Elizabeth B. House, “Carolyn Kizer,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 169, American Poets Since World War II, Fifth Series, Gale Research, 1996, pp. 158–64.
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Sources Gioia, Dana, “Can Poetry Matter?” in the Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 267, No. 5, May 1991, pp. 94–106. House, Elizabeth B., “Carolyn Kizer,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 169, American Poets Since World War II, Fifth Series, edited by Joseph Conte, Gale Research, 1996, pp. 157–64. Kizer, Carolyn, “To an Unknown Poet,” in The Nearness of You, Copper Canyon Press, 1986, pp. 90–91. Libby, Anthony, “Fathers and Daughers and Mothers and Poets,” in the New York Times Book Review, March 22, 1987, p. 23. McDowell, Robert, and Mark Jarman, Editorial, in the Reaper, No. 1, 1981, p. 3. Miller, Diane, “ODU hosts Pulitzer Prize Winner,” in the Mace & Crown, October 17, 1985. Quinn, Sister Bernetta, “Carolyn Kizer, Poet of Compassion,” in An Answering Music: On the Poetry of Carolyn Kizer, edited by David Rigsbee, Ford-Brown, 1990, pp. 172–85. Wakoski, Diane, Review of The Nearness of You, in Women’s Review of Books, September 1987, p. 6.
Further Reading Barbato, Joseph, “Carolyn Kizer: Pulitzer Poet,” in Small Press, Vol. 3, No. 2, November–December 1985, pp. 54–58. Barbato profiles Kizer’s career and rise to fame. Howard, Richard, “Our Masks Keep Us Enthralled to Ourselves,” in Alone with America, Atheneum, 1980, 320–30. Howard offers an enlightening essay on the role of gender in Kizer’s poetry. Kizer, Carolyn, Proses: On Poems & Poets, Copper Canyon Press, 1993. In the first section of this collection of essays, Kizer writes extensively about her childhood and how she became interested in poetry.
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Glossary of Literary Terms A Abstract: Used as a noun, the term refers to a short summary or outline of a longer work. As an adjective applied to writing or literary works, abstract refers to words or phrases that name things not knowable through the five senses. Accent: The emphasis or stress placed on a syllable in poetry. Traditional poetry commonly uses patterns of accented and unaccented syllables (known as feet) that create distinct rhythms. Much modern poetry uses less formal arrangements that create a sense of freedom and spontaneity. Aestheticism: A literary and artistic movement of the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement believed that art should not be mixed with social, political, or moral teaching. The statement “art for art’s sake” is a good summary of aestheticism. The movement had its roots in France, but it gained widespread importance in England in the last half of the nineteenth century, where it helped change the Victorian practice of including moral lessons in literature. Affective Fallacy: An error in judging the merits or faults of a work of literature. The “error” results from stressing the importance of the work’s effect upon the reader—that is, how it makes a reader “feel” emotionally, what it does as a literary work—instead of stressing its inner qualities as a created object, or what it “is.” Age of Johnson: The period in English literature between 1750 and 1798, named after the most
prominent literary figure of the age, Samuel Johnson. Works written during this time are noted for their emphasis on “sensibility,” or emotional quality. These works formed a transition between the rational works of the Age of Reason, or Neoclassical period, and the emphasis on individual feelings and responses of the Romantic period. Age of Reason: See Neoclassicism Age of Sensibility: See Age of Johnson Agrarians: A group of Southern American writers of the 1930s and 1940s who fostered an economic and cultural program for the South based on agriculture, in opposition to the industrial society of the North. The term can refer to any group that promotes the value of farm life and agricultural society. Alexandrine Meter: See Meter Allegory: A narrative technique in which characters representing things or abstract ideas are used to convey a message or teach a lesson. Allegory is typically used to teach moral, ethical, or religious lessons but is sometimes used for satiric or political purposes. Alliteration: A poetic device where the first consonant sounds or any vowel sounds in words or syllables are repeated. Allusion: A reference to a familiar literary or historical person or event, used to make an idea more easily understood. Amerind Literature: The writing and oral traditions of Native Americans. Native American liter-
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ature was originally passed on by word of mouth, so it consisted largely of stories and events that were easily memorized. Amerind prose is often rhythmic like poetry because it was recited to the beat of a ceremonial drum. Analogy: A comparison of two things made to explain something unfamiliar through its similarities to something familiar, or to prove one point based on the acceptedness of another. Similes and metaphors are types of analogies. Anapest: See Foot Angry Young Men: A group of British writers of the 1950s whose work expressed bitterness and disillusionment with society. Common to their work is an antihero who rebels against a corrupt social order and strives for personal integrity. Anthropomorphism: The presentation of animals or objects in human shape or with human characteristics. The term is derived from the Greek word for “human form.” Antimasque: See Masque Antithesis: The antithesis of something is its direct opposite. In literature, the use of antithesis as a figure of speech results in two statements that show a contrast through the balancing of two opposite ideas. Technically, it is the second portion of the statement that is defined as the “antithesis”; the first portion is the “thesis.” Apocrypha: Writings tentatively attributed to an author but not proven or universally accepted to be their works. The term was originally applied to certain books of the Bible that were not considered inspired and so were not included in the “sacred canon.” Apollonian and Dionysian: The two impulses believed to guide authors of dramatic tragedy. The Apollonian impulse is named after Apollo, the Greek god of light and beauty and the symbol of intellectual order. The Dionysian impulse is named after Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and the symbol of the unrestrained forces of nature. The Apollonian impulse is to create a rational, harmonious world, while the Dionysian is to express the irrational forces of personality. Apostrophe: A statement, question, or request addressed to an inanimate object or concept or to a nonexistent or absent person. Archetype: The word archetype is commonly used to describe an original pattern or model from which all other things of the same kind are made. This term was introduced to literary criticism from the
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psychology of Carl Jung. It expresses Jung’s theory that behind every person’s “unconscious,” or repressed memories of the past, lies the “collective unconscious” of the human race: memories of the countless typical experiences of our ancestors. These memories are said to prompt illogical associations that trigger powerful emotions in the reader. Often, the emotional process is primitive, even primordial. Archetypes are the literary images that grow out of the “collective unconscious.” They appear in literature as incidents and plots that repeat basic patterns of life. They may also appear as stereotyped characters. Argument: The argument of a work is the author’s subject matter or principal idea. Art for Art’s Sake: See Aestheticism Assonance: The repetition of similar vowel sounds in poetry. Audience: The people for whom a piece of literature is written. Authors usually write with a certain audience in mind, for example, children, members of a religious or ethnic group, or colleagues in a professional field. The term “audience” also applies to the people who gather to see or hear any performance, including plays, poetry readings, speeches, and concerts. Automatic Writing: Writing carried out without a preconceived plan in an effort to capture every random thought. Authors who engage in automatic writing typically do not revise their work, preferring instead to preserve the revealed truth and beauty of spontaneous expression. Avant-garde: A French term meaning “vanguard.” It is used in literary criticism to describe new writing that rejects traditional approaches to literature in favor of innovations in style or content.
B Ballad: A short poem that tells a simple story and has a repeated refrain. Ballads were originally intended to be sung. Early ballads, known as folk ballads, were passed down through generations, so their authors are often unknown. Later ballads composed by known authors are called literary ballads. Baroque: A term used in literary criticism to describe literature that is complex or ornate in style or diction. Baroque works typically express tension, anxiety, and violent emotion. The term “Baroque Age” designates a period in Western European literature beginning in the late sixteenth century and ending about one hundred years later.
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Works of this period often mirror the qualities of works more generally associated with the label “baroque” and sometimes feature elaborate conceits. Baroque Age: See Baroque Baroque Period: See Baroque Beat Generation: See Beat Movement Beat Movement: A period featuring a group of American poets and novelists of the 1950s and 1960s—including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti—who rejected established social and literary values. Using such techniques as stream-of-consciousness writing and jazzinfluenced free verse and focusing on unusual or abnormal states of mind—generated by religious ecstasy or the use of drugs—the Beat writers aimed to create works that were unconventional in both form and subject matter. Beat Poets: See Beat Movement Beats, The: See Beat Movement Belles-lettres: A French term meaning “fine letters” or “beautiful writing.” It is often used as a synonym for literature, typically referring to imaginative and artistic rather than scientific or expository writing. Current usage sometimes restricts the meaning to light or humorous writing and appreciative essays about literature. Black Aesthetic Movement: A period of artistic and literary development among African Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s. This was the first major African American artistic movement since the Harlem Renaissance and was closely paralleled by the civil rights and black power movements. The black aesthetic writers attempted to produce works of art that would be meaningful to the black masses. Key figures in black aesthetics included one of its founders, poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones; poet and essayist Haki R. Madhubuti, formerly Don L. Lee; poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez; and dramatist Ed Bullins. Black Arts Movement: See Black Aesthetic Movement Black Comedy: See Black Humor Black Humor: Writing that places grotesque elements side by side with humorous ones in an attempt to shock the reader, forcing him or her to laugh at the horrifying reality of a disordered world. Black Mountain School: Black Mountain College and three of its instructors—Robert Creeley, Robert
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Duncan, and Charles Olson—were all influential in projective verse. Today poets working in projective verse are referred to as members of the Black Mountain school. Blank Verse: Loosely, any unrhymed poetry, but more generally, unrhymed iambic pentameter verse (composed of lines of five two-syllable feet with the first syllable accented, the second unaccented). Blank verse has been used by poets since the Renaissance for its flexibility and its graceful, dignified tone. Bloomsbury Group: A group of English writers, artists, and intellectuals who held informal artistic and philosophical discussions in Bloomsbury, a district of London, from around 1907 to the early 1930s. The Bloomsbury Group held no uniform philosophical beliefs but did commonly express an aversion to moral prudery and a desire for greater social tolerance. Bon Mot: A French term meaning “good word.” A bon mot is a witty remark or clever observation. Breath Verse: See Projective Verse Burlesque: Any literary work that uses exaggeration to make its subject appear ridiculous, either by treating a trivial subject with profound seriousness or by treating a dignified subject frivolously. The word “burlesque” may also be used as an adjective, as in “burlesque show,” to mean “striptease act.”
C Cadence: The natural rhythm of language caused by the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. Much modern poetry—notably free verse— deliberately manipulates cadence to create complex rhythmic effects. Caesura: A pause in a line of poetry, usually occurring near the middle. It typically corresponds to a break in the natural rhythm or sense of the line but is sometimes shifted to create special meanings or rhythmic effects. Canzone: A short Italian or Provencal lyric poem, commonly about love and often set to music. The canzone has no set form but typically contains five or six stanzas made up of seven to twenty lines of eleven syllables each. A shorter, five- to ten-line “envoy,” or concluding stanza, completes the poem. Carpe Diem: A Latin term meaning “seize the day.” This is a traditional theme of poetry, especially lyrics. A carpe diem poem advises the reader or the person it addresses to live for today and enjoy the pleasures of the moment.
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Catharsis: The release or purging of unwanted emotions—specifically fear and pity—brought about by exposure to art. The term was first used by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics to refer to the desired effect of tragedy on spectators. Celtic Renaissance: A period of Irish literary and cultural history at the end of the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement aimed to create a romantic vision of Celtic myth and legend. The most significant works of the Celtic Renaissance typically present a dreamy, unreal world, usually in reaction against the reality of contemporary problems. Celtic Twilight: See Celtic Renaissance Character: Broadly speaking, a person in a literary work. The actions of characters are what constitute the plot of a story, novel, or poem. There are numerous types of characters, ranging from simple, stereotypical figures to intricate, multifaceted ones. In the techniques of anthropomorphism and personification, animals—and even places or things—can assume aspects of character. “Characterization” is the process by which an author creates vivid, believable characters in a work of art. This may be done in a variety of ways, including (1) direct description of the character by the narrator; (2) the direct presentation of the speech, thoughts, or actions of the character; and (3) the responses of other characters to the character. The term “character” also refers to a form originated by the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus that later became popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is a short essay or sketch of a person who prominently displays a specific attribute or quality, such as miserliness or ambition. Characterization: See Character Classical: In its strictest definition in literary criticism, classicism refers to works of ancient Greek or Roman literature. The term may also be used to describe a literary work of recognized importance (a “classic”) from any time period or literature that exhibits the traits of classicism. Classicism: A term used in literary criticism to describe critical doctrines that have their roots in ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and art. Works associated with classicism typically exhibit restraint on the part of the author, unity of design and purpose, clarity, simplicity, logical organization, and respect for tradition. Colloquialism: A word, phrase, or form of pronunciation that is acceptable in casual conversation
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but not in formal, written communication. It is considered more acceptable than slang. Complaint: A lyric poem, popular in the Renaissance, in which the speaker expresses sorrow about his or her condition. Typically, the speaker’s sadness is caused by an unresponsive lover, but some complaints cite other sources of unhappiness, such as poverty or fate. Conceit: A clever and fanciful metaphor, usually expressed through elaborate and extended comparison, that presents a striking parallel between two seemingly dissimilar things—for example, elaborately comparing a beautiful woman to an object like a garden or the sun. The conceit was a popular device throughout the Elizabethan Age and Baroque Age and was the principal technique of the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets. This usage of the word conceit is unrelated to the best-known definition of conceit as an arrogant attitude or behavior. Concrete: Concrete is the opposite of abstract, and refers to a thing that actually exists or a description that allows the reader to experience an object or concept with the senses. Concrete Poetry: Poetry in which visual elements play a large part in the poetic effect. Punctuation marks, letters, or words are arranged on a page to form a visual design: a cross, for example, or a bumblebee. Confessional Poetry: A form of poetry in which the poet reveals very personal, intimate, sometimes shocking information about himself or herself. Connotation: The impression that a word gives beyond its defined meaning. Connotations may be universally understood or may be significant only to a certain group. Consonance: Consonance occurs in poetry when words appearing at the ends of two or more verses have similar final consonant sounds but have final vowel sounds that differ, as with “stuff” and “off.” Convention: Any widely accepted literary device, style, or form. Corrido: A Mexican ballad. Couplet: Two lines of poetry with the same rhyme and meter, often expressing a complete and selfcontained thought. Criticism: The systematic study and evaluation of literary works, usually based on a specific method or set of principles. An important part of literary studies since ancient times, the practice of criticism has given rise to numerous theories, methods, and
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“schools,” sometimes producing conflicting, even contradictory, interpretations of literature in general as well as of individual works. Even such basic issues as what constitutes a poem or a novel have been the subject of much criticism over the centuries.
D Dactyl: See Foot Dadaism: A protest movement in art and literature founded by Tristan Tzara in 1916. Followers of the movement expressed their outrage at the destruction brought about by World War I by revolting against numerous forms of social convention. The Dadaists presented works marked by calculated madness and flamboyant nonsense. They stressed total freedom of expression, commonly through primitive displays of emotion and illogical, often senseless, poetry. The movement ended shortly after the war, when it was replaced by surrealism. Decadent: See Decadents Decadents: The followers of a nineteenth-century literary movement that had its beginnings in French aestheticism. Decadent literature displays a fascination with perverse and morbid states; a search for novelty and sensation—the “new thrill”; a preoccupation with mysticism; and a belief in the senselessness of human existence. The movement is closely associated with the doctrine Art for Art’s Sake. The term “decadence” is sometimes used to denote a decline in the quality of art or literature following a period of greatness. Deconstruction: A method of literary criticism developed by Jacques Derrida and characterized by multiple conflicting interpretations of a given work. Deconstructionists consider the impact of the language of a work and suggest that the true meaning of the work is not necessarily the meaning that the author intended. Deduction: The process of reaching a conclusion through reasoning from general premises to a specific premise. Denotation: The definition of a word, apart from the impressions or feelings it creates in the reader. Diction: The selection and arrangement of words in a literary work. Either or both may vary depending on the desired effect. There are four general types of diction: “formal,” used in scholarly or lofty writing; “informal,” used in relaxed but educated conversation; “colloquial,” used in everyday speech; and “slang,” containing newly coined words and other terms not accepted in formal usage.
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Didactic: A term used to describe works of literature that aim to teach some moral, religious, political, or practical lesson. Although didactic elements are often found in artistically pleasing works, the term “didactic” usually refers to literature in which the message is more important than the form. The term may also be used to criticize a work that the critic finds “overly didactic,” that is, heavy-handed in its delivery of a lesson. Dimeter: See Meter Dionysian: See Apollonian and Dionysian Discordia concours: A Latin phrase meaning “discord in harmony.” The term was coined by the eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson to describe “a combination of dissimilar images or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” Johnson created the expression by reversing a phrase by the Latin poet Horace. Dissonance: A combination of harsh or jarring sounds, especially in poetry. Although such combinations may be accidental, poets sometimes intentionally make them to achieve particular effects. Dissonance is also sometimes used to refer to close but not identical rhymes. When this is the case, the word functions as a synonym for consonance. Double Entendre: A corruption of a French phrase meaning “double meaning.” The term is used to indicate a word or phrase that is deliberately ambiguous, especially when one of the meanings is risque or improper. Draft: Any preliminary version of a written work. An author may write dozens of drafts which are revised to form the final work, or he or she may write only one, with few or no revisions. Dramatic Monologue: See Monologue Dramatic Poetry: Any lyric work that employs elements of drama such as dialogue, conflict, or characterization, but excluding works that are intended for stage presentation. Dream Allegory: See Dream Vision Dream Vision: A literary convention, chiefly of the Middle Ages. In a dream vision a story is presented as a literal dream of the narrator. This device was commonly used to teach moral and religious lessons.
E Eclogue: In classical literature, a poem featuring rural themes and structured as a dialogue among shepherds. Eclogues often took specific poetic forms, such as elegies or love poems. Some were
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written as the soliloquy of a shepherd. In later centuries, “eclogue” came to refer to any poem that was in the pastoral tradition or that had a dialogue or monologue structure. Edwardian: Describes cultural conventions identified with the period of the reign of Edward VII of England (1901–1910). Writers of the Edwardian Age typically displayed a strong reaction against the propriety and conservatism of the Victorian Age. Their work often exhibits distrust of authority in religion, politics, and art and expresses strong doubts about the soundness of conventional values. Edwardian Age: See Edwardian Electra Complex: A daughter’s amorous obsession with her father. Elegy: A lyric poem that laments the death of a person or the eventual death of all people. In a conventional elegy, set in a classical world, the poet and subject are spoken of as shepherds. In modern criticism, the word elegy is often used to refer to a poem that is melancholy or mournfully contemplative. Elizabethan Age: A period of great economic growth, religious controversy, and nationalism closely associated with the reign of Elizabeth I of England (1558–1603). The Elizabethan Age is considered a part of the general renaissance—that is, the flowering of arts and literature—that took place in Europe during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. The era is considered the golden age of English literature. The most important dramas in English and a great deal of lyric poetry were produced during this period, and modern English criticism began around this time. Empathy: A sense of shared experience, including emotional and physical feelings, with someone or something other than oneself. Empathy is often used to describe the response of a reader to a literary character. English Sonnet: See Sonnet Enjambment: The running over of the sense and structure of a line of verse or a couplet into the following verse or couplet. Enlightenment, The: An eighteenth-century philosophical movement. It began in France but had a wide impact throughout Europe and America. Thinkers of the Enlightenment valued reason and believed that both the individual and society could achieve a state of perfection. Corresponding to this essentially humanist vision was a resistance to religious authority.
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Epic: A long narrative poem about the adventures of a hero of great historic or legendary importance. The setting is vast and the action is often given cosmic significance through the intervention of supernatural forces such as gods, angels, or demons. Epics are typically written in a classical style of grand simplicity with elaborate metaphors and allusions that enhance the symbolic importance of a hero’s adventures. Epic Simile: See Homeric Simile Epigram: A saying that makes the speaker’s point quickly and concisely. Epilogue: A concluding statement or section of a literary work. In dramas, particularly those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the epilogue is a closing speech, often in verse, delivered by an actor at the end of a play and spoken directly to the audience. Epiphany: A sudden revelation of truth inspired by a seemingly trivial incident. Epitaph: An inscription on a tomb or tombstone, or a verse written on the occasion of a person’s death. Epitaphs may be serious or humorous. Epithalamion: A song or poem written to honor and commemorate a marriage ceremony. Epithalamium: See Epithalamion Epithet: A word or phrase, often disparaging or abusive, that expresses a character trait of someone or something. Erziehungsroman: See Bildungsroman Essay: A prose composition with a focused subject of discussion. The term was coined by Michel de Montaigne to describe his 1580 collection of brief, informal reflections on himself and on various topics relating to human nature. An essay can also be a long, systematic discourse. Existentialism: A predominantly twentiethcentury philosophy concerned with the nature and perception of human existence. There are two major strains of existentialist thought: atheistic and Christian. Followers of atheistic existentialism believe that the individual is alone in a godless universe and that the basic human condition is one of suffering and loneliness. Nevertheless, because there are no fixed values, individuals can create their own characters—indeed, they can shape themselves—through the exercise of free will. The atheistic strain culminates in and is popularly associated with the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. The Christian existentialists, on the other hand, believe that only in God may people find freedom from life’s an-
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guish. The two strains hold certain beliefs in common: that existence cannot be fully understood or described through empirical effort; that anguish is a universal element of life; that individuals must bear responsibility for their actions; and that there is no common standard of behavior or perception for religious and ethical matters. Expatriates: See Expatriatism Expatriatism: The practice of leaving one’s country to live for an extended period in another country. Exposition: Writing intended to explain the nature of an idea, thing, or theme. Expository writing is often combined with description, narration, or argument. In dramatic writing, the exposition is the introductory material which presents the characters, setting, and tone of the play. Expressionism: An indistinct literary term, originally used to describe an early twentieth-century school of German painting. The term applies to almost any mode of unconventional, highly subjective writing that distorts reality in some way. Extended Monologue: See Monologue
F Feet: See Foot Feminine Rhyme: See Rhyme Fiction: Any story that is the product of imagination rather than a documentation of fact. Characters and events in such narratives may be based in real life but their ultimate form and configuration is a creation of the author. Figurative Language: A technique in writing in which the author temporarily interrupts the order, construction, or meaning of the writing for a particular effect. This interruption takes the form of one or more figures of speech such as hyperbole, irony, or simile. Figurative language is the opposite of literal language, in which every word is truthful, accurate, and free of exaggeration or embellishment. Figures of Speech: Writing that differs from customary conventions for construction, meaning, order, or significance for the purpose of a special meaning or effect. There are two major types of figures of speech: rhetorical figures, which do not make changes in the meaning of the words; and tropes, which do. Fin de siecle: A French term meaning “end of the century.” The term is used to denote the last decade of the nineteenth century, a transition period when
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writers and other artists abandoned old conventions and looked for new techniques and objectives. First Person: See Point of View Folk Ballad: See Ballad Folklore: Traditions and myths preserved in a culture or group of people. Typically, these are passed on by word of mouth in various forms—such as legends, songs, and proverbs—or preserved in customs and ceremonies. This term was first used by W. J. Thoms in 1846. Folktale: A story originating in oral tradition. Folktales fall into a variety of categories, including legends, ghost stories, fairy tales, fables, and anecdotes based on historical figures and events. Foot: The smallest unit of rhythm in a line of poetry. In English-language poetry, a foot is typically one accented syllable combined with one or two unaccented syllables. Form: The pattern or construction of a work which identifies its genre and distinguishes it from other genres. Formalism: In literary criticism, the belief that literature should follow prescribed rules of construction, such as those that govern the sonnet form. Fourteener Meter: See Meter Free Verse: Poetry that lacks regular metrical and rhyme patterns but that tries to capture the cadences of everyday speech. The form allows a poet to exploit a variety of rhythmical effects within a single poem. Futurism: A flamboyant literary and artistic movement that developed in France, Italy, and Russia from 1908 through the 1920s. Futurist theater and poetry abandoned traditional literary forms. In their place, followers of the movement attempted to achieve total freedom of expression through bizarre imagery and deformed or newly invented words. The Futurists were self-consciously modern artists who attempted to incorporate the appearances and sounds of modern life into their work.
G Genre: A category of literary work. In critical theory, genre may refer to both the content of a given work—tragedy, comedy, pastoral—and to its form, such as poetry, novel, or drama. Genteel Tradition: A term coined by critic George Santayana to describe the literary practice of certain late nineteenth-century American writers, especially New Englanders. Followers of the Genteel
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Tradition emphasized conventionality in social, religious, moral, and literary standards. Georgian Age: See Georgian Poets Georgian Period: See Georgian Poets Georgian Poets: A loose grouping of English poets during the years 1912–1922. The Georgians reacted against certain literary schools and practices, especially Victorian wordiness, turn-of-the-century aestheticism, and contemporary urban realism. In their place, the Georgians embraced the nineteenthcentury poetic practices of William Wordsworth and the other Lake Poets. Georgic: A poem about farming and the farmer’s way of life, named from Virgil’s Georgics. Gilded Age: A period in American history during the 1870s characterized by political corruption and materialism. A number of important novels of social and political criticism were written during this time. Gothic: See Gothicism Gothicism: In literary criticism, works characterized by a taste for the medieval or morbidly attractive. A gothic novel prominently features elements of horror, the supernatural, gloom, and violence: clanking chains, terror, charnel houses, ghosts, medieval castles, and mysteriously slamming doors. The term “gothic novel” is also applied to novels that lack elements of the traditional Gothic setting but that create a similar atmosphere of terror or dread. Graveyard School: A group of eighteenth-century English poets who wrote long, picturesque meditations on death. Their works were designed to cause the reader to ponder immortality. Great Chain of Being: The belief that all things and creatures in nature are organized in a hierarchy from inanimate objects at the bottom to God at the top. This system of belief was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grotesque: In literary criticism, the subject matter of a work or a style of expression characterized by exaggeration, deformity, freakishness, and disorder. The grotesque often includes an element of comic absurdity.
H Haiku: The shortest form of Japanese poetry, constructed in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively. The message of a haiku poem usually centers on some aspect of spirituality and provokes an emotional response in the reader.
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Half Rhyme: See Consonance Harlem Renaissance: The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s is generally considered the first significant movement of black writers and artists in the United States. During this period, new and established black writers published more fiction and poetry than ever before, the first influential black literary journals were established, and black authors and artists received their first widespread recognition and serious critical appraisal. Among the major writers associated with this period are Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Hellenism: Imitation of ancient Greek thought or styles. Also, an approach to life that focuses on the growth and development of the intellect. “Hellenism” is sometimes used to refer to the belief that reason can be applied to examine all human experience. Heptameter: See Meter Hero/Heroine: The principal sympathetic character (male or female) in a literary work. Heroes and heroines typically exhibit admirable traits: idealism, courage, and integrity, for example. Heroic Couplet: A rhyming couplet written in iambic pentameter (a verse with five iambic feet). Heroic Line: The meter and length of a line of verse in epic or heroic poetry. This varies by language and time period. Heroine: See Hero/Heroine Hexameter: See Meter Historical Criticism: The study of a work based on its impact on the world of the time period in which it was written. Hokku: See Haiku Holocaust: See Holocaust Literature Holocaust Literature: Literature influenced by or written about the Holocaust of World War II. Such literature includes true stories of survival in concentration camps, escape, and life after the war, as well as fictional works and poetry. Homeric Simile: An elaborate, detailed comparison written as a simile many lines in length. Horatian Satire: See Satire Humanism: A philosophy that places faith in the dignity of humankind and rejects the medieval perception of the individual as a weak, fallen creature. “Humanists” typically believe in the perfectibility of human nature and view reason and education as the means to that end.
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Humors: Mentions of the humors refer to the ancient Greek theory that a person’s health and personality were determined by the balance of four basic fluids in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. A dominance of any fluid would cause extremes in behavior. An excess of blood created a sanguine person who was joyful, aggressive, and passionate; a phlegmatic person was shy, fearful, and sluggish; too much yellow bile led to a choleric temperament characterized by impatience, anger, bitterness, and stubbornness; and excessive black bile created melancholy, a state of laziness, gluttony, and lack of motivation.
ics who believe in the concept of the intentional fallacy typically argue that the work itself is sufficient matter for interpretation, even though they may concede that an author’s statement of purpose can be useful.
Humours: See Humors
Internal Rhyme: Rhyme that occurs within a single line of verse.
Hyperbole: In literary criticism, deliberate exaggeration used to achieve an effect.
I Iamb: See Foot Idiom: A word construction or verbal expression closely associated with a given language. Image: A concrete representation of an object or sensory experience. Typically, such a representation helps evoke the feelings associated with the object or experience itself. Images are either “literal” or “figurative.” Literal images are especially concrete and involve little or no extension of the obvious meaning of the words used to express them. Figurative images do not follow the literal meaning of the words exactly. Images in literature are usually visual, but the term “image” can also refer to the representation of any sensory experience. Imagery: The array of images in a literary work. Also, figurative language. Imagism: An English and American poetry movement that flourished between 1908 and 1917. The Imagists used precise, clearly presented images in their works. They also used common, everyday speech and aimed for conciseness, concrete imagery, and the creation of new rhythms. In medias res: A Latin term meaning “in the middle of things.” It refers to the technique of beginning a story at its midpoint and then using various flashback devices to reveal previous action. Induction: The process of reaching a conclusion by reasoning from specific premises to form a general premise. Also, an introductory portion of a work of literature, especially a play. Intentional Fallacy: The belief that judgments of a literary work based solely on an author’s stated or implied intentions are false and misleading. Crit-
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Interior Monologue: A narrative technique in which characters’ thoughts are revealed in a way that appears to be uncontrolled by the author. The interior monologue typically aims to reveal the inner self of a character. It portrays emotional experiences as they occur at both a conscious and unconscious level. Images are often used to represent sensations or emotions.
Irish Literary Renaissance: A late nineteenthand early twentieth-century movement in Irish literature. Members of the movement aimed to reduce the influence of British culture in Ireland and create an Irish national literature. Irony: In literary criticism, the effect of language in which the intended meaning is the opposite of what is stated. Italian Sonnet: See Sonnet
J Jacobean Age: The period of the reign of James I of England (1603–1625). The early literature of this period reflected the worldview of the Elizabethan Age, but a darker, more cynical attitude steadily grew in the art and literature of the Jacobean Age. This was an important time for English drama and poetry. Jargon: Language that is used or understood only by a select group of people. Jargon may refer to terminology used in a certain profession, such as computer jargon, or it may refer to any nonsensical language that is not understood by most people. Journalism: Writing intended for publication in a newspaper or magazine, or for broadcast on a radio or television program featuring news, sports, entertainment, or other timely material.
K Knickerbocker Group: A somewhat indistinct group of New York writers of the first half of the nineteenth century. Members of the group were linked only by location and a common theme: New York life. Kunstlerroman: See Bildungsroman
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L Lais: See Lay Lake Poets: See Lake School Lake School: These poets all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single “school” of thought or literary practice, although their works were uniformly disparaged by the Edinburgh Review. Lay: A song or simple narrative poem. The form originated in medieval France. Early French lais were often based on the Celtic legends and other tales sung by Breton minstrels—thus the name of the “Breton lay.” In fourteenth-century England, the term “lay” was used to describe short narratives written in imitation of the Breton lays. Leitmotiv: See Motif Literal Language: An author uses literal language when he or she writes without exaggerating or embellishing the subject matter and without any tools of figurative language. Literary Ballad: See Ballad Literature: Literature is broadly defined as any written or spoken material, but the term most often refers to creative works. Lost Generation: A term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war. Lyric Poetry: A poem expressing the subjective feelings and personal emotions of the poet. Such poetry is melodic, since it was originally accompanied by a lyre in recitals. Most Western poetry in the twentieth century may be classified as lyrical.
M Mannerism: Exaggerated, artificial adherence to a literary manner or style. Also, a popular style of the visual arts of late sixteenth-century Europe that was marked by elongation of the human form and by intentional spatial distortion. Literary works that are self-consciously high-toned and artistic are often said to be “mannered.” Masculine Rhyme: See Rhyme Measure: The foot, verse, or time sequence used in a literary work, especially a poem. Measure is often used somewhat incorrectly as a synonym for meter.
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Metaphor: A figure of speech that expresses an idea through the image of another object. Metaphors suggest the essence of the first object by identifying it with certain qualities of the second object. Metaphysical Conceit: See Conceit Metaphysical Poetry: The body of poetry produced by a group of seventeenth-century English writers called the “Metaphysical Poets.” The group includes John Donne and Andrew Marvell. The Metaphysical Poets made use of everyday speech, intellectual analysis, and unique imagery. They aimed to portray the ordinary conflicts and contradictions of life. Their poems often took the form of an argument, and many of them emphasize physical and religious love as well as the fleeting nature of life. Elaborate conceits are typical in metaphysical poetry. Metaphysical Poets: See Metaphysical Poetry Meter: In literary criticism, the repetition of sound patterns that creates a rhythm in poetry. The patterns are based on the number of syllables and the presence and absence of accents. The unit of rhythm in a line is called a foot. Types of meter are classified according to the number of feet in a line. These are the standard English lines: Monometer, one foot; Dimeter, two feet; Trimeter, three feet; Tetrameter, four feet; Pentameter, five feet; Hexameter, six feet (also called the Alexandrine); Heptameter, seven feet (also called the “Fourteener” when the feet are iambic). Modernism: Modern literary practices. Also, the principles of a literary school that lasted from roughly the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of World War II. Modernism is defined by its rejection of the literary conventions of the nineteenth century and by its opposition to conventional morality, taste, traditions, and economic values. Monologue: A composition, written or oral, by a single individual. More specifically, a speech given by a single individual in a drama or other public entertainment. It has no set length, although it is usually several or more lines long. Monometer: See Meter Mood: The prevailing emotions of a work or of the author in his or her creation of the work. The mood of a work is not always what might be expected based on its subject matter. Motif: A theme, character type, image, metaphor, or other verbal element that recurs throughout a sin-
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gle work of literature or occurs in a number of different works over a period of time. Motiv: See Motif Muckrakers: An early twentieth-century group of American writers. Typically, their works exposed the wrongdoings of big business and government in the United States. Muses: Nine Greek mythological goddesses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory). Each muse patronized a specific area of the liberal arts and sciences. Calliope presided over epic poetry, Clio over history, Erato over love poetry, Euterpe over music or lyric poetry, Melpomene over tragedy, Polyhymnia over hymns to the gods, Terpsichore over dance, Thalia over comedy, and Urania over astronomy. Poets and writers traditionally made appeals to the Muses for inspiration in their work. Myth: An anonymous tale emerging from the traditional beliefs of a culture or social unit. Myths use supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. They may also explain cosmic issues like creation and death. Collections of myths, known as mythologies, are common to all cultures and nations, but the best-known myths belong to the Norse, Roman, and Greek mythologies.
N Narration: The telling of a series of events, real or invented. A narration may be either a simple narrative, in which the events are recounted chronologically, or a narrative with a plot, in which the account is given in a style reflecting the author’s artistic concept of the story. Narration is sometimes used as a synonym for “storyline.” Narrative: A verse or prose accounting of an event or sequence of events, real or invented. The term is also used as an adjective in the sense “method of narration.” For example, in literary criticism, the expression “narrative technique” usually refers to the way the author structures and presents his or her story. Narrative Poetry: A nondramatic poem in which the author tells a story. Such poems may be of any length or level of complexity. Narrator: The teller of a story. The narrator may be the author or a character in the story through whom the author speaks. Naturalism: A literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement’s major theorist, French novelist Emile Zola,
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envisioned a type of fiction that would examine human life with the objectivity of scientific inquiry. The Naturalists typically viewed human beings as either the products of “biological determinism,” ruled by hereditary instincts and engaged in an endless struggle for survival, or as the products of “socioeconomic determinism,” ruled by social and economic forces beyond their control. In their works, the Naturalists generally ignored the highest levels of society and focused on degradation: poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, insanity, and disease. Negritude: A literary movement based on the concept of a shared cultural bond on the part of black Africans, wherever they may be in the world. It traces its origins to the former French colonies of Africa and the Caribbean. Negritude poets, novelists, and essayists generally stress four points in their writings: One, black alienation from traditional African culture can lead to feelings of inferiority. Two, European colonialism and Western education should be resisted. Three, black Africans should seek to affirm and define their own identity. Four, African culture can and should be reclaimed. Many Negritude writers also claim that blacks can make unique contributions to the world, based on a heightened appreciation of nature, rhythm, and human emotions—aspects of life they say are not so highly valued in the materialistic and rationalistic West. Negro Renaissance: See Harlem Renaissance Neoclassical Period: See Neoclassicism Neoclassicism: In literary criticism, this term refers to the revival of the attitudes and styles of expression of classical literature. It is generally used to describe a period in European history beginning in the late seventeenth century and lasting until about 1800. In its purest form, Neoclassicism marked a return to order, proportion, restraint, logic, accuracy, and decorum. In England, where Neoclassicism perhaps was most popular, it reflected the influence of seventeenth-century French writers, especially dramatists. Neoclassical writers typically reacted against the intensity and enthusiasm of the Renaissance period. They wrote works that appealed to the intellect, using elevated language and classical literary forms such as satire and the ode. Neoclassical works were often governed by the classical goal of instruction. Neoclassicists: See Neoclassicism New Criticism: A movement in literary criticism, dating from the late 1920s, that stressed close textual analysis in the interpretation of works of
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literature. The New Critics saw little merit in historical and biographical analysis. Rather, they aimed to examine the text alone, free from the question of how external events—biographical or otherwise—may have helped shape it. New Journalism: A type of writing in which the journalist presents factual information in a form usually used in fiction. New journalism emphasizes description, narration, and character development to bring readers closer to the human element of the story, and is often used in personality profiles and in-depth feature articles. It is not compatible with “straight” or “hard” newswriting, which is generally composed in a brief, fact-based style. New Journalists: See New Journalism New Negro Movement: See Harlem Renaissance Noble Savage: The idea that primitive man is noble and good but becomes evil and corrupted as he becomes civilized. The concept of the noble savage originated in the Renaissance period but is more closely identified with such later writers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Aphra Behn.
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unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Omniscience: See Point of View Onomatopoeia: The use of words whose sounds express or suggest their meaning. In its simplest sense, onomatopoeia may be represented by words that mimic the sounds they denote such as “hiss” or “meow.” At a more subtle level, the pattern and rhythm of sounds and rhymes of a line or poem may be onomatopoeic. Oral Tradition: See Oral Transmission Oral Transmission: A process by which songs, ballads, folklore, and other material are transmitted by word of mouth. The tradition of oral transmission predates the written record systems of literate society. Oral transmission preserves material sometimes over generations, although often with variations. Memory plays a large part in the recitation and preservation of orally transmitted material. Ottava Rima: An eight-line stanza of poetry composed in iambic pentameter (a five-foot line in which each foot consists of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable), following the abababcc rhyme scheme.
Objective Correlative: An outward set of objects, a situation, or a chain of events corresponding to an inward experience and evoking this experience in the reader. The term frequently appears in modern criticism in discussions of authors’ intended effects on the emotional responses of readers.
Oxymoron: A phrase combining two contradictory terms. Oxymorons may be intentional or unintentional.
Objectivity: A quality in writing characterized by the absence of the author’s opinion or feeling about the subject matter. Objectivity is an important factor in criticism.
Pantheism: The idea that all things are both a manifestation or revelation of God and a part of God at the same time. Pantheism was a common attitude in the early societies of Egypt, India, and Greece—the term derives from the Greek pan meaning “all” and theos meaning “deity.” It later became a significant part of the Christian faith.
Occasional Verse: Poetry written on the occasion of a significant historical or personal event. Vers de societe is sometimes called occasional verse although it is of a less serious nature. Octave: A poem or stanza composed of eight lines. The term octave most often represents the first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet. Ode: Name given to an extended lyric poem characterized by exalted emotion and dignified style. An ode usually concerns a single, serious theme. Most odes, but not all, are addressed to an object or individual. Odes are distinguished from other lyric poetic forms by their complex rhythmic and stanzaic patterns. Oedipus Complex: A son’s amorous obsession with his mother. The phrase is derived from the story of the ancient Theban hero Oedipus, who
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Parable: A story intended to teach a moral lesson or answer an ethical question. Paradox: A statement that appears illogical or contradictory at first, but may actually point to an underlying truth. Parallelism: A method of comparison of two ideas in which each is developed in the same grammatical structure. Parnassianism: A mid nineteenth-century movement in French literature. Followers of the movement stressed adherence to well-defined artistic forms as a reaction against the often chaotic expression of the artist’s ego that dominated the work of the Romantics. The Parnassians also rejected the
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moral, ethical, and social themes exhibited in the works of French Romantics such as Victor Hugo. The aesthetic doctrines of the Parnassians strongly influenced the later symbolist and decadent movements. Parody: In literary criticism, this term refers to an imitation of a serious literary work or the signature style of a particular author in a ridiculous manner. A typical parody adopts the style of the original and applies it to an inappropriate subject for humorous effect. Parody is a form of satire and could be considered the literary equivalent of a caricature or cartoon. Pastoral: A term derived from the Latin word “pastor,” meaning shepherd. A pastoral is a literary composition on a rural theme. The conventions of the pastoral were originated by the third-century Greek poet Theocritus, who wrote about the experiences, love affairs, and pastimes of Sicilian shepherds. In a pastoral, characters and language of a courtly nature are often placed in a simple setting. The term pastoral is also used to classify dramas, elegies, and lyrics that exhibit the use of country settings and shepherd characters. Pathetic Fallacy: A term coined by English critic John Ruskin to identify writing that falsely endows nonhuman things with human intentions and feelings, such as “angry clouds” and “sad trees.” Pen Name: See Pseudonym Pentameter: See Meter Persona: A Latin term meaning “mask.” Personae are the characters in a fictional work of literature. The persona generally functions as a mask through which the author tells a story in a voice other than his or her own. A persona is usually either a character in a story who acts as a narrator or an “implied author,” a voice created by the author to act as the narrator for himself or herself. Personae: See Persona Personal Point of View: See Point of View Personification: A figure of speech that gives human qualities to abstract ideas, animals, and inanimate objects. Petrarchan Sonnet: See Sonnet Phenomenology: A method of literary criticism based on the belief that things have no existence outside of human consciousness or awareness. Proponents of this theory believe that art is a process that takes place in the mind of the observer as he or she contemplates an object rather than a quality of the object itself.
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Plagiarism: Claiming another person’s written material as one’s own. Plagiarism can take the form of direct, word-for-word copying or the theft of the substance or idea of the work. Platonic Criticism: A form of criticism that stresses an artistic work’s usefulness as an agent of social engineering rather than any quality or value of the work itself. Platonism: The embracing of the doctrines of the philosopher Plato, popular among the poets of the Renaissance and the Romantic period. Platonism is more flexible than Aristotelian Criticism and places more emphasis on the supernatural and unknown aspects of life. Plot: In literary criticism, this term refers to the pattern of events in a narrative or drama. In its simplest sense, the plot guides the author in composing the work and helps the reader follow the work. Typically, plots exhibit causality and unity and have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes, however, a plot may consist of a series of disconnected events, in which case it is known as an “episodic plot.” Poem: In its broadest sense, a composition utilizing rhyme, meter, concrete detail, and expressive language to create a literary experience with emotional and aesthetic appeal. Poet: An author who writes poetry or verse. The term is also used to refer to an artist or writer who has an exceptional gift for expression, imagination, and energy in the making of art in any form. Poete maudit: A term derived from Paul Verlaine’s Les poetes maudits (The Accursed Poets), a collection of essays on the French symbolist writers Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, and Tristan Corbiere. In the sense intended by Verlaine, the poet is “accursed” for choosing to explore extremes of human experience outside of middle-class society. Poetic Fallacy: See Pathetic Fallacy Poetic Justice: An outcome in a literary work, not necessarily a poem, in which the good are rewarded and the evil are punished, especially in ways that particularly fit their virtues or crimes. Poetic License: Distortions of fact and literary convention made by a writer—not always a poet—for the sake of the effect gained. Poetic license is closely related to the concept of “artistic freedom.” Poetics: This term has two closely related meanings. It denotes (1) an aesthetic theory in literary criticism about the essence of poetry or (2) rules prescribing the proper methods, content, style, or
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diction of poetry. The term poetics may also refer to theories about literature in general, not just poetry. Poetry: In its broadest sense, writing that aims to present ideas and evoke an emotional experience in the reader through the use of meter, imagery, connotative and concrete words, and a carefully constructed structure based on rhythmic patterns. Poetry typically relies on words and expressions that have several layers of meaning. It also makes use of the effects of regular rhythm on the ear and may make a strong appeal to the senses through the use of imagery. Point of View: The narrative perspective from which a literary work is presented to the reader. There are four traditional points of view. The “third person omniscient” gives the reader a “godlike” perspective, unrestricted by time or place, from which to see actions and look into the minds of characters. This allows the author to comment openly on characters and events in the work. The “third-person” point of view presents the events of the story from outside of any single character’s perception, much like the omniscient point of view, but the reader must understand the action as it takes place and without any special insight into characters’ minds or motivations. The “first person” or “personal” point of view relates events as they are perceived by a single character. The main character “tells” the story and may offer opinions about the action and characters which differ from those of the author. Much less common than omniscient, third person, and first person is the “secondperson” point of view, wherein the author tells the story as if it is happening to the reader. Polemic: A work in which the author takes a stand on a controversial subject, such as abortion or religion. Such works are often extremely argumentative or provocative. Pornography: Writing intended to provoke feelings of lust in the reader. Such works are often condemned by critics and teachers, but those which can be shown to have literary value are viewed less harshly. Post-Aesthetic Movement: An artistic response made by African Americans to the black aesthetic movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Writers since that time have adopted a somewhat different tone in their work, with less emphasis placed on the disparity between black and white in the United States. In the words of post-aesthetic authors such as Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and Kristin Hunter, African Americans are portrayed as
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looking inward for answers to their own questions, rather than always looking to the outside world. Postmodernism: Writing from the 1960s forward characterized by experimentation and continuing to apply some of the fundamentals of modernism, which included existentialism and alienation. Postmodernists have gone a step further in the rejection of tradition begun with the modernists by also rejecting traditional forms, preferring the antinovel over the novel and the antihero over the hero. Pre-Raphaelites: A circle of writers and artists in mid nineteenth-century England. Valuing the preRenaissance artistic qualities of religious symbolism, lavish pictorialism, and natural sensuousness, the Pre-Raphaelites cultivated a sense of mystery and melancholy that influenced later writers associated with the Symbolist and Decadent movements. Primitivism: The belief that primitive peoples were nobler and less flawed than civilized peoples because they had not been subjected to the corrupt influence of society. Projective Verse: A form of free verse in which the poet’s breathing pattern determines the lines of the poem. Poets who advocate projective verse are against all formal structures in writing, including meter and form. Prologue: An introductory section of a literary work. It often contains information establishing the situation of the characters or presents information about the setting, time period, or action. In drama, the prologue is spoken by a chorus or by one of the principal characters. Prose: A literary medium that attempts to mirror the language of everyday speech. It is distinguished from poetry by its use of unmetered, unrhymed language consisting of logically related sentences. Prose is usually grouped into paragraphs that form a cohesive whole such as an essay or a novel. Prosopopoeia: See Personification Protagonist: The central character of a story who serves as a focus for its themes and incidents and as the principal rationale for its development. The protagonist is sometimes referred to in discussions of modern literature as the hero or antihero. Proverb: A brief, sage saying that expresses a truth about life in a striking manner. Pseudonym: A name assumed by a writer, most often intended to prevent his or her identification as the author of a work. Two or more authors may work together under one pseudonym, or an author
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may use a different name for each genre he or she publishes in. Some publishing companies maintain “house pseudonyms,” under which any number of authors may write installations in a series. Some authors also choose a pseudonym over their real names the way an actor may use a stage name. Pun: A play on words that have similar sounds but different meanings. Pure Poetry: poetry written without instructional intent or moral purpose that aims only to please a reader by its imagery or musical flow. The term pure poetry is used as the antonym of the term “didacticism.”
Q Quatrain: A four-line stanza of a poem or an entire poem consisting of four lines.
R Realism: A nineteenth-century European literary movement that sought to portray familiar characters, situations, and settings in a realistic manner. This was done primarily by using an objective narrative point of view and through the buildup of accurate detail. The standard for success of any realistic work depends on how faithfully it transfers common experience into fictional forms. The realistic method may be altered or extended, as in stream of consciousness writing, to record highly subjective experience. Refrain: A phrase repeated at intervals throughout a poem. A refrain may appear at the end of each stanza or at less regular intervals. It may be altered slightly at each appearance.
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Restoration: See Restoration Age Restoration Age: A period in English literature beginning with the crowning of Charles II in 1660 and running to about 1700. The era, which was characterized by a reaction against Puritanism, was the first great age of the comedy of manners. The finest literature of the era is typically witty and urbane, and often lewd. Rhetoric: In literary criticism, this term denotes the art of ethical persuasion. In its strictest sense, rhetoric adheres to various principles developed since classical times for arranging facts and ideas in a clear, persuasive, appealing manner. The term is also used to refer to effective prose in general and theories of or methods for composing effective prose. Rhetorical Question: A question intended to provoke thought, but not an expressed answer, in the reader. It is most commonly used in oratory and other persuasive genres. Rhyme: When used as a noun in literary criticism, this term generally refers to a poem in which words sound identical or very similar and appear in parallel positions in two or more lines. Rhymes are classified into different types according to where they fall in a line or stanza or according to the degree of similarity they exhibit in their spellings and sounds. Some major types of rhyme are “masculine” rhyme, “feminine” rhyme, and “triple” rhyme. In a masculine rhyme, the rhyming sound falls in a single accented syllable, as with “heat” and “eat.” Feminine rhyme is a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed, as with “merry” and “tarry.” Triple rhyme matches the sound of the accented syllable and the two unaccented syllables that follow: “narrative” and “declarative.”
Renaissance: The period in European history that marked the end of the Middle Ages. It began in Italy in the late fourteenth century. In broad terms, it is usually seen as spanning the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, although it did not reach Great Britain, for example, until the 1480s or so. The Renaissance saw an awakening in almost every sphere of human activity, especially science, philosophy, and the arts. The period is best defined by the emergence of a general philosophy that emphasized the importance of the intellect, the individual, and world affairs. It contrasts strongly with the medieval worldview, characterized by the dominant concerns of faith, the social collective, and spiritual salvation.
Rhyme Royal: A stanza of seven lines composed in iambic pentameter and rhymed ababbcc. The name is said to be a tribute to King James I of Scotland, who made much use of the form in his poetry.
Repartee: Conversation featuring snappy retorts and witticisms.
Rococo: A style of European architecture that flourished in the eighteenth century, especially in
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Rhyme Scheme: See Rhyme Rhythm: A regular pattern of sound, time intervals, or events occurring in writing, most often and most discernably in poetry. Regular, reliable rhythm is known to be soothing to humans, while interrupted, unpredictable, or rapidly changing rhythm is disturbing. These effects are known to authors, who use them to produce a desired reaction in the reader.
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France. The most notable features of rococo are its extensive use of ornamentation and its themes of lightness, gaiety, and intimacy. In literary criticism, the term is often used disparagingly to refer to a decadent or overly ornamental style. Romance: Romantic Age: See Romanticism Romanticism: This term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it refers to a European intellectual and artistic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that sought greater freedom of personal expression than that allowed by the strict rules of literary form and logic of the eighteenth-century Neoclassicists. The Romantics preferred emotional and imaginative expression to rational analysis. They considered the individual to be at the center of all experience and so placed him or her at the center of their art. The Romantics believed that the creative imagination reveals nobler truths—unique feelings and attitudes—than those that could be discovered by logic or by scientific examination. Both the natural world and the state of childhood were important sources for revelations of “eternal truths.” “Romanticism” is also used as a general term to refer to a type of sensibility found in all periods of literary history and usually considered to be in opposition to the principles of classicism. In this sense, Romanticism signifies any work or philosophy in which the exotic or dreamlike figure strongly, or that is devoted to individualistic expression, self-analysis, or a pursuit of a higher realm of knowledge than can be discovered by human reason. Romantics: See Romanticism Russian Symbolism: A Russian poetic movement, derived from French symbolism, that flourished between 1894 and 1910. While some Russian Symbolists continued in the French tradition, stressing aestheticism and the importance of suggestion above didactic intent, others saw their craft as a form of mystical worship, and themselves as mediators between the supernatural and the mundane.
S Satire: A work that uses ridicule, humor, and wit to criticize and provoke change in human nature and institutions. There are two major types of satire: “formal” or “direct” satire speaks directly to the reader or to a character in the work; “indirect” satire relies upon the ridiculous behavior of its characters to make its point. Formal satire is further divided into two manners: the “Horatian,” which
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ridicules gently, and the “Juvenalian,” which derides its subjects harshly and bitterly. Scansion: The analysis or “scanning” of a poem to determine its meter and often its rhyme scheme. The most common system of scansion uses accents (slanted lines drawn above syllables) to show stressed syllables, breves (curved lines drawn above syllables) to show unstressed syllables, and vertical lines to separate each foot. Second Person: See Point of View Semiotics: The study of how literary forms and conventions affect the meaning of language. Sestet: Any six-line poem or stanza. Setting: The time, place, and culture in which the action of a narrative takes place. The elements of setting may include geographic location, characters’ physical and mental environments, prevailing cultural attitudes, or the historical time in which the action takes place. Shakespearean Sonnet: See Sonnet Signifying Monkey: A popular trickster figure in black folklore, with hundreds of tales about this character documented since the nineteenth century. Simile: A comparison, usually using “like” or “as,” of two essentially dissimilar things, as in “coffee as cold as ice” or “He sounded like a broken record.” Slang: A type of informal verbal communication that is generally unacceptable for formal writing. Slang words and phrases are often colorful exaggerations used to emphasize the speaker’s point; they may also be shortened versions of an oftenused word or phrase. Slant Rhyme: See Consonance Slave Narrative: Autobiographical accounts of American slave life as told by escaped slaves. These works first appeared during the abolition movement of the 1830s through the 1850s. Social Realism: See Socialist Realism Socialist Realism: The Socialist Realism school of literary theory was proposed by Maxim Gorky and established as a dogma by the first Soviet Congress of Writers. It demanded adherence to a communist worldview in works of literature. Its doctrines required an objective viewpoint comprehensible to the working classes and themes of social struggle featuring strong proletarian heroes. Soliloquy: A monologue in a drama used to give the audience information and to develop the speaker’s character. It is typically a projection of the speaker’s innermost thoughts. Usually deliv-
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ered while the speaker is alone on stage, a soliloquy is intended to present an illusion of unspoken reflection. Sonnet: A fourteen-line poem, usually composed in iambic pentameter, employing one of several rhyme schemes. There are three major types of sonnets, upon which all other variations of the form are based: the “Petrarchan” or “Italian” sonnet, the “Shakespearean” or “English” sonnet, and the “Spenserian” sonnet. A Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave rhymed abbaabba and a “sestet” rhymed either cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce. The octave poses a question or problem, relates a narrative, or puts forth a proposition; the sestet presents a solution to the problem, comments upon the narrative, or applies the proposition put forth in the octave. The Shakespearean sonnet is divided into three quatrains and a couplet rhymed abab cdcd efef gg. The couplet provides an epigrammatic comment on the narrative or problem put forth in the quatrains. The Spenserian sonnet uses three quatrains and a couplet like the Shakespearean, but links their three rhyme schemes in this way: abab bcbc cdcd ee. The Spenserian sonnet develops its theme in two parts like the Petrarchan, its final six lines resolving a problem, analyzing a narrative, or applying a proposition put forth in its first eight lines. Spenserian Sonnet: See Sonnet Spenserian Stanza: A nine-line stanza having eight verses in iambic pentameter, its ninth verse in iambic hexameter, and the rhyme scheme ababbcbcc. Spondee: In poetry meter, a foot consisting of two long or stressed syllables occurring together. This form is quite rare in English verse, and is usually composed of two monosyllabic words. Sprung Rhythm: Versification using a specific number of accented syllables per line but disregarding the number of unaccented syllables that fall in each line, producing an irregular rhythm in the poem. Stanza: A subdivision of a poem consisting of lines grouped together, often in recurring patterns of rhyme, line length, and meter. Stanzas may also serve as units of thought in a poem much like paragraphs in prose. Stereotype: A stereotype was originally the name for a duplication made during the printing process; this led to its modern definition as a person or thing that is (or is assumed to be) the same as all others of its type.
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Stream of Consciousness: A narrative technique for rendering the inward experience of a character. This technique is designed to give the impression of an ever-changing series of thoughts, emotions, images, and memories in the spontaneous and seemingly illogical order that they occur in life. Structuralism: A twentieth-century movement in literary criticism that examines how literary texts arrive at their meanings, rather than the meanings themselves. There are two major types of structuralist analysis: one examines the way patterns of linguistic structures unify a specific text and emphasize certain elements of that text, and the other interprets the way literary forms and conventions affect the meaning of language itself. Structure: The form taken by a piece of literature. The structure may be made obvious for ease of understanding, as in nonfiction works, or may obscured for artistic purposes, as in some poetry or seemingly “unstructured” prose. Sturm und Drang: A German term meaning “storm and stress.” It refers to a German literary movement of the 1770s and 1780s that reacted against the order and rationalism of the enlightenment, focusing instead on the intense experience of extraordinary individuals. Style: A writer’s distinctive manner of arranging words to suit his or her ideas and purpose in writing. The unique imprint of the author’s personality upon his or her writing, style is the product of an author’s way of arranging ideas and his or her use of diction, different sentence structures, rhythm, figures of speech, rhetorical principles, and other elements of composition. Subject: The person, event, or theme at the center of a work of literature. A work may have one or more subjects of each type, with shorter works tending to have fewer and longer works tending to have more. Subjectivity: Writing that expresses the author’s personal feelings about his subject, and which may or may not include factual information about the subject. Surrealism: A term introduced to criticism by Guillaume Apollinaire and later adopted by Andre Breton. It refers to a French literary and artistic movement founded in the 1920s. The Surrealists sought to express unconscious thoughts and feelings in their works. The best-known technique used for achieving this aim was automatic writing— transcriptions of spontaneous outpourings from the unconscious. The Surrealists proposed to unify the
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contrary levels of conscious and unconscious, dream and reality, objectivity and subjectivity into a new level of “super-realism.”
stanza rhyming with the first and third lines of the following stanza.
Suspense: A literary device in which the author maintains the audience’s attention through the buildup of events, the outcome of which will soon be revealed.
Textual Criticism: A branch of literary criticism that seeks to establish the authoritative text of a literary work. Textual critics typically compare all known manuscripts or printings of a single work in order to assess the meanings of differences and revisions. This procedure allows them to arrive at a definitive version that (supposedly) corresponds to the author’s original intention.
Syllogism: A method of presenting a logical argument. In its most basic form, the syllogism consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. Symbol: Something that suggests or stands for something else without losing its original identity. In literature, symbols combine their literal meaning with the suggestion of an abstract concept. Literary symbols are of two types: those that carry complex associations of meaning no matter what their contexts, and those that derive their suggestive meaning from their functions in specific literary works. Symbolism: This term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it denotes an early modernist literary movement initiated in France during the nineteenth century that reacted against the prevailing standards of realism. Writers in this movement aimed to evoke, indirectly and symbolically, an order of being beyond the material world of the five senses. Poetic expression of personal emotion figured strongly in the movement, typically by means of a private set of symbols uniquely identifiable with the individual poet. The principal aim of the Symbolists was to express in words the highly complex feelings that grew out of everyday contact with the world. In a broader sense, the term “symbolism” refers to the use of one object to represent another. Symbolist: See Symbolism Symbolist Movement: See Symbolism Sympathetic Fallacy: See Affective Fallacy
T Tanka: A form of Japanese poetry similar to haiku. A tanka is five lines long, with the lines containing five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables respectively. Terza Rima: A three-line stanza form in poetry in which the rhymes are made on the last word of each line in the following manner: the first and third lines of the first stanza, then the second line of the first stanza and the first and third lines of the second stanza, and so on with the middle line of any
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Tetrameter: See Meter
Theme: The main point of a work of literature. The term is used interchangeably with thesis. Thesis: A thesis is both an essay and the point argued in the essay. Thesis novels and thesis plays share the quality of containing a thesis which is supported through the action of the story. Third Person: See Point of View Tone: The author’s attitude toward his or her audience may be deduced from the tone of the work. A formal tone may create distance or convey politeness, while an informal tone may encourage a friendly, intimate, or intrusive feeling in the reader. The author’s attitude toward his or her subject matter may also be deduced from the tone of the words he or she uses in discussing it. Tragedy: A drama in prose or poetry about a noble, courageous hero of excellent character who, because of some tragic character flaw or hamartia, brings ruin upon him- or herself. Tragedy treats its subjects in a dignified and serious manner, using poetic language to help evoke pity and fear and bring about catharsis, a purging of these emotions. The tragic form was practiced extensively by the ancient Greeks. In the Middle Ages, when classical works were virtually unknown, tragedy came to denote any works about the fall of persons from exalted to low conditions due to any reason: fate, vice, weakness, etc. According to the classical definition of tragedy, such works present the “pathetic”—that which evokes pity—rather than the tragic. The classical form of tragedy was revived in the sixteenth century; it flourished especially on the Elizabethan stage. In modern times, dramatists have attempted to adapt the form to the needs of modern society by drawing their heroes from the ranks of ordinary men and women and defining the nobility of these heroes in terms of spirit rather than exalted social standing. Tragic Flaw: In a tragedy, the quality within the hero or heroine which leads to his or her downfall.
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Transcendentalism: An American philosophical and religious movement, based in New England from around 1835 until the Civil War. Transcendentalism was a form of American romanticism that had its roots abroad in the works of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Coleridge, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of intuition and subjective experience in communication with God. They rejected religious dogma and texts in favor of mysticism and scientific naturalism. They pursued truths that lie beyond the “colorless” realms perceived by reason and the senses and were active social reformers in public education, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. Trickster: A character or figure common in Native American and African literature who uses his ingenuity to defeat enemies and escape difficult situations. Tricksters are most often animals, such as the spider, hare, or coyote, although they may take the form of humans as well. Trimeter: See Meter Triple Rhyme: See Rhyme Trochee: See Foot
U Understatement: See Irony Unities: Strict rules of dramatic structure, formulated by Italian and French critics of the Renaissance and based loosely on the principles of drama discussed by Aristotle in his Poetics. Foremost among these rules were the three unities of action, time, and place that compelled a dramatist to: (1) construct a single plot with a beginning, middle, and end that details the causal relationships of action and character; (2) restrict the action to the events of a single day; and (3) limit the scene to a single place or city. The unities were observed faithfully by continental European writers until the Romantic Age, but they were never regularly observed in English drama. Modern dramatists are typically more concerned with a unity of impression or emotional effect than with any of the classical unities. Urban Realism: A branch of realist writing that attempts to accurately reflect the often harsh facts of modern urban existence. Utopia: A fictional perfect place, such as “paradise” or “heaven.”
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Utopian: See Utopia Utopianism: See Utopia
V Verisimilitude: Literally, the appearance of truth. In literary criticism, the term refers to aspects of a work of literature that seem true to the reader. Vers de societe: See Occasional Verse Vers libre: See Free Verse Verse: A line of metered language, a line of a poem, or any work written in verse. Versification: The writing of verse. Versification may also refer to the meter, rhyme, and other mechanical components of a poem. Victorian: Refers broadly to the reign of Queen Victoria of England (1837–1901) and to anything with qualities typical of that era. For example, the qualities of smug narrowmindedness, bourgeois materialism, faith in social progress, and priggish morality are often considered Victorian. This stereotype is contradicted by such dramatic intellectual developments as the theories of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud (which stirred strong debates in England) and the critical attitudes of serious Victorian writers like Charles Dickens and George Eliot. In literature, the Victorian Period was the great age of the English novel, and the latter part of the era saw the rise of movements such as decadence and symbolism. Victorian Age: See Victorian Victorian Period: See Victorian
W Weltanschauung: A German term referring to a person’s worldview or philosophy. Weltschmerz: A German term meaning “world pain.” It describes a sense of anguish about the nature of existence, usually associated with a melancholy, pessimistic attitude.
Z Zarzuela: A type of Spanish operetta. Zeitgeist: A German term meaning “spirit of the time.” It refers to the moral and intellectual trends of a given era.
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Cumulative Author/Title Index A Acosta, Teresa Palomo My Mother Pieced Quilts: V12 Address to the Angels (Kumin): V18 The Afterlife (Collins): V18 An African Elegy (Duncan): V13 Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave? (Hardy): V4 Ai Reunions with a Ghost: V16 Akhmatova, Anna Midnight Verses: V18 Alabama Centennial (Madgett): V10 American Poetry (Simpson): V7 An Arundel Tomb (Larkin): V12 Anasazi (Snyder): V9 Angelou, Maya Harlem Hopscotch: V2 On the Pulse of Morning: V3 Angle of Geese (Momaday): V2 Annabel Lee (Poe): V9 Anniversary (Harjo): V15 Anonymous Barbara Allan: V7 Go Down, Moses: V11 Lord Randal: V6 The Seafarer: V8 Sir Patrick Spens: V4 Swing Low Sweet Chariot: V1 Anorexic (Boland): V12 Any Human to Another (Cullen): V3 A Pièd (McElroy): V3 Arnold, Matthew Dover Beach: V2 Ars Poetica (MacLeish): V5 The Arsenal at Springfield (Longfellow): V17
As I Walked Out One Evening (Auden): V4 Ashbery, John Paradoxes and Oxymorons: V11 Astonishment (Szymborska): V15 At the Bomb Testing Site (Stafford): V8 Atwood, Margaret Siren Song: V7 Auden, W. H. As I Walked Out One Evening: V4 Funeral Blues: V10 Musée des Beaux Arts: V1 The Unknown Citizen: V3 Auto Wreck (Shapiro): V3 Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio (Wright): V8
B Ballad of Orange and Grape (Rukeyser): V10 Baraka, Amiri In Memory of Radio: V9 Barbara Allan (Anonymous): V7 Barbie Doll (Piercy): V9 Ballad of Birmingham (Randall): V5 Barrett, Elizabeth Sonnet 43: V2 The Base Stealer (Francis): V12 Basho¯, Matsuo Falling Upon Earth: V2 The Moon Glows the Same: V7 Temple Bells Die Out: V18 The Bean Eaters (Brooks): V2 Because I Could Not Stop for Death (Dickinson): V2 Bedtime Story (MacBeth): V8
La Belle Dame sans Merci (Keats): V17 The Bells (Poe): V3 Beowulf (Wilbur): V11 Beware: Do Not Read This Poem (Reed): V6 Beware of Ruins (Hope): V8 Bidwell Ghost (Erdrich): V14 Birch Canoe (Revard): V5 Birches (Frost): V13 Birney, Earle Vancouver Lights: V8 A Birthday (Rossetti): V10 Bishop, Elizabeth Brazil, January 1, 1502: V6 Filling Station: V12 Blackberrying (Plath): V15 Black Zodiac (Wright): V10 Blake, William The Lamb: V12 The Tyger: V2 A Blessing (Wright): V7 Blood Oranges (Mueller): V13 The Blue Rim of Memory (Levertov): V17 Blumenthal, Michael Inventors: V7 Bly, Robert Come with Me: V6 Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter: V17 Boland, Eavan Anorexic: V12 Bradstreet, Anne To My Dear and Loving Husband: V6 Brazil, January 1, 1502 (Bishop): V6
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Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art (Keats): V9 Brooke, Rupert The Soldier: V7 Brooks, Gwendolyn The Bean Eaters: V2 The Sonnet-Ballad: V1 Strong Men, Riding Horses: V4 We Real Cool: V6 Brouwer, Joel Last Request: V14 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Sonnet 43: V2 Sonnet XXIX: V16 Browning, Robert My Last Duchess: V1 Porphyria’s Lover: V15 Burns, Robert A Red, Red Rose: V8 Business (Cruz): V16 The Bustle in a House (Dickinson): V10 Butcher Shop (Simic): V7 Byron, Lord The Destruction of Sennacherib: V1 She Walks in Beauty: V14
C The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer): V14 Cargoes (Masefield): V5 Carroll, Lewis Jabberwocky: V11 Carson, Anne New Rule: V18 Carver, Raymond The Cobweb: V17 Casey at the Bat (Thayer): V5 Cavalry Crossing a Ford (Whitman): V13 The Charge of the Light Brigade (Tennyson): V1 Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales: V14 Chicago (Sandburg): V3 Chocolates (Simpson): V11 Clifton, Lucille Climbing: V14 Miss Rosie: V1 Climbing (Clifton): V14 The Cobweb (Carver): V17 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Kubla Khan: V5 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: V4 Colibrí (Espada): V16 Collins, Billy The Afterlife: V18 Come with Me (Bly): V6 The Constellation Orion (Kooser): V8 Concord Hymn (Emerson): V4
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The Conquerors (McGinley): V13 The Continuous Life (Strand): V18 Cool Tombs (Sandburg): V6 The Country Without a Post Office (Shahid Ali): V18 Courage (Sexton): V14 The Courage That My Mother Had (Millay): V3 Crane, Stephen War Is Kind: V9 The Creation (Johnson): V1 The Cremation of Sam McGee (Service): V10 Cruz, Victor Hernandez Business: V16 Cullen, Countee Any Human to Another: V3 cummings, e. e. l(a: V1 i was sitting in mcsorley’s: V13 maggie and milly and molly and may: V12 old age sticks: V3 The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter. A Barn in the Urals (Dubie): V12
D The Darkling Thrush (Hardy): V18 Darwin in 1881 (Schnackenberg): V13 Dawe, Bruce Drifters: V10 Daylights (Warren): V13 Dear Reader (Tate): V10 The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner (Jarrell): V2 The Death of the Hired Man (Frost): V4 Deep Woods (Nemerov): V14 The Destruction of Sennacherib (Byron): V1 Dickey, James The Heaven of Animals: V6 The Hospital Window: V11 Dickinson, Emily Because I Could Not Stop for Death: V2 The Bustle in a House: V10 “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers: V3 I felt a Funeral, in my Brain: V13 I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died—: V5 Much Madness Is Divinest Sense: V16 My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close: V8 A Narrow Fellow in the Grass: V11 The Soul Selects Her Own Society: V1 There’s a Certain Slant of Light: V6 This Is My Letter to the World: V4 Digging (Heaney): V5
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night (Thomas): V1 Donne, John Holy Sonnet 10: V2 A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning: V11 Dove, Rita Geometry: V15 This Life: V1 Dover Beach (Arnold): V2 Dream Variations (Hughes): V15 Drifters (Dawe): V10 A Drink of Water (Heaney): V8 Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter (Bly): V17 Drought Year (Wright): V8 Dubie, Norman The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter. A Barn in the Urals: V12 Du Bois, W. E. B. The Song of the Smoke: V13 Duncan, Robert An African Elegy: V13 Dugan, Alan How We Heard the Name: V10 Dulce et Decorum Est (Owen): V10 Duration (Paz): V18
E The Eagle (Tennyson): V11 Early in the Morning (Lee): V17 Easter 1916 (Yeats): V5 Eating Poetry (Strand): V9 Elegy for My Father, Who is Not Dead (Hudgins): V14 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (Gray): V9 Eliot, T. S. Journey of the Magi: V7 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: V1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Concord Hymn: V4 The Rhodora: V17 Erdrich, Louise Bidwell Ghost: V14 Espada, Martín Colibrí: V16 We Live by What We See at Night: V13 Ethics (Pastan): V8 The Exhibit (Mueller): V9
F Facing It (Komunyakaa): V5 Falling Upon Earth (Basho¯): V2 A Far Cry from Africa (Walcott): V6 A Farewell to English (Hartnett): V10 Fenton, James The Milkfish Gatherers: V11
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Fern Hill (Thomas): V3 Fifteen (Stafford): V2 Filling Station (Bishop): V12 Fire and Ice (Frost): V7 The Fish (Moore): V14 For a New Citizen of These United States (Lee): V15 For An Assyrian Frieze (Viereck): V9 For Jean Vincent D’abbadie, Baron St.-Castin (Nowlan): V12 For Jennifer, 6, on the Teton (Hugo): V17 For the Union Dead (Lowell): V7 For the White poets who would be Indian (Rose): V13 The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower (Thomas): V8 Forché, Carolyn The Garden Shukkei-en: V18 Four Mountain Wolves (Silko): V9 Francis, Robert The Base Stealer: V12 Frost, Robert Birches: V13 The Death of the Hired Man: V4 Fire and Ice: V7 Mending Wall: V5 Nothing Gold Can Stay: V3 Out, Out—: V10 The Road Not Taken: V2 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: V1 The Wood-Pile: V6 Funeral Blues (Auden): V10
G Gallagher, Tess I Stop Writing the Poem: V16 The Garden Shukkei-en (Forché): V18 Geometry (Dove): V15 Ginsberg, Allen A Supermarket in California: V5 Giovanni, Nikki Knoxville, Tennessee: V17 Glück, Louise The Gold Lily: V5 The Mystery: V15 Go Down, Moses (Anonymous): V11 The Gold Lily (Glück): V5 A Grafted Tongue (Montague): V12 Graham, Jorie The Hiding Place: V10 Mind: V17 Gray, Thomas Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: V9 The Greatest Grandeur (Rogers): V18 Gunn, Thom The Missing: V9
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H H.D. Helen: V6 Hall, Donald Names of Horses: V8 Hardy, Thomas Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?: V4 The Darkling Thrush: V18 The Man He Killed: V3 Harjo, Joy Anniversary: V15 Harlem (Hughes): V1 Harlem Hopscotch (Angelou): V2 Hartnett, Michael A Farewell to English: V10 Having a Coke with You (O’Hara): V12 Having it Out with Melancholy (Kenyon): V17 Hawk Roosting (Hughes): V4 Hayden, Robert Those Winter Sundays: V1 Heaney, Seamus Digging: V5 A Drink of Water: V8 Midnight: V2 The Singer’s House: V17 Hecht, Anthony “More Light! More Light!”: V6 The Heaven of Animals (Dickey): V6 Helen (H.D.): V6 Herrick, Robert To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time: V13 The Hiding Place (Graham): V10 High Windows (Larkin): V3 The Highwayman (Noyes): V4 Hirshfield, Jane Three Times My Life Has Opened: V16 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Old Ironsides: V9 Holy Sonnet 10 (Donne): V2 Hope, A. D. Beware of Ruins: V8 Hope Is a Tattered Flag (Sandburg): V12 “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers (Dickinson): V3 The Horizons of Rooms (Merwin): V15 The Hospital Window (Dickey): V11 Housman, A. E. To an Athlete Dying Young: V7 When I Was One-and-Twenty: V4 How We Heard the Name (Dugan): V10 Howe, Marie What Belongs to Us: V15 Hudgins, Andrew Elegy for My Father, Who is Not Dead: V14
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Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Pound): V16 Hughes, Langston Dream Variations: V15 Harlem: V1 Mother to Son: V3 The Negro Speaks of Rivers: V10 Theme for English B: V6 Hughes, Ted Hawk Roosting: V4 Hugo, Richard For Jennifer, 6, on the Teton: V17 Hunger in New York City (Ortiz): V4 Huong, Ho Xuan Spring-Watching Pavilion: V18 Hurt Hawks (Jeffers): V3
I I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (Dickinson): V13 I Go Back to May 1937 (Olds): V17 I Hear America Singing (Whitman): V3 I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died— (Dickinson): V5 I Stop Writing the Poem (Gallagher): V16 The Idea of Order at Key West (Stevens): V13 In a Station of the Metro (Pound): V2 Incident in a Rose Garden (Justice): V14 In Flanders Fields (McCrae): V5 In Memory of Radio (Baraka): V9 In the Land of Shinar (Levertov): V7 In the Suburbs (Simpson): V14 Inventors (Blumentha): V7 An Irish Airman Foresees His Death (Yeats): V1 Island of the Three Marias (Ríos): V11 i was sitting in mcsorley’s (cummings): V13
J Jabberwocky (Carroll): V11 Jarrell, Randall The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner: V2 Jeffers, Robinson Hurt Hawks: V3 Shine Perishing Republic: V4 Johnson, James Weldon The Creation: V1 Journey of the Magi (Eliot): V7 Justice, Donald Incident in a Rose Garden: V14
K Keats, John La Belle Dame sans Merci: V17
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Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art: V9 Ode on a Grecian Urn: V1 Ode to a Nightingale: V3 When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be: V2 Kenyon, Jane Having it Out with Melancholy: V17 “Trouble with Math in a OneRoom Country School”: V9 Kilroy (Viereck): V14 King James Bible Psalm 8: V9 Psalm 23: V4 Kinnell, Galway Saint Francis and the Sow: V9 Kizer, Carolyn To an Unknown Poet: V18 Knoxville, Tennessee (Giovanni): V17 Kooser, Ted The Constellation Orion: V8 Komunyakaa, Yusef Facing It: V5 Kubla Khan (Coleridge): V5 Kumin, Maxine Address to the Angels: V18 Kunitz, Stanley The War Against the Trees: V11
L l(a (cummings): V1 The Lady of Shalott (Tennyson): V15 The Lake Isle of Innisfree (Yeats): V15 The Lamb (Blake): V12 Lament for the Dorsets (Purdy): V5 Landscape with Tractor (Taylor): V10 Lanier, Sidney Song of the Chattahoochee: V14 Larkin, Philip An Arundel Tomb: V12 High Windows: V3 Toads: V4 The Last Question (Parker): V18 Last Request (Brouwer): V14 Lawrence, D. H. Piano: V6 Layton, Irving A Tall Man Executes a Jig: V12 Leda and the Swan (Yeats): V13 Lee, Li-Young Early in the Morning: V17 For a New Citizen of These United States: V15 The Weight of Sweetness: V11 Levertov, Denise The Blue Rim of Memory: V17 In the Land of Shinar: V7 Leviathan (Merwin): V5 Levine, Philip Starlight: V8
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Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth The Arsenal at Springfield: V17 Paul Revere’s Ride: V2 A Psalm of Life: V7 Lord Randal (Anonymous): V6 Lorde, Audre What My Child Learns of the Sea: V16 Lost Sister (Song): V5 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Eliot): V1 Lowell, Robert For the Union Dead: V7 The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket: V6
M MacBeth, George Bedtime Story: V8 MacLeish, Archibald Ars Poetica: V5 Madgett, Naomi Long Alabama Centennial: V10 maggie and milly and molly and may (cummings): V12 The Man He Killed (Hardy): V3 A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (Raine): V7 Marvell, Andrew To His Coy Mistress: V5 Masefield, John Cargoes: V5 Matsuo Basho¯ Falling Upon Earth: V2 The Moon Glows the Same: V7 Temple Bells Die Out: V18 McCrae, John In Flanders Fields: V5 McElroy, Colleen A Pièd: V3 McGinley, Phyllis The Conquerors: V13 Reactionary Essay on Applied Science: V9 McKay, Claude The Tropics in New York: V4 Meeting the British (Muldoon): V7 Mending Wall (Frost): V5 Merlin Enthralled (Wilbur): V16 Merriam, Eve Onomatopoeia: V6 Merwin, W. S. The Horizons of Rooms: V15 Leviathan: V5 Midnight (Heaney): V2 Midnight Verses (Akhmatova): V18 The Milkfish Gatherers (Fenton): V11 Millay, Edna St. Vincent The Courage That My Mother Had: V3 Wild Swans: V17 Milosz, Czeslaw Song of a Citizen: V16
Milton, John [On His Blindness] Sonnet 16: V3 On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three: V17 Mind (Graham): V17 Mirror (Plath): V1 Miss Rosie (Clifton): V1 The Missing (Gunn): V9 Momaday, N. Scott Angle of Geese: V2 To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly: V11 Montague, John A Grafted Tongue: V12 The Moon Glows the Same (Basho¯): V7 Moore, Marianne The Fish: V14 Poetry: V17 “More Light! More Light!” (Hecht): V6 Mother to Son (Hughes): V3 Much Madness Is Divinest Sense (Dickinson): V16 Muldoon, Paul Meeting the British: V7 Mueller, Lisel Blood Oranges: V13 The Exhibit: V9 Musée des Beaux Arts (Auden): V1 Music Lessons (Oliver): V8 My Father’s Song (Ortiz): V16 My Last Duchess (Browning): V1 My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close (Dickinson): V8 My Mother Pieced Quilts (Acosta): V12 My Papa’s Waltz (Roethke): V3 The Mystery (Glück): V15
N Names of Horses (Hall): V8 A Narrow Fellow in the Grass (Dickinson): V11 The Negro Speaks of Rivers (Hughes): V10 Nemerov, Howard Deep Woods: V14 The Phoenix: V10 Neruda, Pablo Tonight I Can Write: V11 New Rule (Carson): V18 Not Waving but Drowning (Smith): V3 Nothing Gold Can Stay (Frost): V3 Nowlan, Alden For Jean Vincent D’abbadie, Baron St.-Castin: V12 Noyes, Alfred The Highwayman: V4 The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd (Raleigh): V14
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O O Captain! My Captain! (Whitman): V2 Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats): V1 Ode to a Nightingale (Keats): V3 Ode to the West Wind (Shelley): V2 O’Hara, Frank Having a Coke with You: V12 Why I Am Not a Painter: V8 old age sticks (cummings): V3 Old Ironsides (Holmes): V9 Olds, Sharon I Go Back to May 1937: V17 Oliver, Mary Music Lessons: V8 Wild Geese: V15 Ondaatje, Michael To a Sad Daughter: V8 On Freedom’s Ground (Wilbur): V12 [On His Blindness] Sonnet 16 (Milton): V3 On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three (Milton): V17 Onomatopoeia (Merriam): V6 On the Pulse of Morning (Angelou): V3 Ortiz, Simon Hunger in New York City: V4 My Father’s Song: V16 Out, Out— (Frost): V10 Overture to a Dance of Locomotives (Williams): V11 Owen, Wilfred Dulce et Decorum Est: V10 Oysters (Sexton): V4
P Paradoxes and Oxymorons (Ashbery): V11 Parker, Dorothy The Last Question: V18 Pastan, Linda Ethics: V8 Paul Revere’s Ride (Longfellow): V2 Paz, Octavio Duration: V18 The Phoenix (Nemerov): V10 Piano (Lawrence): V6 Piercy, Marge Barbie Doll: V9 Pinsky, Robert Song of Reasons: V18 Plath, Sylvia Blackberrying: V15 Mirror: V1 A Psalm of Life (Longfellow): V7 Poe, Edgar Allan Annabel Lee: V9 The Bells: V3 The Raven: V1 Poetry (Moore): V17 Pope, Alexander The Rape of the Lock: V12
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Porphyria’s Lover (Browning): V15 Pound, Ezra Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: V16 In a Station of the Metro: V2 The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter: V8 Psalm 8 (King James Bible): V9 Psalm 23 (King James Bible): V4 Purdy, Al Lament for the Dorsets: V5 Wilderness Gothic: V12
Q The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket (Lowell): V6 Queen-Ann’s-Lace (Williams): V6
R Raine, Craig A Martian Sends a Postcard Home: V7 Raleigh, Walter, Sir The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd: V14 Randall, Dudley Ballad of Birmingham: V5 The Rape of the Lock (Pope): V12 The Raven (Poe): V1 Reactionary Essay on Applied Science (McGinley): V9 A Red, Red Rose (Burns): V8 The Red Wheelbarrow (Williams): V1 Reed, Ishmael Beware: Do Not Read This Poem: V6 Remember (Rossetti): V14 Reunions with a Ghost (Ai): V16 Revard, Carter Birch Canoe: V5 The Rhodora (Emerson): V17 Rich, Adrienne Rusted Legacy: V15 Richard Cory (Robinson): V4 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge): V4 Ríos, Alberto Island of the Three Marias: V11 The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter (Pound): V8 The Road Not Taken (Frost): V2 Robinson, E. A. Richard Cory: V4 Roethke, Theodore My Papa’s Waltz: V3 Rogers, Pattiann The Greatest Grandeur: V18 Rose, Wendy For the White poets who would be Indian: V13
G a r y
Rossetti, Christina A Birthday: V10 Remember: V14 Rukeyser, Muriel Ballad of Orange and Grape: V10 Rusted Legacy (Rich): V15
S Sailing to Byzantium (Yeats): V2 Saint Francis and the Sow (Kinnell): V9 Sandburg, Carl Chicago: V3 Cool Tombs: V6 Hope Is a Tattered Flag: V12 Schnackenberg, Gjertrud Darwin in 1881: V13 The Seafarer (Anonymous): V8 The Second Coming (Yeats): V7 Service, Robert W. The Cremation of Sam McGee: V10 Sexton, Anne Courage: V14 Oysters: V4 Shahid Ali, Agha The Country Without a Post Office: V18 Shakespeare, William Sonnet 18: V2 Sonnet 19: V9 Sonnet 29: V8 Sonnet 30: V4 Sonnet 55: V5 Sonnet 116: V3 Sonnet 130: V1 Shapiro, Karl Auto Wreck: V3 She Walks in Beauty (Byron): V14 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Ode to the West Wind: V2 Shine, Perishing Republic (Jeffers): V4 Silko, Leslie Marmon Four Mountain Wolves: V9 Story from Bear Country: V16 Simic, Charles Butcher Shop: V7 Simpson, Louis American Poetry: V7 Chocolates: V11 In the Suburbs: V14 The Singer’s House (Heaney): V17 Sir Patrick Spens (Anonymous): V4 Siren Song (Atwood): V7 60 (Tagore): V18 Small Town with One Road (Soto): V7 Smart and Final Iris (Tate): V15 Smith, Stevie Not Waving but Drowning: V3 Snyder, Gary Anasazi: V9
2 6 5
T h e
S o l d i e r
The Soldier (Brooke): V7 Song, Cathy Lost Sister: V5 Song of a Citizen (Milosz): V16 Song of Reasons (Pinsky): V18 Song of the Chattahoochee (Lanier): V14 The Song of the Smoke (Du Bois): V13 Sonnet 16 [On His Blindness] (Milton): V3 Sonnet 18 (Shakespeare): V2 Sonnet 19 (Shakespeare): V9 Sonnet 30 (Shakespeare): V4 Sonnet 29 (Shakespeare): V8 Sonnet XXIX (Browning): V16 Sonnet 43 (Browning): V2 Sonnet 55 (Shakespeare): V5 Sonnet 116 (Shakespeare): V3 Sonnet 130 (Shakespeare): V1 The Sonnet-Ballad (Brooks): V1 Soto, Gary Small Town with One Road: V7 The Soul Selects Her Own Society (Dickinson): V1 Southbound on the Freeway (Swenson): V16 Spring-Watching Pavilion (Huong): V18 Stafford, William At the Bomb Testing Site: V8 Fifteen: V2 Ways to Live: V16 Starlight (Levine): V8 Stevens, Wallace The Idea of Order at Key West: V13 Sunday Morning: V16 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (Frost): V1 Story from Bear Country (Silko): V16 Strand, Mark The Continuous Life: V18 Eating Poetry: V9 Strong Men, Riding Horses (Brooks): V4 Sunday Morning (Stevens): V16 A Supermarket in California (Ginsberg): V5 Swenson, May Southbound on the Freeway: V16 Swing Low Sweet Chariot (Anonymous): V1 Szymborska, Wislawa Astonishment: V15
Tate, James Dear Reader: V10 Smart and Final Iris: V15 Taylor, Henry Landscape with Tractor: V10 Tears, Idle Tears (Tennyson): V4 Teasdale, Sara There Will Come Soft Rains: V14 Temple Bells Die Out (Basho¯): V18 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord The Charge of the Light Brigade: V1 The Eagle: V11 The Lady of Shalott: V15 Tears, Idle Tears: V4 Ulysses: V2 Thayer, Ernest Lawrence Casey at the Bat: V5 Theme for English B (Hughes): V6 There’s a Certain Slant of Light (Dickinson): V6 There Will Come Soft Rains (Teasdale): V14 This Life (Dove): V1 Thomas, Dylan Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night: V1 Fern Hill: V3 The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower: V8 Those Winter Sundays (Hayden): V1 Three Times My Life Has Opened (Hirshfield): V16 Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth): V2 To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly (Momaday): V11 To a Sad Daughter (Ondaatje): V8 To an Athlete Dying Young (Housman): V7 To an Unknown Poet (Kizer): V18 To His Coy Mistress (Marvell): V5 To His Excellency General Washington (Wheatley): V13 To My Dear and Loving Husband (Bradstreet): V6 To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time (Herrick): V13 Toads (Larkin): V4 Tonight I Can Write (Neruda): V11 The Tropics in New York (McKay): V4 The Tyger (Blake): V2
T Tagore, Rabindranath 60: V18 A Tall Man Executes a Jig (Layton): V12
2 6 6
U Ulysses (Tennyson): V2 The Unknown Citizen (Auden): V3
V A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning (Donne): V11 Vancouver Lights (Birney): V8 Viereck, Peter For An Assyrian Frieze: V9 Kilroy: V14
W Walcott, Derek A Far Cry from Africa: V6 The War Against the Trees (Kunitz): V11 War Is Kind (Crane): V9 Warren, Rosanna Daylights: V13 Ways to Live (Stafford): V16 We Live by What We See at Night (Espada): V13 We Real Cool (Brooks): V6 The Weight of Sweetness (Lee): V11 What Belongs to Us (Howe): V15 What My Child Learns of the Sea (Lorde): V16 Wheatley, Phillis To His Excellency General Washington: V13 When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be (Keats): V2 When I Was One-and-Twenty (Housman): V4 Whitman, Walt Cavalry Crossing a Ford: V13 I Hear America Singing: V3 O Captain! My Captain!: V2 Why I Am Not a Painter (O’Hara): V8 Wilbur, Richard Beowulf: V11 Merlin Enthralled: V16 On Freedom’s Ground: V12 Wild Geese (Oliver): V15 Wild Swans (Millay): V17 Wilderness Gothic (Purdy): V12 Williams, William Carlos Overture to a Dance of Locomotives: V11 Queen-Ann’s-Lace: V6 The Red Wheelbarrow: V1 The Wood-Pile (Frost): V6 Wordsworth, William Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey: V2 Wright, Charles Black Zodiac: V10 Wright, James A Blessing: V7 Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio: V8 Wright, Judith Drought Year: V8
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
Y e a t s ,
W i l l i a m
B u t l e r
Y Yeats, William Butler Easter 1916: V5 An Irish Airman Foresees His Death: V1 The Lake Isle of Innisfree: V15 Leda and the Swan: V13 Sailing to Byzantium: V2 The Second Coming: V7
V o l u m e
1 8
2 6 7
Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index Acoma Pueblo Ortiz, Simon Hunger in New York City: V4 My Father’s Song: V16
African American Ai Reunions with a Ghost: V16 Angelou, Maya Harlem Hopscotch: V2 On the Pulse of Morning: V3 Baraka, Amiri In Memory of Radio: V9 Brooks, Gwendolyn The Bean Eaters: V2 The Sonnet-Ballad: V1 Strong Men, Riding Horses: V4 We Real Cool: V6 Clifton, Lucille Climbing: V14 Miss Rosie: V1 Cullen, Countee Any Human to Another: V3 Dove, Rita Geometry: V15 This Life: V1 Giovanni, Nikki Knoxville, Tennessee: V17 Hayden, Robert Those Winter Sundays: V1 Hughes, Langston Dream Variations: V15 Harlem: V1 Mother to Son: V3 The Negro Speaks of Rivers: V10 Theme for English B: V6 Johnson, James Weldon The Creation: V1
Komunyakaa, Yusef Facing It: V5 Lorde, Audre What My Child Learns of the Sea: V16 Madgett, Naomi Long Alabama Centennial: V10 McElroy, Colleen A Pièd: V3 Randall, Dudley Ballad of Birmingham: V5 Reed, Ishmael Beware: Do Not Read This Poem: V6
American Acosta, Teresa Palomo My Mother Pieced Quilts: V12 Ai Reunions with a Ghost: V16 Angelou, Maya Harlem Hopscotch: V2 On the Pulse of Morning: V3 Ashbery, John Paradoxes and Oxymorons: V11 Auden, W. H. As I Walked Out One Evening: V4 Musée des Beaux Arts: V1 The Unknown Citizen: V3 Bishop, Elizabeth Brazil, January 1, 1502: V6 Filling Station: V12 Blumenthal, Michael Inventors: V7
Bly, Robert Come with Me: V6 Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter: V17 Bradstreet, Anne To My Dear and Loving Husband: V6 Brooks, Gwendolyn The Bean Eaters: V2 The Sonnet-Ballad: V1 Strong Men, Riding Horses: V4 We Real Cool: V6 Brouwer, Joel Last Request: V14 Carver, Raymond The Cobweb: V17 Clifton, Lucille Climbing: V14 Miss Rosie: V1 Collins, Billy The Afterlife: V18 Crane, Stephen War Is Kind: V9 Cruz, Victor Hernandez Business: V16 Cullen, Countee Any Human to Another: V3 cummings, e. e. l(a: V1 i was sitting in mcsorley’s: V13 maggie and milly and molly and may: V12 old age sticks: V3 Dickey, James The Heaven of Animals: V6 The Hospital Window: V11
2 6 9
A m e r i c a n
Dickinson, Emily Because I Could Not Stop for Death: V2 The Bustle in a House: V10 “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers: V3 I felt a Funeral, in my Brain: V13 I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died—: V5 Much Madness Is Divinest Sense: V16 My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close: V8 A Narrow Fellow in the Grass: V11 The Soul Selects Her Own Society: V1 There’s a Certain Slant of Light: V6 This Is My Letter to the World: V4 Dove, Rita Geometry: V15 This Life: V1 Dubie, Norman The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter. A Barn in the Urals: V12 Du Bois, W. E. B. The Song of the Smoke: V13 Dugan, Alan How We Heard the Name: V10 Duncan, Robert An African Elegy: V13 Eliot, T. S. Journey of the Magi: V7 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: V1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Concord Hymn: V4 The Rhodora: V17 Erdrich, Louise Bidwell Ghost: V14 Espada, Martín Colibrí: V16 We Live by What We See at Night: V13 Forché, Carolyn The Garden Shukkei-En: V18 Francis, Robert The Base Stealer: V12 Frost, Robert Birches: V13 The Death of the Hired Man: V4 Fire and Ice: V7 Mending Wall: V5 Nothing Gold Can Stay: V3 Out, Out—: V10 The Road Not Taken: V2 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: V1 The Wood-Pile: V6 Gallagher, Tess I Stop Writing the Poem: V16
2 7 0
Ginsberg, Allen A Supermarket in California: V5 Giovanni, Nikki Knoxville, Tennessee: V17 Glück, Louise The Gold Lily: V5 The Mystery: V15 Graham, Jorie The Hiding Place: V10 Mind: V17 Gunn, Thom The Missing: V9 H.D. Helen: V6 Hall, Donald Names of Horses: V8 Harjo, Joy Anniversary: V15 Hayden, Robert Those Winter Sundays: V1 Hecht, Anthony “More Light! More Light!”: V6 Hirshfield, Jane Three Times My Life Has Opened: V16 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Old Ironsides: V9 Howe, Marie What Belongs to Us: V15 Hudgins, Andrew Elegy for My Father, Who is Not Dead: V14 Hughes, Langston Dream Variations: V15 Harlem: V1 Mother to Son: V3 The Negro Speaks of Rivers: V10 Theme for English B: V6 Hugo, Richard For Jennifer, 6, on the Teton: V17 Jarrell, Randall The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner: V2 Jeffers, Robinson Hurt Hawks: V3 Shine, Perishing Republic: V4 Johnson, James Weldon The Creation: V1 Justice, Donald Incident in a Rose Garden: V14 Kenyon, Jane Having it Out with Melancholy: V17 “Trouble with Math in a OneRoom Country School”: V9 Kinnell, Galway Saint Francis and the Sow: V9 Kizer, Carolyn To An Unknown Poet: V18 Komunyakaa, Yusef Facing It: V5
Kooser, Ted The Constellation Orion: V8 Kumin, Maxine Address to the Angels: V18 Kunitz, Stanley The War Against the Trees: V11 Lanier, Sidney Song of the Chattahoochee: V14 Lee, Li-Young Early in the Morning: V17 For a New Citizen of These United States: V15 The Weight of Sweetness: V11 Levertov, Denise The Blue Rim of Memory: V17 In the Land of Shinar: V7 Levine, Philip Starlight: V8 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth The Arsenal at Springfield: V17 Paul Revere’s Ride: V2 A Psalm of Life: V7 Lorde, Audre What My Child Learns of the Sea: V16 Lowell, Robert For the Union Dead: V7 The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket: V6 MacLeish, Archibald Ars Poetica: V5 Madgett, Naomi Long Alabama Centennial: V10 McElroy, Colleen A Pièd: V3 McGinley, Phyllis The Conquerors: V13 Reactionary Essay on Applied Science: V9 McKay, Claude The Tropics in New York: V4 Merriam, Eve Onomatopoeia: V6 Merwin, W. S. The Horizons of Rooms: V15 Leviathan: V5 Millay, Edna St. Vincent The Courage that My Mother Had: V3 Wild Swans: V17 Momaday, N. Scott Angle of Geese: V2 To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly: V11 Montague, John A Grafted Tongue: V12 Moore, Marianne The Fish: V14 Poetry: V17 Mueller, Lisel The Exhibit: V9
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
E n g l i s h
Nemerov, Howard Deep Woods: V14 The Phoenix: V10 O’Hara, Frank Having a Coke with You: V12 Why I Am Not a Painter: V8 Olds, Sharon I Go Back to May 1937: V17 Oliver, Mary Music Lessons: V8 Wild Geese: V15 Ortiz, Simon Hunger in New York City: V4 My Father’s Song: V16 Parker, Dorothy The Last Question: V18 Pastan, Linda Ethics: V8 Piercy, Marge Barbie Doll: V9 Pinsky, Robert Song of Reasons: V18 Plath, Sylvia Blackberrying: V15 Mirror: V1 Poe, Edgar Allan Annabel Lee: V9 The Bells: V3 The Raven: V1 Pound, Ezra Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: V16 In a Station of the Metro: V2 The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter: V8 Randall, Dudley Ballad of Birmingham: V5 Reed, Ishmael Beware: Do Not Read This Poem: V6 Revard, Carter Birch Canoe: V5 Rich, Adrienne Rusted Legacy: V15 Ríos, Alberto Island of the Three Marias: V11 Robinson, E. A. Richard Cory: V4 Roethke, Theodore My Papa’s Waltz: V3 Rogers, Pattiann The Greatest Grandeur: V18 Rose, Wendy For the White poets who would be Indian: V13 Rukeyser, Muriel Ballad of Orange and Grape: V10 Sandburg, Carl Chicago: V3 Cool Tombs: V6 Hope Is a Tattered Flag: V12 Schnackenberg, Gjertrud Darwin in 1881: V13
V o l u m e
1 8
Sexton, Anne Courage: V14 Oysters: V4 Shapiro, Karl Auto Wreck: V3 Silko, Leslie Marmon Four Mountain Wolves: V9 Story from Bear Country: V16 Simic, Charles Butcher Shop: V7 Simpson, Louis American Poetry: V7 Chocolates: V11 In the Suburbs: V14 Snyder, Gary Anasazi: V9 Song, Cathy Lost Sister: V5 Soto, Gary Small Town with One Road: V7 Stafford, William At the Bomb Testing Site: V8 Fifteen: V2 Ways to Live: V16 Stevens, Wallace The Idea of Order at Key West: V13 Sunday Morning: V16 Strand, Mark The Continuous Life: V18 Swenson, May Southbound on the Freeway: V16 Tate, James Dear Reader: V10 Smart and Final Iris: V15 Taylor, Henry Landscape with Tractor: V10 Teasdale, Sara There Will Come Soft Rains: V14 Thayer, Ernest Lawrence Casey at the Bat: V5 Viereck, Peter For An Assyrian Frieze: V9 Kilroy: V14 Warren, Rosanna Daylights: V13 Wheatley, Phillis To His Excellency General Washington: V13 Whitman, Walt Cavalry Crossing a Ford: V13 I Hear America Singing: V3 O Captain! My Captain!: V2 Wilbur, Richard Beowulf: V11 Merlin Enthralled: V16 On Freedom’s Ground: V12 Williams, William Carlos Overture to a Dance of Locomotives: V11 Queen-Ann’s-Lace: V6 The Red Wheelbarrow: V1 Wright, Charles Black Zodiac: V10
Wright, James A Blessing: V7 Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio: V8
Australian Dawe, Bruce Drifters: V10 Hope, A. D. Beware of Ruins: V8 Wright, Judith Drought Year: V8
Canadian Atwood, Margaret Siren Song: V7 Birney, Earle Vancouver Lights: V8 Carson, Anne New Rule: V18 Layton, Irving A Tall Man Executes a Jig: V12 McCrae, John In Flanders Fields: V5 Nowlan, Alden For Jean Vincent D’abbadie, Baron St.-Castin: V12 Purdy, Al Lament for the Dorsets: V5 Wilderness Gothic: V12 Strand, Mark Eating Poetry: V9
Canadian, Sri Lankan Ondaatje, Michael To a Sad Daughter: V8
Cherokee Momaday, N. Scott Angle of Geese: V2 To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly: V11
Chilean Neruda, Pablo Tonight I Can Write: V11
English Alleyn, Ellen A Birthday: V10 Arnold, Matthew Dover Beach: V2 Auden, W. H. As I Walked Out One Evening: V4 Funeral Blues: V10 Musée des Beaux Arts: V1 The Unknown Citizen: V3
2 7 1
E n g l i s h
Blake, William The Lamb: V12 The Tyger: V2 Bradstreet, Anne To My Dear and Loving Husband: V6 Brooke, Rupert The Soldier: V7 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Sonnet XXIX: V16 Sonnet 43: V2 Browning, Robert My Last Duchess: V1 Porphyria’s Lover: V15 Byron, Lord The Destruction of Sennacherib: V1 She Walks in Beauty: V14 Carroll, Lewis Jabberwocky: V11 Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales: V14 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Kubla Khan: V5 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: V4 Donne, John Holy Sonnet 10: V2 A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning: V11 Eliot, T. S. Journey of the Magi: V7 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: V1 Fenton, James The Milkfish Gatherers: V11 Gray, Thomas Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: V9 Gunn, Thom The Missing: V9 Hardy, Thomas Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?: V4 The Darkling Thrush: V18 The Man He Killed: V3 Herrick, Robert To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time: V13 Housman, A. E. To an Athlete Dying Young: V7 When I Was One-and-Twenty: V4 Hughes, Ted Hawk Roosting: V4 Keats, John La Belle Dame sans Merci: V17 Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art: V9 Ode on a Grecian Urn: V1 Ode to a Nightingale: V3 When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be: V2
2 7 2
Larkin, Philip An Arundel Tomb: V12 High Windows: V3 Toads: V4 Lawrence, D. H. Piano: V6 Levertov, Denise The Blue Rim of Memory: V17 Marvell, Andrew To His Coy Mistress: V5 Masefield, John Cargoes: V5 Milton, John [On His Blindness] Sonnet 16: V3 On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three: V17 Noyes, Alfred The Highwayman: V4 Owen, Wilfred Dulce et Decorum Est: V10 Pope, Alexander The Rape of the Lock: V12 Raine, Craig A Martian Sends a Postcard Home: V7 Raleigh, Walter, Sir The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd: V14 Rossetti, Christina A Birthday: V10 Remember: V14 Service, Robert W. The Cremation of Sam McGee: V10 Shakespeare, William Sonnet 18: V2 Sonnet 19: V9 Sonnet 30: V4 Sonnet 29: V8 Sonnet 55: V5 Sonnet 116: V3 Sonnet 130: V1 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Ode to the West Wind: V2 Smith, Stevie Not Waving but Drowning: V3 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord The Charge of the Light Brigade: V1 The Eagle: V11 The Lady of Shalott: V15 Tears, Idle Tears: V4 Ulysses: V2 Williams, William Carlos Queen-Ann’s-Lace: V6 The Red Wheelbarrow: V1 Wordsworth, William Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey: V2 Yeats, W. B. Easter 1916: V5 An Irish Airman Forsees His Death: V1
The Lake Isle of Innisfree: V15 Leda and the Swan: V13 Sailing to Byzantium: V2 The Second Coming: V7
German Blumenthal, Michael Inventors: V7 Erdrich, Louise Bidwell Ghost: V14 Mueller, Lisel Blood Oranges: V13 The Exhibit: V9 Roethke, Theodore My Papa’s Waltz: V3
Ghanaian Du Bois, W. E. B. The Song of the Smoke: V13
Hispanic Cruz, Victor Hernandez Business: V16 Espada, Martín Colibrí: V16
Indian Shahid Ali, Agha Country Without a Post Office: V18 Tagore, Rabindranath 60: V18
Indonesian Lee, Li-Young Early in the Morning: V17 For a New Citizen of These United States: V15 The Weight of Sweetness: V11
Irish Boland, Eavan Anorexic: V12 Hartnett, Michael A Farewell to English: V10 Heaney, Seamus Digging: V5 A Drink of Water: V8 Midnight: V2 The Singer’s House: V17 Muldoon, Paul Meeting the British: V7 Yeats, William Butler Easter 1916: V5 An Irish Airman Foresees His Death: V1 The Lake Isle of Innisfree: V15 Leda and the Swan: V13 Sailing to Byzantium: V2 The Second Coming: V7
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
W e s t
Jamaican
Native American
Scottish
McKay, Claude The Tropics in New York: V4 Simpson, Louis In the Suburbs: V14
Ai
Burns, Robert A Red, Red Rose: V8 Byron, Lord The Destruction of Sennacherib: V1 MacBeth, George Bedtime Story: V8
Japanese Ai Reunions with a Ghost: V16 Basho¯, Matsuo Falling Upon Earth: V2 The Moon Glows the Same: V7 Temple Bells Die Out: V18
Jewish Blumenthal, Michael Inventors: V7 Espada, Martín Colibrí: V16 We Live by What We See at Night: V13 Piercy, Marge Barbie Doll: V9 Shapiro, Karl Auto Wreck: V3
Reunions with a Ghost: V16 Erdrich, Louise Bidwell Ghost: V14 Harjo, Joy Anniversary: V15 Momaday, N. Scott Angle of Geese: V2 To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly: V11 Ortiz, Simon Hunger in New York City: V4 My Father’s Song: V16 Revard, Carter Birch Canoe: V5 Rose, Wendy For the White poets who would be Indian: V13 Silko, Leslie Marmon Four Mountain Wolves: V9 Story from Bear Country: V16
Osage Revard, Carter Birch Canoe: V5
Kiowa Momaday, N. Scott Angle of Geese: V2 To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly: V11
Lithuanian Milosz, Czeslaw Song of a Citizen: V16
Mexican Paz, Octavio Duration: V18 Soto, Gary Small Town with One Road: V7
V o l u m e
1 8
Polish Milosz, Czeslaw Song of a Citizen: V16 Szymborska, Wislawa Astonishment: V15
Russian Akhmatova, Anna Midnight Verses: V18 Levertov, Denise In the Land of Shinar: V7 Merriam, Eve Onomatopoeia: V6 Shapiro, Karl Auto Wreck: V3
I n d i a n
Senegalese Wheatley, Phillis To His Excellency General Washington: V13
Spanish Williams, William Carlos The Red Wheelbarrow: V1
Swedish Sandburg, Carl Chicago: V3
Vietnamese Huong, Ho Xuan Spring-Watching Pavilion: V18
Welsh Levertov, Denise In the Land of Shinar: V7 Thomas, Dylan Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night: V1 Fern Hill: V3 The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower: V8
West Indian Walcott, Derek A Far Cry from Africa: V6
2 7 3
Subject/Theme Index *Boldface denotes discussion in Themes section.
A Adultery Address to the Angels: 30 Adulthood 60: 2, 4–6 Africa The Darkling Thrush: 77–78 Ambiguity The Last Question: 134 Angels Address to the Angels: 18, 20–22, 25–26, 33 The Afterlife: 43 Animals and Humankind Address to the Angels: 22 Anxiety The Last Question: 133 Asia The Garden Shukkei-en: 106, 108–111, 113–117 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 197, 201–202 Temple Bells Die Out: 211–213, 216, 218
B Barrenness The Last Question: 134 Buddhism Spring-Watching Pavilion: 197, 199–200, 202, 207–208 Temple Bells Die Out: 215, 217–218
C Central America The Garden Shukkei-en: 114–116 Chaos and Order The Darkling Thrush: 77 Class To an Unknown Poet: 223 Classicism The Last Question: 143, 145 Communication The Country Without a Post Office: 67 Communism Duration: 97–98 Midnight Verses: 147, 152–153 Confucianism Spring-Watching Pavilion: 197, 201–202 Creativity To an Unknown Poet: 226–227 Crime and Criminals The Last Question: 132–133, 135 Cruelty The Garden Shukkei-en: 109–110, 112, 114–117 Cubism Duration: 97 Curiosity The Greatest Grandeur: 124 Cynicism The Darkling Thrush: 73, 77–80
D Death 60: 4–6 Address to the Angels: 18, 20–22, 24, 29–30, 32–37
The Afterlife: 38, 40–47 The Continuous Life: 50, 52–55 The Country Without a Post Office: 65–66, 69 The Darkling Thrush: 73, 75–78, 80–81, 87–88 The Garden Shukkei-en: 113–117 The Last Question: 141–142 Midnight Verses: 147–151, 153 New Rule: 166–168 To an Unknown Poet: 234–235, 237 Description The Afterlife: 41–42 New Rule: 165, 168 To an Unknown Poet: 222–223 Distance To an Unknown Poet: 224 Divinity The Greatest Grandeur: 122 Dreams and Visions Address to the Angels: 29–30, 32 Midnight Verses: 156–159
E Emotions Address to the Angels: 21, 25–26, 28–29 The Afterlife: 45 The Country Without a Post Office: 67–68 The Darkling Thrush: 75, 77, 79–80, 82, 90 The Garden Shukkei-en: 109–112, 117 The Greatest Grandeur: 120, 122
2 7 5
E m o t i o n s
The Last Question: 133–134, 140–143 Midnight Verses: 148–149, 151–152, 156–157, 160 New Rule: 166–168 Song of Reasons: 193, 195 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 206 To an Unknown Poet: 232, 234 Eternity 60: 10 Europe 60: 1, 7–8 The Darkling Thrush: 76–78 Midnight Verses: 147, 152–153, 156–157 Song of Reasons: 180, 183 Exile The Country Without a Post Office: 66, 71–72
F Family The Continuous Life: 53 Family Life To an Unknown Poet: 229 Farm and Rural Life The Darkling Thrush: 76, 78 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 201–202 Fate and Chance The Last Question: 130, 132–134 Song of Reasons: 189–192 To an Unknown Poet: 228–229, 232, 235–236, 239 Fear and Terror The Last Question: 132–133, 136 Midnight Verses: 149–150, 152 New Rule: 165–167, 169, 173, 175 To an Unknown Poet: 234–237 Film The Garden Shukkei-en: 111–112 Freedom To an Unknown Poet: 232–233 Future The Greatest Grandeur: 122
G God Address to the Angels: 20–22 The Afterlife: 40–41, 43, 46–47 The Greatest Grandeur: 121–122 Song of Reasons: 194–195 Grief and Sorrow Address to the Angels: 18–26 The Darkling Thrush: 79–80 New Rule: 172–175
H Haiku Temple Bells Die Out: 209–218
2 7 6
Happiness and Gaiety 60: 2, 5, 8 The Darkling Thrush: 73, 76, 78, 82–85, 87–90 Heaven Address to the Angels: 20 The Afterlife: 38, 40–42, 44–47 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 198–202, 205–208 History Address to the Angels: 23 The Garden Shukkei-en: 106, 112, 114–115, 117 The Last Question: 135 Midnight Verses: 153 Song of Reasons: 180, 182–183 Hope The Darkling Thrush: 75–76, 79, 81–82, 86–88 The Greatest Grandeur: 122–124 Humor Address to the Angels: 20–23 The Afterlife: 38, 41–43, 46–48 The Last Question: 142–143 Song of Reasons: 186, 188
I Ignorance To an Unknown Poet: 220, 222–224 Imagery and Symbolism 60: 3–6 Address to the Angels: 28–29, 34–36 The Afterlife: 38, 40, 43 The Continuous Life: 52, 54–56 The Country Without a Post Office: 66–70 The Darkling Thrush: 73, 75–77, 79, 83–86, 89–90 Duration: 94–96, 100–101 The Garden Shukkei-en: 108, 110, 112 The Greatest Grandeur: 127, 129 Midnight Verses: 147–148, 150–151, 154–156, 159 New Rule: 163, 166, 168 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 198–199, 201, 203–205 Temple Bells Die Out: 214–215 Imagination The Afterlife: 44–45 Impatience 60: 3–5 Innocence 60: 5 Irony The Afterlife: 46–47 The Darkling Thrush: 82, 84–88 Song of Reasons: 180–182, 184, 192–195 To an Unknown Poet: 230–232
Islamism The Country Without a Post Office: 65–68
J Judaism Song of Reasons: 178, 180–182
K Kindness Spring-Watching Pavilion: 198–201 Knowledge The Greatest Grandeur: 124 New Rule: 169–170 Temple Bells Die Out: 211
L Landscape 60: 3–6, 9–10 Address to the Angels: 33–34, 36–37 The Continuous Life: 58–59 The Darkling Thrush: 73, 75–78, 82–83, 85–86 Duration: 94–96, 98 The Garden Shukkei-en: 106, 108, 110, 113, 115–117 The Greatest Grandeur: 118, 120–122, 125–127, 129 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 198–201, 203 Language and Meaning The Garden Shukkei-en: 109 Midnight Verses: 150 Literary Criticism Duration: 99 Temple Bells Die Out: 214–215 To an Unknown Poet: 239 Loneliness Address to the Angels: 33–34, 36 Midnight Verses: 156–158 New Rule: 166–167 Love and Passion 60: 11–12 Address to the Angels: 30 The Continuous Life: 50, 52–55 Duration: 101–104 The Last Question: 130–135, 137–145 Midnight Verses: 147–151, 153, 159–161 New Rule: 163, 165–168, 170, 172–173, 175 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 199–200, 204–207 To an Unknown Poet: 224–225, 228–229, 231–238
P o e t r y
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Loyalty To an Unknown Poet: 229–230, 233
M Making Connections Song of Reasons: 182 Marriage To an Unknown Poet: 228, 232 Meaning of Life The Afterlife: 42 The Continuous Life: 54 Memory The Garden Shukkei-en: 110 Memory and Reminiscence The Garden Shukkei-en: 108–110, 112 Middle East 60: 2, 6–7, 9–10 The Country Without a Post Office: 66–68, 71 Song of Reasons: 183 Modernism The Darkling Thrush: 79 Monologue To an Unknown Poet: 230–231 Mortality 60: 5 Music 60: 10–11 The Afterlife: 48 The Darkling Thrush: 73, 75–76, 81–90 The Garden Shukkei-en: 111–112 The Last Question: 135–136, 143–145 Midnight Verses: 149–151 Song of Reasons: 178–183, 185–188, 190–191, 193–195 Myths and Legends Address to the Angels: 20, 22–23 The Afterlife: 41 To an Unknown Poet: 234, 237–238
N Narration The Continuous Life: 52, 55–60 The Country Without a Post Office: 70–72 The Garden Shukkei-en: 109–110, 114–117 The Greatest Grandeur: 123 The Last Question: 139–140 New Rule: 172–176 To an Unknown Poet: 224–225, 228–229, 231 Nature 60: 9 Address to the Angels: 20, 23–24, 29, 31–32, 35–37
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The Darkling Thrush: 73, 75–82, 84–89 Duration: 92, 94–101, 103 The Garden Shukkei-en: 110 The Greatest Grandeur: 118, 120, 122, 124–127, 129 Midnight Verses: 148, 150 New Rule: 167 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 197–201 Temple Bells Die Out: 211 To an Unknown Poet: 234–237 Nature and Its Meaning The Greatest Grandeur: 122 Nature Versus the Human World Spring-Watching Pavilion: 200 1920s The Last Question: 130, 133, 135, 137 1970s Address to the Angels: 23–24 1980s The Garden Shukkei-en: 111–112 Song of Reasons: 182–184 Nirvana Spring-Watching Pavilion: 200 North America The Continuous Life: 54–55 Duration: 92, 97–98 The Garden Shukkei-en: 108, 111–112 Midnight Verses: 152–153 New Rule: 163, 169–170 Nuclear War The Garden Shukkei-en: 106, 108, 111–117
O Organized Religion Spring-Watching Pavilion: 200
P Painting The Continuous Life: 58–59 Passivity The Last Question: 132–133 Perception Temple Bells Die Out: 215, 217–218 Permanence 60: 4–5, 9–10 Song of Reasons: 182–184 Persecution The Garden Shukkei-en: 108–109, 111–117 Perseverance The Greatest Grandeur: 120, 123–124 Personal Identity The Darkling Thrush: 82–83, 85–86
a n d
N o n s e n s e
Personification 60: 14–15 The Darkling Thrush: 73, 75, 77 Midnight Verses: 149–150 New Rule: 165, 168 Poetry 60: 1–15 Address to the Angels: 18–37 The Afterlife: 38, 40–49 The Continuous Life: 50, 52–61 The Country Without a Post Office: 63, 65–72 The Darkling Thrush: 73, 75–90 Duration: 92, 94–104 The Garden Shukkei-en: 106–117 The Greatest Grandeur: 118, 120–129 The Last Question: 130–135, 137–145 Midnight Verses: 147–161 New Rule: 163–168, 170–177 Song of Reasons: 178–182, 184–195 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 197–208 Temple Bells Die Out: 209–219 To an Unknown Poet: 220, 222–239 Point of View The Country Without a Post Office: 71 The Garden Shukkei-en: 113–114 Midnight Verses: 151–152 Politicians Song of Reasons: 183 Politics 60: 6–7 Address to the Angels: 23–24 Duration: 97–98 The Garden Shukkei-en: 114–115 Midnight Verses: 147, 152–153 Song of Reasons: 180, 183–184, 189–191 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 198, 202–203 To an Unknown Poet: 234–236 Postcolonialism The Country Without a Post Office: 67 Postmodernism The Afterlife: 46–47 Privilege and Entitlement To an Unknown Poet: 223 Prose Poetry 60: 3, 6 Psychology and the Human Mind The Country Without a Post Office: 68 The Garden Shukkei-en: 110
R Reasons and Nonsense Song of Reasons: 181
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R e c i p r o c i t y
Reciprocity The Last Question: 133 Reconciliation Midnight Verses: 151 Relationships New Rule: 167 Religion The Afterlife: 41 Temple Bells Die Out: 211 Religion and Religious Thought 60: 1, 4, 6–8 Address to the Angels: 18, 22, 24–26, 28–29, 32 The Afterlife: 38, 40–46 The Greatest Grandeur: 118, 122–125, 127 Song of Reasons: 180, 182–184, 193–195 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 197–202, 207–208 Temple Bells Die Out: 211 Religious Faith Versus Human Will Address to the Angels: 22
S Satire Song of Reasons: 187–188 Science and Technology The Greatest Grandeur: 120, 122, 124–125 The Last Question: 135–136 New Rule: 169 Search for Meaning The Darkling Thrush: 76 Seeking Guidance From Nature New Rule: 167 Setting The Darkling Thrush: 89–90 New Rule: 163–165, 167–168
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Sin The Garden Shukkei-en: 106, 109–110 Soothsayer Duration: 101–102 Soul Address to the Angels: 34–37 The Darkling Thrush: 84–85 Spirituality The Country Without a Post Office: 69–70 The Greatest Grandeur: 118, 122–123, 125 Sports and the Sporting Life Address to the Angels: 29, 31–32 Starting Over New Rule: 167 Storms and Weather Conditions 60: 5–7 Address to the Angels: 33–34, 36–37 The Country Without a Post Office: 69–70 The Darkling Thrush: 82, 86 Duration: 94–97, 101–103 New Rule: 164–165, 168–170 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 198–201 Structure 60: 9–10 The Garden Shukkei-en: 107, 110, 112 The Greatest Grandeur: 120, 123 New Rule: 171–172 Song of Reasons: 191 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 199, 201, 203–204 The Sublime The Continuous Life: 61 Surrealism Duration: 99, 103–104 Synchronicity Duration: 96
T Time and Change 60: 3–4, 8 Tone The Afterlife: 42–43 The Continuous Life: 50, 52, 54 The Darkling Thrush: 75, 77 The Garden Shukkei-en: 108, 112 The Last Question: 130, 132–133
U Ugliness The Country Without a Post Office: 67–69 Understanding Temple Bells Die Out: 215–216, 218 Unity 60: 6
W War The Garden Shukkei-en: 109 War, the Military, and Soldier Life 60: 1, 7–8 The Continuous Life: 54–55 The Country Without a Post Office: 66–68 The Darkling Thrush: 77–78, 80 The Garden Shukkei-en: 106, 108–117 Spring-Watching Pavilion: 198–199, 202 Wildlife Address to the Angels: 18, 20, 22–24 The Darkling Thrush: 75–76, 78–79, 82–88 The Greatest Grandeur: 120, 122 New Rule: 163, 165–168, 170–175
P o e t r y
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Cumulative Index of First Lines A A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,— (The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket) V6:158 “A cold coming we had of it (Journey of the Magi) V7:110 A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck (The Cobweb) V17:50 A gentle spring evening arrives (Spring-Watching Pavilion) V18:198 A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands, (Cavalry Crossing a Ford) V13:50 A narrow Fellow in the grass (A Narrow Fellow in the Grass) V11:127 A pine box for me. I mean it. (Last Request) V14: 231 A poem should be palpable and mute (Ars Poetica) V5:2 A stone from the depths that has witnessed the seas drying up (Song of a Citizen) V16:125 A tourist came in from Orbitville, (Southbound on the Freeway) V16:158 A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt (A Far Cry from Africa) V6:60 a woman precedes me up the long rope, (Climbing) V14:113 About me the night moonless wimples the mountains (Vancouver Lights) V8:245 About suffering they were never wrong (Musée des Beaux Arts) V1:148 Across Roblin Lake, two shores away, (Wilderness Gothic) V12:241 After you finish your work (Ballad of Orange and Grape) V10:17 Again I’ve returned to this country (The Country Without a Post Office) V18:64 “Ah, are you digging on my grave (Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?) V4:2 All Greece hates (Helen) V6:92 All night long the hockey pictures (To a Sad Daughter) V8:230
All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding (Names of Horses) V8:141 Also Ulysses once—that other war. (Kilroy) V14:213 Anasazi (Anasazi) V9:2 And God stepped out on space (The Creation) V1:19 Animal bones and some mossy tent rings (Lament for the Dorsets) V5:190 As I perceive (The Gold Lily) V5:127 As I walked out one evening (As I Walked Out One Evening) V4:15 As virtuous men pass mildly away (A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning) V11:201 At noon in the desert a panting lizard (At the Bomb Testing Site) V8:2 Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! (Old Ironsides) V9:172
B Back then, before we came (On Freedom’s Ground) V12:186 Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root (The Tropics in New York) V4:255 Because I could not stop for Death— (Because I Could Not Stop for Death) V2:27 Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? (Leda and the Swan) V13:182 Bent double, like old beggars under slacks, (Dulce et Decorum Est) V10:109 Between my finger and my thumb (Digging) V5:70 Beware of ruins: they have a treacherous charm (Beware of Ruins) V8:43 Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art— (Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art) V9:44 By the rude bridge that arched the flood (Concord Hymn) V4:30 By way of a vanished bridge we cross this river (The Garden Shukkei-en) V18:107
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C e l e s t i a l
c h o i r !
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C Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light, (To His Excellency General Washington V13:212 Come with me into those things that have felt his despair for so long— (Come with Me) V6:31 Complacencies of the peignoir, and late (Sunday Morning) V16:189 Composed in the Tower, before his execution (“More Light! More Light!”) V6:119
D Darkened by time, the masters, like our memories, mix (Black Zodiac) V10:46 Death, be not proud, though some have called thee (Holy Sonnet 10) V2:103 Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws (Sonnet 19) V9:210 Do not go gentle into that good night (Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night) V1:51 Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind (War Is Kind) V9:252 Don Arturo says: (Business) V16:2 (Dumb, (A Grafted Tongue) V12:92
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He clasps the crag with crooked hands (The Eagle) V11:30 He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be (The Unknown Citizen) V3:302 Hear the sledges with the bells— (The Bells) V3:46 Her body is not so white as (Queen-Ann’s-Lace) V6:179 Her eyes were coins of porter and her West (A Farewell to English) V10:126 Here they are. The soft eyes open (The Heaven of Animals) V6:75 Hog Butcher for the World (Chicago) V3:61 Hold fast to dreams (Dream Variations) V15:42 Hope is a tattered flag and a dream out of time. (Hope is a Tattered Flag) V12:120 “Hope” is the thing with feathers— (Hope Is the Thing with Feathers) V3:123 How do I love thee? Let me count the ways (Sonnet 43) V2:236 How shall we adorn (Angle of Geese) V2:2 How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, (On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three) V17:159 How would it be if you took yourself off (Landscape with Tractor) V10:182 Hunger crawls into you (Hunger in New York City) V4:79
E
I
Each day the shadow swings (In the Land of Shinar) V7:83 Each night she waits by the road (Bidwell Ghost) V14:2
I am not a painter, I am a poet (Why I Am Not a Painter) V8:258 I am the Smoke King (The Song of the Smoke) V13:196 I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions (Mirror) V1:116 I am trying to pry open your casket (Dear Reader) V10:85 I became a creature of light (The Mystery) V15:137 I cannot love the Brothers Wright (Reactionary Essay on Applied Science) V9:199 I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, (I felt a Funeral in my Brain) V13:137 I have just come down from my father (The Hospital Window) V11:58 I have met them at close of day (Easter 1916) V5:91 I haven’t the heart to say (To an Unknown Poet) V18:221 I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear (I Hear America Singing) V3:152 I heard a Fly buzz—when I died— (I Heard a Fly Buzz— When I Died—) V5:140 I know that I shall meet my fate (An Irish Airman Foresees His Death) V1:76 I leant upon a coppice gate (The Darkling Thrush) V18:74 I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over. (Wild Swans) V17:221 I prove a theorem and the house expands: (Geometry) V15:68 I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, (I go Back to May 1937) V17:112 I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed (Hawk Roosting) V4:55 I’m delighted to see you (The Constellation Orion) V8:53 I’ve known rivers; (The Negro Speaks of Rivers) V10:197 I was sitting in mcsorley’s. outside it was New York and beautifully snowing. (i was sitting in mcsorley’s) V13:151
F Falling upon earth (Falling Upon Earth) V2:64 Five years have past; five summers, with the length (Tintern Abbey) V2:249 Flesh is heretic. (Anorexic) V12:2 For three years, out of key with his time, (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) V16:26 Forgive me for thinking I saw (For a New Citizen of These United States) V15:55 From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State (The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner) V2:41
G Gardener: Sir, I encountered Death (Incident in a Rose Garden) V14:190 Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may, (To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time ) V13:226 Go down, Moses (Go Down, Moses) V11:42 Gray mist wolf (Four Mountain Wolves) V9:131
H “Had he and I but met (The Man He Killed) V3:167 Had we but world enough, and time (To His Coy Mistress) V5:276 Half a league, half a league (The Charge of the Light Brigade) V1:2 Having a Coke with You (Having a Coke with You) V12:105
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O n c e
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I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, (The Lake Isle of Innisfree) V15:121 If all the world and love were young, (The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepard) V14:241 If ever two were one, then surely we (To My Dear and Loving Husband) V6:228 If I should die, think only this of me (The Soldier) V7:218 “Imagine being the first to say: surveillance,” (Inventors) V7:97 In 1936, a child (Blood Oranges) V13:34 In a while they rose and went out aimlessly riding, (Merlin Enthralled) V16:72 In China (Lost Sister) V5:216 In ethics class so many years ago (Ethics) V8:88 In Flanders fields the poppies blow (In Flanders Fields) V5:155 In India in their lives they happen (Ways to Live) V16:228 In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, (The Rhodora) V17:191 In the groves of Africa from their natural wonder (An African Elegy) V13:3 In the Shreve High football stadium (Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio) V8:17 In Xanadu did Kubla Khan (Kubla Khan) V5:172 Ink runs from the corners of my mouth (Eating Poetry) V9:60 It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted. (Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter) V17:63 It is an ancient Mariner (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) V4:127 It is in the small things we see it. (Courage) V14:125 It little profits that an idle king (Ulysses) V2:278 It looked extremely rocky for the Mudville nine that day (Casey at the Bat) V5:57 It seems vainglorious and proud (The Conquerors) V13:67 It was in and about the Martinmas time (Barbara Allan) V7:10 It was many and many a year ago (Annabel Lee) V9:14 Its quick soft silver bell beating, beating (Auto Wreck) V3:31
J Januaries, Nature greets our eyes (Brazil, January 1, 1502) V6:15 Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota (A Blessing) V7:24 just once (For the White poets who would be Indian) V13:112
L l(a (l(a) V1:85 Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet 116) V3:288 Listen, my children, and you shall hear (Paul Revere’s Ride) V2:178 Little Lamb, who made thee? (The Lamb) V12:134 Long long ago when the world was a wild place (Bedtime Story) V8:32
V o l u m e
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w e r e
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M maggie and milly and molly and may (maggie & milly & molly & may) V12:149 Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table (The Death of the Hired Man) V4:42 Men with picked voices chant the names (Overture to a Dance of Locomotives) V11:143 “Mother dear, may I go downtown (Ballad of Birmingham) V5:17 Much Madness is divinest Sense— (Much Madness is Divinest Sense) V16:86 My black face fades (Facing It) V5:109 My father stands in the warm evening (Starlight) V8:213 My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains (Ode to a Nightingale) V3:228 My heart is like a singing bird (A Birthday) V10:33 My life closed twice before its close— (My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close) V8:127 My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130) V1:247 My uncle in East Germany (The Exhibit) V9:107
N Nature’s first green is gold (Nothing Gold Can Stay) V3:203 No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness (The Weight of Sweetness) V11:230 Nobody heard him, the dead man (Not Waving but Drowning) V3:216 Not marble nor the gilded monuments (Sonnet 55) V5:246 Not the memorized phone numbers. (What Belongs to Us) V15:196 Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs (Fern Hill) V3:92 Now as I watch the progress of the plague (The Missing) V9:158
O O Captain! my Captain, our fearful trip is done (O Captain! My Captain!) V2:146 O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens (Psalm 8) V9:182 O my Luve’s like a red, red rose (A Red, Red Rose) V8:152 O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, (La Belle Dame sans Merci) V17:18 “O where ha’ you been, Lord Randal, my son? (Lord Randal) V6:105 O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being (Ode to the West Wind) V2:163 Oh, but it is dirty! (Filling Station) V12:57 old age sticks (old age sticks) V3:246 On either side the river lie (The Lady of Shalott) V15:95 On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. The infinite (60) V18:3 Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary (The Raven) V1:200 Once some people were visiting Chekhov (Chocolates) V11:17
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O n e
d a y
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l i f t
t h e
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One day I’ll lift the telephone (Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead) V14:154 One foot down, then hop! It’s hot (Harlem Hopscotch) V2:93 one shoe on the roadway presents (A Piéd) V3:16 Out of the hills of Habersham, (Song of the Chattahoochee) V14:283 Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day (The Wood-Pile) V6:251 Oysters we ate (Oysters) V4:91
P Pentagon code (Smart and Final Iris) V15:183 Poised between going on and back, pulled (The Base Stealer) V12:30
Q Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir (Cargoes) V5:44
R Red men embraced my body’s whiteness (Birch Canoe) V5:31 Remember me when I am gone away (Remember) V14:255
S Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day? (Sonnet 18) V2:222 She came every morning to draw water (A Drink of Water) V8:66 She sang beyond the genius of the sea. (The Idea of Order at Key West) V13:164 She walks in beauty, like the night (She Walks in Beauty) V14:268 Side by side, their faces blurred, (An Arundel Tomb) V12:17 Since the professional wars— (Midnight) V2:130 S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) V1:97 Sky black (Duration) V18:93 Sleepless as Prospero back in his bedroom (Darwin in 1881) V13:83 so much depends (The Red Wheelbarrow) V1:219 So the man spread his blanket on the field (A Tall Man Executes a Jig) V12:228 So the sky wounded you, jagged at the heart, (Daylights) V13:101 Softly, in the dark, a woman is singing to me (Piano) V6:145 Some say it’s in the reptilian dance (The Greatest Grandeur) V18:119 Some say the world will end in fire (Fire and Ice) V7:57 Something there is that doesn’t love a wall (Mending Wall) V5:231 Sometimes walking late at night (Butcher Shop) V7:43 Sometimes, a lion with a prophet’s beard (For An Assyrian Frieze) V9:120 Sometimes, in the middle of the lesson (Music Lessons) V8:117
2 8 2
South of the bridge on Seventeenth (Fifteen) V2:78 Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, (Funeral Blues) V10:139 Strong Men, riding horses. In the West (Strong Men, Riding Horses) V4:209 Such places are too still for history, (Deep Woods) V14:138 Sundays too my father got up early (Those Winter Sundays) V1:300 Swing low sweet chariot (Swing Low Sweet Chariot) V1:283
T Take heart, monsieur, four-fifths of this province (For Jean Vincent D’abbadie, Baron St.-Castin) V12:78 Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean (Tears, Idle Tears) V4:220 Tell me not, in mournful numbers (A Psalm of Life) V7:165 Temple bells die out. (Temple Bells Die Out) V18:210 That is no country for old men. The young (Sailing to Byzantium) V2:207 That time of drought the embered air (Drought Year) V8:78 That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall (My Last Duchess) V1:165 The apparition of these faces in the crowd (In a Station of the Metro) V2:116 The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold (The Destruction of Sennacherib) V1:38 The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder (Hurt Hawks) V3:138 The bud (Saint Francis and the Sow) V9:222 The Bustle in a House (The Bustle in a House) V10:62 The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard (Out, Out—) V10:212 The courage that my mother had (The Courage that My Mother Had) V3:79 The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day (Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard) V9:73 The force that through the green fuse drives the flower (The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower) V8:101 The green lamp flares on the table (This Life) V1:293 The ills I sorrow at (Any Human to Another) V3:2 The instructor said (Theme for English B) V6:194 The king sits in Dumferling toune (Sir Patrick Spens) V4:177 The land was overmuch like scenery (Beowulf) V11:2 The last time I saw it was 1968. (The Hiding Place) V10:152 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want (Psalm 23) V4:103 The man who sold his lawn to standard oil (The War Against the Trees) V11:215 The moon glows the same (The Moon Glows the Same) V7:152 The old South Boston Aquarium stands (For the Union Dead) V7:67 The others bent their heads and started in (“Trouble with Math in a One-Room Country School”) V9:238 The pale nuns of St. Joseph are here (Island of Three Marias) V11:79
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
W h y
The Phoenix comes of flame and dust (The Phoenix) V10:226 The rain set early in to-night: (Porphyria’s Lover) V15:151 The river brought down (How We Heard the Name) V10:167 The rusty spigot (Onomatopoeia) V6:133 The sea is calm tonight (Dover Beach) V2:52 The sea sounds insincere (The Milkfish Gatherers) V11:111 The slow overture of rain, (Mind) V17:145 The Soul selects her own Society—(The Soul Selects Her Own Society) V1:259 The time you won your town the race (To an Athlete Dying Young) V7:230 The way sorrow enters the bone (The Blue Rim of Memory) V17:38 The whiskey on your breath (My Papa’s Waltz) V3:191 The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees (The Highwayman) V4:66 There are strange things done in the midnight sun (The Cremation of Sam McGee) V10:75 There have been rooms for such a short time (The Horizons of Rooms) V15:79 There is the one song everyone (Siren Song) V7:196 There’s a Certain Slant of Light (There’s a Certain Slant of Light) V6:211 There’s no way out. (In the Suburbs) V14:201 There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, (There Will Come Soft Rains) V14:301 These open years, the river (For Jennifer, 6, on the Teton) V17:86 They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair (The Bean Eaters) V2:16 they were just meant as covers (My Mother Pieced Quilts) V12:169 They said, “Wait.” Well, I waited. (Alabama Centennial) V10:2 This girlchild was: born as usual (Barbie Doll) V9:33 This is my letter to the World (This Is My Letter to the World) V4:233 This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling, (The Arsenal at Springfield) V17:2 This is the black sea-brute bulling through wave-wrack (Leviathan) V5:203 This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level (Paradoxes and Oxymorons) V11:162 This tale is true, and mine. It tells (The Seafarer) V8:177 Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness (Ode on a Grecian Urn) V1:179 Three times my life has opened. (Three Times My Life Has Opened) V16:213 to fold the clothes. No matter who lives (I Stop Writimg the Poem) V16:58 Tonight I can write the saddest lines (Tonight I Can Write) V11:187 tonite, thriller was (Beware: Do Not Read This Poem) V6:3 Turning and turning in the widening gyre (The Second Coming) V7:179 ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves (Jabberwocky) V11:91 Two roads diverged in a yellow wood (The Road Not Taken) V2:195 Tyger! Tyger! burning bright (The Tyger) V2:263
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t o a d
w o r k
W wade (The Fish) V14:171 Wanting to say things, (My Father’s Song) V16:102 We could be here. This is the valley (Small Town with One Road) V7:207 We met the British in the dead of winter (Meeting the British) V7:138 We real cool. We (We Real Cool) V6:242 Well, son, I’ll tell you (Mother to Son) V3:178 What dire offense from amorous causes springs, (The Rape of the Lock) V12:202 What happens to a dream deferred? (Harlem) V1:63 What of the neighborhood homes awash (The Continuous Life) V18:51 What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon (A Supermarket in California) V5:261 Whatever it is, it must have (American Poetry) V7:2 When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads, and the assassin . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs (Cool Tombs) V6:45 When I consider how my light is spent ([On His Blindness] Sonnet 16) V3:262 When I have fears that I may cease to be (When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be) V2:295 When I see a couple of kids (High Windows) V3:108 When I see birches bend to left and right (Birches) V13:14 When I was born, you waited (Having it Out with Melancholy) V17:98 When I was one-and-twenty (When I Was One-andTwenty) V4:268 When I watch you (Miss Rosie) V1:133 When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes (Sonnet 29) V8:198 When the mountains of Puerto Rico (We Live by What We See at Night) V13:240 When the world was created wasn’t it like this? (Anniversary) V15:2 When they said Carrickfergus I could hear (The Singer’s House) V17:205 Whenever Richard Cory went down town (Richard Cory) V4:116 While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead (The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter) V8:164 While the long grain is softening (Early in the Morning) V17:75 While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire (Shine, Perishing Republic) V4:161 While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth, (The Afterlife) V18:39 Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston? (In Memory of Radio) V9:144 Whose woods these are I think I know (Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening) V1:272 Why should I let the toad work (Toads) V4:244
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Y o u
a r e
s m a l l
a n d
i n t e n s e
Y You are small and intense (To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly) V11:173 You do not have to be good. (Wild Geese) V15:207 You were never told, Mother, how old Illya was drunk (The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter) V12:44
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P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
Cumulative Index of Last Lines A A heart whose love is innocent! (She Walks in Beauty) V14:268 a man then suddenly stops running (Island of Three Marias) V11:80 A perfect evening! (Temple Bells Die Out) V18:210 a space in the lives of their friends (Beware: Do Not Read This Poem) V6:3 A sudden blow: the great wings beating still (Leda and the Swan) V13:181 A terrible beauty is born (Easter 1916) V5:91 About my big, new, automatically defrosting refrigerator with the built-in electric eye (Reactionary Essay on Applied Science) V9:199 about the tall mounds of termites. (Song of a Citizen) V16:126 Across the expedient and wicked stones (Auto Wreck) V3:31 Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? (A Supermarket in California) V5:261 All losses are restored and sorrows end (Sonnet 30) V4:192 Amen. Amen (The Creation) V1:20 Anasazi (Anasazi) V9:3 and all beyond saving by children (Ethics) V8:88 and all the richer for it. (Mind) V17:146 And all we need of hell (My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close) V8:127 and changed, back to the class (“Trouble with Math in a One-Room Country School”) V9:238 And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die (Holy Sonnet 10) V2:103 And drunk the milk of Paradise (Kubla Khan) V5:172 And Finished knowing—then— (I Felt a Funeral in My Brain) V13:137
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies (Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio) V8:17 and go back. (For the White poets who would be Indian) V13:112 And handled with a Chain—(Much Madness is Divinest Sense) V16:86 And has not begun to grow a manly smile. (Deep Woods) V14:139 And his own Word (The Phoenix) V10:226 And I am Nicholas. (The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter) V12:45 And I was unaware. (The Darkling Thrush) V18:74 And in the suburbs Can’t sat down and cried. (Kilroy) V14:213 And it’s been years. (Anniversary) V15:3 And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair (Mother to Son) V3:179 And like a thunderbolt he falls (The Eagle) V11:30 And makes me end where I begun (A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning) V11:202 And ‘midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name. (The Rape of the Lock) V12:209 And miles to go before I sleep (Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening) V1:272 and my father saying things. (My Father’s Song) V16:102 And no birds sing. (La Belle Dame sans Merci) V17:18 And not waving but drowning (Not Waving but Drowning) V3:216 And oh, ‘tis true, ‘tis true (When I Was One-and-Twenty) V4:268 And reach for your scalping knife. (For Jean Vincent D’abbadie, Baron St.-Castin) V12:78 and retreating, always retreating, behind it (Brazil, January 1, 1502) V6:16 And settled upon his eyes in a black soot (“More Light! More Light!”) V6:120 And shuts his eyes. (Darwin in 1881) V13: 84
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A n d
s o
l i v e
e v e r — o r
e l s e
And so live ever—or else swoon to death (Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art) V9:44 and strange and loud was the dingoes’ cry (Drought Year) V8:78 and stride out. (Courage) V14:126 and sweat and fat and greed. (Anorexic) V12:3 And that has made all the difference (The Road Not Taken) V2:195 And the deep river ran on (As I Walked Out One Evening) V4:16 And the midnight message of Paul Revere (Paul Revere’s Ride) V2:180 And the mome raths outgrabe (Jabberwocky) V11:91 And the Salvation Army singing God loves us. . . . (Hope is a Tattered Flag) V12:120 and these the last verses that I write for her (Tonight I Can Write) V11:187 And those roads in South Dakota that feel around in the darkness . . . (Come with Me) V6:31 and to know she will stay in the field till you die? (Landscape with Tractor) V10:183 and two blankets embroidered with smallpox (Meeting the British) V7:138 and waving, shouting, Welcome back. (Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead) V14:154 And would suffice (Fire and Ice) V7:57 And yet God has not said a word! (Porphyria’s Lover) V15:151 and you spread un the thin halo of night mist. (Ways to Live) V16:229 And Zero at the Bone— (A Narrow Fellow in the Grass) V11:127 (answer with a tower of birds) (Duration) V18:93 As any She belied with false compare (Sonnet 130) V1:248 As ever in my great Task-Master’s eye. (On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three) V17:160 As far as Cho-fu-Sa (The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter) V8:165 As the contagion of those molten eyes (For An Assyrian Frieze) V9:120 As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and clothes, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes (The Bean Eaters) V2:16 aspired to become lighter than air (Blood Oranges) V13:34 at home in the fish’s fallen heaven (Birch Canoe) V5:31
B Back to the play of constant give and change (The Missing) V9:158 Before it was quite unsheathed from reality (Hurt Hawks) V3:138 Black like me. (Dream Variations) V15:42 Bless me (Hunger in New York City) V4:79 But be (Ars Poetica) V5:3 but it works every time (Siren Song) V7:196 But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has “Struck Out.” (Casey at the Bat) V5:58 But, baby, where are you?” (Ballad of Birmingham) V5:17 But we hold our course, and the wind is with us. (On Freedom’s Ground) V12:187 by good fortune (The Horizons of Rooms) V15:80
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s w o o n
t o
d e a t h
C Calls through the valleys of Hall. (Song of the Chattahoochee) V14:284 chickens (The Red Wheelbarrow) V1:219 clear water dashes (Onomatopoeia) V6:133 come to life and burn? (Bidwell Ghost) V14:2 Comin’ for to carry me home (Swing Low Sweet Chariot) V1:284
D Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? (The Tyger) V2:263 “Dead,” was all he answered (The Death of the Hired Man) V4:44 deep in the deepest one, tributaries burn. (For Jennifer, 6, on the Teton) V17:86 Delicate, delicate, delicate, delicate—now! (The Base Stealer) V12:30 Die soon (We Real Cool) V6:242 Do what you are going to do, I will tell about it. (I go Back to May 1937) V17:113 Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past (Piano) V6:145 Downward to darkness, on extended wings. (Sunday Morning) V16:190 Driving around, I will waste more time. (Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter) V17:63 dry wells that fill so easily now (The Exhibit) V9:107
E endless worlds is the great meeting of children. (60) V18:3 Eternal, unchanging creator of earth. Amen (The Seafarer) V8:178 every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow. (The Afterlife) V18:39
F fall upon us, the dwellers in shadow (In the Land of Shinar) V7:84 Fallen cold and dead (O Captain! My Captain!) V2:147 filled, never. (The Greatest Grandeur) V18:119 Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays (Cargoes) V5:44 Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? (Ode to a Nightingale) V3:229 For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.” (Lord Randal) V6:105 For nothing now can ever come to any good. (Funeral Blues) V10:139 forget me as fast as you can. (Last Request) V14:231
H Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard (The Unknown Citizen) V3:303 Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on (Mus‚e des Beaux Arts) V1:148 half eaten by the moon. (Dear Reader) V10:85 hand over hungry hand. (Climbing) V14:113 Happen on a red tongue (Small Town with One Road) V7:207
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
N o t h i n g
g o l d
c a n
s t a y
Has no more need of, and I have (The Courage that My Mother Had) V3:80 Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord! (The Destruction of Sennacherib) V1:39 He rose the morrow morn (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) V4:132 He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.” (Mending Wall) V5:232 Has set me softly down beside you. The Poem is you (Paradoxes and Oxymorons) V11:162 How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm (The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower) V8:101 How can I turn from Africa and live? (A Far Cry from Africa) V6:61 How sad then is even the marvelous! (An Africian Elegy) V13:4
Is Come, my love is come to me. (A Birthday) V10:34 is still warm (Lament for the Dorsets) V5:191 It asked a crumb—of Me (Hope Is the Thing with Feathers) V3:123 it is the bell to awaken God that we’ve heard ringing. (The Garden Shukkei-en) V18:107 It rains as I write this. Mad heart, be brave. (The Country Without a Post Office) V18:64 It was your resting place.” (Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?) V4:2 it’s always ourselves we find in the sea (maggie & milly & molly & may) V12:150 its bright, unequivocal eye. (Having it Out with Melancholy) V17:99 its youth. The sea grows old in it. (The Fish) V14:172
I
Judge tenderly—of Me (This Is My Letter to the World) V4:233 Just imagine it (Inventors) V7:97
I I I I
am black. (The Song of the Smoke) V13:197 am going to keep things like this (Hawk Roosting) V4:55 am not brave at all (Strong Men, Riding Horses) V4:209 could not see to see— (I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died—) V5:140 I have just come down from my father (The Hospital Window) V11:58 I cremated Sam McGee (The Cremation of Sam McGee) V10:76 I hear it in the deep heart’s core. (The Lake Isle of Innisfree) V15:121 I never writ, nor no man ever loved (Sonnet 116) V3:288 I romp with joy in the bookish dark (Eating Poetry) V9:61 I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES (Why I Am Not a Painter) V8:259 I shall but love thee better after death (Sonnet 43) V2:236 I should be glad of another death (Journey of the Magi) V7:110 I stand up (Miss Rosie) V1:133 I stood there, fifteen (Fifteen) V2:78 I take it you are he? (Incident in a Rose Garden) V14:191 I turned aside and bowed my head and wept (The Tropics in New York) V4:255 I’ll be gone from here. (The Cobweb) V17:51 I’ll dig with it (Digging) V5:71 If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? (Ode to the West Wind) V2:163 In a convulsive misery (The Milkfish Gatherers) V11:112 In balance with this life, this death (An Irish Airman Foresees His Death) V1:76 In Flanders fields (In Flanders Fields) V5:155 In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. (The Idea of Order at Key West) V13:164 In hearts at peace, under an English heaven (The Soldier) V7:218 In her tomb by the side of the sea (Annabel Lee) V9:14 in the family of things. (Wild Geese) V15:208 in the grit gray light of day. (Daylights) V13:102 In the rear-view mirrors of the passing cars (The War Against the Trees) V11:216 in this bastion of culture. (To an Unknown Poet) V18:221 iness (l(a) V1:85 Into blossom (A Blessing) V7:24
V o l u m e
1 8
J
L Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation (Chicago) V3:61 Learn to labor and to wait (A Psalm of Life) V7:165 Leashed in my throat (Midnight) V2:131 Let my people go (Go Down, Moses) V11:43 life, our life and its forgetting. (For a New Citizen of These United States) V15:55 Like Stone— (The Soul Selects Her Own Society) V1:259 Little Lamb, God bless thee. (The Lamb) V12:135
M ‘Make a wish, Tom, make a wish.’ (Drifters) V10: 98 make it seem to change (The Moon Glows the Same) V7:152 midnight-oiled in the metric laws? (A Farewell to English) V10:126 Monkey business (Business) V16:2 More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake! (Tintern Abbey) V2:250 My love shall in my verse ever live young (Sonnet 19) V9:211 My soul has grown deep like the rivers. (The Negro Speaks of Rivers) V10:198
N never to waken in that world again (Starlight) V8:213 Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten. (Spring-Watching Pavilion) V18:198 No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair (Facing It) V5:110 no—tell them no— (The Hiding Place) V10:153 Noble six hundred! (The Charge of the Light Brigade) V1:3 Not even the blisters. Look. (What Belongs to Us) V15:196 Nothing gold can stay (Nothing Gold Can Stay) V3:203
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N o t h i n g ,
a n d
i s
n o w h e r e ,
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless (High Windows) V3:108 Now! (Alabama Centennial) V10:2 nursing the tough skin of figs (This Life) V1:293
O O Death in Life, the days that are no more! (Tears, Idle Tears) V4:220 O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! (Psalm 8) V9:182 O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost (Names of Horses) V8:142 of gentleness (To a Sad Daughter) V8:231 of love’s austere and lonely offices? (Those Winter Sundays) V1:300 of peaches (The Weight of Sweetness) V11:230 Of the camellia (Falling Upon Earth) V2:64 Of the Creator. And he waits for the world to begin (Leviathan) V5:204 Of what is past, or passing, or to come (Sailing to Byzantium) V2:207 Old Ryan, not yours (The Constellation Orion) V8:53 On the dark distant flurry (Angle of Geese) V2:2 On the look of Death— (There’s a Certain Slant of Light) V6:212 On your head like a crown (Any Human to Another) V3:2 One could do worse that be a swinger of birches. (Birches) V13:15 Or does it explode? (Harlem) V1:63 Or help to half-a-crown.” (The Man He Killed) V3:167 or nothing (Queen-Ann’s-Lace) V6:179 or the one red leaf the snow releases in March. (Three Times My Life Has Opened) V16:213 ORANGE forever. (Ballad of Orange and Grape) V10:18 outside. (it was New York and beautifully, snowing . . . (i was sitting in mcsorley’s) V13:152 owing old (old age sticks) V3:246
P Perhaps he will fall. (Wilderness Gothic) V12:242 Petals on a wet, black bough (In a Station of the Metro) V2:116 Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair (The Highwayman) V4:68 Pro patria mori. (Dulce et Decorum Est) V10:110
R Rage, rage against the dying of the light (Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night) V1:51 Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear. (The Singer’s House) V17:206 Remember the Giver fading off the lip (A Drink of Water) V8:66 Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish (Mirror) V1:116
S Shall be lifted—nevermore! (The Raven) V1:202
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a n d
i s
e n d l e s s
Singing of him what they could understand (Beowulf) V11:3 Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs (I Hear America Singing) V3:152 slides by on grease (For the Union Dead) V7:67 Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (The Second Coming) V7:179 So long lives this, and this gives life to thee (Sonnet 18) V2:222 Somebody loves us all. (Filling Station) V12:57 Stand still, yet we will make him run (To His Coy Mistress) V5:277 startled into eternity (Four Mountain Wolves) V9:132 Still clinging to your shirt (My Papa’s Waltz) V3:192 Stood up, coiled above his head, transforming all. (A Tall Man Executes a Jig) V12:229 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever (Psalm 23) V4:103 syllables of an old order. (A Grafted Tongue) V12:93
T Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns . . . tell me if the lovers are losers . . . tell me if any get more than the lovers . . . in the dust . . . in the cool tombs (Cool Tombs) V6:46 Than that you should remember and be sad. (Remember) V14:255 That then I scorn to change my state with Kings (Sonnet 29) V8:198 That when we live no more, we may live ever (To My Dear and Loving Husband) V6:228 That’s the word. (Black Zodiac) V10:47 the bigger it gets. (Smart and Final Iris) V15:183 The bosom of his Father and his God (Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard) V9:74 The dance is sure (Overture to a Dance of Locomotives) V11:143 The eyes turn topaz. (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) V16:30 The garland briefer than a girl’s (To an Athlete Dying Young) V7:230 The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind. (Cavalry Crossing a Ford) V13:50 The hands gripped hard on the desert (At the Bomb Testing Site) V8:3 The holy melodies of love arise. (The Arsenal at Springfield) V17:3 the knife at the throat, the death in the metronome (Music Lessons) V8:117 The Lady of Shalott.” (The Lady of Shalott) V15:97 The lightning and the gale! (Old Ironsides) V9:172 the long, perfect loveliness of sow (Saint Francis and the Sow) V9:222 The Lord survives the rainbow of His will (The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket) V6:159 The man I was when I was part of it (Beware of Ruins) V8:43 the quilts sing on (My Mother Pieced Quilts) V12:169 The red rose and the brier (Barbara Allan) V7:11 The self-same Power that brought me there brought you. (The Rhodora) V17:191 The shaft we raise to them and thee (Concord Hymn) V4:30
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
y o u
The sky became a still and woven blue. (Merlin Enthralled) V16:73 The spirit of this place (To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly) V11:173 The town again, trailing your legs and crying! (Wild Swans) V17:221 the unremitting space of your rebellion (Lost Sister) V5:217 The woman won (Oysters) V4:91 their guts or their brains? (Southbound on the Freeway) V16:158 There is the trap that catches noblest spiritts, that caught—they say—God, when he walked on earth (Shine, Perishing Republic) V4:162 there was light (Vancouver Lights) V8:246 They also serve who only stand and wait.” ([On His Blindness] Sonnet 16) V3:262 They are going to some point true and unproven. (Geometry) V15:68 They rise, they walk again (The Heaven of Animals) V6:76 They think I lost. I think I won (Harlem Hopscotch) V2:93 This is my page for English B (Theme for English B) V6:194 This Love (In Memory of Radio) V9:145 Tho’ it were ten thousand mile! (A Red, Red Rose) V8:152 Though I sang in my chains like the sea (Fern Hill) V3:92 or the one red leaf the snow releases in March. (Three Times My Life Has Opened) V16:213 Till human voices wake us, and we drown (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) V1:99 Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink (When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be) V2:295 To every woman a happy ending (Barbie Doll) V9:33 to glow at midnight. (The Blue Rim of Memory) V17:39 to its owner or what horror has befallen the other shoe (A Piéd) V3:16 To live with thee and be thy love. (The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd) V14:241 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield (Ulysses) V2:279 To the moaning and the groaning of the bells (The Bells) V3:47 To the temple, singing. (In the Suburbs) V14:201
U Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond. (The Continuous Life) V18:51 Until Eternity. (The Bustle in a House) V10:62 unusual conservation (Chocolates) V11:17 Uttering cries that are almost human (American Poetry) V7:2
V o l u m e
1 8
w h o
r a i s e d
m e ?
W War is kind (War Is Kind) V9:253 watching to see how it’s done. (I Stop Writing the Poem) V16:58 Went home and put a bullet through his head (Richard Cory) V4:117 Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs. (Out, Out—) V10:213 Were toward Eternity— (Because I Could Not Stop for Death) V2:27 What will survive of us is love. (An Arundel Tomb) V12:18 When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose (The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner) V2:41 when they untie them in the evening. (Early in the Morning) V17:75 When you have both (Toads) V4:244 Where deep in the night I hear a voice (Butcher Shop) V7:43 Where ignorant armies clash by night (Dover Beach) V2:52 Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! (My Last Duchess) V1:166 which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it (Having a Coke with You) V12:106 white ash amid funereal cypresses (Helen) V6:92 Who are you and what is your purpose? (The Mystery) V15:138 Wi’ the Scots lords at his feit (Sir Patrick Spens) V4:177 Will hear of as a god.” (How we Heard the Name) V10:167 Wind, like the dodo’s (Bedtime Story) V8:33 With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine. (To His Excellency General Washington) V13:213 with my eyes closed. (We Live by What We See at Night) V13:240 With the slow smokeless burning of decay (The WoodPile) V6:252 With what they had to go on. (The Conquerors) V13:67 Would scarcely know that we were gone. (There Will Come Soft Rains) V14:301
Y Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know (Ode on a Grecian Urn) V1:180 You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes (Sonnet 55) V5:246 You may for ever tarry. (To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time) V13:226 you who raised me? (The Gold Lily) V5:127
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