Poetry for Students, Vol. 35

POETRY for Students Advisors Erik France: Adjunct Instructor of English, Macomb Community College, Warren, Michigan...

Author: Sara Constantakis | David J. Kelly

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POETRY

for Students

Advisors Erik France: Adjunct Instructor of English, Macomb Community College, Warren, Michigan. B.A. and M.S.L.S. from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Ph.D. from Temple University. Kate Hamill: Grade 12 English Teacher, Catonsville High School, Catonsville, Maryland. Joseph McGeary: English Teacher, Germantown Friends School, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ph.D. in English from Duke University. Timothy Showalter: English Department Chair, Franklin High School, Reisterstown, Maryland. Certified teacher by the Maryland State Department of Education. Member of the National Council of Teachers of English. Amy Spade Silverman: English Department Chair, Kehillah Jewish High School, Palo Alto, California. Member of National Council of

Teachers of English (NCTE), Teachers and Writers, and NCTE Opinion Panel. Exam Reader, Advanced Placement Literature and Composition. Poet, published in North American Review, Nimrod, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among other publications. Jody Stefansson: Director of Boswell Library and Study Center and Upper School Learning Specialist, Polytechnic School, Pasadena, California. Board member, Children’s Literature Council of Southern California. Member of American Library Association, Association of Independent School Librarians, and Association of Educational Therapists. Laura Jean Waters: Certified School Library Media Specialist, Wilton High School, Wilton, Connecticut. B.A. from Fordham University; M.A. from Fairfield University.

POETRY

for Students Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Poetry

VOLUME 35 Sara Constantakis, Project Editor Foreword by David J. Kelly

Poetry for Students, Volume 35 Project Editor: Sara Constantakis Rights Acquisition and Management: Margaret Chamberlain-Gaston, Kelly Quin, Aja Perales, Robyn Young Composition: Evi Abou-El-Seoud Manufacturing: Drew Kalasky Imaging: John Watkins Product Design: Pamela A. E. Galbreath, Jennifer Wahi Content Conversion: Katrina Coach Product Manager: Meggin Condino

ª 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all copyright notices, the acknowledgments constitute an extension of the copyright notice. For product information and technology assistance, contact us at Gale Customer Support, 1-800-877-4253. For permission to use material from this text or product, submit all requests online at www.cengage.com/permissions. Further permissions questions can be emailed to [email protected] While every effort has been made to ensure the reliability of the information presented in this publication, Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, does not guarantee the accuracy of the data contained herein. Gale accepts no payment for listing; and inclusion in the publication of any organization, agency, institution, publication, service, or individual does not imply endorsement of the editors or publisher. Errors brought to the attention of the publisher and verified to the satisfaction of the publisher will be corrected in future editions.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4144-4183-2 ISBN-10: 1-4144-4183-5 ISSN 1094-7019 This title is also available as an e-book. ISBN-13: 978-1-4144-4956-2 ISBN-10: 1-4144-4956-9 Contact your Gale, a part of Cengage Learning sales representative for ordering information.

Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 14 13 12 11 10

Table of Contents ADVISORS

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JUST A FEW LINES ON A PAGE (by David J. Kelly) . . . . . INTRODUCTION

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LITERARY CHRONOLOGY .

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CONTRIBUTORS .

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ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT (by Robert Frost). . . . . . .

Author Biography Poem Text . . . Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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BLACKBERRY EATING (by Galway Kinnell) .

Author Biography Poem Text . . . Poem Summary . Themes . . . .

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Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE (by Lord Byron) . . . . . . .


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THE DEAD (by Susan Mitchell) .


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I’M NOBODY! WHO ARE YOU? (by Emily Dickinson). . . . .


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IN MUSIC (by Czeslaw Milosz) .

Author Biography Poem Text . . . Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . .

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. 68 68 69 69 70 72 73 75 76 79 80

. 81 81 83 83 84 85 86 88 89 102 102 103 103 105 105 107 108 109 111 112

Sources . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . MINIVER CHEEVY (by Edwin Arlington Robinson).


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ODYSSEUS TO TELEMACHUS (by Joseph Brodsky) . . . . .


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145 145 146 147 147 149 150 152 153 167 167

OF MODERN POETRY (by Wallace Stevens) .

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Author Biography Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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RIVER OF AUGUST (by Pak Tu-Jin)

Author Biography Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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SEVEN AGES OF MAN (by William Shakespeare) .

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Poem Text . . . Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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235 236 237 237 238 240 241 242 243 256 256

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SONG (by John Donne).


SONNET LXXXIX (by Pablo Neruda) .


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UNCOILING (by Pat Mora) .

Author Biography Poem Text . . . Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview .

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Criticism. . . . . . . . . . . Sources . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . WINTER (by Nikki Giovanni) .


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WORDS ARE THE DIMINUTION OF ALL THINGS (by Charles Penzel Wright) . . . . . . .


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GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS .

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CUMULATIVE AUTHOR/TITLE INDEX .

295 295 297 297 299 299 300 302 304 313 314

315 316 316 316 318 320 321 322 323 337 337 339

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CUMULATIVE NATIONALITY/ETHNICITY INDEX. . . . . . . . . . . . .

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SUBJECT/THEME INDEX

CUMULATIVE INDEX OF FIRST LINES . CUMULATIVE INDEX OF LAST LINES

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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 actually 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.

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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 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

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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.

overview essay, and excerpts from critical essays on the poem. A unique feature of PfS is a specially commissioned critical essay on each poem, targeted toward the student reader. To further help today’s student in studying and enjoying each poem, information on audio recordings and other 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 and reference 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 are selected by surveying numerous sources on notable literary works and analyzing course curricula for various schools, school districts, and states. Some of the sources surveyed include: high school and undergraduate literature anthologies and textbooks; lists of award-winners, and recommended titles, including the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) list of best books for young adults.

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

Input solicited from our expert advisory board—consisting of educators and librarians— guides us to maintain a mix of ‘‘classic’’ and contemporary literary works, a mix of challenging and engaging works (including genre titles that are commonly studied) appropriate for different age levels, and a mix of international, multicultural

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and women authors. These advisors also consult on each volume’s entry list, advising on which titles are most studied, most appropriate, and meet the broadest interests across secondary (grades 7–12) curricula and undergraduate literature studies.

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. 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 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.

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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 quoted in the entry, with full bibliographical information. Further Reading: an alphabetical list of other critical sources which may prove useful for the student. 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 & 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. What Do I Read Next?: a list of works that might give a reader points of entry into a classic work (e.g., YA or multicultural titles) and/ or complement the featured poem or serve as a contrast to it. This includes works by the same author and others, works from various genres, YA works, and works from various cultures and eras.

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Other Features 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 PfS 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. 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 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 PfS 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. 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:

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‘‘Angle of Geese.’’ Poetry for Students. Ed. Marie Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 8–9. When quoting the specially commissioned essay from PfS (usually the first piece under the ‘‘Criticism’’ subhead), the following format should be used: Velie, Alan. Critical Essay on ‘‘Angle of Geese.’’ Poetry for Students. Ed. 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 30.2 (1984): 111–16. Excerpted and reprinted in Poetry for Students. Ed. Marie Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 1 Detroit: Gale, 1998. 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’.’’ A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Ed. Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. 177–80, 191. Excerpted and reprinted in Poetry for Students. Ed. Marie Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 22–24.

We Welcome Your Suggestions The editorial staff 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 E-mail at: [email protected] Or write to the editor at: Editor, Poetry for Students Gale 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535

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Literary Chronology 1564: William Shakespeare is born on April 23 in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

1904: Pablo Neruda is born on July 12 in Parral, Chile.

1572: John Donne is born in London, England.

1910: Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ is published.

1616: William Shakespeare dies on April 23 in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. 1623: William Shakespeare’s comedic play, As You Like It, which contains the poem ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ is published. 1631: John Donne dies after a long illness on March 31 in London, England. 1633: John Donne’s poem ‘‘Song’’ is published. 1788: Lord Byron is born on January 22 in London, England. 1818: Lord Byron’s poem ‘‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’’ is published. 1824: Lord Byron dies of a fever on April 19 in Missolonghi, Greece. 1830: Emily Dickinson is born on December 10 in Amherst, Massachusetts. 1869: Edwin Arlington Robinson is born on December 22 in Head Tide, Maine.

1911: Czeslaw Milosz is born on June 30 in Szetejnie, Lithunia. 1916: Pak Tu-Jin is born on March 10 in Anseong, Kyonggi province, South Korea. 1922: Edwin Arlington Robinson is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Collected Poems. 1924: Robert Frost is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for New Hampshire. 1925: Edwin Arlington Robinson is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Man Who Died Twice. 1927: Robert Frost’s poem ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ is published. 1927: Galway Kinnell is born on February 1 in Providence, Rhode Island. 1928: Edwin Arlington Robinson is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Tristram. 1931: Robert Frost is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Collected Poems.

1874: Robert Frost is born on March 26 in San Francisco, California.

1935: Edwin Arlington Robinson dies of cancer on April 6 in New York, New York.

1879: Wallace Stevens is born on October 2 in Reading, Pennsylvania.

1935: Charles Penzel Wright is born on August 25 in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee.

1886: Emily Dickinson dies of kidney disease on May 15 in Amherst, Massachusetts.

1937: Robert Frost is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for A Further Range.

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1940: Joseph Brodsky is born on May 24 in Leningrad, Russia. 1942: Wallace Steven’s poem ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ is published. 1942: Pat Mora is born on January 19 in El Paso, Texas. 1943: Robert Frost is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for A Witness Tree. 1943: Nikki Giovanni is born on June 7 in Knoxville, Tennessee. 1944: Susan Mitchell is born in New York, New York. 1955: Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who Are You?’’ is published. 1955: Wallace Stevens is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Collected Poems. 1955: Wallace Stevens dies of cancer on August 2 in Hartford, Connecticut. 1959: Pablo Neruda’s poem ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX’’ is published.

1972: Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus’’ is published. 1973: Pablo Neruda dies of heart failure on September 23 in Santiago, Chile. 1978: Nikki Giovanni’s poem ‘‘Winter’’ is published. 1980: Galway Kinnell’s poem ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ is published. 1980: Czeslaw Milosz is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. 1983: Galway Kinnell is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems. 1983: Susan Mitchell’s poem ‘‘The Dead’’ is published. 1987: Joseph Brodsky is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. 1991: Czeslaw Milosz’s poem ‘‘In Music’’ is published. 1996: Joseph Brodsky dies of a heart attack on January 28 in New York, New York. 1998: Charles Wright is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Black Zodiac.

1963: Pak Tu-Jin’s poem ‘‘River of August’’ is published.

1998: Pak Tu-Jin dies on September 16.

1963: Robert Frost dies of complications from prostate surgery on January 29 in Boston, Massachusetts.

2001: Pat Mora’s poem ‘‘Uncoiling’’ is published. 2004: Charles Penzel Wright’s poem ‘‘Words and the Diminution of All Things’’ is published.

1971: Pablo Neruda is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

2004: Czeslaw Milosz dies on August 14 in Krakow, Poland.

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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 PfS. Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know. COPYRIGHTED EXCERPTS IN PfS, VOLUME 35, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING PERIODICALS: America Magazine, v. 191, November 8, 2004. Copyright 2004 www.americamagazine. org. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of America Press. For subscription information, visit www.americamagazine.org.—Ame´ricas, v. 56, July/August, 2004. Copyright Ó 2004 Ame´ricas. Reproduced by permission of Ame´ricas, a bimonthly magazine published by the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States in English and Spanish.—The Byron Journal, v. 35, 2007. Reproduced by permission of Liverpool University Press.—The Christian Century, v. 114, April 2, 1997. Copyright Ó 1997 by the Christian

Century Foundation. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Christianity and Literature, v. 58, autumn, 2008. Copyright 2008 Conference on Christianity and Literature. Reproduced by permission.—Classical and Modern Literature, v. 23, spring, 2003. Copyright Ó 2003 by CML, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, v. 49, summer, 2007. Copyright Ó 2007 Wayne State University Press. Reproduced with permission of the Wayne State University Press.—The Explicator, v. 62, summer, 2004; v. 65, fall, 2006. Copyright Ó 2004, 2006 by Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. Both reproduced with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation, published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036-1802.—The Hudson Review, v. 6, summer, 1953 for ‘‘Thomas Lovell Beddoes: The Mask of Parody’’ by Louis Coxe. Copyright Ó 1953 by The Hudson Review, Inc. Renewed 1981.Reproduced by permission of the Estate of the author.—First Things, November, 2004. Copyright Ó 2004 Institute on Religion and Public Life. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Hispania, v. 70, September, 1987. Ó 1987 The American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Independent School, v. 66, winter, 2007 for ‘‘The Seven Ages of Man’’ by Richard Barbieri. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Journal of Children’s Literature, v. 32, fall, 2006. Reproduced by permission.—Korea

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Journal, v. 21, November, 1981. Reproduced by permission of the Korean Society of Authors (KOSA).—The Massachusetts Review, v. 25, summer, 1984. Copyright Ó 1984. Reprinted by permission from The Massachusetts Review.— MELUS, v. 9, winter, 1982; v. 21, spring, 1996. Copyright MELUS: The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 1982, 1996. Both reproduced by permission.— The Midwest Quarterly, v. 15, summer, 1974; v. 41, autumn, 1999; v. 41, summer, 2000. Copyright Ó 1974, 1999, 2000 by The Midwest Quarterly, Pittsburgh State University. All reproduced by permission.—Modern Poetry Studies, v. 11, 1982. Copyright 1982 by Media Study, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Renascence, v. 52, summer, 2000. Copyright Ó 2000, Marquette University Press. Reproduced by permission.—The Southern Review, v. 36, spring, 2000 for ‘‘An Interview with Charles Wright’’ by Ted Genoways. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Twentieth Century Literature, v. 54, spring, 2008. Copyright Ó 2008, Hofstra University Press. Reproduced by permission. COPYRIGHTED EXCERPTS IN PfS, VOLUME 35, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING BOOKS: Brodsky, Joseph. From A Part of Speech. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980. Translation copyright Ó 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Ó 1977 by Joseph Brodsky. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Farrar Straus Giroux, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.—Frost, Robert. From Complete Poems of Robert Frost. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1949. Copyright 1916, 1923, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1939, 1943, 1945, 1947, 1949 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1948, 1951, Ó 1956, 1958, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright Ó 1964, 1967, 1977 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Copyright 1928, 1969 by Henry Holt and

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Company. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.—Giovanni, Nikki. From The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni. William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1996. Copyright Ó 1968, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975, 1978, 1979, 1983, 1995, 1996 by Nikki Giovanni. Copyright compilation Ó 1996 by Nikki Giovanni. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.—Kinnell, Galway. From Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980. Copyright Ó 1980 by Galway Kinnell. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.—Milosz, Czeslaw. From Provinces. Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass. The Ecco Press, 1991. Copyright Ó 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.—Mitchell, Susan. From The Water Inside the Water. HarperPerennial, 1994. Copyright Ó 1983 by Susan Mitchell. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.—Mora, Pat. From ‘‘Uncoiling,’’ in Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry. Edited by Bryce Milligan, Mary Guerreo Milligan, and Angela de Hoyos. Riverhead Books, 1995. Ó 1995 Pat Mora.First appeared in Daughters of the Fifth Sun, published by Riverhead Press. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.—Neruda, Pablo. From 100 Love Sonnets: Cien Sonetos de Amor. Translated by Stephen Tapscott. University of Texas Press, 1986. Ó Pablo Neruda, 1959 and Heirs of Pablo Neruda. Ó 1986 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the University of Texas Press.—Wright, Charles. From Buffalo Yoga. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004. Copyright Ó 2004 by Charles Wright. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

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Contributors Susan Andersen: Andersen has a Ph.D. in literature and is a teacher and writer. Entry on ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX.’’ Original essays on ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX,’’ ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ and ‘‘Song.’’ Bryan Aubrey: Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on literature. Entries on ‘‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’’ and ‘‘Song.’’ Original essays on ‘‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’’ and ‘‘Song.’’ David Kelly: Kelly is a writer who teaches creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College and College of Lake County in Illinois and has written for numerous scholarly publications. Entries on ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ and ‘‘Uncoiling.’’ Original essays on ‘‘Miniver Cheevy,’’ ‘‘Uncoiling,’’ and ‘‘The Dead.’’ Sheri Karmiol: Karmiol teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico, where she is a lecturer in the University Honors Program. Entries on ‘‘Blackberry Eating,’’ ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ and ‘‘Winter.’’ Original essays on ‘‘Blackberry Eating,’’ ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ and ‘‘Winter.’’ Lois Kerschen: Kerschen has a Ph.D. in English and is an educator and freelance writer.

Entries on ‘‘Words and Diminution of All Things’’ and ‘‘River of August.’’ Original essays on ‘‘Words and Diminution of All Things’’ and ‘‘River of August.’’ Melodie Monahan: Monahan holds a Ph.D. in English and operates an editing service, The Inkwell Works. Entries on ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who Are You?,’’ and ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus.’’ Original essays on ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who Are You?,’’ ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus,’’ and ‘‘River of August.’’ Wendy Perkins: Perkins is a professor of English at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland and has had several articles published on American and British literature. Entries on ‘‘In Music’’ and ‘‘Of Modern Poetry.’’ Original essays on ‘‘In Music’’ and ‘‘Of Modern Poetry.’’ Claire Robinson: Robinson has an M.A. in English. She is a freelance writer and editor and a former teacher of English literature and creative writing. Entry on ‘‘The Dead.’’ Original essay on ‘‘The Dead.’’

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Acquainted with the Night Robert Frost’s poem ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ first appeared in 1927 in the Virginia Quarterly Review, and it also appeared in his 1928 collection of poetry, West-Running Brook. ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ consists of four tercets and one couplet, using terza rima for its rhyme scheme; sometimes the poem is called a terza rima sonnet, because it is also written in iambic pentameter. The Pulitzer Prize-winning collection West-Running Brook was included in Complete Poems of Robert Frost, published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, first in 1949 with numerous subsequent printings. In 2002, Henry Holt published Edward Connery Lathem’s edition of The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged.

ROBERT FROST 1927

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874. When Robert was eleven years old, his father William Prescott Frost Jr., a journalist, died of tuberculosis, and his mother Isabelle Moody Frost moved her son and his younger sister Jeanie back east to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where the family lived near Frost’s paternal grandfather, and Isabelle Frost worked as a schoolteacher. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892, and he briefly attended Dartmouth College, where he studied Latin and Greek.

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Between 1917 and 1920, the poet taught at Amherst College, and then he moved his family to a farm in Vermont and helped establish the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. He published New Hampshire in 1923 and West-Running Brook in 1928. During the following years he taught at a several prestigious institutions, including University of Michigan, Dartmouth College, Yale, and Harvard. Various collections also appeared, including A Further Range (1936); A Witness Tree (1942); and Steeple Bush (1947). During many of these years, the poet’s permanent home was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Frost owned a summer place in Ripton, Vermont, where he continued his affiliation with the Bread Loaf School.

Robert Frost (The Library of Congress)

Frost held various jobs during the next two years, and in 1894, he had his first poem published in the Independent, a New York newspaper. He continued to publish poems in magazines through the following year, and in 1895, he married Elinor Miriam White, with whom he was to have six children. Two years later, Frost attended Harvard for one year, where he again studied Latin and Greek. In 1900, with money from his grandfather, Frost bought a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. He farmed and taught English at an academy in Derry between 1905 and 1911. In 1912, at the age of thirty-eight, Frost sold the farm and moved his family to England. There, in 1913, he published A Boy’s Will and in 1914, North of Boston, both of which garnered positive evaluations. North of Boston was especially well received, containing as it does some of Frost’s most beloved poems: ‘‘Mending Wall,’’ ‘‘Death of a Hired Man,’’ ‘‘Home Burial,’’ and ‘‘After Apple-Picking.’’ World War I began, and the family moved back to New England in 1915. By that time, the new poet’s reputation was quite well established in the United States. The family settled in Franconia, New Hampshire.

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During his long life, Robert Frost received many professional honors and endured more than his share of private tragedy. He was admitted to the American Academy of Poets (1953), read from memory his poem ‘‘The Gift Outright’’ at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1962. He received honorary degrees from several universities, including Cambridge and Oxford. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times, for New Hampshire; Collected Poems (1930); A Further Range; and A Witness Tree. But personal tragedy plagued him and his family. Mental illness recurred in the family: Frost’s mother, wife, the poet himself, and two of their children struggled with depression. His sister Jeanie spent the last nine years of her life in a mental institution, and his daughter Irma was committed to one in 1947. Frost and his wife lost their first son Elliott in 1900 at age four to cholera, their second child Elinor one day after she was born in 1907, and their daughter Marjorie at age twenty-nine in 1934 from complications following childbirth. The poet lost his wife to heart failure in 1938, and in 1940, his son Carol committed suicide. Thereafter, the poet was wracked with depression and drank heavily. During the 1940s, he formed a long-term relationship with Kathleen Morrison, who was married. Morrison served as his secretary and managed his calendar of appearances right up until the poet’s death. The nature of their personal relationship has been a matter of speculation. The Morrison-Frost letters, housed in the Baker Library at Dartmouth College, attest to their mutual devotion. Frost died on January 29, 1963, of complications from prostate surgery. His body was buried in Bennington, Vermont, and the epitaph

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on his grave marker reads: ‘‘I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.’’ Only two of his children outlived the poet: Irma, who died in 1967, and Leslie, who died in 1983.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

POEM TEXT

I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

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I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-by; And further still at an unearthly height, One luminary clock against the sky

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Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.

POEM SUMMARY

In 1956, Frost recorded a number of his poems, including ‘‘Mending Wall,’’ ‘‘Death of a Hired Man,’’ ‘‘After Apple-Picking,’’ ‘‘Birches,’’ and ‘‘West-running Brook.’’ The recording was produced by HarperAudio and is available online. Robert Frost Out Loud includes the poet reading A Boy’s Will, North of Boston, and Mountain Interval. These recordings are available online. Various DVDs are available featuring work by Robert Frost. For example, in 2006, Monterey Video produced Robert Frost: New England in Autumn, a twenty-nine-minute film featuring photographs of Massachusetts accompanied by readings of such poems as ‘‘Tree at my Window,’’ ‘‘The Pasture,’’ and ‘‘The Cow in Apple Time.’’

Stanza 1 The words of the title repeat in line one and the first sentence of this poem. The setting and action are established in the second and third line. The speaker walks out in rain in the night beyond the reach of the city lights.

Stanza 2 The speaker’s isolation and sadness are conveyed in this stanza. He reports looking down sad lanes and averting his eyes from those of a night watchman.

Stanza 3 In this stanza, the speaker stops walking to hear more clearly a distant cry that reaches him from some streets away.

Stanza 4 The cry he hears is not aimed at him. The speaker is not called back or acknowledged with a farewell. The speaker describes a clock against the night sky. It may be literally a clock in a tower or the full moon overhead.

Stanza 5 But this clock does not say anything good or bad about the time. The first line of the poem repeats as its last line and sentence.

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THEMES Alienation Frost’s poem describes a frame of mind, a sense of being alone and withdrawn from human relationships and social connection. The speaker walks alone, at night, and toward the unrelieved darkness beyond streetlights. Though he is not a criminal, he averts his eyes from the lone night watchman he passes. The suggestion is made that he is not the only person who feels disconnected from others. The cry that comes across the lanes suggests another person is suffering too, is calling out for connection. This cry is described as broken off, as though it is checked or muffled. The inference is the one voice that seeks to communicate is frustrated and does not elicit a response.

Depression The speaker’s mood suggests depression, a mental condition characterized by loss of interest, lack of energy or enthusiasm, a sense of flatness, and disrupted sleep pattern. A depressed person is not necessarily sad, but the person is likely to

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Study one Shakespearean sonnet and one Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet. Write an essay that compares Frost’s poem to the two you studied. Be sure to include an explanation of the sonnet as a form. Do some historical research about night watchmen and what their jobs entailed in small New England towns in the early twentieth century. Prepare an oral presentation in which you describe this kind of police force and how it evolved. Include information about the size of a town that might employ a night watchman.

Search for images of night watchmen in the visual arts, some of which can be found online. Bring reproductions of these images to class to pass them around and discuss how they may or may not lend some meaning to Frost’s poem.

Using Frost’s poem as a model, write a poem in which you describe an actual scene or sequence of actions, but handle your description in such a way that the literal picture suggests a psychological or emotional state. Research clock towers in various places and different periods and create a PowerPoint presentation for your classmates, which includes photographs of important clock towers. In order to explore modernist poetry, read aloud T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’’ (1917) and have a classmate read aloud ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ to your class. Discuss similarities and differences between these two poems, including their poetic form, the character of the speaker, the actions described, and the differences in the settings.

feel detached, aimless, and purposeless. The fact that the speaker in this poem is out at night suggests he may have trouble sleeping. That he is headed beyond the city limit suggests he has no social destination in mind. Moreover, he reads

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the clock as pronouncing the time as ‘‘neither wrong nor right,’’ which conveys an inability to evaluate the moment or perhaps to see meaning in it. In all, the poet conveys a mental state by describing the speaker’s walk in these ways.

STYLE Terza Rima, Iambic Pentameter, and Sonnet Forms A rhyme scheme attributed to Dante, terza rima is a pattern of interlocking end-rhyme that follows the pattern aba bcb, cdc and so forth. Typically, terza rima occurs in poetry that has the metrical pattern iambic pentameter. A line of poetry is divided into feet containing syllables counted as beats. An iamb is one foot that contains two beats, that is, one unstressed and one stressed syllable. In iambic pentameter, there are five feet to the line, each of which contains an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, thus ten syllables per line. ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ consists of four tercets (three-line stanzas) and one couplet, all in iambic pentameter. Because the poem has this meter and fourteen lines it is called a sonnet. But it diverts from both the Shakespearean sonnet, which contains three quatrains (four-line stanzas) and a couplet, and the Petrarchan sonnet, which contains an octave (eight-line stanza) and a sestet (six-line stanza). Typically, the Shakespearean quatrains pose parallel examples of a given topic, which is summed up in the couplet, whereas the Petrarchan octave poses a question or problem that the sestet attempts to answer or resolve. So in both form and content, Frost’s poem differs in some respects from these conventional sonnet forms. In his essay on ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ Keat Murray stresses how Frost’s craft merges the form of this poem with its content: ‘‘The triple terza rima rhyme . . . interlocks and suggests an interdependency of content and form, as each stanza is linked to its contiguous stanzas. In the seeming ease of crafted rhyme, Frost masks the fusion of content and form via superb technique.’’ Thus in his mastery of form, Frost was able to employ a structure that both fits and conveys the subject of his poem.

Monologue and Soliloquy A monologue is a speech in which one person delivers all the lines and typically there is a silent

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Full moon (Image copyright Alex Franklin, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

listener, whose presence is implied by what the speaker says and the speaker’s use of direct address. By contrast, a soliloquy is a speech in which one person, who is alone, speaks all the lines as is thinking aloud. An audience can hear both a monologue and a soliloquy when these occur in plays. In poetry, both are used, too, and the reader of the poem serves as an audience. In ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ one speaker delivers all the lines, as if thinking out loud. No one is with the speaker to hear what he has to say. He does not speak to the watchman; the cry he hears does not communicate to him, and he is beyond hearing range of the person who cries out. So this poem is an example of a soliloquy. This form offers the poet two advantages: he can communicate the material in the first person, which gives it the intimacy of a personal revelation, yet the absence of a listener underscores the speaker’s isolation. What is dramatized here is the felt isolation of the speaker, which the reader can sense at the removed position of reading the poem.

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT T. S. Eliot When Robert Frost moved his family to England, he wanted to join the literary circle of London and to be recognized in England as an up-and-coming poet. He associated with a number of important poets of the day, among whom T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) was one of the more important. Moving to England for aspiring American poets was not uncommon. Eliot had moved there himself in 1914, a year before the Frost family returned to the United States, but Eliot remained, eventually converting to Anglicanism and becoming a British subject. Eliot’s famous poem, ‘‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’’ (1917) might be compared to Frost’s later ‘‘Acquainted with the Night.’’ In their expression of ill ease, mental disturbance, self-doubt, the two narrators have something in common and voice modern sentiments. In their intentions regarding social contact, they diverge.

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COMPARE & CONTRAST

1920s: ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ is composed during a period of steady economic growth and increased consumerism, years that come to be known as the Roaring Twenties and which are characterized by the fast-paced lifestyle of suddenly wealthy urbanites. The car replaces the train, and suburbs develop along the outer edges of cities. Widespread use of the radio and ever-expanding telephone service reduce the previous isolation felt by rural people and increase their ability to receive news and entertainment regularly in the home. Today: In the wake of a global economic downturn, the failure of major banks, and numerous bankruptcies among major businesses that cause a sharp increase in unemployment, many people in the United States face reduced or lost income and possible home foreclosure. Personal debt is seen as a liability and credit card use declines. Many people discontinue their landline telephone service and use only their cell phones.

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1920s: The Federal Reserve System, created by Congress in 1913, first tests its power to regulate banking institutions, control the flow of money in the market, and reduce the possibility of bank panics, among other functions.

and weakening real estate market. The Federal Reserve System is criticized by many for its perceived failure to regulate banking institutions and keep them safe.

1920s: A mild recession occurs in 1927 connected in part with Henry Ford’s decision to close all his factories for six months and change from producing the Model T to the new Model A automobile. This year Ford still accounts for 40 percent of all new cars sold in the United States. Today: After necessary restructuring in order to cope with a sharp drop in profits, Ford announces in 2005 that 30,000 hourly jobs will be cut and at least ten plants will be closed in the United States over the coming five years.

1920s: As Europe recovers from World War I and farm production increases, U.S. farmers face increasing debt and a steady increase in farm foreclosures during the decade. By 1927, there are 18 farm foreclosures per thousand farms in the United States.

Today: Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve System, testifies at congressional hearings regarding ongoing bank failures due to the nationwide credit crunch

Today: During the economic downturn, Midwest farming states remain economically stable in part because of alternative energy production, good farm income, and relatively lesser effect of the weakening housing market on the area. Moreover, many farmers espouse conservative money practices and do not face the credit card debt that burdens many urbanites.

Like T. S. Eliot, Frost studied Latin and Greek, and both poets drew upon their knowledge of Dante. Eliot’s poem uses a quotation from Dante’s Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy, and Frost uses terza rima, a rhyme scheme attributed to Dante. In London, both Eliot and Frost sought to establish themselves in the world of letters, and in different ways each succeeded. Frost, who had dropped out of

Harvard and not succeeded particularly in any profession in the United States, published his first two books of poems in England to positive reviews, and he returned to the United States a respected newcomer among other recognized American poets. Eliot completed his bachelor’s degree at Harvard and began his master’s program there with great success, but with the advent of World War I and his decision to

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A lonely, rainy night in the city (Image copyright Clara, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

remain in England, he transferred to Merton College, Oxford University, where he took his degree. Frost returned to the New England he loved, to farming and teaching to make a living for his family, whereas Eliot pursued editing the Criterion and then the Egoist literary magazines and, in addition to becoming one of the century’s most important poets, became the leading arbiter of literary taste in the modern period.

Bread Loaf Mountain School, Ripton, Vermont Established in 1920, the Bread Loaf School of English was made possible by Joseph Battell, a newspaper proprietor and breeder of Morgan horses. In 1915, Battell gave 30,000 acres near Middlebury, Vermont, and in view of Bread Loaf Mountain, to Middlebury College. The Bread Loaf School of English was established on this land in Ripton, Vermont, and students used some buildings Battell had constructed there. Through the remaining decades of the

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twentieth century, many famous authors served as faculty at the school, but none more consistently than Robert Frost, who participated every summer over the span of forty-two years, missing only three years. It was Frost who had the idea of a writers’ summer conference, launched in 1926. Frost spent summers from the late 1930s to 1962 at the Homer Noble Farm, consisting of several hundred acres. He purchased the farm in 1940. It was later entrusted to Middlebury College, which maintains it as the Robert Frost Farm, a National Historic Site.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW After a slow start with poems individually published in various U.S. periodicals, Robert Frost published his first two books of poetry in England, A Boy’s Will in 1913 and North of Boston in 1914, to considerable success. Ezra Pound

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reviewed the first book in Poetry Magazine in the fall 1913. Frost was glad for the attention a review by the celebrated author brought to the collection, despite its cool praise. The second volume was much more popular, and by the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, the poet’s reputation was quite well established. In these early years, however, no one envisioned the success that Frost would have over the coming decades, as he continued to publish collections of poetry and held visiting lectureships at various colleges and universities. When Henry Holt published Complete Poems of Robert Frost in 1949, David Daiches wrote a review for the New York Times, tracing the trajectory of Frost’s impressive career. Daiches remarked that the second volume of poems, North of Boston, won Frost respect in the United States and that upon his return from England, Frost became, in a sense, the ‘‘Poet Laureate of New England.’’ By 1939, Frost had won three Pulitzer Prizes and had published his collected poems. Then, in 1949, this new collection appeared, replete with what Daiches termed ‘‘enduring wisdom.’’ Daiches praised Frost as having ‘‘broadened and deepened the tradition of Georgian poetry’’ (that is, English poetry written during the reign of George V, 1910–1936). Frost avoids ‘‘radical innovations in technique,’’ Daiches pointed out, while employing the idiom of ‘‘conversational speech.’’ The effect of Frost’s poetry, according to Daiches, is ‘‘a remarkable feeling of directness . . . so that the reader is stopped in his tracks as the wedding guest was stopped by the Ancient Mariner,’’ a reference to Coleridge’s poem, ‘‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’’ In all of the poet’s work, Daiches remarked Frost ‘‘has gone his solitary way without bothering to pose before anything except his own mirror.’’ A measure of the national respect for Robert Frost was given by the invitation he received to recite a poem at the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy. Later that same year, Frost accompanied Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall to Moscow. The poet read ‘‘Mending Wall,’’ to the Soviets, a choice that was taken to imply a comment on the Berlin Wall, and he visited with Premier Khrushchev. Two years later, when the poet died, many tributes were paid to him and his work. In a New York Times obituary, Robert Frost was remembered for symbolizing ‘‘the rough-hewn individuality of the American creative spirit.’’ He was praised in the same article for

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his ‘‘breath-taking sense of exactitude in the use of metaphors based on direct observation.’’ Also that year, Lawrance Thompson, who at the time was writing a biography of the poet, pointed out that the poetry could now be assessed without the ‘‘dramatic presence’’ of the poet himself ‘‘and his persuasive voice.’’ Thompson predicted that in the years to come, the vigor of Frost’s work would ‘‘establish a permanent position for him among our best American poets.’’ Winner of four Pulitzer Prizes, Frost did not receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, though many thought he should have. Short of receiving that honor, nearly thirty years after his death, the poet received a bow from three men who did. In Homage to Robert Frost, Nobel laureates Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott variously analyze selected Frost poems and describe the achievement of Robert Frost and how his work affected their own development as poets. Brodsky described Frost as ‘‘a quintessential American poet,’’ a poet who communicated ‘‘man’s recognition of his own negative potential—with his sense of what he is capable of.’’ This, Brodsky maintained, is ‘‘Frost’s forte.’’ Heaney praised the ‘‘bracing lyric power’’ of Frost’s poetry, which is dependent in part on the poet’s ‘‘faultless ear.’’ Walcott traced ‘‘Wordworthian vocabulary’’ in some of the early poems, but he pointed out that eventually Frost came into his own by writing the ‘‘American’’ language, heightened by his masterful poetic technique. Alluding to Frost’s comment that form is as essential to poetry as a net is to playing tennis, Walcott explained: ‘‘He played tennis, to use his famous description, but you couldn’t see the net; his caesuras slid with a wry snarl over the surface, over the apparently conventional scansion.’’ Admittedly folksy, regional, sweet in certain of his famous poems, Robert Frost was in other instances fully able to expose the dark side of the human condition and to find the universal by close observation of natural elements and exact description of ordinary activity. He did all of this with a keen understanding of classical forms and the ability to match form with sense.

CRITICISM Melodie Monahan Monahan has a Ph.D. in English and operates an editing service, The Inkwell Works. In the following essay, she explores the literary tradition Frost

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Robert Frost: A Biography (1996), by Jeffrey Meyers, offers a reevaluation of the threevolume biography by Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: A Biography (1966–1976). Meyers adds information to the story of the poet’s life, which Thompson relegated to some two thousand pages of unpublished notes. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (2001), a large-size edition beautifully illustrated in black and white by Susan Jeffers, transforms the famous poem into a bedtime storybook to be enjoyed by children and adults alike. West-Running Brook (1928), the collection of poems by Robert Frost that contains ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ is included in The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, which was edited by Edward Connery Lathem and published by Henry Holt in 2002. After Frost: An Anthology of Poetry from New England, edited by Henry Lyman and published in 1996 by the University of Massachusetts, brings together the poems of thirty New England poets and organizes them according to four main themes frequently explored by Frost. The anthology

appreciated and drew upon and discusses how his poem ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ can be interpreted within that tradition. Every work of art has its context, the larger aesthetic environment in which it holds a unique place. One way to understand a work of art comes from understanding its context and considering what a given artist used or rejected in it. Robert Frost wrote mostly during the first half of the twentieth century, but it is safe to say he was in form and content more closely aligned with certain nineteenth-century sensibilities and poets who dominated much of that century. From early childhood, Frost was taught to appreciate

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illustrates how regional poets who followed Frost have used the tradition he affirmed and the modern themes he defined.

Annie Proulx’s collection of eleven Vermont stories, Heart Songs and Other Stories, which was published in 1995 by Scribner, describes regional conflicts between newcomers and old-timers and the haves and have-nots, as urban sprawl encroaches on New England farmland and threatens to change the long-established ways of the people whose families have for generations lived among the Vermont mountains.

One of the Alex Award winners for 2009 is Over and Under, a novel written by Todd Tucker and published by Thomas Dunne Books. Suitable for young adult readers, the book is reminiscent of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1961 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Tucker’s regional novel is set in 1979 and follows the summer experiences of two fourteen-year-old boys in rural southern Indiana. Their friendship and exploits are set against the backdrop of a local labor conflict, in which the boys’ fathers are involved.

romantic English poets, and it was from them that he later drew much of his aesthetic taste. This aesthetic value derived specifically from the revolutionary theory of poetry explained by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) in his preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1802). Wordsworth’s ballads and some poems written later by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) and in the United States by such poets as Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) and Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950) illustrate the kind of work with which Frost had natural affinity. In collaboration with Samuel Coleridge (1772–1834), Wordsworth put forth a new literary

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UNDERSTANDING A POEM REQUIRES READERS TO CONSIDER THE LITERARY CONTEXT IN WHICH THE POEM EXISTS, TO CHECK DEFINITIONS OF THE WORDS USED IN THE POEM, AND TO IDENTIFY THE ELEMENTS THAT CONVEY THIS PARTICULAR POEM’S MEANING.’’

theory of poetry quite unlike what had been espoused previously. In the first generation of romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge were reacting against the neoclassicism and elitism that characterized much eighteenth-century literature, values that were established early on by the work of John Dryden (1631–1700) and Alexander Pope (1688–1744) among others. These restoration and neoclassical poets and many others who published during their time wrote strictly for and about the aristocratic class. Their works drew upon a body of classical texts from ancient Greece and Rome, with which both these authors and their courtly readers were familiar. Hence, the term neoclassical, meaning a new classicism, described these writers who were themselves so shaped by classical literature and who resurrected and transformed that ancient literature in creating their own. A reader needed a classical education to understand their works, and only moneyed people had that. Middle- and lower-class individuals, if they were literate at all, would have been hard pressed to understand neoclassical poetry. It was complicated grammatically, intricately layered with allusions to classical mythology, and replete with ornate and convoluted figures of speech. Reacting against this courtly literature, Wordsworth asserted a revolutionary idea: Poetry ought to be written in the language spoken by real people in their everyday lives, and it ought to take its subjects from ordinary people’s actual experiences. This new manifesto asserted the importance of the common man, the value of rural work and cottage experience, and the beauty of the countryside. It privileged the widely known world of agricultural labor and promoted the rejuvenating benefits in escaping from the city for walking tours in the countryside. This day-to-

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dayness of simple rural life, Wordsworth maintained, brought people to an awareness of the essence of things, to the true nature of life itself, and to the spiritual essence nature manifests. This communion with nature was democratically available regardless of class or education, and it was to be sought and appreciated over the artificial world of powdered and self-indulgent aristocrats. Wordsworth’s ideas were as revolutionary to the established world of English and European arts and letters as the ethics that fueled the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and the French Revolution (1789–1799) were to the worlds of the English and French courts. Wordsworth challenged the neoclassical assumptions about genre, subject matter, style, and tone. He dismissed the eighteenth-century assumption that types of poetry intrinsically form a hierarchy, with epic and tragedy the highest forms and comedy and satire among the lowest. In this hierarchy, the neoclassicists placed short lyric poems at the very bottom. Wordsworth chose to write lyric poems, translating his democratic values into a literary choice that promoted the lowest form as the best. He depicted peasants, outcasts, and criminals, believing them to be worthy subjects of poetry. Another neoclassical assumption was that the language used ought to be elevated, ornate, and complicated. The grammar should be intricate and classical allusions should occur frequently. Wordsworth threw off these assumptions about style, choosing instead the simple syntax of street people, often capturing dialect and vernacular usage, which a classicist would have disparaged as totally unsuitable to poetry. Finally, the neoclassical poets privileged the intellect over emotion and decorous, affected behavior over impulsive or quick enthusiastic response. But in Wordsworth’s view, it was through subjective response and feelings that people could be truly alive and in touch with the spiritual energy in all created life. Rural life stimulated these basic feelings, Wordsworth believed, and through these feelings people could intuit an elemental truth, directness, and innocence, which were dulled or eclipsed altogether by city living and upper-class refinement. In doing all of this, Wordsworth promoted the voice of ordinary people, and he saw himself as their poet, writing for them about their own experience. By the time Frost began writing poetry in the first decade of the twentieth century, Wordsworth’s principles were well established, indeed

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taken for granted. The nineteenth century had witnessed a growing middle class of literate people who were increasingly fond of reading as a form of evening family entertainment. People living and working in cities longed for and idealized country life. After all, the increasingly overpopulated industrial urban centers reeked with air and water pollution. People on Sundays or holidays struck out of town on long walks into the relatively fresher country air. Wordsworth described walking trips along the Wye River and visits to the popular ruins of Tintern Abbey, the subject of one of his most famous poems. He wrote about a single reaper and about a little girl lost in a snowstorm. These poems provided both the lens and focus that many middle-class readers enjoyed and many subsequent writers were to emulate. For example, Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) in ‘‘The Darkling Thrush’’ (1900) describes a person alone in a natural landscape, a person who is unable to connect with other people and who is fearful about what lies ahead in the new century but who is affected by the song of a single bird. The setting and sentiments, and the language the poet uses to convey them, are akin to several of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, published a century earlier, and they anticipate Frost’s poetry in general and ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ in particular. In the United States among the late nineteenth-century realists, readers can find many instances of Wordsworth’s literary theory illustrated in poetry. One example is Edwin Arlington Robinson’s ‘‘Richard Cory’’ (1896), which is written from the collective point of view of the townspeople, who work through their days cursing their bread and doing without meat, who stand on the pavement and envy the wealthy, handsome Richard Cory and cannot understand how it is that a man like that who has everything (from their point of view) could ‘‘put a bullet through his head.’’ Another example can be drawn from any of the poems in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915). These 244 monologues are spoken from the graves of former Spoon River residents. The poems read like grave-marker epitaphs for ordinary people who now, in death, can speak the absolute truth of their lives. The work of Hardy in England and Robinson and Masters in the United States illustrate the realism that characterized much late nineteenth-century poetry, that depicted a world inhabited by ordinary people dealing with the realities of their lives.

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Depiction of ordinary experience written in the language actually spoken by common people produces poetry that is accessible to a wide range of readers, but accessibility does not disallow nuance. Read on a literal level, Frost’s ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ is easy to understand: Paraphrased, one might say the poem is a statement given by a lonely or alienated person who takes a walk at night. But two words in the poem might cause readers to think there is more to this poem than its literal meaning. These words are ‘‘acquainted’’ and ‘‘night.’’ The word acquainted has several connotations: to be introduced to; to have personal but partial knowledge of; to have had social contact with; to be partially familiar with. The word suggests a level of polite encounter and a sense of limited exposure. The word, ‘‘acquainted’’ describes the speaker’s connection to ‘‘night.’’ Night is the time between dusk and sunrise, the time of darkness, the time generally given to rest and sleep, the time in which intimate couples may have sexual intercourse, the time of being nestled down at home. In the setting of this poem, night is the time during which the speaker heads out of town alone. For the speaker, nighttime is a period of feeling total isolation and detachment from social groups, a time of disconnection, lack of communication, and a measure of vulnerability. The word night draws with it a constellation of associations established by the countless ways it has been used in literature across the centuries. St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 13:12, metaphorically describes confronting the limitations of human understanding as trying to see through a dark glass. St. John of the Cross, a sixteenth-century mystic, wrote about loneliness, desolation, and loss of faith, calling it the dark night of the human soul. Many poets have used images of darkness and night to convey negative human emotions, bad experiences, trouble, and death. In Tennyson’s ‘‘Crossing the Bar’’ (1889), dying is metaphorically described as voyaging out to sea at night. In the poem, ‘‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’’ (1951), Welsh poet Dylan Thomas urges those who face imminent death to resist the inevitable by getting angry and fighting back. Everyone experiences nighttime, knows what it is to be startled in the night, knows what it is to stumble in the dark, and knows what it is to have restless thoughts about daytime troubles that prevent sleep. Because it is universally experienced, night provides a vehicle, a way of understanding, certain mental states that may otherwise be

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introduced to it. He knows the daytime of social interaction, but he is acquainted also with loneliness, depression, and insomnia. Understanding a poem requires readers to consider the literary context in which the poem exists, to check definitions of the words used in the poem, and to identify the elements that convey this particular poem’s meaning. In these ways, readers come to appreciate what the poet has accomplished. Personally, they may also come to understand something about their own experience that they had not yet consciously considered. In ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ Robert Frost gives readers a depiction of a frame of mind or emotional state most individuals experience at least some of the time. The universality of the poem is delivered through the way its particular features are handled; its success is measured in the degree to which it increases readers’ understanding of this aspect of the human condition.

Night watchman (Image copyright Winthrop Brookhouse, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

Source: Melodie Monahan, Critical Essay on ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

Kyoko Amano hard to describe. The literal night is equated with depression or loneliness or alienation. It is equated with the absolute blackness of the closed grave. The totality of literary uses of a given word may be to some greater or lesser degree suggested in any one literary instance in which the word occurs. These associations give the word in its immediate usage a layered meaning or suggestiveness. Implicit in Frost’s use of night are these other uses of it. But in this poem Frost does something quite unusual: He links this evocative and potentially scary word with the restrained, social concept delivered in ‘‘acquainted.’’ The speaker in ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ has some knowledge of darkness, of loneliness, of loss of faith. The speaker has been introduced to trouble, to the limits of human understanding, to the questions that have no easy answers. While complacent others stay home, snug in their beds, the speaker walks out beyond the streetlights into the darkness. He is engulfed by it. The suggestion is that in this time and place he confronts the unanswered questions, his own littleness, his detachment from others, perhaps even the dark night of his human soul. He does not live in the darkness, but he has been

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In the following essay, Amano asserts that ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ is about the process of writing poetry In Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, Richard Poirier suggests that Robert Frost’s poems are often about the poet’s process—the choices he has to make—in writing a poem. Poirier writes, ‘‘The Frost of the best-loved poems is also the Frost who is simultaneously meditating, in a manner often unavailable to the casual reader, on the nature of poetry itself.’’ Poirier uses ‘‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’’ and ‘‘Mending Wall’’ as examples and points out that the human dilemmas seen in these poems are ‘‘poetic ones’’ (7). ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ similarly, is a poem that exemplifies Poirier’s suggestion that Frost’s poems are about writing poems. The journey motif in this poem asks its readers to analyze the allegorical aspects of the poem. Kimberley H. Kidd, for example, suggests that the night in the poem represents ‘‘the poet’s own inner life, possibly self knowledge’’ and that the poet ‘‘is acquainted but does not know’’ his inner self well. Kidd maintains, ‘‘The poet’s journey into the night, then, can be seen as ongoing and continual, progressing to a more complete selfknowledge.’’ This same journey into the poet’s inner self may represent the poet’s exploration of

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Modern Mind: The Archetypal Resonance of ‘Acquainted with the Night’’’: IN ADDITION TO THE SYMBOLS OF ‘ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT,’ THE FORM OF THIS POEM ENHANCES POIRIER’S SUGGESTION THAT FROST’S POEM IS OFTEN ABOUT THE CREATIVE PROCESS.’’

the unknown territory, a poetic experimentation that characterizes the height of American modernism of Frost’s time. With its conventional symbol of the ‘‘night’’ in the title, opening line, and the concluding line, Frost’s ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ invites its readers to examine death and grief expressed in the poem. Yet the ‘‘night’’ should not be taken as a conventional symbol; rather, the darkness of the night represents the symbols, form, and structure of a poem that no other poet has explored in the past. Whereas the ‘‘city’’ and its ‘‘light’’ in line 3 represent civilized society or traditional poetry, the darkness of the ‘‘night’’ in this poem represents the kind of poems and its poetic devices that the speaker’s predecessors have not yet explored. Thus, ‘‘I have been one acquainted with the night’’ in the opening and concluding lines, as well as ‘‘I have outwalked the furthest city light’’ (3), express that the speaker-poet has experimented with new techniques. However, the speaker-poet has written experimental poems only on occasion, for he claims, ‘‘I have walked out in rain—and back in rain’’ (2). The speaker implies that he has always come back to traditional poetry. Whereas the first stanza of the poem presents the speaker as an experimental poet, the second stanza presents a slightly different side of the speaker. In, the second stanza, consisting of two complete sentences, the speaker-poet calls the city lane, or traditional poetry, ‘‘the saddest’’ (4). While exploring the unknown territory, the speaker poet has ‘‘passed by the watchman on his beat’’ (5), but he could not meet the watchman’s eyes and says, ‘‘And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain’’ (6). This watchman is the only other human character in the poem, but the speaker avoids human contact. Keat Murray explains in his ‘‘Robert Frost’s Portrait of a

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The word ‘‘watchman’’ relies on the sense of sight. [ . . . ] And instrumental to the watchman is his function at his post as the embodiment of conscience, or its visual sign. [ . . . ] The fact that the persona drops his eyes from the watchman indicates a measure of guilt or reticence so dissonant that it resounds with a din from his conscience all the way to God. (376)

This God-like watchman is also the speaker’s conscience that tells him to stay in the traditional paths, or those surrounding the speaker who remind him of the safe paths. The watchman, on the other hand, can be a man in charge of a watch, a timekeeper, so to speak, because time is another recurring symbol in the poem. In the fourth stanza, the poet observes ‘‘One luminary clock against the sky’’ (12), which is both the moon and a clock tower, and concludes in the final couplet that ‘‘the time was neither wrong nor right’’ (13). That the speaker cannot make an eye contact with the timekeeper of poetic tradition and is, ‘‘unwilling to explain’’ (6) suggests that the speaker is not willing to explain his urge to experiment. In addition to the symbols of ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ the form of this poem enhances Poirier’s suggestion that Frost’s poem is often about the creative process. Although the speaker is straying away from poetic tradition, he is not completely out of its limits. ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ is written in a terza rima sonnet, using four tercets of an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme. In a Petrarchan sonnet, the natural thematic break often comes between the first eight line, octave, and the concluding six line, sestet. In a Shakespearean sonnet, the thematic break is frequently after three quatrains and right before the concluding couplet. However, in ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ the break comes prematurely at the end of the first two tercets. The first sestet relies on the speaker’s motion, such as ‘‘walked’’ (2) ‘‘outwalked’’ (3), and ‘‘‘passed’’ (5); in the last octave, the speaker stops and ponders: ‘‘I have stood still’’ (7). The first two stanzas consist of five complete sentences, whereas the last three stanzas have only two complete sentences—one expanding from line 7 to line 13, and the other on line 14. Unlike a Shakespearean sonnet, there is not break right before the concluding couplet because line 12 serves as the subject of line 13: ‘‘One luminary clock against the sky / Proclaimed the time was

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neither wrong nor right’’ (12–13). While writing in a terza rima sonnet, the speaker fractures the traditional thematic break in a sonnet very much like the speaker in ‘‘The Road Not Taken,’’ who chooses the path ‘‘less traveled by’’ (19). By the third tercet, the speaker is near the city limits, where he can still hear ‘‘an interrupted cry’’ (8) that comes ‘‘over houses from another street’’ (9). As the speaker tries out the limits of conventional symbols and form he realizes that cry he hears is ‘‘not to call [him] back or say good-by’’ (10). In short, the speaker comes to the realization that there is no one, not even the watchman, to prevent him exploring new possibilities in poetry. Indeed, the watchman in the second tercet does not question the speaker as he passes by. An alienation that the speaker must experience to create new, artistic poetry is emphasized through the images of deserted streets, distant houses, and the darkness that envelopes the whole civilization in the octave. This isolation is heightened by the moon: ‘‘And further still at an unearthly height / One luminary clock against the sky / Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right’’ (11–13). In observing the moon, the speaker realizes that there is no right time to create a new poem. That creating a new poem is a continual trial and error is enhanced by the seven presentperfect-tense statements that ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ contains. The speaker explored the unknown territory in the past, and though he has come back to the familiar territory, he continues to go back to the unknown. In this sense, the use of terza rima in this sonnet is appropriate: the interlocking rhyme scheme gives the sense of continuation to the readers. However, the speaker cannot resist experimenting with the traditional rhyme scheme. Although the readers would expect the traditional terza rima of the aba bcb cdc ded ee rhyme, ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ rhymes aba bcb cdc dad aa, making a circular structure by repeating the opening line of the poem at the end: ‘‘I have been one acquainted with the night’’ (1, 14). This circular structure of the poem, again, enhances the continuous nature of creating a new poem. Robert Frost is quoted as saying in 1962 in his talk titled ‘‘On Extravagance’’ that many of his poems have ‘‘literary criticism in them—in them’’ (Poirier 86; emphasis in original). Frost’s literary criticism in ‘‘Acquainted with

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FROST, IN EFFECT, SIMULATES IN THE PERSONA OUR EXPERIENCE IN READING THE POEM. AND WE ENCOUNTER OUR OWN WATCHMAN AND EXPERIENCE A MODERN CREATION MYTH IN ARTISTIC FORM.’’

the Night,’’ then, might be directed toward his contemporary poets, who in modernizing poetry, strayed away from the closed-form poetry. Written at the height of the American modernist movement in 1928, ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ stresses the importance of pushing the boundaries and exploring the unknown, while remaining within the limits of accepted tradition. Source: Kyoko Amano, ‘‘Frost’s ‘Acquainted with the Night,’’’ in Explicator, Vol. 65, No. 1, Fall 2006, pp. 39–42.

Keat Murray In the following essay, Murray offers an interpretation using archetypes to explore the thinking process of the narrator of the poem. Robert Frost once said, ‘‘I like anything that penetrates the mysteries. And if it penetrates straight to hell, then that’s all right, too’’ (Frost, 266). This statement underscores a mainstay of Frost’s poetry: he places the careful reader in direct, candid confrontation with mysteries, such as those of human conscience, of philosophical barricades and corridors, and of our mythical depths. In ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ Frost compounds all of these into a tightly structured poem depicting a modern mythological consciousness amid effusions of guilt, loneliness, and a desire for self-perpetuating vision. Frost’s persona imaginatively enacts an attempt to penetrate the mystery of his own nature. Framing a portrait of a modern mind, the process of the enactment taps into vital archetypal associations and opens the poem for a reading that incorporates observations by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. The first two stanzas perspicuously establish a few things that will be developed as the poem continues:

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I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. The predominance of ‘‘I’’ tells us that this poem is centered in one figure. Also, the tercets and terza rima form draw attention to the number three as a building block, reminiscent of the way Dante’s Divine Comedy ‘‘is dominated by the symbolic trinity’’ (Boorstin, 260). The triple terza rima rhyme aba bcb cdc and so on) interlocks and suggests an interdependency of content and form, as each stanza is linked to its contiguous stanzas. In the seeming ease of crafted rhyme, Frost masks the fusion of content and form via superb technique. This unity multiplies in other things, such as the joining of poetic forms in the terza rima sonnet and the trinity implicit in the repetition of threes. The first stanza is composed of three endstopped lines that are dependent on the others. Commencing the poem with what will develop into its intrinsic ideas, the three lines summon three archetypes, or symbols of things indigenous to our human condition. Night (darkness), rain (water), and light promptly add deep dimensions to the poem. Similar to Dante’s use of terza rima, Frost’s first tercet provides a trinity of its own. Evocative, familiar, yet magically unsettling, these archetypes present a universal human experience for the reader. From these archetypes the poem springs toward the ‘‘spiritual synthesis’’ (Cirlot, 222) signified by the number three. The first line sets an inescapable mood and aligns the reader with a mythical conception of consciousness. The present-perfect tense indicates that the persona’s acquaintance with the night began in the past and continues into the present. In accord with the archetypal night, his acquaintance is immemorial and ongoing, having no stated beginning or a projected end. The use of ‘‘one’’ signifies a single person, a lone consciousness withdrawn from the daylight and on the periphery of the conscious world of the city. No ‘‘Other’’ (Sartre, 223) is present. He is now but one. No man-made meaning system surrounds him, and thus, he feels a need to create a form through artistry with the Word. His frame of mind is further described by the word ‘‘acquainted,’’ which literally frames the poem in lines one and fourteen. The word conveys a sense

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of familiarity, recognition, and a slight indifference, but not a complete affinity. The persona’s conception of the night is ambivalent. In the beginning of the poem, he views himself as somewhat detached from night, yet at the same time lured toward it as a suitable place for his loneliness. His acquaintance, as acquaintances are, lacks a clear identification with the night but also urges him to explore it, else he would not go beyond ‘‘the furthest city light’’ (Frost, 3). Whether he seeks to alleviate his loneliness or to feel ‘‘solid lonesomeness’’ for the solitude of ‘‘listening to stillness’’ (Twain, 97), we do not know. The night, a mystery to be penetrated, can paradoxically comfort him either way. In this way, Frost’s poem is what Carl Jung calls ‘‘visionary.’’ In visionary literature ‘‘the experience that furnishes the material for artistic expression is no longer familiar. It is a strange something that derives its existence from the hinterland of man’s mind. . . . It is a primordial experience which surpasses man’s understanding’’ (Jung, 211). The acquaintance with the night originates from this hinterland, the atavistic homeland of the collective unconscious. Darkness is that archetype which signifies the unknown, the unconscious, mystery, and ‘‘primigenial chaos’’ (Cirlot, 73). In the poem, the desire to fathom it is transformed into an artistic attempt to create out of chaos. This is no small chore, so the persona couples two traditional poetic forms (terza rima and the sonnet) as a foundation for creation. The endeavor to maintain order defines visionary literature: ‘‘our intuitions point to things that are unknown and hidden. . . . If they ever become conscious, they are intentionally kept back and concealed. . . . In the day-time [man] believes in our ordered cosmos, and he tries to maintain this faith against the fear of chaos that besets him by night’’ (Jung, 216). Frost’s poem enacts this drama of the modern mind. The persona willingly removes himself from the concrete forms of a modern city and releases himself to artistic forms, through which he confronts the chief forces of archetypal creation. In this visionary poem, he poses in the role of God, as a Creator. In the cosmogonies of many cultural mythologies, the creation of the universe begins with a God-figure working among the three elements of darkness, water, and light. The first stanza swiftly summons the three elements and does so in the same succession as the creation myths. First, all is a primeval darkness,

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formless and vague. Second, water accompanies the darkness, as a prescience of the coming of life. Third, the God-figure produces light in contrast to the vast chaos; thus, the primordial confusion is wrought into a semblance of order. The two forces conjoin, alternating in a perpetual and self-fulfilling cycle that is represented in the symbol of yin-yang. The persona’s venture into the darkness, water, and light parallels that of the Creator. But Frost’s narrator does not create the natural world, rather he sees the natural world within himself. The parallels between the creation of the cosmos and the creation of the persona’s poem culminate in the awakening of consciousness from the unconscious state, from darkness into light. Yet as the poem continues, the persona moves beyond light and seeks revelation in the darkness rather than being repulsed by its density and ambiguity. Like the character Ananyev in Anton Chekhov’s ‘‘Lights,’’ he explores the primordial ‘‘nocturnal gloom [for] some vital secret’’ (32) that can overcome his nihilistic tendencies. Frost’s persona fulfills a similar role as a representative of the archetypal man amidst what Jung terms the collective unconscious, which is, in sum, a mind of mythical proportions. As Jung indicates, the unconscious influence does not terminate with the awakening. Instead it contributes to the continual shaping of consciousness. This is elemental to Frost’s poem, for the persona is compelled to compose art from his experience with the void of darkness. But Frost takes one more step, for the awakening of consciousness is inextricably bound to thought, emotion, action, and conscience. The persona’s experience taps the vital unconscious which, uninhibited by the vastness of the archetypes, assimilates them with experience. This unrestrained surge of the Jungian mind is explained by Miguel Serrano: ‘‘to project the light of the consciousness into the bottomless sea of the Unconscious, which is to say, into God himself’’ (qtd. by Leeming, 333). By engaging mythical symbols the persona propels artistic creation back to its creative model, God. Synthesizing natural elements and human artifice, the persona is naturally inclined to venture into the collective unconscious through the embodiments of archetypes. In a sense, the poem suggests two integral parts of the voyage of the divine, mythical hero: the trial and the descent into the underworld. At the bottom of the mythological journey lie the hellish quandaries

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of human existence and quest for meaning. The method befitting our persona’s quest is literary art hewn from archetypes. The persona hesitates as he walks into the rain, as the dash preceding ‘‘and back in rain’’ (Frost, 2) implies. But why is he hesitant and reticent? Perhaps it is the fear of discerning little or nothing in the rainy night. But despite this, he yearns for an approachable order that societal institutions (the watchman in line five), constructions (city), and conventions cannot offer and have not fulfilled. He unwittingly turns to universal archetypes; ironically, the mythological night can fulfill what in him has been emptied. But what, we may ask, is left for this man to ponder as he leaves the furthest city light behind him? It is his own consciousness within the stream of the collective, mythical mind. At this point, the archetype of darkness, water, and light tint the poem with universal force in the form of the persona’s microcosmic creation. Frost links the consciousness of the persona with that of God, the being who originally had only Himself to ponder before creating His new self-expression. In simpler terms, the persona had been compelled to ponder himself and his imagination before creating his poetic form. The present perfect tense of ‘‘I have,’’ then, strongly implies that the persona continues, even after the poem, to engage in this process of reflecting upon himself and his spiritual potential. In short, by summoning the images of creation myth, the persona sustains a part in a rite, or ‘‘an organization of mythological symbols.’’ Joseph Campbell explains the drama of the ritual in this way: by participating in the drama of the rite one is brought directly in touch with these [symbols], not as verbal reports of historic events, either past, present, or to be, but as revelations, here and now, of what is always and forever . . . no one’s sense of the presence of God can be anything more than a function of his spiritual capacity. (Campbell, Myths, 97)

Campbell’s process of the rite recalls T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘objective correlative,’’ which is ‘‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of [a] particular emotion’’ (Eliot, 124). Remaining unnamed, the emotion of Frost’s poem bridges the gulf between the persona’s conception of God and his spiritual capacity. Both Campbell’s rite and Eliot’s objective correlative accentuate spiritual capacity in asserting the need for the imagined form. Eliot envisions this in the fusion of art and mind; Campbell in art, mind, and myth. Frost’s persona applies the thrust of

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Eliot to assert a mythical, spiritual introspection like that of Campbell. The second tercet shows another side of the persona. Here the persona looks ‘‘down the saddest city lane’’ (Frost, 4) rather than traveling it. Lowering his eyes from the watchman’s glance, he turns from human contact. The persona consciously avoids reminders of human misery, as well as those conceptual essences (such as law) invented by humanity in order to define and understand itself. What the deplorable side of the human condition needs most is sympathy and human contact, both of which our persona is unwilling to offer. But his cursory look does acknowledge an acquaintance with the pain of others. His familiarity, however, is no less cruel than kind. This ambivalence, as part of the human condition, demands that the saddest city lane impress upon him. He hazards an encounter although it adds to his loneliness, and in disquietude he ponders things in the same way a Stoic endures the pangs of life. This tendency in the persona is also evidenced by his movement beyond the known form, beyond the security of street lights and shelter. He steps into the darkness with a hopeful hesitancy to confront his painful vastness; whatever adds to his pain also gives him solace. The dark night will propitiously offer the light of the next day. The rain that plangently pitter-patters will regenerate life in a natural cycle. In the same way, he hopes that the superlative ‘‘saddest lane’’ will offer its counterpart. His introspection bears a stoic numbness yet a keen sensitivity. Continuing the drama of the rite, the suspended image of the watchman rounds off the second tercet, with the poem’s second human character. This person remains masked in the impersonality of his occupation, just as the persona seems masked in the indifference of the night. Both the persona and the watchman fulfill the same role. The word ‘‘watchman’’ relies on the sense of sight, which is the sense that composes the persona’s surroundings: the night, the furthest city light, the saddest city lane, the eyes. And instrumental to the watchman is his function at his post as the embodiment of conscience, or its visual sign. His purpose is to aid those in distress, yet he is the very presence of it; he reminds us of distress as we think about the necessity of his work. The watchman, then, refers back to the persona, the conscience, and God; all of which monitor urges, thoughts, and

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actions. The persona charges the watchman as a modern archetype, for the purpose of having a conceivable, symbolic outlet. The fact that the persona drops his eyes from the watchman indicates a measure of guilt or reticence so dissonant that it resounds with a din from his conscience all the way to God. The second tercet, then, underscores the power and depth of the first. Let us notice that the images of the first two tercets are impersonal and external—darkness, rain, light, a street, a watchman. But at the same time these images reflect internal conflicts, moving closer to the conscience of the persona. Against the cityscape the persona sketches the street and the watchman as symbols of potential safety. But against the dark night of the city they produce nothing but homelessness, guilt, and despair. The modern mind’s dependency on these images is obfuscated by the resonance of the archetypes in the first stanza. Here the mythical and the modern-made archetypes overlap. The street and the watchman imbricate the past with the present, bridging the gulf that divides the mythical assurance of an ordered belongingness and the modern homelessness of a wandering conscience. The first two stanzas form one sestet, leaving an octet to respond. Readers of sonnets have come to expect the octet first, with its following sestet framing the complex problem of the octet into a conceivable perspective. Frost, however, inverts this with his adaptations to the terza rima sonnet. The octet will expand the enigma of the sestet. In one compound sentence the octet presents a short narrative drama that personalizes what seemed impersonal in the five sentences of the sestet. Paradoxically, Frost expands the poem by presenting a single narrative of one, lone individual. The vast forces of the first sestet form an undercurrent for the short narrative drama. The created upheaval of a complex human conscience is the subject, and because the persona is compelled to employ the collective symbols of creation, he enacts and sustains the mythological depth of the modern mind. In the last three stanzas, Frost’s use of poetic form and language advance the archetypal associations and themes discussed above: I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street,

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But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly height, One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night. Despite urges to create order and to unify experience, the persona is subject to his own poetic creation. He incrementally decreases what he has. His goal to possess some sense of unity is offset by the abatement of certainty and direction. In other words, the persona strives for creation but in vying with a desire for certainty, his creation is lessened, one possession at a time. This lessening is emphasized in the structure of the poem. The third tercet begins as the first two did, with ‘‘I have.’’ In all, the poem contains seven present perfect tense statements beginning with these words. As highlighted by John Robert Doyle, from the first tercet to the fourth the number of these statements decreases (167). Three appear in the first tercet, two in the second, one in the third, and none in the fourth. As the poem progresses, the persona expresses a loss of experience with something partially identifiable, decimating clarity and definition. In other words, he is not conscious of what he has anymore. By the fourth tercet definite experience and certainty have been nullified. The last line, however, reinstates the first line, and this repetition requires a figurative reading in a fashion similar to that explained by John Ciardi in his reading of the last line of ‘‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening’’ (Ciardi, 145). In ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ the repetition serves as a refrain that encloses the form but then extends it into issues of conscience and equivocal questions about existence. Frost offers the intricacies of the poem in other ways also, particularly in his craft of word choice and rhythm. Line seven effectively employs alliteration in ‘‘stood still and stopped the sound of feet.’’ In this line sound and sense merge, as the footsteps and their ceasing are simulated by the alliteration. Frost varies the meter in the line, beginning with an iamb in ‘‘I have’’ and then using a spondee in ‘‘stood still.’’ This emphasizes the stillness that accompanies the stopping of footsteps. But again Frost achieves a slight paradox as the spondee itself implies a steady continuation of action: the feet cease but something else remains active. Frost captures the ongoing conflict, or the yin yang, of the active versus the passive, of the conscious versus the unconscious, of indifference versus conscience. The persona tells us that the

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part of him that had been active is now passive and vice versa. In effect, however, the clarity of this perpetual working of opposites is confounded by the fact that the unconscious becomes more active and the conscious verges into passivity. As in the inverted sonnet form, Frost has inverted the ideas of the poem. This inversion pivots on the persona’s conscience, the part of him that feels guilt and ponders wrong and right. The last three stanzas signal the emergence of the conscience and invigorate the interplay between conscious and unconscious. Frost’s portrait of a modern mind hinges on the addition of a third element, the conscience, as a mediator and a ‘‘solution of conflict posed by dualism’’ (Cirlot, 222). The conscience imbues the conflict between the external world and the persona’s internal world. This same conflict is not new to the poem, for it runs the whole of the introductory sestet. The persona abruptly stops his walking as he hears ‘‘an interrupted cry’’ (Frost, 8). What, we may ask, interrupts the cry? It is the same conscience that had interrupted him twice before: upon his view of the saddest city lane and upon his passing by the watchman. The conscience heaves in sight three times. His conscience is an acquaintance with his own night, or the sometimes blind persistence of the conscious mind. His awareness of his position plagues him, overriding any comfortable solitude and breaking the impenetrable void of the night. By continuing after the cry, by looking past the sad street and away from the watchman, the persona seeks comfort in the night, supposing that nothingness cannot create a disturbance. Here, the persona assures himself of something, and like Chekhov’s character Ananyev, he endeavors to transcend nihilism. The cry that pervades the night piques and stirs the conscience. It ‘‘came over houses’’ (Frost, 9), and thus to the persona it seems to emanate from a civilization blanketed by darkness. Its purpose is unclear; it does not ‘‘call . . . back or say good-bye’’ (Frost, 10). He stops what he is doing and releases the reader into ambiguity. Does the persona recognize the cry? Does he think he may recognize the cry and then decide that he doesn’t? Does he recognize the cry and choose to ignore its plea? Is the cry a plea at all? He does stop in his tracks, indicating that the cry at least seems familiar, like that of an acquaintance. He does listen for it to call him back or to say good-bye, as if he left someone in distress or pain. The possible interpretations multiply from

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here, but none are clearly satisfied by the poem itself. But why conceal these details? Vague and unreachable, this shifting ambiguity adds to the darkness that envelops it, which, in turn, escalates the significance of conscience. Thereby, the conscience is magnified to great proportions, making it a prodigious force that deserves reckoning in this portrait of the modern mind. Being vast and deep, the conscience reaches mythological proportions deserving of an archetype its own. The poem, however, supplies no single image to serve this function; instead, it is achieved in the interplay of the elements: the persona, his actions, the watchman, and the reader. The attentive reader joins in the response to the ambiguity of the cry. Frost, in effect, simulates in the persona our experience in reading the poem. And we encounter our own watchman and experience a modern creation myth in artistic form. The invitation to the reader reverberates just as the interrupted cry resounds over the houses and over our residence in the fallow certainty of self-assurance. Immersed in vast darkness, the persona decides to move ‘‘further still’’ (Frost, 11) into the third part of the journey. First, he ventured out into the night. Second, he ‘‘outwalked the furthest city light.’’ Third, he moves ‘‘further still,’’ beyond the cry, with the sight of ‘‘one luminary clock against the sky’’ (Frost, 12). Residing ‘‘at an unearthly height’’ (Frost, 11), the moon remains apart from the physical domain of the persona. Here the moon contrasts with darkness, adding yet another contrast to a long series: the persona’s walking and stopping, the cry and conscience, the earth and the height of the moon, the dropping of eyes and raising them. The moon, a symbol of permanent change and resurrection, rotates and at the same time revolves around the earth. It works in time as an agent of time, enveloped in the cycle it measures. This is the exponent of the cyclical nature of the poem, as it is formed and enveloped within the ideas it measures. The moon, however, can be quite problematic for the person who sees it simply. If we watch the moon’s changing phases night after night, times seems to move forward. But if we observe the moon tonight and then again in twenty-nine days, time seems to remain the same. Our mistake is in imposing our idea of time onto the universe. As one large comprehensive system, the universe moves with the same impersonality that the persona creates in encountering the poem’s various scenes. Only the moon

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offsets the enshrouding darkness; only this ‘‘luminary clock’’ can enlighten the persona to its archetypal qualities: it is ‘‘the first celestial stop of . . . spiritual flight to God’s throne’’ (Campbell, Myths, 233). It is also ‘‘the residence of the souls of those who have passed away and are there waiting to return for rebirth. For the moon, as we see it, dies and is resurrected’’ (Campbell, Myths, 235). In short, the moon represents the human soul striving for spiritual fulfillment, and the persona becomes aware of this in the moon’s proclamation. The description of the moon as a ‘‘cloak against the sky’’ implies a few things. As a symbol of our perception of time, the moon both spans and divides the past and the present. In this way, the personified moon verifies and proclaims itself, as a symbol of the self-verification sought by the persona. But Frost sets the plan askew in a certain word choice. The persona sees the clock in a position ‘‘against the sky’’ (my italics). Each of several meanings for ‘‘against’’ can work, with each altering the poem’s direction. If we read ‘‘against’’ to mean ‘‘in contrast to,’’ the moon and the persona stand out apart from the darkness. If we read ‘‘against’’ to mean ‘‘in opposition to,’’ the moon counters the darkness. If we read ‘‘against’’ to mean ‘‘press on or push,’’ the moon defers the effects of darkness. If we read ‘‘against’’ to mean ‘‘next to, or adjoining,’’ the moon is integrally tied to the darkness. The most appropriate reading I see combines two of the above four. The persona looks to the moon and its luminescence in consolation and in seeking a response to the ‘‘interrupted cry.’’ He supposes the moon is in contrast to the surrounding darkness. But because the moon ‘‘Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right,’’ the persona realizes that the alluring moon and its inability to breach his own ambivalence is adjoined to and part of the darkness. In other words, a moral being discovers his intuitive and mythical affection for an amoral universe, a universe that seems to invite human passion. Consequently, the persona is stunned. The universe, it seems to him, must be loved although it doesn’t love. But given this human condition, the persona must choose a response. As a result, the persona’s loneliness intensifies in the choice. The poem taps the streams of the conscious, the unconscious, and the conscience through the interplay of archetypal forces that initially seem, through symbols, to lie beyond him but are very much a part of him. Unfortunately, the quest to alleviate the persona’s burden is not achieved. Fortunately, the very act of searching is

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the nature of the human, just as darkness, water, light, moon, and sky are inseparable from the external world. The persona must choose his action in the moral conscience created by humanity. The persona dubiously embraces the fact that questions of right and wrong do not apply to the universe. Morality is a human issue partially regulated by mythology, which is, among other things, ‘‘the enforcement of moral order’’ (Campbell, Creative Mythology, 4). Morality involves a collective imagination but ultimately must be enacted by individuals. In this way, the persona must choose his reaction to a distant cry. Will he respond with the amorality of the universe? No, it is impossible. The word ‘‘choose’’ here is a key, because the persona has emphasized what he has done and what he still does. He emphasizes his actions: ‘‘walked’’ (Frost, 2), ‘‘outwalked’’ (2), ‘‘looked’’ (4), ‘‘passed’’ (5), ‘‘dropped’’ (6), ‘‘stood still and stopped’’ (7), and his unwillingness to explain. The emphasis on action proclaims his self-hood. But because he avoids human contact, he is self-alienated, taking himself to an existential brink. The reticence, the vision of an amoral universe, the emphasis on one’s own actions, and the presence of alienation add up to a brand of existential thought steeped in archetypal depths. But he does reach beyond a solipsistic existence. He attempts to see the order of the universe and the order of his life as he contemplates darkness and light, decision and indecision, active forces and passive forces. He seeks to feel, to feel a universe that returns no comprehensible sign of affection. All of this is accomplished in Frost’s conscious creation of a persona, who himself is a creator masked in his quest for form. In all of these ways, Frost’s ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ moves toward the fulfillment of Joseph Campbell’s four functions of a living mythology: the metaphysical-mystical, the cosmological, the social, and the psychological. Campbell emphasizes in the modern world these four functions are soundly grounded in the individual, in ‘‘the centering and harmonization of the individual’’ (Creative Mythology, 623). This quest for the centering of oneself seems the thrust of Frost’s poem. Pivoting on deep-rooted symbols intrinsic to human experience, the poem invites an archetypal reading as it extricates and transplants the symbols in the modern world, with their mythical vitality in tact. In the life of ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ exacting claims have assuredly tried to specify literal circumstances and events fortified in the

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poem’s symbols. But to cling to such claims is to sacrifice its universal potential. What must be specified, however, lies in the last line of the poem. Despite all at stake, the persona reinstates his sense of having something: ‘‘I have been one acquainted with the night.’’ Although this line may suggest a lack of progress since line one, we know that the process in between was anything but uneventful. He has acquainted himself with his condition as a thinking, feeling, and dynamic being whose condition is as intriguing as it is bottomless. He accepts his position, knowing he and the night will never be in complete affinity. Inciting a myriad of associations, night represents formlessness yet, at the same time, a desire to ponder it, to create beyond it. And whether we fear the night, celebrate it, or are indifferent to it, we shall always be its acquaintance. The persona realizes that a struggle with perplexity both invites and inhibits us. If he has nothing else, the persona still has an acquaintance with his own night. He has at least chosen to explore his own nature, having attempted ‘‘to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is’’ (Campbell, Creative Mythology, 4). He confronts a great mystery which is both within and without him. Source: Keat Murray, ‘‘Robert Frost’s Portrait of a Modern Mind: The Archetypal Resonance of ‘Acquainted with the Night,’’’ in Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4, Summer 2000, pp. 370–84.

SOURCES Brodsky, Joseph, ‘‘On Grief and Reason,’’ in Homage to Robert Frost, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996, p. 7. Frost, Robert, ‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ in Complete Poems of Robert Frost, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967, p. 324; originally published in West-Running Brook, Henry Holt, 1928. Heaney, Seamus, ‘‘Above the Rim,’’ in Homage to Robert Frost, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996, p. 87. Murray, Keat. ‘‘Robert Frost’s Portrait of the Modern Mind: The Archetypal Resonance of ‘Acquainted with the Night,’’’ in Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 370–84. Pitt, David, ‘‘Energy, Farm States Evade Worst of Recession,’’ Associated Press, March 18, 2008, http://www. warws.com/documents/Energyfarmstatesevadeworstofre cession.pdf (accessed August 4, 2009). ‘‘Report: Ford could cut up to 30,000,’’ USATODAY, December 7, 2005, http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/ 2005-12-07-ford-layoffs_x.htm (accessed August 4, 2009).

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‘‘Robert Frost Dies at 88; Kennedy Leads in Tribute,’’ New York Times, January 30, 1963. Smiley, Gene, ‘‘U.S. Economy in the 1920s.’’ EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples, March 26, 2008, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/Smiley.1920s.final (accessed August 4, 2009). Thompson, Lawrance, ‘‘The Verse of the Poet Reread,’’ in New York Times, June 23, 1963, p. 213. Walcott, Derek, ‘‘The Road Taken,’’ in Homage to Robert Frost, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996, pp. 96, 97, 103.

FURTHER READING Amano, Kyoko, ‘‘Frost’s ‘Acquainted with the Night,’’’ in Explicator, Vol. 65, No. 1, Fall 2006, pp. 39–42. Amano bases his analysis of this poem on a theory promoted by Richard Poirer, that many of Frost’s poems are really about the process of writing poetry. Amano suggests

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that the night in ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ is not a conventional symbol of grief or death but rather it stands for the formal elements of poetry that the poet confronts and explores as he composes his poetry. Frost, Robert, ‘‘The Figure a Poem Makes,’’ in Complete Poems of Robert Frost, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967, pp. v–viii. In this essay that serves as a preface to his collected poems, Frost explains the important function of a poem, that it moves from delight to wisdom and that it is of a single piece and action like ice is while melting on a stove. Stanlis, Peter J., Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, ISI Books, 2007. Stanlis explains the intellectual basis of the poet’s philosophy and poetics. He explains Frost’s responses to current ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and sets each of Frost’s beliefs within an historical context.

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Blackberry Eating GALWAY KINNELL 1980

Galway Kinnell’s ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ appears in his fifteenth collection of poetry, Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, published in 1980. ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ is a fourteen-line quatorzain, a term applied to fourteen-line poems that do not conform to one of the three sonnet formats. Although there is no rhyme scheme, the poem is clearly divided into an octave and sestet, as in the Petrarchan sonnet. Kinnell’s poem is one long sentence, filled with rich imagery and several examples of alliteration. Kinnell also makes use of the simile in linking the power of blackberries to the power of words. This is an action poem, not a reflective one. With the first line, Kinnell describes the act of picking blackberries, and at the end, he describes creating words. Important themes include nature, poetic creativity, and the Fall of Man. ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ is included in Kinnell’s A New Selected Poems (2006). ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ is also included in the Bedford Introduction to Literature, eighth edition, published in 2008.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Kinnell was born February 1, 1927, in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the youngest of four children born to James Scott and Elizabeth Kinnell. After graduation from high school, Kinnell attended Princeton University, graduating summa cum

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Galway Kinnell (AP Images)

laude in 1948. The following year he received a master’s of art degree from the University of Rochester. After completing his education, Kinnell supervised the liberal arts program at the University of Chicago until 1955. In 1956 and 1957, he taught at the University of Grenoble, in Grenoble, France, as a Fulbright lecturer. A second Fulbright provided a lectureship at the University of Iran, in Teheran, in 1959 and 1960. Kinnell’s first collection of poetry, What a Kingdom It Was, was published in 1960, upon his return to the United States. A second collection of poetry, Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock, appeared in 1964. In 1965, Kinnell married Inez Delgado del Torres. A daughter was born in 1966 and a son in 1968. Throughout the 1960s, Kinnell was active in social protests. He joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and was arrested during an integration protest in Louisiana. Kinnell’s experiences as a social activist found expression in his poetry, most notably in Body Rags (1968) and The Book of Nightmares (1971), a narrative poem about the Vietnam War. Kinnell had

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actively protested against the war, and those views about the war found their way into his poetry. During the 1960s and 1970s, Kinnell worked as an adjunct professor in writing programs at several universities across the United States, from the East Coast (Columbia University) to the West Coast (University of California at Irvine), with many stops in between. He was the recipient of several poetry honors during the 1970s. In 1974, he received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the Medal of Merit from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1975. Mortal Acts, Mortal Words was published in 1980, which turned out to be a decade in which Kinnell published some of his most acclaimed poetry. Selected Poems (1982) earned a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983. Kinnell received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984. In 1986, another collection of poetry, The Past (1985), garnered a National Book Critics Circle Award for Kinnell. In 1987, Kinnell edited The Essential Whitman. Kinnell’s poetry has often been compared to Whitman’s. Kinnell’s 1990 book of poetry, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, was his twentysecond collection of his verse. In 1996, Imperfect Thirst (1994) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Two additional collections of poetry appeared subsequently—A New Selected Poems (2001), which was selected as a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award, and Strong Is Your Hold (2006). Kinnell received the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America in 2002 and served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. As of 2009, Kinnell resided in New York City and Vermont.

POEM TEXT I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,

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which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry-eating in late September.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

POEM SUMMARY Lines 1–2 ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ opens with a simple declarative statement expressing the speaker’s enjoyment of eating blackberries, which he does in late September, when the berries are ripe. (The speaker seems much like the poet himself.) The emotion expressed is love for the blackberries and for the season. The first sentence establishes that the action takes place in autumn, traditionally a time of harvest and preparation for the winter ahead. This is also a time of transition and change, the moving from one season to the next, which brings new opportunities, even as the current world is changing. The colder weather causes the blackberries to be icy when the speaker tastes them.

Lines 3–4 In line 3, the speaker explains that he particularly loves blackberries for breakfast. He loves blackberries so much that he eats his breakfast standing in the blackberry patch. Once again, the poet describes eating, but it is linked to the same love that motivates the speaker’s excursion to pick blackberries. The early morning consumption of blackberries will carry the speaker through the day. The stalks have thorns, which prick the fingers. The prickly stalks and the risk of being wounded is the price to be paid for picking blackberries. The punishment that the blackberries must inflict is the price for their exquisite beauty and taste. It is the enjoyment of the moment that matters.

Lines 5–6 The discussion of line 4 is continued on line 5. The thorns are the blackberry’s punishment for knowing too much about the magic required to create such delectable flavor, which seduces would-be blackberry eaters into risking contact with the prickly stalks. These lines hint at the Fall in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve are punished for having obtained forbidden knowledge. Like Adam and Eve, the blackberry stalks are punished for knowing what should not be known. That this knowledge is expressed in terms of magic suggests that the possessing of this knowledge is especially dangerous for the

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The Poetry Voice of Galway Kinnell is a sixtyminute audio recording by Caedmon Audio, which includes selections from Book of Nightmares (1983). Galway Kinnell (1989) is a sixty-minute video recording by the Lannan Foundation. In this recording, Kinnell reads from several different books of his poetry, including selections from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. In 1993, Kinnell participated in ‘‘Poetry Breaks,’’ a television series, broadcast by WGBH, in Boston, Massachusetts. In a series of very brief recordings broadcast for this program, Kinnell reads four of his poems and briefly answers questions about his poetry. In 2007, Kinnell recorded Hard Prayer, a sixtyminute audio recording, in which he reads a selection of his poetry. This recording is available from Audio-Forum.

stalks. In line 6, the speaker completes the previous line. The sorcery committed by the plant is the creation of blackberries.

Lines 7–8 The speaker again comments that he eats his breakfast while standing in the blackberry patch. He cannot resist the berries and eats them as he picks them. He is unable to resist their lure and as he raises the stalks, the berries practically fall into his mouth unbidden. However, the action is not complete. The berries do not quite fall in his mouth of their own accord, and thus for the berries to be eaten, an action is still required. The speaker must place the blackberries in his mouth. Line 8 concludes the octave. In the sestet that follows, readers learn that the ripe blackberries are like certain juicy words.

Lines 9–10 The sestet begins with a shift to the complimentary idea. The eating of blackberries gives way to the

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benefit of eating the blackberries. Where before the action was the taking in or consuming, now the action is forcing out or expelling. Creative words tumble from his mouth, just as the berries had earlier practically tumbled into it. These are not ordinary words, though; the words that are expelled in line 10 begin with the letter -s. The italicized words, strengths and squinched alliterate (repeat the same initial consonant sound). Squinch is an archaic form of the word scrunch. The use of the initial -s may remind readers of the Fall of Man, and the role in that story of the serpent or snake. It is worth considering that the Fall of Man gave rise to a world in which God is present. For the poet, the eating of the blackberries, with their allusion to sin, gives rise to the word that forms his poetry. References to the Fall of Man mirror one another in this poem. The first one occurs in the fifth line of the poem, whereas the second reference occurs in the fifth line from the end of the poem.

Lines 11–12 The connection between blackberries and words is reinforced in the description of instances in which many letters combined make up a singlesyllable word. Similarly, a blackberry is composed of many small seed pods that combine to make the larger berry. Both the berry and the syllable are a larger mass, created from several smaller units. In line 12, the poet explains that it is necessary for him to squeeze the letters and syllables out of his mouth, which is turn creates a splurge of language. Therefore, the creating of poetry is not unlike the eating of berries. Each word in a poem is made up of letters, not unlike the many seed pods that make up a blackberry.

Lines 13–14 Expelling words is described in the same language used to describe the overripe, cold blackberries of line 2. Words are sensory objects like the blackberries described in the octave. Words have power, but that power can be mysterious, emerging out of silence and coldness and filling the poet with surprise at their creation. Words can even be black, wicked in their use and meaning. The language of line 2 is mirrored in the second to last line of ‘‘Blackberry Eating.’’ Words are just as tantalizing as the fruit. The final line repeats the phrase from line 1 that opened the poem, a reminder that the poet/speaker loves September and the ripe blackberries, which when eaten, feed his creativity and create letters, syllables, words, and finally poetry.

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THEMES Creativity ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ is about the creative process. For the poet, creativity is enhanced by immersion in an activity that he loves, in this case the eating of blackberries. All artists have something that enhances or that feeds their creativity. For the poet/speaker in ‘‘Blackberry Eating,’’ creativity is engendered with the taste and texture of cold fall blackberries. The poet connects the intense experience in the blackberry patch with the essence of his creative process. Nature directly experienced feeds his creativity. Standing amid the blackberries also brings him joy and renewal. In a real sense, nature awakens the poet’s creative process.

Fall of Man In the second chapter of Genesis, Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and are expelled from the Garden of Eden. This story, referred to as the Fall of Man, is the archetypal theme of the human search for forbidden knowledge. In ‘‘Blackberry Eating,’’ the prickly stalks of the plant are described as its own punishment for knowing what the plant is not supposed to know—the sorcery necessary to create such tantalizing berries. Black magic is associated with the devil and with evil, which further parallels the Genesis story. Eve is seduced by the serpent, who entices her to sin. Kinnell deliberately recalls the Fall of Man with the repetition of s sounds in words such as ‘‘strengths,’’ ‘‘squinched,’’ ‘‘squeeze,’’ ‘‘squinch,’’ ‘‘splurge,’’ ‘‘silent,’’ ‘‘startled,’’ and ‘‘September.’’ The quick repetition of s sounds evokes the hissing serpent that speaks in Genesis. The speaker also claims that the berries practically fall into his mouth without invitation, just as the words fall from his mouth, also without effort. Once again, these two images may remind readers of the Fall. The seduction of Eve is likened to the seductive blackberries. Eating blackberries seduces words from the poet, which are tasted by him with the same attention to texture and essence.

Nature During autumn, outside work prepares for winter. It is a time of harvest, and for the poet, nature is ripe with what nourishes. In ‘‘Blackberry Eating,’’ the speaker cannot stop the enthusiastic flow of words. Nature, as represented by the blackberries, feeds the poet, but as it stimulates

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Kinnell’s poetry is about a literal action that refers metaphorically to the act of creating poetry. Choose an activity that you enjoy and then write a poem in which you describe the specific actions associated with your activity and then link them to something else that you do. For instance, you could make a connection between playing football and studying for an exam in your science class. Research the history of the sonnet as a poetic form. Create a PowerPoint presentation in which you include the distinguishing characteristics of the different sonnet forms. Be sure to provide an example of each kind of sonnet. Kinnell is only one of several notable twentieth-century poets, such as William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Allan Ginsberg, and W. S. Merwin. Choose one of these poets to study and write a research paper in which you discuss the poet and his work and what they contributed to American culture. Kinnell’s poem is one of several that deal with blackberries as a topic. Choose one of the following poems as the subject of a compare and contrast paper in which you discuss ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ and the poem you have chosen. Choose Seamus Heaney’s ‘‘Blackberry Picking’’; Yusef Komunyakaa’s ‘‘Blackberries’’; Robert Hass’s ‘‘Meditation at Lagunitas’’; or Sylvia Plath’s ‘‘Blackberrying.’’ ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ is excellent read aloud. The alliteration of consonants and the sheer beauty of the language give it a different power when spoken rather than read. Read ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ aloud and then ask a friend to read it. With several friends, memorize lines from the poem and take turns reciting the lines aloud. Then write a one-page response paper in which you describe the experience of speaking Kinnell’s words.

Blackberries (Image copyright Birute Vijeikiene, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

the poet, nature also feeds his creative force. ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ offers an idealistic view of nature, in which all the berries are equally delicious. There are no unripe or rotten ones. The poet minimizes the sting of the prickly stalks. This nature is thoroughly appreciated by the speaker. The berries are beautiful, and eating them provides his first and best meal of the day. In actuality, blackberry patches are not as welcoming as the poet claims, but for him and the purpose of his poem, they provide exactly the right setting and metaphor.

STYLE Alliteration Alliteration is repetition of the initial consonant or vowel sounds in words. Alliteration is used to link words in terms of sound and to call attention to how these words are connected in other ways,

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for example, by definition or by the meaning they have in a given context. For example, the words ‘‘black blackberries’’ alliterate. The repetition of b, even the repetition of the word, black, functions as a linking device in terms of sound, and it emphasizes the color by stating it twice. Other examples include ‘‘prickly penalty’’ in line 4 and the use of ‘‘squeeze,’’ ‘‘squinch,’’ and ‘‘splurge’’ in line 12. The repetition of these consonants makes the words cohere in sound.

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sonnet. Traditionally, the octave states an issue, a theme, or a problem that is then resolved in the sestet. In Kinnell’s sonnet, the octave describes the consuming of the blackberries, whereas the sestet describes the expelling of words. Thus in the octave, the poet consumes the nourishment necessary to produce poetry. In Kinnell’s poem, the sestet provides the result of the blackberry eating. For the poet, eating blackberries enhances his creativity and helps him think of the delicious words he uses in writing his poems.

First-Person Narration The narrator is the person who speaks the story. In first-person narration the narrator is the one through whose perspective the story is seen by the reader. In first-person narration, the reader is limited to this single point of view. In ‘‘Blackberry Eating,’’ the speaker may be identified with the poet, because the poem describes the act of writing poetry. Kinnell’s narrator relates what appears to be a personal experience, eating blackberries, and then demonstrates in the poem how that experience is like writing poetry. Thus, the poem is both an explanation of the creative process and the product of that process.

Metaphysical Conceit A metaphor is an analogy in which an object is described by comparing it to another object. A metaphysical conceit is a complicated metaphor in which the analogy is an elaborate comparison between dissimilar objects. When used effectively, the metaphysical conceit teaches something about the subject by revealing something unusual in the object to which it is compared. In Kinnell’s poem, eating blackberries is compared to the experience of creating poetry. In the conceit, blackberry seeds are compared to letters, each of which (seeds and letters) are combined to make the larger unit (berries and words).

Sonnet A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem that follows a specific rhyme scheme. The sonnet originally developed in Italy in the thirteenth century and was introduced in England early in the sixteenth century. The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet and the English or Shakespearean sonnet are the two most common kinds of sonnets. The Petrarchan sonnet is divided into the octave and the sestet. The octave contains the first eight-lines, and often these are set apart as a separate stanza. (Octave is a synonym for octet or any group of eight.) The sestet contains the final six lines of a

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT A Decade of Social Protest ‘‘Blackberry Eating,’’ was published in 1980, but its author spent much of the two previous decades actively involved in social protest. In particular, the 1970s were marked by social protest, idealism, and disillusionment. Thanks to television coverage, the war in Vietnam was broadcasted nightly across the United States. Television allowed Americans at home to view battles and eat their dinners to reports of body counts. It did not take long for disillusionment with the war to lead to large demonstrations against the war. When the war finally ended in 1973, approximately 58,000 U.S. servicemen had died, over 300,000 had been wounded, and an estimated three million Vietnamese, including both military and civilian, had died. Protests continued with other themes. As the war was ending, a scandal in Washington D.C. was just getting started. A small break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in 1972 led to televised congressional hearings in 1974 and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Protests in Boston against school busing pitted neighbor against neighbor but soon enough it became clear that the protest was not about race but about class. Many wealthy people pushed for school busing, but the children being bused were from bluecollar middle-class families. Protests and class warfare led to violent protests in some cases. Meanwhile, both the civil rights and women’s rights movements, which had begun in the 1960s, continued in the 1970s, where they were joined by the fledgling gay rights movement. The bill for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which was passed in 1972, began with ratification by twenty-two of the thirty-eight states in

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1970s–1980s: After years of public protests, the United States involvement in the Vietnam War finally ends in March 1973. Today: The United States is engaged in two wars, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Large public protests against both wars are common. 1970s–1980s: In August 1974, President Richard Nixon resigns as president amid allegations of political corruption and abuse of power, stemming from the break-in at the Watergate Hotel in 1972. Today: Thirty-five years after the Watergate investigation, the legacy continues to be distrust of government officials. A 2001 report by the National Academy of Public Administration reports that government officials need to work to rebuild public trust in government. 1970s–1980s: In 1977, President Jimmy Carter decides to cut U.S. aid to countries that condone human rights abuses, becoming the first U.S. president to take an active position against human rights abuse. Today: Human rights abuse is reported in several nations, including in the United States

just the first year, but by the deadline for ratification in 1982, only thirty-five of the necessary thirty-eight states had voted in favor of the amendment. The amendment was thus defeated. Social protest encompassed all aspects of life in the 1970s and early 1980s. California’s Proposition 13 was the culmination of a tax revolt by people who decided that they wanted an end to higher property taxes. A grass-roots effort by ordinary citizens quickly led to the 350,000 signatures required to get Proposition 13 on the ballot, where it passed easily. Its success fueled citizen anti-tax protests in other parts of the country. Soon enough, though, there was something new to grab the public’s attention. The birth of the

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regarding the use of waterboarding as an interrogation device during the Bush administration and in Sudan and elsewhere regarding ethnic killings.

1970s–1980s: In March 1979, a nuclear disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station is narrowly avoided after half of the radioactive core begins to melt. The crisis lasts twelve days, ten thousand people are evacuated, and the plant is closed permanently. Today: Because of a desire to be less dependent on oil as a primary energy source, there is a new push to develop additional nuclear power plants, after many years of public resistance to the idea. In 2008, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission receives applications to build twenty-six new reactors.

1970S–1980s: In 1980, the World Conservation Strategy issues a report that suggests that one million plants and animals face extinction, due to destruction of habitat and other human-related causes. Today: It is estimated that if nothing changes, half of all species on Earth will disappear during the twenty-first century.

first test-tube baby in England focused people’s fears on the specter of science creating babies in test-tubes. The reality of in-vitro fertilization was far removed from the fears provoked by baby Brown’s birth, but that did not seem to matter to the many people who felt compelled to protest the use of science in pregnancy.

Continuing Turmoil Two events in 1978 and 1979 figured largely into the national consciousness of the time. The turmoil the 1960s and 1970s had led many people to seek alternatives to organized government and religion. Some of these people turned to religious cults to fulfill their need for spirituality. A minister of the People’s Temple in northern California,

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A New England farm in autumn (Image copyright rebvt, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

James Jones, was the leader of one of these cults, which Jones eventually moved to Guyana in South America. Because of reports that cult members were not being allowed to leave, U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan Jr. visited Jones’s compound in November 1978, along with a small crew. After Jones became certain that his compound would soon be invaded, he ordered the congressman killed. Ryan, along with an NBC correspondent and a newspaper photographer, were murdered. Jones then ordered the members of his cult to kill themselves. In all, 913 people committed suicide. In 1979, approximately 450 demonstrators over-ran Marine guards and seized control of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, Iran, taking sixty-six hostages. The hostage drama played out on television for the next fourteen months. President Jimmy Carter lost his re-election bid, in large part due to his inability to secure the hostages release. However, Carter was able to accomplish the feat, and as Ronald Reagan was being sworn in as the new president, the embassy hostages were boarding planes for their trip back to the United States. The hostages’ return in January 1980 marked the end of a particularly turbulent

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decade. No wonder the blackberry patch seemed to offer so much renewal; the world beyond a rural place was not nearly as peaceful.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Many books of poetry are never reviewed, but Kinnell was already well known in 1980 when Mortal Acts, Mortal Words was published. Harold Bloom’s review for the New York Times provides an indication of Kinnell’s importance as a poet. Bloom began by noting that Kinnell’s early work showed enormous promise and that each of his subsequent books has included some very good poems, including this most recent collection. Bloom selected a couple of poems from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words for special mention, but not ‘‘Blackberry Eating.’’ Bloom described ‘‘Wait’’ as ‘‘beautiful and gentle’’; another poem, ‘‘There Are Things I Tell to No One,’’ as ‘‘generous, honest, and open.’’ Bloom compared Kinnell to Walt Whitman in the development his ‘‘descriptive powers,’’ as evidenced in still another

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poem. But of the book as a whole, Bloom stated that Mortal Acts, Mortal Words is the ‘‘weakest volume so far by a poet who cannot be dismissed, because he seems destined still to accomplish the auguries of his grand beginnings.’’ Although Bloom found poems in this volume worthy of praise, he delivered a mixed assessment of Kinnell’s work. In a review for the Chicago Tribune, William Logan echoed Bloom’s disappointment with Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, but went a bit further. Logan wrote that in this volume of poetry, ‘‘signs of exhaustion are intermittently apparent’’ in Kinnell’s poems. According to Logan, Kinnell often sacrifices ‘‘substance for sentiment.’’ The result, stated Logan, is that Kinnell has become ‘‘a benign, dotty naturalist,’’ whose poems ‘‘exhaust the vitality of the nature they would describe.’’ Although not mentioning ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ by title, Logan did state that the existence of blackberries is ‘‘usurped’’ in Kinnell’s effort to make their existence ‘‘exalt a visionary truth.’’ Not all is negative in this review, however. Logan noted that there are places where ‘‘Kinnell still writes vigorously.’’ On the whole, though, Logan’s review of Mortal Acts, Mortal Words reflected his disappointment in this volume of Kinnell’s poetry.

CRITICISM


Sheri Metzger Karmiol Karmiol teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico, where she is a lecturer in the University Honors Program. In this essay, she discusses the interdependence of nature, imagery, and poetry in ‘‘Blackberry Eating.’’ Why read poetry? It entertains and teaches. But perhaps another answer is that poetry forces readers to think about the world in a different way. Yes, poetry can be challenging, but like anything that is rewarding, some effort is required. Poetry can lead a reader to explore new territory, a new feeling or emotion, or it can lead a reader into a blackberry bramble and help him emerge with a poem, as it does in Kinnell’s ‘‘Blackberry Eating.’’ Like poetry, sometimes nature is not what it seems, as well. When poetry is about nature, the poet entices his readers to consider nature as capable of surprises never before imagined. Art and nature provide a natural pairing for Kinnell, who uses nature as a

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Kinnell’s Pulitzer Price-winning collection Selected Poems (1982) contains poems from his first twenty years of writing. Body Rags (1968) contains a number of Kinnell’s best-known poems about animals and nature. In New and Selected Poems (2007), W. S. Merwin, a contemporary of Kinnell, presents poems written across four decades. The English poet Ted Hughes, a contemporary of Kinnell, wrote many poems for children. Two hundred and fifty of his poems for children are included in Collected Poems for Children (2008). This collection begins with poems for very young children and progresses to more complex poems for adolescents and young adults. Footprints on the Roof: Poems About the Earth (2002), by Marilyn Singer, is a collection of poetry for children that focuses on the natural beauty of the earth. This book is beautifully illustrated. Pamela Michael is the editor of River of Words: Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of Things (2008), a collection of poetry about water and nature written by children and teens. The focus of the book is environmentalism. The Circle of Thanks: Native American Poems and Songs of Thanksgiving (2003) is a collection of songs and poems by Native American poets that honor nature.

metaphor for creativity in this poem. The images of nature in ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ engage the reader in a partnership with Kinnell to explore the intersection between nature and art. Kinnell’s poem, ‘‘Blackberry Eating,’’ uses images of nature that appeal by simulating a physical response to nature. The images in its first eight lines describe sensations that are experienced through the physical senses. The reader

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ART AND NATURE PROVIDE A NATURAL PAIRING FOR KINNELL, WHO USES NATURE AS A METAPHOR FOR CREATIVITY IN THIS POEM.’’

is able to imagine the taste of blackberries and feel their texture as the speaker describes squeezing them slightly. The reader can imagine the blackberry juices running into the hand of the speaker and can visualize the juice stains on his fingers. The reader can even appreciate the coldness of the fruit as the blackberries drop into the speaker’s mouth. These nature images create a way for readers to connect with the immediate, felt world described in the poem. Nature in this poem is idealized: The thorny stalks prick the berries but not the man standing in the middle of the blackberry bramble. Some readers fault the speaker here for projecting onto the plants something in the psyche of the one who appreciates them. For example, Keith Sagar argues in the ‘‘Forward’’ to his book Literature and the Crime Against Nature that literature often deals with man’s relationship to the ‘‘non-human powers he perceives as operating in the world.’’ Sagar points out that all mirrors held up to nature distort it. Sagar claims that images of nature are ‘‘partly descriptions of the contents of the writer’s own psyche projected onto the receptive face of nature.’’ It is this projection and the interaction between man and nature that becomes the stuff of the nature poet, who seeks to unite the ‘‘inner and outer’’ world—the world of the poet’s psyche and the world of nature. Poetry uses words to create meaning; the meaning of the poem is partially determined by the images that the poet creates with his word choice. Kinnell probably hoped that this poem would give readers a felt experience of the blackberry patch. The images in ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ do more than bring blackberries into sharp focus. These images are reminders that blackberry season signals the end of summer and the beginning of fall. The fall harvest marks the time to prepare for winter, but the passing of each season is also a reminder of transience, of the importance of each finite moment. Change is in the air. The

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cold berries are the result of colder nights. In line 13, the poet describes the verse he creates standing amid the blackberries. He uses words that recall images of winter, with its silent, icy cold darkness. These words are a reminder that winter is approaching. Time is passing and with the passage of time, the world also changes. When Kinnell was writing ‘‘Blackberry Eating,’’ the world was in turmoil. The 1970s were years of protest and demonstrations. Escape into nature, with its abundance and peace, provides a welcome distraction from a human world in conflict. Henry David Thoreau explains in Wild Fruits that the value to be found in wild fruits is not only in the possessing and eating, ‘‘but in the sight and enjoyment of them.’’ The act of picking and eating fruit, while standing in the blackberry patch, as speaker describes himself doing in line 6 of ‘‘Blackberry Eating,’’ is exactly what Thoreau had in mind. The speaker is not buying blackberries at the market; he is immersing himself in the blackberries, consuming his breakfast in the middle of a bramble and not at a kitchen table. Thoreau claims that it is the degree of enthusiasm for ‘‘going a-berrying’’ that makes a difference. This enthusiasm is evident in Kinnell’s description of this experience. As Kinnell describes it in this poem, the speaker is living Thoreau’s claim that it is ‘‘the spirit’’ with which a man approaches the activity that makes it worthwhile. Thoreau, then, would have been pleased with Kinnell’s appreciation of blackberry picking and the immediate consumption of blackberries in ‘‘Blackberry Eating.’’ The power of Kinnell’s imagery is that it can create a vivid picture of nature. Kristie S. Fleckenstein argues in her essay, ‘‘Words Made Flesh: Fusing Imagery and Language in a Polymorphic Literacy,’’ that images do not just exist. Instead, ‘‘an image evolves when we shape a reality based on the logic of analogy.’’ Thus, readers create meaning from the imagery that the poet creates. Fleckenstein maintains that readers shape poetic images based on connections with which they are familiar. In other words, once the reader grasps the connection between eating blackberries and mouthing language into verse, the poem takes on a different meaning. According to Fleckenstein, readers ‘‘do not merely shape and experience a simple visual image, whether mental or graphic or verbal.’’ Instead, ‘‘visuality is permeated with an array of other senses, such as texture, sound, smell, and feeling.’’ This is especially evident in

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the first 8 lines of Kinnell’s sonnet. In the description of the size, shape, texture, temperature, and color of the blackberries, the blackberries are brought to life, and the reader experiences what the poet has experienced. The poem has more power because of the image that the poet creates when he links blackberries to the creation of poetry, but much of the verse’s initial power is in the descriptive imagery contained within the octave. Once again it is the reader’s interpretation of that imagery that infuses the poem with meaning. Because poetry requires the reader to seek meaning and work for understanding, readers often assume that poetry is just too difficult to read. Prose ends up being the more privileged literature. Many readers think that novels and short stories are clearer, easier to understand, and less work. According to Fleckenstein, ‘‘historically, language has overshadowed image, preventing us from recognizing the essential role of imagery in meaning.’’ If readers grasp the purpose of the imagery in the poem and privilege the poet’s creativity, they emerge from a reading of ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ having experienced nature and poetry. In line 9, Kinnell shifts to more abstract images. The blackberries are transformed into syllables, words, sentences, and finally poetry— all of it associated with the creative force associated with nature and poetry. This is the power of nature for Kinnell, which feeds him and his poetry. In his essay, ‘‘A Reading of Galway Kinnell,’’ Ralph J. Mills Jr. argues that Kinnell is drawn to the natural world in his poetry because nature provides Kinnell with an ‘‘inexhaustible store for his imaginative meditation.’’ According to Mills, ‘‘imaginative meditation’’ describes the kind of thinking that Kinnell does that works ‘‘through images and particulars,’’ that are ‘‘integral to the poetic act.’’ Kinnell creates poetry that flows from one image to the next as a way to depict internalized experiences. Mills claims that in some of his poetry, Kinnell’s ‘‘desire to articulate what the poet sees, hears, thinks, and dreams with undeviating accuracy’’ is what makes him work to compress language and create imagery that is ‘‘sharp, spare, precise and is set down with an admirable directness that enhances the effect of lyrical poetry.’’ As Mills maintains, Kinnell finds an affiliation with nature and the non-human world ‘‘as the basic context for man’s living . . . in which other forms of life manifest their being together with him.’’

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This is especially evident in ‘‘Blackberry Eating’’ when poet and nature merge to create poetry. Why use blackberries to carry the weight of the poet’s creativity? It is clear that blackberries connect Kinnell to nature, which in turn, feeds his creative self. In her essay, ‘‘Approaching Home Ground: Galway Kinnell’s Mortal Acts, Mortal Words,’’ Lorrie Goldensohn observes that ‘‘Within the objects of Kinnell’s language, there is an insistence on the ordinary object as the right carrier for meaning; as if more exalted objects could only blur or distort the precise fitting, the exact adjustment of language to reality.’’ In other words, while blackberries may appear to be a perfectly ordinary object, in Kinnell’s hands, they are transformed into so much more. After all, as Kinnell writes in ‘‘Blackberry Eating,’’ his blackberries possess magic. Source: Sheri Metzger Karmiol, Critical Essay on ‘‘Blackberry Eating,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

Lorrie Goldensohn In the following excerpt, Goldensohn, in the process of reviewing Galway Kinnell’s Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, discusses the poet’s use of everyday relationships to explore transcendental themes. In a 1975 interview with the Colorado State Review, Galway Kinnell signalled the turn of his subjects to private or domestic event when he said: ‘‘My circumstances are such that I live most of my life rather busily in the midst of the daily and ordinary . . . whatever my poetry will be, from now on it will no doubt come out of this involvement in the ordinary.’’ A little bald; more than a little uncompromising in its avoidance of anything that could smack of a hankering after the sublime, or the titanic. Yet from within new subjects, the best of Kinnell’s poems remain alert to ‘‘The moment / in the late night,’’ as in ‘‘The Poem’’ (1968), when: . . . objects on the page grow suddenly heavy, hugged by a rush of strange gravity. Language, in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980), is still the negotiation between flesh and spirit, making up the tracks that spirit lays down in the flesh of the word. Or, looks for that curious double moment when language flashes out to the quick of things, only to show in another and reciprocal pulsation how things themselves exist as a language. . . .

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WHAT IS MOST APPEALING IN KINNELL’S NEW BOOK IS . . . A PERSONA THAT EXUDES HUMAN WARMTH, A GENEROUS AND CARING SOUL.’’

Within the objects of Kinnell’s language, there is an insistence on the ordinary object as the right carrier for meaning; as if more exalted objects could only blur or distort the precise fitting the exact adjustment of language to reality. It is a language so understated that it seems proof against unintentional ironies, a speech fully armored by republican modesty for any necessary raids on the heavenly palace. A milk bottle, for instance, bearing a resemblance to the jar in Tennessee, works up to transcedence from just this deliberately prosy beginning: . . . It’s funny, I imagine I can actually remember one certain quart of milk which has just finished clinking against three of its brethren in the milkman’s great hand and stands, freeing itself from itself, on the rotting doorstep in Pawtucket circa 1932, by one in whom time hasn’t completely woven all its tangles, and not ever set down. . . . The old bottle will shatter no one knows when in the decay of its music, the sea eagle will cry itself back down into the sea the sea’s creatures transfigure over and over. Look. Everything has changed. Ahead of us the meantime is overflowing. Around us its own almost-invisibility streams and sparkles over everything. Whatever the language is doing, it still admits the higher continuities. Ordinariness does not signal a rejection of significant subject, but gives notice instead of Kinnell’s intention to broaden the space of subject where that significance is to be found. In the diction of this poetical discourse, ‘‘ordinary’’ means universal, means egalitarian. But the ordinary also contains the timebound, and from within it, Kinnell advances his central preoccupation: the conflict between

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eternity and human death. Broadly shaping all the new poems towards the elegiac, he takes these lines from Petrarch as his epigraph: ‘‘moral beauty, acts, and words have put all their burden on my soul.’’ In ‘‘There Are Things I Tell To No One’’ (a distressingly coy title for one of the more ambitious poems in the book), he says: I say ‘‘God’’; I believe, rather, in a music of grace that we hear, sometimes, playing to us from the other side of happiness. When we hear it, it flows through our bodies, it lets us live these days lighted by their vanity worshipping—as the other animals do, who live and die in the spirit of the end—that backward-spreading brightness. The new book’s task is to understand that ‘‘backward-spreading brightness,’’ and to balance the longing heavenward against the downpulling anchor of earth’s subjects, and to be determined to pay earth its measure of honor. In 1972, in his essay ‘‘The Poetics of the Physical World,’’ these intentions were phrased: The subject of the poem is the thing which dies. . . . Poetry is the wasted breath. This is why it needs the imperfect music of the human voice, this is why its words have no higher aim than to press themselves to us, to cling to the creatures and things we know and love, to be the ragged garments. It is through something radiant in our lives that we have been able to dream of paradise, that we have been able to invent the realm of eternity. But there is another kind of glory in our lives which derives precisely from our inability to enter that paradise or to experience eternity. That we last only for a time, that everyone around us lasts only for a time, that we know this, radiates a thrilling, tragic light on all our loves, all our relationships, even on those moments when the world, through its poetry, becomes almost capable of spurning time and death.

As that ‘‘thrilling, tragic light’’ spreads over the poems that deal directly with the death of various people important to the poet—brother, mother, and indirectly, the father—how do the concessions made to poetry’s limited reach eventually affect the style of Kinnell’s tenderness to earthborn subjects? Given the modest possibilities enumerated here, the invention but not the occupation of heaven, poetry’s ‘‘wasted breath,’’ how will the poet keep expressive faith in his

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bleaknesses; or will the dark mortalities have their edges bleached by sentimental compromise? If we take seriously Stevens’ premise that death is the mother of beauty, an analogous premise shaped a little flatfootedly by Kinnell into ‘‘another kind of glory in our lives’’—then any poetics becomes at best a poetics of tragedy; but in dilution, a poetry of cloying pathos. If we follow Kinnell in the things he tells to no one, God is a distant concept to be set off with inverted commas. The only knowable part of ‘‘God’’ is the ‘‘music of grace that we hear’’— or, all that is knowable of grace is the music or poetry of life. Yet in this prose, frequently at variance with the speech of his poems, Kinnell limits poetry’s capacity to fuse connections between life and eternity: poetry is only ‘‘almost capable’’ of beating back time and death. Kinnell is not consistently certain where, or if, the poetic act should be divinized. In this essay, a doubt about the transfigurative powers of language eventually registers in the poetry as the lesser force of nostalgia; a conceptual scheme of reality in which language is never more than the etiolations of print. In Kinnell’s secularized humanism, uncertainty cuts edge away from the blade. Skepticism becomes a blurring diffidence where poetry denuded of religious authority, of security within Blake’s ‘‘Human Form Divine,’’ cannot sustain or accept the merely human as a style of holiness without gods. Suspended homelessly between invention and experience, between speaking and being Kinnell’s poets drop their prophetic mantles. . . . An inheritor of ‘‘l’univers concentrationnaire,’’ and wary of anything leading to a religion of art, Kinnell does not toss us bon-mots in the style of Pound: ‘‘Religion: another of the numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.’’ About ‘‘God’’ Kinnell isn’t sure; about poetry, its fitful illumination flows from what becomes ‘‘in the bedraggled poem of the modern . . . the images, those lowly touchers of physical reality, which remain shining.’’ Or, in the nominalist tradition, poetic images flow and shine in the apparent power of thing over word. Given this perspective on the bedraggled language of the modern, to what degree can Kinnell’s prose be said to rule, or over-rule the convictions of his poetry? It is instructive to begin by comparing a strong elegy for a brother; ‘‘Freedom New Hampshire,’’ from 1960’s What A Kingdom It Was, with family elegies from the

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current book. The early poem is quite explicit in its refusal to have its grief mitigated by belief in the comforts of the resurrection: When a man dies he dies trying to say without slurring The abruptly decaying sounds. It is true That only flesh dies, and spirit flowers without stop For men, cows, dung, for all dead things; and it is good, yes— But an incarnation is in particular flesh And the dust that is swirled into a shape And crumbles and is swirled again had but one shape That was this man. When he is dead the grass heals what he suffered, but he remains dead, And the few who loved him know this until they die. Similarly, the theme of resurrection, or incarnate flesh as immortal spirit, is passed upon ironically in ‘‘The Supper after the Last,’’ again from the early book, where Kinnell has Christ speak this doctrine: From the hot shine where he sits his whispering drifts: You struggle from flesh into wings; the change exists. But the wings that live gripping the contours of the dirt Are all at once nothing, flesh and light lifted away. You are the flesh; I am the resurrection, because I am the light I cut to your measure the creeping piece of darkness That haunts you in the dirt. Step into light— I make you over. I breed the shape of your grave in the dirt. In both of these poems, the energy gained is the energy of their unbelief. Earth is read uncompromisingly as the site that confers meaning. Heavenly transfiguration is not our dominion because our turf remains turf. ‘‘The Sadness of Brothers’’ picks up the death of a brother again, but this time twentyone years later, loss is differently approached: He comes to me like a mouth speaking from under several inches of water. I can no longer understand what he is saying. He has become one

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who never belonged to us, someone it is useless to think about or remember. The task of this elegy is to accept the absolute loss and suffering that the living experience. The dead brother is not lost merely to himself, or to some limited point in time, nor is imagination seen as an adequate substitute for real loss, because poetry is only an ‘‘almost capable.’’ From within the poem, there is clear acknowledgement that all moves at assuming the consciousness of others can only be partially or totally blocked: and then the poem enacts that blockage. When memory picks up an isolated picture of the dead brother, and tries to animate that body with what would be its living voice— projecting the long dead into the present moment—the real nature of loss is sustained. The speaker of section 4, playing at supposing his brother alive, and training his eyes on that resurrected image, says: I think he’s going to ask for beer for breakfast, sooner or later he’ll start making obnoxious remarks about race or sex and criticize our loose ways of raising children, while his eyes grow more slick, his puritan heart more pure Then dismisses that imagining: ‘‘But no, that’s fear’s reading.’’ And returns his brother to the mute and unknowable dead. What is dead is dead, not only to itself, but more crucially, and more persuasively this time, to us. We long for the company of those who are dead, but fruitlessly:

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with strained results. These elegies and the poems that deal with children and friends prefer conventional bromides, or conventional evasions and discretions. Nearing the conclusion of ‘‘The Last Hiding Places of Snow,’’ a patchy, if intermittently interesting poem, Kinnell shifts from his earlier view of the flesh as perishable, declaring the mother ‘‘beloved dross promising heaven,’’ and describes her ultimate transmutation from dead woman to eternal presence: Every so often, when I look at the dark sky, I know she remains among the old endless blue lightedness of stars; or finding myself out in a field in November, when a strange starry perhaps the first snowfall blows down across the darkening air, lightly, I know she is there, where snow falls flakes down fragile softly falling until I can’t see the world any longer, only its stilled shapes. This soft falling skitters uncomfortably close to bathos, and matches other sections in ‘‘Fisherman’’ and ‘‘Two Set Out on Their Journey’’ where there are similar forced marches heavenward. More convinced by his religious skepticism than by his half-hearted religious faith, I would rather wait for the Kinnell who ends the poem on the human side of the grave as ‘‘the memory / her old body slowly executes into the earth.’’ With the marvelous turn on execute, the poem conforms to its darker finalities, and briefly, the language is once again invested.

Both the earlier and later elegy offer a richness of life gathered in for observation, and a steady clearsightedness. But the second elegy, unlike the first, highlights much more complex personal and familial relationships over a longer arc of time. The earlier elegy, freshly within the experience, shaped its retrospective pastoral icon from childhood material, and interwove an account of its grief with farm imagery and animal life. Both are lovely poems; but the one less fierce, and written in middle age, draws closer to people, farther from nature, while it continues the earlier poem’s stoic resignation to the rule of severance over our lives and language.

But invested in a way that underlines the whole problem of the new book. While faith in the existence of a language, of existence itself as code is named, nevertheless the constraints that Kinnell has voiced earlier in prose eventually close in on poetry, and shut down faith in language just as he gives himself no other ground to stand on as his junction between flesh and all forms of spirit. The hop from ‘‘lowly touchers of physical reality’’ to ‘‘images’’ is all we have left as passage over the gap between ideas and things. The only way that the nominalist doctrine that all American poets have inherited—‘‘No ideas but in things’’—can be subverted is to take it seriously enough; to submit to its inherent realism and to believe that being and saying are one and the same. To see that blackberries are an order of language; and that word is a form of blackberry.

But in the elegies for the poet’s mother, the subject tests other relations and perceptions,

When Kinnell refuses to walk on that water, to rest on the constitutive powers of language,

. . . —if it’s true of love, only what the flesh can bear surrenders to time.

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the whole game finishes. What we get next, in this book—and so many others like it plumping the domestic, the filial, the ordinary and the private—is not the shaping, visionary imagination—but after-images on the retina, the secondary vision that sadness produces. What we get is tragedy’s younger and flabbier brother nostalgia, that de-energized heir of late civilizations. There are other problematic exclusions and refusals in ‘‘The Last Hiding Places of Snow,’’ and most of these cluster around the treatment of women and children. To take the women first, ‘‘The Last Hiding Places of Snow’’ steps uneasily around the identification of woman as earthsymbol; the mother-spirit issues from ‘‘a place in the woods’’ which is at first quite a scary place; then, while ‘‘mother love’’ is invoked, and perceived as protecting the speaker, gradually, other feelings emerge: My mother did not want me to be born; afterwards, all her life, she needed me to return. When this more-than-love flowed toward me, it brought darkness; she wanted me as burial earth wants—to heap itself gently upon but also to annihilate— and I knew, whenever I felt longings to go back, that is what wanting to die is. That is why dread lives in me, dread which comes when what gives life beckons toward death, dread which throws through me waves of utter strangeness, which wash the entire world empty. In this stance, Kinnell is not Antaeus, deriving strength from a reaffirmation of the ground of earth which is his being. While the lines depend on a basic identification of woman as earth-mother, they also follow the traditional misogynist conflation of womb/tomb, where the chthonic female is not muse, but instead the fixedly mortal part: the dread mother who in giving life beckons toward death. Kinnell’s mother is a blurred, and softened, but still recognizable form of Blake’s Tirzah: Thou Mother of my Mortal Part With cruelty didst mould my Heart. And with false self-deceiving tears, Didst bind my Nostrils Eyes & Ears. Didst close my Tongue in senseless clay

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and me to Mortal Life betray: The Death Of Jesus set me free. Then what have I to do with thee? In Kinnell’s poem, while he has declined both conventional Christian terms, as well as Blake’s idiosyncratic enactment of the dialectical struggle of heaven and earth, in its allegorized reading of gender, he still makes use of this significant convergence of symbols, womb/tomb, but finally neither denies nor develops its misogynist coloring Kinnell’s mother dread just sits there. Finally, the mother is absorbed into the Empyrean, and her fearful parentage subsides into the poet’s resolute acceptance of his own parenting as a way of transcending despair and discontinuity. Kinnell introduces, then backs away from the explicit gender alignment and its problems. Although in the poem he seems uneasy about his inability to be there at the last and say goodbye, the whole argument of gender relationship in parenting, and what it negatively represents, and negatively enforces, is slipstreamed, or bypassed, as the poet simply wishes to be blessed at his own deathbed by his children’s presence. Refusing to respond to the dread that has broken loose, Kinnell dissolves the gender issue into a spongy prose whose firmest and most vivid moment is this image: . . . memories these hands keep, of strolling down Bethune Street in spring, a little creature hanging from each arm, by a hand so small it can do no more than press its tiny thumb pathetically into the soft beneath my thumb. . . .

But implicitly, in the context of the poem, Kinnell shows that the suicidal despair that the earth-religion of the devouring mother evokes can be turned aside, its energy blessedly reconverted into an unproblematic, non-smothering father love. The female womb, and earth’s asphyxiating ownership, however, explicitly put in an appearance as the cause of death and failed transcendence, as they did in The Book of Nightmares, where the womb/tomb of earth becomes a shroud for the newborn. In two books, now, fetal life, in agreement with Wordsworth’s ‘‘Intimations Ode,’’ represents attachment to a primary great world of memory and being. Born, ‘‘memories rush out,’’ as the newborn . . . sucks air, screams her first song—and turns rose, the slow,

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beating, featherless arms already clutching at the emptiness. As babies leave the kingdom of the infinite, and pass through the bone gates of the woman, they diminish, and enter mortality: still touched, if fadingly, with the greater life of the nonhuman, and trailing those clouds of glory. Finally, the ground of the poem of family relationships muddies in the space between the transition from one eschatological belief to another. In Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, the belief that an individual human existence is a flower that blooms but once, hence its singular sweetness, tangles with the belief suggested in The Book of Nightmares that life is part of a birth-death cycle wherein we die to be born, and in which death returns us to our higher life in eternity, where we are free of the circling of generations of mere matter. There is a strong pull in this view towards a gender-polarized description of human nature, where the good parts are assigned to longing for celestial transcendence (male) and the wicked parts to a quietist chthonic restriction (female). In Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, except for the passage on dread of the female, quoted from ‘‘The Last Hiding Places of Snow,’’ Kinnell does not wholly retreat to an overtly sexist position. This is only brushed in lightly for flashed seconds. Instead, for Kinnell, and for Blake on occasion, the negative symbology of woman/ nature can be shelved in favor of a happier postulate: that sexual union of male and female is the iridescent emblem of the ruling principle of love made indwelling and physically manifest, as sexual love transforms the impermanence of the flesh through time-eating ecstasy: . . . the last cry in the throat or only dreamed into it by its thread too wasted to cry will he but an ardent note of gratefulness so intense it disappears into that music which carries our time on earth away on the great catafalque of spine marrowed with god’s flesh, thighs bruised by the blue flower, pelvis that makes angels shiver to know down here we mortals make love with our bones. In terms more casual, but no less convinced, from ‘‘Flying Home’’:

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in the airport men’s room seeing the middle-aged men my age as they washed their hands after touching their penises—when it might have been more in accord with the lost order to wash first, then touch— Only through mortal flesh is flesh made immortal, as human birth, fueled by holy sexual desire, cancels human death. If, in another poetics, language is finally too unreliable to be the conveyor of the eternal real, sex is not. And from this elevation of sexuality as death’s deathblow, it also seems an easy transit to a usually phallocentric world, and to the elimination of woman as muse, or energy source, in literary terms. Not an enriching move: as Kinnell and so many other American male writers use their masculinity, often with crushing innocence, as an occluded representation of the human state. Self-consciousness about sexism has driven the more robust misogyny underground, but the old vision, still stubbornly retained in pieces, has not yet been replaced with one more generous or inclusive. For many, the choice simply becomes retreat to a human effigy with the genitals either conspicuously male, or blurred, or lopped. A muse figure, except as a flickering possibility, does not exist for Kinnell. As we have seen earlier, deity as the origin of grace or song is equally remote. While earlier poems drew from his animals the most resonant cry longing for immortality, longing for the artifice of eternity, that cry originated in a male totem: a porcupine or a bear. . . . It is interesting to see that Kinnel . . . displaces women from the birth-role in ‘‘The Bear,’’ by claiming the male totem as his source of creative energy. In ‘‘The Bear,’’ Kinnell’s speaker literally climbs into the carcass, to he re-born as poetic speech; more overtly later, but in an analogous displacement, in ‘‘The Last Hiding Places of Snow,’’ the generative line dissolves from the problematic mothering into the speaker’s fathering. (As usual, more is hunkering down in the American woodlot than first meets the eye.) In The Book of Nightmares, the source of transcending mortality through mortality begins to thrust forward in Kinnell’s mythology of children, where the births of his daughter Maud and son Fergus provide the framework for the sequence opening and closing the book. Speaking in Walking Down the Stairs about The Book of Nightmares, and after remarking that the

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book is ‘‘nothing but an effort to face death and live with death,’’ Kinnell goes on to describe the special connection that infants have to transcendence: These little lumps of clinging flesh, and one’s terrible, inexplicable closeness to them, make one feel very strongly the fragility of a person. In the company of babies, one is very close to the kingdom of death. And as children grow so quickly, as they change almost from day to day, it’s hardly possible to put mortality out of mind for long.

Approximately eight years after saying this, Kinnell’s concern with babies as emblem of the human link to death has altered, and broadened to stress generational and familial continuity. The focus on eternal co-presence is returned earthside; out Kinnell’s way, however, parenting is mostly something that fathers do by themselves. Up to The Book of Nightmares and including all of the previous work, Kinnell’s personae live comfortably within the American macho: boy, tramp, convict, logger, skier and hiker— these solitary speakers wander quite naturally and without any sense of excluded life. If in poems about parenting Kinnell later becomes the celebrant of domesticity, it is certainly not that he does so after having served a term as the poet of marriage. The adult female, abstractly celebrated as a featureless sexual partner, is only fleetingly invoked as part of Kinnell’s cosmos. (An early exception to this is the vivid little poem dedicated to Denise Levertov, reading her poetry.) If in the new book we are slowly working up to a family romance, it is still a romance where most of the parts are played by men. In the work of some poets, it would be easy to construct an argument defending this practice. As many worlds exist that can legitimately be characterized by the acute absence of either sex, it seems fruitless to demand equal time at all times. But Kinnell suggests a poetics yoking physical and imaginative creativity, and fusing poems and human generations within a single energy source. If mothers, wives and daughters are obliterated, except for equivocal traces, within this set-up, Kinnell invites the return of the repressed in significant lapses in the story; important gaps, and because of the gaps, distortions. You can’t take on children, parents and the family without installing the ladies somewhere. From the recent book, the short poem ‘‘Saint Francis and the Snow,’’ moves to fill this absence, as the sow is lifted into the series of

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animal totems including porcupine and bear. In the poem, the speaker firmly tells the mama pig the old story of her beauty: . . . Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow. But Saint Francis may be casting out more than the poet bargains for, as this poem appears to transform mother dread, or a potentially fearsome and devil-ridden sow into a nurturant, if phallically lengthy, ‘‘perfect loveliness.’’ Kinnell has elsewhere pleaded for a poetics that will be personally inclusive. In ‘‘Poetry, Personality and Death’’ he says: If we take seriously Thoreau’s dictum, ‘‘Be it life or death, we crave only reality,’’ if we are willing to face the worst in ourselves, we also have to accept the risks I have mentioned, that probing into one’s own wretchedness one may just dig up more wretchedness. What justifies the risk is the hope that in the end the search may open and transfigure us.

What is most appealing in Kinnell’s new book is not wretchedness, but a persona that exudes human warmth, a generous and caring soul. What creates the dilemma of sentimentality, though, is exactly what charm excludes: that core of faith in language’s ability to reflect directly on the relation of men and women, in the minute particulars of what is to constitute, in Kinnell’s phrase from The Book Of Nightmares, ‘‘tenderness to existence.’’. . . . In The Book of Nightmares, both daughter and son, Maud and Fergus, become emblems of continuity; but in the new book the son becomes the emblem of the on-going continuity of father generations. While it is true that people, even

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poets, have to live their lives as people, rather than as symbolic portents, nevertheless, the absence of one of the earlier symbolic people belonging to this story of lives becomes noticeable. What happened to the memorable girlchild detailed in ‘‘Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight’’: In a restaurant once, everyone quietly eating, you clambered up on my lap: to all the mouthfuls rising toward all the mouths, at the top of your voice you cried your one word caca! caca! caca! and each spoonful stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering steam. Shame on Kinnell for forgetting this pungent little critic of transcendence, echoing as she does the earlier feelings of her father: The great thing about Whitman is that he knew all of our being must be loved, if we are to love any of it. I have often thought there should be a book called Shit, telling us that what comes out of the body is no less a part of reality, no less sacred, than what goes into it; only a little less nourishing. It’s a matter of its moment in the life cycle: food eaten is on the cross, at its moment of sacrifice, while food eliminated is at its moment of ascension. (Kinnell, ‘‘The Poetics of the Physical World’’)

But while on the subject of problematic exclusions in Kinnell’s American romanticism, and his failure to avoid entrapment in some of its aesthetic positions, I’d also like to point to successful adaptations and continuities, especially in the parts of Kinnell’s work that overlap Thoreau. In the necessarily revisionist strategy of our late age, the best answer for difficulties that the tradition offers may well not be to sink the offending antecedent, as Kinnell tried to do with Thoreau in ‘‘The Last River,’’ or to bury him in your prose, but to keep a wary eye on him up front. In ‘‘The Last River,’’ Kinnell dismissed Thoreau and what Thoreau himself called the ‘‘excrementitious’’ truths of his gravel bank in a Spring thaw, and which Kinnell relabeled the failure of ‘‘Seeking love. . . . ’’; accusing Henry David of ‘‘failing to know I only loved / my purity.’’ Nonetheless, Kinnell has him come back to inhabit the fisher child of Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. In one of the most successful new poems, ‘‘Fergus Falling,’’ Kinnell outlines in fairly compact from what both the strengths

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and dilemmas are of accepting the full flowering of the isolato, to borrow another American writer’s term for the revolutionary persona in question. In this poem, written with a deceptively casual music, Kinnell begins: He climbed to the top of one of those million white pines set out across emptying pastures of the fifties—some program to enrich the rich and rebuke the forefather who cleared it all once with ox and axe— climbed to the top, probably to get out of the shadow not of those forefathers but of this father, and saw for the first time, down in its valley, Bruce Pond, giving off its little steam in the afternoon After completing this magical climb out of the order of the generations, in full Oedipal revolt, the poem stalls the engine of ascent for a moment to look at Bruce Pond. In effective, rhythmically irregular strophes, Kinnell describes the pond. In service to a belief in the fusion of letter and literal within the real, and with the intent of tracing the same intersection between the real and the symbolic, Thoreau drew Walden Pond for us in fidelity to its deceptive ordinariness, and then told us: A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

Kinnell follows the same intention of reflecting in language the order of language within the order of nature: pond where Clarence Akley came on Sunday mornings to cut down the cedars around the shore, I’d sometimes hear the slow spondees of his work, he’s gone, where Milton Norway came up behind me while I was fishing and stood awhile before I knew he was there, he’s the one who put the cedar shingles on the house, some have curled or split, a few have blown off, he’s gone, In banging home that refrain, ‘‘he’s gone,’’ Kinnell puts us in the book’s preoccupation, mortality, but here, the mortality of a serenely repeating human order, in a persuasive syntax of continuity:

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pond where an old fisherman in a rowboat sits, drowning hookedworms, when he’s gone he’s replaced and is never gone

And then we get to the moment of recognition preceding the fall which gives the poem its title: when Fergus . . . saw its oldness down there in its old place in the valley, he became heavier suddenly in his bones the way fledglings do just before they fly, and the soft pine cracked. . . . Fergus falls into his own mortality, anticipating what his adult body will do later. But the pond remains for the transfixed child an exchange of gazes with the eye of earth. The pond also remains an emblem in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau as a fusion, or crossing-place of self and world, where through nature’s mediation, both become known, even though in the ending, emphasis shifts from the optimism of having achieved knowledge, or spirit-food, to the more phlegmatic angling and waiting for it: Yes—a pond that lets off its mist on clear afternoons of August, in that valley to which many have come, for their reasons, from which many have gone, a few for their reasons, most not, where even now an old fisherman only the pinetops can see sits in the dry gray wood of his rowboat, waiting for pickerel. In this poem, which takes the child protagonist into the romantic struggle to know self through nature, Kinnell only briefly touches on the intersection of that task with the style of selfknowledge gained through contrasting one’s knowledge of identity through family order. In this poem, the father generations are the muted backdrop. As he evades an open treatment of the family themes that have met with such partial success elsewhere, Kinnell in this poem converts avoidance into advantage: ‘‘Fergus Falling’’ comes into its own by freshly acknowledging an aspect of harmony which has more to do with our place in the non-human, physical world, and much less to do with our relations to each other. Source: Lorrie Goldensohn, ‘‘Approaching Home Ground: Galway Kinnell’s Mortal Acts, Mortal Words,’’ in Massachusetts Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer 1984, pp. 303–21.

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Galway Kinnell, Michael Molloy, and Thomas Hilgers In the following interview, Kinnell discusses being a poet, poetic inspiration, and writing poetry. [Hilgers:] I’d like to begin by talking not about poetry, but about poets. Does a poet ever stop being a poet? [Kinnell:] It’s hard to stop. Many poets should. Wordsworth, for example who did all his best work as a young man, continued cranking out verses during his long life; and none of the late verses were of any use. But poetry is not a profession in the ordinary sense. It’s so much a part of what you are. Nothing else takes its place. Being a poet is in part a state of mind. Many people are in such a state; probably everybody is a poet to some degree or another. It’s part of being itself. That’s why it’s so hard to stop. How is ‘‘everybody’’ a poet? What is there about that state of mind, or what is there in every man’s state of mind, that’s poetic? Well, we all use language; and at those moments when we’re really deeply affected by something, we often express our response in words. When these come directly out of our feelings, whether we write them down and work them up into a poem that can have a public life or not, in some way we’ve uttered poetry. Do you at any time in your own life feel yourself in a super-poetic frame of mind? When you’re actually in the process of writing poetry, are you in a different state from what you are right now when we’re talking prose? Yes, I think when one writes well, there does come upon one a kind of heightened state of aliveness, a surge of energy and exhilaration. It may come before you start writing, but it’s a sign that you should start. [Molloy:] Does that surge come often after you’ve decided to start writing rather than before? No, I think the surge actually comes when writing is the farthest thing from your mind and something in the world or in your memory of the world or fantasy of it engages your attention very intensely. In the interaction between yourself and whatever it is that you’ve been excited by comes some kind of strange psychological chemical infusion of energy and then you want to express that relationship. It must happen often that you have such a feeling, such a surge, and the poem never emerges. Are there many unspoken poems in you?

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WHAT GOES ON IN A POEM IS, GENERALLY SPEAKING, A VERY PERSONAL STRUGGLE BETWEEN WHAT A POET WANTS TO BE AND WHAT HE’S ABLE TO BE.’’

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I don’t know. It depends how the poet feels about Ronald Reagan. He may be currying favor, or he may actually love Ronald Reagan. It makes all the difference. Poetry should enter the political realm; poems should be able to contain one’s political opinions. But poetry which doesn’t do that may be fine poetry. And poetry which exclusively does that may be fine poetry too. Is the poet’s voice an individual voice?

I think there are. I think there are many unspoken poems in everyone. The best layer of existence consists of unspoken poems.

Yes, in our time and in the modern world, it is necessarily an individual voice. What goes on in a poem is, generally speaking, a very personal struggle between what a poet wants to be and what he’s able to be.

[Hilgers:] In today’s literary world, we often hear prose spoken of as ‘‘poetic prose.’’ We also have prose poems, and we have poetry. Do you think the former distinctions between the prose writer and the poet are breaking down?

[Molloy:] You said earlier that certain things engage a poet and bring about, perhaps, a ‘‘surge’’ of feeling. What would you say are the things that have particularly engaged you and brought about the surge for you?

Yes, I think so. The conventional novel proves to be somewhat unsatisfactory to most modern novelists. They want to achieve in their novels moments of poetry—intense, direct expressions of feelings—rather than to accomplish everything through naturalistic narrative. Also, poets often write at a secondary level of intensity, and produce a kind of secondary poem, almost the notes for a poem. These are called ‘‘prose poems’’—unfortunately so, because the name implies that these notes are the completed thing in itself. To my mind, prose poems are unfulfilled poems, prose-y poems, and they should be so called.

It’s hard to say. When I glance back at the poems I’ve written, they seem to have sprung from many different sources. I can’t, for instance, say that animals are the principle source.

Our conversation so far has been skirting around the big question, the question of just what a poet is. Maybe we can have a go at it in just one other way. Someone like the Russian poet Yevtushenko, for example, may be criticized for being an apologist for political purposes. Does this make him any less a poet? I’m not in a position to judge the question of a Russian poet’s relationship to his society. It’s such a difficult relationship. Since I don’t experience the same burden, I can’t judge how well a Russian poet copes with it. I don’t feel that Yevtushenko’s work is very interesting, at least as it comes through in translation. Let’s say we had a poet laureate in this country who wrote paeans to Ronald Reagan periodically. Would that be a compromise of the poet’s integrity?

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Although animals are very important in your poetry, surely. Animals occur often in my poems, but putting myself in a farmyard will not start me writing poems. If one knew the answer to your question, there would be no such thing as a dry spell. One would just go down to the local pigfarm, or whatever. [Molloy:] Or over to the zoo. I remember reading that when Rama Krishna would go to the Calcutta Zoo, he would be sent off into a trance if he would hear the lion roar. It seemed to be for him some great manifestation of the Divine. [Hilgers:] Besides animals, are there other objects that have particularly attracted you? On the whole, creatures (earthly creatures) and children (my own children) have been great sources of poetry for me. But also any aspect of life which seems to have a tradition to it— whether a continuing tradition, as one finds in Vermont farms, for example, or broken traditions, as one finds in the slums of New York. The sense of tradition, however distorted, seems to awaken something. [Molloy:] Does that come from your background in religious structures which place great importance on tradition?

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It may; but it’s characteristic of poetry as a whole. Poetry tries to connect with the sacred past. It tries to find in the present the sacred which the prose glance can’t see any longer. [Hilgers:] As you walk around your kitchen, as you walk around the campus, do you see poetic possibilities? Do you ask about what you see, does this thing go beyond itself? No. I think, as I said earlier, that it’s when writing is the last thing in your mind that you tend to start writing. If you begin to think, what use can this kettle of boiling water that I’m making my coffee with this morning have for my poems?, you might write a poem, but it might be a self-conscious exercise. If you’re thoroughly absorbed in the boiling of water, on the other hand, that might set you off to write a poem that comes forth more spontaneously. What is the relationship of your everyday existence to what you write? I know that you don’t talk a lot about your private life. But does it come through in your poetry? Well, yes. At one time I would recast experience and make it quite impersonal; I did that often in my earlier poetry. Now, for better or worse, I write more directly about my own experiences. When I feel like writing about my children I don’t try to imagine a fictitious family, and write about that; I just write about my own family and my own children. Some readers are upset that there should be, in my poems, the actual names of my children and my wife, and my own name. They find that close a connection to life inappropriate for poetry. But that’s just the way I happen to be writing at this time. On what grounds is that inappropriate? Some readers want poetry to be more objective, cast in a more universal mold and not tied to a particular family and a particular place—to have everything be a type rather than another particular. I’d like to talk a little about other American poets. Recently, when I was talking with Marvin Bell, he mentioned you and the late James Wright, Sylvia Plath, and Ann Sexton as part of the still dominant generation in American poetry. He spoke of himself as part of the next generation which is still trying to make itself heard. Would you make a distinction along generational lines when you describe the American poetry world? There are a few of the very old poets still thriving, most notably Robert Penn Warren.

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And then there are a number of people who turned out to be poets who were born in 1926, 1927, and 1928. I don’t know why. It may have had something to do with the Depression. That we spent our childhoods in poverty and social dislocation may have given us some longing for a transfigured life. And poetry is an avenue to a transfigured life. Then there is Marvin’s generation, which has fewer poets who stand out, I think. Maybe the generation younger than that has even fewer, but it’s too early to tell. Are there any differences beyond the chronological which determine these generations? It’s hard for us to say. A critic in the twentyfirst century will see much we hold in common. But what has a poet like Creeley got in common with a poet like Ginsberg? It’s hard for us to see through all the obvious differences. [Molloy:] You used the word transfigured when you talked about these people who were raised during the Depression. They seemed to have a need for a transfigured world. Could you elaborate on that? I just mean that growing up in grim surroundings, as I think most of us did, produced some kind of intense desire for a world that was better, for a recovery of beauty. Poetry seemed the way to find it. My speculation, based on my memories of my own desires, is that I wanted in poetry to find a purity of existence which I didn’t find in the world around me. Now it’s possible that in a later generation, for whom life was easier, there was no longer that intensity of desire to transfigure the world. In fact, one characteristic of the poetry of the young seems to be a kind of contentment with the world—the daily experiences of average life seem to be regarded as adequate. That’s unlikely to be the case in the poetry of my generation. [Hilgers:] Do you sense in your own life more of a contentment coming through? It seems to me that certain poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words reflect some sort of contentment. It’s hard to make such judgments about one’s own work. I think that Mortal Acts, Mortal Words contains many poems that are easygoing; some of them are basically humorous. Other poems, though, deal with things that are difficult—the deaths of my parents, my relationship to my brother, things of that kind. It’s not exactly a peaceful book, but there is no attempt

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to exacerbate the harshness of life, and there is an attempt to come to terms with the difficult things. [Molloy:] Does the title of the book show a greater willingness to express your subjectives? Yes. My own life, place, time, and people I’m living with are the subject of that book. I remember reading at one time something you said about eros and thanatos—that the sensitive person felt both and wanted to reconcile the problems they raised by identifying them. What did you mean by that identification? I’m not sure what I meant. But there is a point where eros and thanatos are the same thing, where the love of existence passes beyond the love of that part of existence which is one’s own time on earth and includes existence beyond one’s own time. Of course, at that point one becomes the sprouting Irish grass. Source: Galway Kinnell, Michael Molloy, and Thomas Hilgers, ‘‘An Interview with Galway Kinnell,’’ in Modern Poetry Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1–2, 1982, pp. 107–12.

Bloom, Harold, ‘‘Straight Forth Out of Self,’’ in the New York Times, June 22, 1980, p. BR4. Courtney-Thompson, Fiona, and Kate Phelps, eds., The 20th Century Year by Year, Barnes & Noble, 1998, p. 289. El Baradei, Mohamed, ‘‘Statement at Beijing International Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Energy in the 21st Century,’’ http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/State ments/2009/ebsp2009n003.html (accessed August 10, 2009). Fleckenstein, Kristie S., ‘‘Words Made Flesh: Fusing Imagery and Language in a Polymorphic Literacy,’’ College English, Vol. 66, No. 6, July 2004, pp. 617, 619. Glennon, Lorraine, ed., The 20th Century, JG Press, 1999, pp. 536–40, 558, 572. Goldensohn, Lorrie, ‘‘Approaching Home Ground: Galway Kinnell’s Mortal Acts, Mortal Words,’’ in Massachusetts Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer 1984, pp. 303–21. Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 11th ed., Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009, pp. 14–15, 120–21, 341–42, 361, 381, 507, 519. Jennings, Peter, and Todd Brewster, ‘‘Years of Doubt: 1969–1981,’’ in The Century, Doubleday, 1998, pp. 424–63. Kinnell, Galway, ‘‘Blackberry Eating,’’ in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, Houghton Mifflin, 1980, p. 24. Logan, William, ‘‘Divisions Between Male and Female,’’ in the Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1980, p. E9.

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Mills, Ralph J., Jr., ‘‘A Reading of Galway Kinnell,’’ in Cry of the Heart: Essays on Contemporary American Poetry, University of Illinois Press, 1975, pp. 136, 167, 168. ‘‘Report Offers Bold Agenda to Improve Citizen Trust in Government,’’ http://www.napawash.org/resources/news/ news_06_22_99.html (accessed August 10, 2009). Sagar, Keith, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Literature and the Crime against Nature, Chaucer Press, 2005, p. xiv. ‘‘Sudan: End Violence in Jonglei State,’’ ‘‘Report Offers Bold Agenda to Improve Citizen Trust in Government,’’ http:// www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/08/11/sudan-end-violence-jongleistate (Accessed August 10, 2009). Thoreau, Henry David, Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript, edited by Bradley P. Dean, Norton, 2000, pp. 3–37. Wilson, Edward O., The Future of Life, Vintage, 2003, p. 102.

FURTHER READING Behn, Robin, The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach, Collins, 1992. This book is ideal for anyone who wants to learn to write poetry. It presents a series of exercises designed to help would-be poets begin writing and finding their poetic voices.

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Bowling, Barbara L., Berry Grower’s Companion, Timber Press, 2005. This book is a complete guide for growing all kinds of berries in a home garden. The author includes many interesting facts and details that make the book an interesting read, even for non-gardeners. Copeland, Jeffery S., Speaking of Poets: Interviews with Poets Who Write for Children and Young Adults, National Council of Teachers of English, 1993. The relevant discussions pertain to the writing process and how poetry for children and young adults is crafted. The poets offer suggestions for how children can find enjoyment in writing their own poetry. Kinnell is not included among the interviewed poets. Farrell, Kate, Art & Nature: An Illustrated Anthology of Nature Poetry, Bulfinch, 1992. This book is an anthology of 186 nature poems, all of which have been matched with art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The poems and art are grouped by season. Felstiner, John, Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems, Yale University Press, 2009. Felstiner presents a selection of nature poems, both past and contemporary ones, that illustrate how much poets appreciate nature. The author

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includes several poems by Kinnell, including ‘‘Blackberry Eating.’’ Moyers, Bill, The Language of Life, Anchor, 1995. Moyers’s book is a companion to his PBS series by the same title, in which he interviewed poets about their work. Kinnell is included, along with thirty-three other poets.

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Stand, Mark, and Eavan Boland, eds., The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Form, Norton, 2001. This text is an excellent guide for learning how to read poetry and appreciate poetic form. This text includes an anthology of poems that illustrate the various concepts discussed.

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Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage The seven stanzas beginning with ‘‘There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,’’ are stanzas CLXXVIII to CLXXXIV (178–184) of Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published in 1818 by Lord Byron, one of the greatest of the English Romantic poets. The last six of these stanzas are also known as the apostrophe to the ocean, since they are directly addressed to the ocean.

LORD BYRON 1818

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a long, semiautobiographical poem in which Byron records his impressions of places he visited during several tours of Europe, the first of which took place in 1811. Childe is the medieval title for a young man who was soon to become a knight. The first two cantos of the poem were published in 1812, and Canto III followed in 1816. In 1817, Byron visited Venice and Rome, and his reflections on what he saw there form the basis of Canto IV. In May 1817, Byron went to the top of the Alban Mount, near Rome, from which he was able to gaze out at the Mediterranean Sea, and this experience inspired the stanzas addressed to the ocean in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. These stanzas are examples of the Spenserian stanzas that Byron uses throughout the poem. They show Byron’s love of nature and also reveal his meditations on the passing of time and the transience of human endeavors.

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interest and admiration of many women. These included Lady Caroline Lamb, with whom Byron had an affair, but eventually he rejected her. Instead, he fell in love with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, but he eventually married Annabella Milbanke in 1815. The marriage was unsuccessful, and they separated a year later. Now the subject of much scandal, Byron left England permanently in April 1816. By that time he had become a renowned poet not only for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage but also for a series of verse narratives known as Oriental tales. These were The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair (1814), and Lara (1814).

Lord Byron (The Library of Congress)

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born into an aristocratic family in London, England, on January 22, 1788. His mother was a Scot, Catherine Gordon, and his father was Captain John (‘‘Mad Jack’’) Byron. The captain had wasted Catherine’s fortune before Byron was born, and his mother took the child to Aberdeen, Scotland, while John Byron lived a dissolute life in Paris until his death in 1791. Byron became heir to the family title at the age of six, and when he was made Lord Byron in 1798, he was taken by his mother to live at Newstead Abbey, the Byrons’ ancestral estate, in England. Byron was schooled in London and at Trinity College, Cambridge, although he only spent a term there before returning to London, where he accumulated debts. In 1809, Byron traveled to Europe with his friend John Cam Hobhouse. They visited Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar, Malta, Greece, Albania, and Turkey. He returned in July 1811 and published Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, an account in verse of his travels and his reflections. The poem immediately made him famous, and he started to move in aristocratic society in London, gaining the

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Byron spent the summer of 1816 in Switzerland with another English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his circle. In that year, Byron published Canto III of Childe Harold as well as The Prisoner of Chillon. In 1817, Byron lived in Venice, where he had an affair with the married Marianna Segati, and visited Florence and Rome. He also published his verse drama Manfred (1817). The following year he published Canto IV of Childe Harold, in which the apostrophe to the ocean appears. In 1819, the first two cantos of Don Juan, Byron’s comic masterpiece, were published. This was also the year in which Byron began his liaison with another married woman, the Countess Teresa Guicioli, which was to last until Byron left for Greece in 1823. Living in Ravenna and then Pisa, Byron published the verse drama, Cain (1821), followed a year later by the satirical poem, A Vision of Judgement. Byron had become interested in the Greek war of independence from Turkey, which had begun in 1821, and in 1823 he sailed to Greece to support the cause. He was greeted warmly by the Greeks, and in 1824 he spent time and money organizing the Greek forces. But he became ill after going riding in drenching rain, and weakened by his doctors’ insistence on bleeding him, he died of fever on April 19 in Missolonghi, at the age of thirty-six. He was mourned in Greece as a national hero.

POEM TEXT CLXXVIII There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes,

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By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, 1600 To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne’er express, yet can not all conceal.

CLXXIX Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin—his control 1605 Stops with the shore;—upon the watery plain The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own, When, for a moment, like a drop of rain, He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, 1610 Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown.

CLXXX His steps are not upon thy paths,—thy fields Are not a spoil for him,—thou dost arise And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields For earth’s destruction thou dost all despise, 1615 Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies, And send’st him, shivering in thy playful spray And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies His petty hope in some near port or bay, And dashest him again to earth:—there let him lay.1620

CLXXXI The armaments which thunderstrike the walls Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake, And monarchs tremble in their capitals, The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make Their clay creator the vain title take 1625 Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war; These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar Alike the Armada’s pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

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CLXXXIII Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form Glasses itself in tempests; in all time, 1640 Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm, Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime Dark-heaving;—boundless, endless, and sublime— The image of Eternity—the throne Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime 1645 The monsters of the deep are made; each zone Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

CLXXXIV And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy 1650 I wanton’d with thy breakers—they to me Were a delight; and if the freshening sea Made them a terror—’twas a pleasing fear, For I was as it were a child of thee, And trusted to thy billows far and near, 1655 And laid my hand upon thy mane—as I do here.

POEM SUMMARY Stanza CLXXVIII In this stanza the poet expresses his deep appreciation of nature. He enjoys being in nature, whether it is in the woods or by the shore of the ocean. Even when he is alone by the sea, he finds a sense of connection, even though no people are there. He likes to listen to the sound of the waves. In line 5 he explains that his love of nature does not diminish his love of man. But in nature he is able to escape from himself and just become part of the universe. This gives rise to deep feelings inside him, so deep that he cannot express them, but neither can he hide them.

Stanza CLXXIX CLXXXII Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee— 1630 Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? Thy waters wasted them power while they were free, And many a tyrant since; their shores obey The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay Has dried up realms to deserts:—not so thou, 1635 Unchangeable save to thy wild waves’ play— Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow— Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

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The poet addresses the ocean directly and pays tribute to its power. On the earth, man has power and can destroy things. But his power ceases when he takes his ships on the ocean. He is at the mercy of the power of the ocean, as the thousands of wrecked ships on the ocean floor demonstrate. Man and his ships sink into the depths of the ocean, where the men have neither grave nor coffin, and where they lie is unknown.

Stanza CLXXX This stanza continues the contrast between the power man wields on earth and his helplessness

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completely destroyed and was never able to land in England.

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

The Romantic Poets, a ten-disc set of CDs released by HighBridge Audio (2005) includes excerpts from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

The Poetry of Lord Byron is an audiobook released by HarperCollins Audiobook on audio cassette in 1997.

Poems by Lord Byron is available from http://www.audible.com as an audio download from Saland Publishing.

The poet contrasts the changing empires that men create with the constancy of the sea. He mentions the empires of Assyria, Greece, Rome, and Carthage. They have been destroyed many times over, by encroachments from the sea as well as by tyrants. All that is left that are ‘‘the stranger, slave, or savage’’; the civilization has been destroyed. Deserts exist now where formerly there were flourishing human societies. But this does not apply to the sea, which is unchangeable except for the movement of the waves. It is unaffected by the passage of time. It is the same now as it was on the day of creation.

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at sea. Man cannot despoil the ocean as he does the land. The ocean has contempt for the power man has on earth. The ocean can create a storm that tosses man up and down, causing him to pray for salvation, hoping that he can reach a port or other safe haven somewhere. But then the sea casts him down again and he is lost.

Stanza CLXXXI This stanza further exposes the vanity of man’s power in contrast to that of the sea. The first three lines refer to the bombardment of cities by ships during wartime. The walls of the cities do not protect them from attack, and the attacks destabilize nations and make kings fear for their lives. In line 4, the reference to ‘‘oak leviathans’’ is to the warships. Leviathan is a sea monster in the Bible, mentioned in Job, Isaiah, and the Psalms. The poet says that the warships are huge, but they mislead men into calling themselves lords of the sea, able to win battles through sea-power. But men forget that they are mortal (the reference to ‘‘clay’’ in line 5 is a reference to their mortality), so their claims to power are foolish. As the speaker points out in line 7, these great warships are treated as toys by the ocean, which destroys them and makes a mockery of their strength. The reference to the Armada is to the Spanish Armada that tried to invade England in 1588. Trafalgar refers to the naval battle between England and France in 1805. Both the Spanish Armada and the French navy suffered much damage through storms before they could begin the battle. In fact, the Spanish Armada was almost

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The speaker refers to the ocean as a mirror in which the power of God may be seen in storms. Whatever condition the sea is in, its vastness is a reflection of eternity. This is true whether the ocean is calm or rough, and wherever the ocean is found, whether at the poles of the earth, where it supplies ice, or in the tropical regions. The ocean is also generative; its slime produces all the creatures that populate its depths. Everything in the ocean obeys its laws, and the ocean always continues in its fathomless depths.

Stanza CLXXXIV The poet confesses to the ocean that he has always loved it. He remembers the joy he felt when he was young and swam in the ocean and was carried along by it. He would play in the breaking waves, which were a delight to him. If the wind increased and the waves became frightening, he was not discouraged. He even enjoyed the fear that such events produced. In line 7 he explains this love of the ocean that he has always had. It was as if he was a child of the ocean and he trusted it wherever he was and in whatever circumstances. He put his hand on the ‘‘mane’’ of the ocean as if he were riding a favorite horse. Now he puts his hand again on the ocean, through the medium of the words he is writing in praise of it.

THEMES Union with Nature The first stanza of this excerpt from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage expresses the theme of love of nature

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waves did not disturb his feeling that the ocean was a benevolent thing, something he could play in and enjoy.


Eternity and Time

Write a short poem about the ocean, a lake, or water generally. How does being around water make you feel? Make a drawing or painting of the sea, with a human observer. What qualities will you try to convey in this picture? Using PowerPoint or similar program, give a class presentation in which you describe, with slides and a map, Byron’s Grand Tour of 1809– 11 and his later travels to Venice and Rome. Consult George Gordon, Lord Byron (Oxford University Press, 2001), by Martin Garrett. This is a biography written for young adults. Pay particular attention to the sections that cover Byron’s writing of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Write an essay in which you describe Byron’s travels in Europe, why he decided to write the poem, and what its main characteristics are.

and union with nature. When the poet is alone in nature, whether in the woods or by the sea, he feels ‘‘pleasure’’ and ‘‘rapture.’’ He feels a sense of communion with nature’s presence, which is why he is not lonely even when in solitary places. He does not miss human company when in the company of nature. Perhaps most importantly, in nature he is able to get beyond himself, so to speak, to leave behind ‘‘all I may be, or have been before’’ and become absorbed in the universe. His human identity as a particular man in a particular place, with all the usual petty human day-to-day concerns and thoughts of the past, seems to melt away in the presence of nature. He becomes a larger being, no longer plagued by the usual small sense of self, of ‘‘I’’ but simply a calm, untroubled part of the wider whole. This feeling he acquires in the presence of nature is ineffable, that is, it cannot be expressed in words, as the speaker admits in the final line. The theme of love of nature returns in the final stanza, when the speaker recalls the delight he felt when as a child he would swim in the ocean. He was like a child trusting a parent; even the turbulence of the

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Whereas the first stanza in this excerpt describes a kind of union with nature, the remaining stanzas suggest the opposite: The ocean is set apart from man and has the capacity to destroy him. The ocean is eternal, but man and his works are transient. They come and go. The ocean is presented as an adversary of man. Man thinks he can tame it, building ships that sail the ocean and using them as powerful means of waging war, but the ships are flimsy and weak when compared to the power of the sea. They can be destroyed in a moment, and all man’s prayers make no difference to his fate. The ocean mocks his arrogance. Man’s proper place is on the earth, where he has his power, even though, as the poem states, he uses it too often for destructive purposes. At sea, the tables are turned. As the second line of stanza CLXXIX states, ‘‘Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.’’ Man’s power, when it comes to the sea, is an illusion. He is always at the mercy of the ocean. And unlike the earth, which always carries the scars of man’s destructive impulses, the ocean swallows up man and his ships and leaves no trace on its smooth surface. The ocean always remains what it is, ‘‘boundless, endless, and sublime’’ (stanza CLXXXIII). The speaker uses this eternal nature of the ocean to set up a contrast between eternity and time. The ocean is ‘‘the image of Eternity’’ (stanza CLXXXIII), but man belongs to the temporal realm. His is the sphere of history, the record of man’s doings on the earth, in which things that once were are no more. The poet cites history several times, both in general and specific terms. He mentions the Spanish Armada and the battle of Trafalgar, as well as the ancient empires of Assyria, Greece, Rome, and Carthage. Powerful in their day, these empires are now described only in the pages of history books. Yet the ocean still laps the same shores, exactly as it did during the heyday of those empires. As stanza CLXXXII states, ‘‘Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow.’’ It is through this contrast between eternity and time that the poet exposes the smallness of man’s life when set against the largeness of the ocean. Man has his hopes, feelings, and desires, but the ocean is impersonal. It knows nothing and cares nothing for such things. It will continue unchanged long after generations of men have

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stressed syllable and one lightly stressed syllable or one strong stress and two lighter ones.) A pentameter consists of five feet. An iambic hexameter consists of six iambic feet. The poet occasionally varies the meter. The most common variation is the substitution of a trochee for an iamb at the beginning of the line, in the first foot. A trochee consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one; it is therefore the opposite of an iamb. The inversion of the first foot occurs, for example, in line 4 of stanza CLXXIX, in which the first syllable, ‘‘Stops,’’ is stressed. The inversion makes the word stand out against the expected regular metrical base. Similar inversions to create a trochaic first foot occur in stanza CLXXX (‘‘Spurning’’), stanza CLXXXIII (‘‘Glasses’’ and ‘‘Icing’’), stanza CLXXXIV (‘‘Borne’’), and elsewhere. Occasionally the line contains an extra unstressed syllable, as in the last line of stanza CLXXXI: ‘‘Alike the Armada’s pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.’’ This is known as a feminine ending. In a regular iambic line, the final syllable is stressed, and such lines are called masculine endings.

Illustration of a scene from Canto I of the poem (Ó Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library / Alamy)

come and gone. The poem thus uses the image of the ocean to give a vision of the vast stretch of time and the changeable, transient nature of human life when set against eternity. Time rushes on, but eternity always remains what it is.

STYLE Spenserian Stanza These stanzas are written in what is called Spenserian stanzas. The Spenserian stanza is named after Elizabethan English poet Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), who invented the form in his poem The Faerie Queene. The Spenserian stanza consists of nine lines. The first eight lines are written in iambic pentameter and the last line in iambic hexameter (also known as an Alexandrine). An iamb is a poetic foot in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable. (A foot consists of two or three syllables, either one strongly

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The rhyme scheme is as follows: line 1 rhymes with lines 3; line 2 rhymes with lines 4, 5, and 7; line 6 rhymes with lines 8 and 9. The rhyme scheme can be described as a b a b b c b c c. The Spenserian stanza was used by other English Romantic poets, including John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth.

Apostrophe An apostrophe is a figure of speech in which a poet directly addresses an absent person, inanimate object, or abstract quality. In this case, six of the seven stanzas consist of apostrophes to the ocean, beginning with stanza CLXXIX, ‘‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!’’ The poet addresses the ocean using the terms ‘‘thou’’ and ‘‘thy’’ throughout. These are archaic words used for the most part only in reference to God. The poet’s use of them shows the reverence with which he regards the ocean, and the god-like status he ascribes to it. He writes as if he were approaching a powerful, conscious being.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Romantic Movement The romantic movement in English literature is usually dated from 1798 to 1832. The principal

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COMPARE & CONTRAST

Early 1800s: Aristocratic young men mainly from England undertake the Grand Tour of Europe to broaden their education and become more cultivated. Travel takes a long time and can only be undertaken by those with adequate financial means. In the 1840s, however, the development of mass transit by rail, as well as steamships, enables more people to tour Europe. Today: Cheap air and train travel, as well as efficient roads, make it easy for anyone with a modest amount of money to explore Europe. Early 1800s: The romantic movement flourishes in England and Germany. In Germany, the leading literary figures are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Novalis, Achim von Armin, E. T. A. Hoffman, and Heinrich Heine.

poets associated with the movement are William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), and William Blake (1757– 1827), who were the first generation of Romantics, and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), John Keats (1795–1821), and Lord Byron, the second generation. Although Blake was publishing his poems himself in the 1790s, he did not have an audience, so it was the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798 that really marked the beginning of the romantic movement. Wordsworth brought a new language to poetry, replacing the formal poetic diction of the eighteenth century with a simpler language that captured the way ordinary people—the country folk, not the educated middle classes—actually spoke. Wordsworth also emphasized the role of feeling, famously defining poetry in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads as the ‘‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’’ Following Wordsworth, the Romantic poets did not just describe objectively what they were perceiving; they also

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Today: The dominant cultural movement in literature and the arts is postmodernism. In poetry, free verse is the most popular form, but many poets also write in traditional form and meter.

early 1800s: When the poets Byron and Shelley are in Italy, the country is a collection of republics (Venice, Genoa), duchies (Milan, Parma, Modena, Tuscany), a monarchy (Naples), and theocracy (the Papal States), all under the domination of Austria. The movement toward Italian independence and unification gathers force. Today: Italy is an independent republic. It is a parliamentary democracy and a member of the European Community and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

recorded their own reactions to it, often in terms of their feelings as much as their thoughts. Wordsworth and Coleridge are associated with the Lake District in northwest England, which provided Wordsworth in particular with almost endless inspiration for poetry. A deep appreciation of nature is a characteristic of Romantic poetry in general, often expressed through a lyric poem, which is a short poem in which a speaker describes his state of mind or feelings. The Romantic lyric poem often uses nature as a point of departure. The speaker may present his often troubled feelings as he contemplates a natural scene. Then after a process in which his mind and heart interact with nature, the poem rounds back where it began, and the speaker feels more tranquil, having resolved some difficult emotion or gained new insight into a problem. Examples of this form, often known as the ‘‘conversation poem’’ because of the informal language used, include Coleridge’s ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ and ‘‘Frost at Midnight.’’ Keats and Shelley varied the form, often apostrophizing the object of their contemplation, as Byron did in the apostrophe

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The Bright Stone of Honour and the Tomb of Marceau. The Tomb of Marceau is mentioned in Canto III of the poem. (Joseph Mallord William Turner / The Bridgeman Art Library) to the ocean from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Examples include Shelley’s ‘‘To a Sky-Lark’’ and ‘‘Ode to the West Wind,’’ and Keats’s ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale.’’ The Romantics valued imagination over reason. They believed that the imagination provided access to a higher level of truth and a clearer, more holistic way of seeing things than the rational intellect. They were explorers in the sphere of human consciousness who wanted to expand their realm of experience. Romantics, therefore, took an interest in the supernatural (Coleridge’s ‘‘Christabel,’’ for example), as well as in dreams (Keats’s ‘‘The Eve of St. Agnes’’). In general, they believed that the poet was a prophet, a man who could see further and understand more deeply than the ordinary person, and whose voice should be respected. Shelley, Wordsworth, and Blake certainly held such views, although Byron did not. The Romantic period was a time of revolution in France followed by the Napoleonic wars

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throughout much of Europe. Wordsworth and Blake were at first enthusiastic supporters of the French Revolution, believing in its ideals of freedom and equality. Later, however, when the revolution betrayed its ideals and France set out on wars of conquest, they turned against it. Wordsworth became politically conservative in his later years, although Blake remained a radical, opposing all forms of war and empire. Of the second generation of Romantics, both Shelley and Byron aligned themselves with the cause of liberty. Byron was sympathetic to the growing movement toward Italian reunification and freedom from Austrian rule. He also supported the Greeks in their war of independence, a cause for which he gave his life. On the domestic front, Blake and Shelley were particularly aware of the social problems caused by the Industrial Revolution. There had been a shift in population from rural areas to the cities where the new factories were, but factory workers toiled for long hours in difficult and

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often dangerous conditions. Social unrest grew, reaching a peak in the 1810s, and culminating in the Peterloo massacre in Manchester in August 1819. Sixty thousand workers had gathered at a public meeting to demand political reform. They were attacked by mounted militiamen, and eleven unarmed citizens were killed, with many more being injured. Shelley was indignant about the massacre and thought that England was on the brink of a revolution that would pit the oppressors against the oppressed. Byron learned of the incident in Italy, and he too thought England was facing imminent revolution. However, the revolution did not occur, and political reform had to wait until the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW These seven stanzas from Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage have always been held in high regard. Many editions of Byron’s works that present only sections of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage are likely to include them, and they are also included in numerous anthologies. Many critics over the last fifty years of the twentieth century commented on these stanzas. M. K. Joseph, in Byron, the Poet, points out that the ‘‘concluding seascape’’ in Canto IV, as well as other elements in the Canto, such as the ‘‘river-poem’’ and the ‘‘mountain-poem’’ draws on ‘‘the whole repertory of forms provided by eighteenth-century topographical poetry.’’ Byron is able to give this convention ‘‘renewed life by working from first-hand material and the resources of a receptive imagination.’’ In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos III and IV and The Vision of Judgement, Patricia M. Ball notes how in the stanzas immediately preceding the apostrophe to the ocean, Byron makes other references to the sea ‘‘until he is ready to unleash the full assault and bring the idea of the sea to us in its most exalted and awesome form.’’ In the apostrophe itself he ‘‘emphas[es] the vastness of his subject by repeated superlatives and a vocabulary of power and grandeur.’’ Peter J. Manning in Byron and His Fictions draws attention to how the apostrophe ends rather differently than it had begun. He writes: ‘‘Byron strives to conclude Childe Harold IV with a peroration of definitive and comprehensive closure. His grandly rhetorical address to the Ocean nonetheless gradually modulates into nostalgic childhood memories.’’ Manning

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also points out that the apostrophe begins with the ocean as ‘‘an epitome of masculine power’’ but ends with an image of the ocean as a ‘‘docilely feminine creature supporting the young Byron.’’ Andrew Rutherford, in Byron: A Critical Study, views the apostrophe to the ocean in light of Canto IV as a whole. The canto is ‘‘a long meditation on Time’s works, defeats, and victories, culminating in the address to Ocean, which for Byron is a symbol of Eternity.’’

CRITICISM Bryan Aubrey Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English. In this essay, he discusses the apostrophe to the ocean, from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in terms of the Roman ruins that helped to inspire it and also considers in what sense the apostrophe to the ocean might be considered a romantic poem. The apostrophe to the ocean is the most wellknown section of Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Serving as a coda to the main part of the poem, it is a fitting end because it reflects the overall theme of the canto, which is a long reflection on time and change, the impermanence of everything that man creates. This theme was particularly present in Byron’s mind when he visited Rome in May 1817, from where he took his trip up the Alban Mount to view the Mediterranean Sea. It is not surprising that after viewing the ruins of ancient Rome he should have been prompted to perceive the ocean as a symbol of the eternal in life, the one thing that does not change, though human empires come and go. Rome was an essential destination for those young eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English aristocrats who furthered their education by taking the Grand Tour of Europe. The city abounded in the ruins of an ancient civilization, the most aweinspiring of which was the Coliseum, which Byron describes in Canto IV as ‘‘this vast and wondrous monument’’ (stanza CXXVIII), a ‘‘long-explored but still exhaustless mine / Of contemplation’’ (stanza CXXIX). The Coliseum was built in the late-first century A.D. It could accommodate fifty thousand spectators and was the place where the Romans held their gladiatorial contests, on which Byron reflects in stanzas CXL to CXLII. The ruins of the Coliseum, once a symbol of the might of Rome, spread over six acres. Visiting the city not too long after Byron, English writer

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Byron’s short poem ‘‘She Walks in Beauty,’’ first published in his collection, Hebrew Melodies, in 1815, has always been one of his most popular lyrics. The poem was written in praise of the beauty of Byron’s young cousin, Lady Wilmot Horton, whom Byron had seen at a party wearing a mourning dress. Byron wrote the poem when he got home from the party. ‘‘She Walks in Beauty,’’ can be found in any selection of Byron’s poems. Adonais (1821), by Byron’s friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, is Shelley’s fifty-five-stanza elegy on the death of the poet John Keats, who died in 1821. Shelley had invited the sick Keats to visit him in Italy, but Keats died before the two poets could meet. Like Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, this elegy is written in Spenserian stanzas. It can be found in any edition of Shelley’s poems. Poems of the Sea (2001), edited by J. D. McClatchy, in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series, contains a variety of poems about the sea from all periods. Authors represented include Homer; John Milton; W. S. Merwin; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Edgar Allan Poe; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; William Shakespeare; John Masefield; Constantine Cavafy; and Wallace Stevens. The Sea! The Sea! An Anthology of Poems (2005), edited by Peter Jay, is a collection of poems about the sea. It includes some anony-

Charles Dickens had this to say (in his 1846 Letters to Italy, quoted in Christopher Woodward’s book, In Ruins) about the neglect into which the remains of the ancient structure had fallen: To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches overgrown with green; its corridors open to the day; the long grass growing in its porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit: chance produce of the seeds dropped there by the birds who build their nests within its chinks

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mous poems, including ‘‘The Seafarer’’ in Old English, as well as poems by Tennyson, Masefield, Edward Lear, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Donne, Paul Vale´ry, and many others. The book was published to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, in which the British Navy defeated the French fleet.

English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology (1996), edited by Stanley Applebaum, is a selection of 123 poems by the six major English Romantic poets: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats (including his poem ‘‘On the Sea’’), Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. Most of the major short poems by these poets are included, and excerpts from longer ones.

Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), edited by Camille T. Dungy, consists of 180 poems by ninety-three African American poets, including such well-known figures as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Melvin B. Tolson, as well as newer voices, including Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. The selections cover well over a century in African American writing, from slavery to Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and the present.

and crannies; . . . is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked wonderful old city.

Other nineteenth-century writers, including the Americans Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James, would all visit the Coliseum and give their impressions of it in writing. It was impossible not to be moved by the grand but also melancholy sight of greatness gone the way of all things under the relentless hand of time. Indeed, soon after Byron turns his

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WHAT MAKES THE APOSTROPHE TO THE OCEAN A ROMANTIC POEM, THEN, IS THE AMOUNT OF FEELING THERE IS IN IT. BYRON DOES NOT MERELY DESCRIBE THE SCENE AS IT APPEARS TO HIS EYES, HE INTERACTS WITH IT IN TERMS OF HIS FEELINGS.’’

attention to the Coliseum, feeling the ‘‘power / And magic in the ruin’d battlement,’’ he writes (stanza CXXX) an apostrophe to time as ‘‘the beautifier of the dead, / Adorner of the ruin.’’ His first description of the Coliseum puts in mind the later apostrophe to the ocean because it presents the ruin— the work of man—in the light of the eternity of nature. He views it at night, illumined by the moon ‘‘As ’twere its natural torches, for divine / Should be the light which streams here.’’ It is the ‘‘azure gloom / Of an Italian night’’ that ‘‘shadows forth its [the Coliseum’s] glory’’ (stanzas CXXX and CXXIX). Byron was not the only English Romantic poet to turn to this theme of the transience of human civilization and the vanity and smallness of man’s life and his hopes. Byron’s friend Shelley did the same in his famous sonnet ‘‘Ozymandias,’’ which was inspired by the granite head of the Egyptian king Ramases II that was put on display at the British Museum in March 1818, only a month before the publication of Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. ‘‘Ozymandias,’’ which was actually written before the statue went on public display, reflects on the contrast between the inscription on the pedestal of the statue, in which Ozymandias (as Ramses II was known at the time) boasts of his mighty works, and the fact that none of those works remains in existence. Although a theme of Byron and used by Shelley in that sonnet, the notion of the ephemeral nature of all man’s works when set against the relentless march of time is not an especially typical one for the English Romantics, although it was very congenial to Byron, who gave another, even more celebrated, description of the ruined Coliseum in his verse drama Manfred. The Romantics

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were more inclined to see the infinite potential of man (the pessimism of Shelley’s ‘‘The Triumph of Life’’ notwithstanding) than bemoan the transience of man and of all his doings. What then, is specifically Romantic, about the apostrophe to the ocean, which takes as its central theme the contrast between the eternity represented by the unchangeable ocean and the fragility and transience of human civilization? First, it should be pointed out that the English romantic movement was not a unified one in which all poets subscribed to the same philosophy or poetic creed. In many ways, Byron was different from the other Romantics. He disliked the later poetry of Wordsworth, and he was no admirer of Keats, with the exception of Keats’s unfinished epic poem, Hyperion. Coleridge’s intellectual speculations were alien to Byron, and although he respected his friend Shelley, he did not share Shelley’s interest in transcendental Platonic and Neoplatonic metaphysics. Byron knew nothing of William Blake. Indeed, rather than making common cause with his contemporaries, Byron was an admirer of the Augustan poets of the first half of the eighteenth century, especially Alexander Pope, to whom he felt poetically inferior. Despite Byron’s perhaps exaggerated antipathy toward Wordsworth, however, the apostrophe to the ocean has some very Wordsworthian (as well as Shelleyan) elements, and it is these that make the poem romantic. The first stanza is a case in point, with its warmly expressed love of nature: ‘‘There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, / There is a rapture on the lonely shore.’’ The beauty of nature enables the speaker to move out of or beyond himself and ‘‘mingle with the Universe.’’ This is a thoroughly Wordsworthian sentiment, although without the metaphysical elaboration which Wordsworth gives such moments in The Prelude (1850), for example. The last line also owes much to Shelley, although curiously, the sentiment expressed is not the most typical of Byron, whose mind was not usually drawn to transcendental notions of human life, the idea that man could be united with the universe, beyond any subject-object relationship, through the faculty Wordsworth and Coleridge called the imagination. However, although such sentiments may not have been typical of Byron, they did occur in other passages in his poetry. Indeed, the fruits of Byron’s most mystical phase, if it might be called that, can be found not in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s

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Pilgrimage, but in Canto III, which he wrote while directly under the influence of Shelley in Switzerland and the Alps. Stanza LXXII of Canto III, for example, shows this influence: I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture: I can see Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, Class’d among creatures, when the soul can flee, And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain. Like the first stanza of the apostrophe of the ocean, the final stanza of the apostrophe is also a celebration of nature, in the form of the ocean, although this time without any notion of the individual self mingling with something larger than itself. The description in which the speaker remembers the enjoyment he had as a boy swimming in the ocean is in substance if not form (Wordsworth only rarely wrote in Spenserian stanzas) reminiscent of Wordsworth’s recollections, in the first two books of The Prelude, of his boyhood spent among the lakes and the hills in England’s Lake District and specifically of swimming in Derwent Water. What makes the apostrophe to the ocean a Romantic poem, then, is the amount of feeling there is in it. Byron does not merely describe the scene as it appears to his eyes, he interacts with it in terms of his feelings. He tells the reader what it means to him personally. It is as much about the poet himself as about what he is observing in the world—a typical Romantic stance. It is this sincerity of feeling, which readers have never doubted, in the apostrophe to the ocean, as well as in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as a whole, that makes the poem representative of the era in which it was written. Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010

Vitana Kostadinova In the following essay, Kastadinova discusses the poem’s ideas on the nature of things as being uncertain, contradictory, and changeable. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV, Byron’s treatment of imagination and reality, art and

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ONE OF THE STRIKING EXPRESSIONS OF BYRONIC AMBIVALENCE IS MORAL RELATIVITY.’’

nature, subjectivity and objectivity, reason and feeling, freedom and tyranny, time and eternity, demonstrates a Romantic logic that defies onesidedness. In this essay I want to argue against a number of familiar critical readings of the canto that want to read it according to the binary logic of ‘either/or’—whereby Byron becomes either (mostly) optimistic or (mainly) pessimistic. I want to suggest that the poem is not characterised by a predominant mood or perspective but by an ambivalence towards all moods and perspectives. From the outset, the canto’s discursive amalgamation of seemingly incompatible elements is foregrounded. Byron’s original intentions were to publish the poem with Hobhouse’s notes on the historical facts behind the canto’s allusions. Byron’s Preface, written with the prospect of such an edition in view, prepares the reader for an encounter with both the personal time of the lyric persona and the historical time of Europe’s past. The enterprise envisages a complex interweaving of past and present, subjectivity and objectivity, imaginative writing and historical fact. This was not realised as originally planned, since Murray refused to have the poem and the notes printed together—and only reluctantly agreed to publish Hobhouse’s contribution in a separate volume. Nevertheless, the initial design seems to have influenced the final product, as the text of the poem itself blurs the boundaries between, and undermines oppositions between, the self and outer world, literature and history, time and eternity. Where the first and second cantos of Childe Harold might well be called a ‘descriptive medley mixing travel and history’, and the third ‘a poem in the confessional mode of Rousseau and Wordsworth’, the fourth canto is a ‘synthesis of the previous two poems’ and of the many contradictory elements the earlier cantos bring together. At the very beginning of Childe Harold IV, Byron famously introduces duality by juxtaposing ‘a palace and a prison’ (i). This binary can be, and has been, seen as symbolising two contradictory

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modes running through the canto: the celebratory and the dejected. Shelley was among the first to ignore the unifying dichotomy of the poem, referring to the spirit in which it was written as ‘the most wicked and mischievous insanity that ever was given forth’ and reducing the text to its ‘expressions of contempt and desperation’. A trend of literary criticism has adopted this interpretation, dismissing in various ways the canto’s celebratory aspects and seeking to foreground its pessimism, reading it as a sustained articulation of ‘the claims of despair’, or, at best, as ‘elegiac’. The first stanza of the canto certainly sets up an opposition between past and present that assigns value to the former and dismisses the latter as worthless, using the image of ‘a dying Glory’ smiling over recollections of a past that is categorically over. ‘Those days are gone.’ What is lost is important both politically and artistically: ‘States fall, arts fade’. Nevertheless, counter arguments prohibit downright pessimism— ‘Beauty still is here’, ‘Nature doth not die’ (3). The transience of human achievements is counterbalanced by the immortality of nature, and by the canto itself, which keeps record not just of beauty but also of human history. On the one hand, the ‘poem makes the past available to the informed imagination so that it can contribute to self-knowledge in the present’. On the other hand, however, admiration for the past is itself checked by the use of a vocabulary of belligerence and conflict: Venice’s glorious past was built upon the ‘spoils of nations’ (2). Ambivalent from the outset, then, the poem almost immediately complicates further any absolute opposition between past and present and between celebration and dejection. The Rialto Bridge, a material monument of the past within the present, may decay but this is not the case with all art: the ‘Venetian’ characters in British literature will always exist. Byron’s enthusiasm invites interpretations of his tone as ‘celebrating creativity’, with the culmination of this celebration coming in stanza 5, but the poet’s choice of the word ‘trophy’ in stanza 4 gives the reader pause and questions the positive nature of even literary art. Resonant of warfare, ‘trophy’ paves the way for the assertion that leaving Venice to its current ‘tyrannical’ owners ‘is shameful to the nations— most of all,/Albion! to thee’ (17). Byron reproaches his native country for not repaying her literary debt by political means, establishing a link between art, politics and historical change. Venice-inspired

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characters such as Shylock and the Moor et al. are ‘keystones’ (4) of the British literary tradition. In Venice, however, the survival of art itself is questioned and Venetian culture is in decline—no songs of gondoliers can be heard, the greatest Italian poet of the late Renaissance is not being re-echoed. What Venice stands for in the speaker’s mind no longer is—precisely because the immortal ‘beings of the mind’ (5) have proved powerless to inspire political action. In the complicated clash between the past and the present, the glories of the past can be reanimated by the imagination yet the speaker’s assessment of the imagination is undercut by the actualities of the contemporary world. In this, no single perspective can be maintained. The canto is, of course, ambivalent about the imagination at other points too. Harold Bloom echoes Byron by stating that ‘auto-intoxication fevers into false creation’ in Childe Harold IV and remarks: ‘So much for the Romantic Imagination.’ Byron also makes a point of stressing how much his writing owes to fact, and insists that the constructs of the mind do not alter the circumstances of one’s life. Even though he speaks Italian, reads Italian poetry and feels at home in Italy, he cannot change where he was born and what his first language was, and twines his hopes with his mother tongue (9). Yet, for Byron, the books we read, alongside subjective spots of time and flights of imagination, do play a part in making us who we are. Unlike Bloom, Marilyn Gaull argues that, in fact, ‘Byron affirms the life of the mind’ in the canto. Indeed, the creative mind can be seen as Byron’s optimistic alternative to reality: ‘what he [Byron] claimed to find in a communion with nature—revitalization, renewal, spiritual ‘‘growth’’—he now recognizes is actually supplied by the imagination’. At times, for Byron in Childe Harold IV, what the imagination offers is not subject to time and destruction and does not bring disappointment. Its creations are more attractive and promising than the world in its objective actuality: The Beings of the Mind are not of clay; Essentially immortal, they create And multiply in us a brighter ray And more beloved existence. (5) Nature is outdone—indeed, in Childe Harold IV, nature offers no secure Wordsworthian refuge and its comforts are transient and deceptive. Man does not find harmony in Nature; it cannot become the Garden of Eden. A Maker in his own right, the artist might attempt to restore

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in his own creations the state of happiness before the Fall, but this is not supplied by the world: Where are the charms and virtues which we dare Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men, The unreach’d Paradise of our despair? (122) We get the impression, in fact, that, ‘from the opening of the canto, we are led gradually inward, from the physical [ . . . ] to the mental [ . . . ] and finally into a meditation upon the activity of mind itself, and from history to art to the creative process at its most intense and active’. The celebration of creativity at the expense of nature is highlighted in the poetic discussion of the statue of Venus: ‘We stand, and in that form and face behold / What Mind can make, when Nature’s self would fail’ (49). Hence, for Jane Stabler, the experience of the sublime in Childe Harold IV ‘comes when the self apprehends the entirety of a work of art’. While the speaker of Childe Harold III idealises nature, in Canto IV he is alienated from it and turns instead to the inventive achievements of human beings. Yet his voice wavers in stanza 163 when discussing ‘this poetic marble’ and provokes Vincent Newey’s response: ‘The greatness of the poem ironically questions the greatness of transcendent Art at the very point where Art’s ‘‘eternal glory’’ is most patently foregrounded.’ It is not long before nature is once again being idealised. Suddenly it offers the panacea the speaker needs: There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and Music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne’er express, yet can not all conceal. (178) Communion with the objective is now preferred to communion with creative subjectivity: ‘there are things whose strong reality / Outshines our fairy land’ (6). ‘What mind can make’ does not, then, outshine objective ‘reality’, but the

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objective is not allowed to outshine the subjective for very long either. Both jostle for attention— and both receive it: Byron’s is, as Newey puts it, a ‘composite perception—not an ‘‘either . . . or’’ but an ‘‘and . . . and’’’, and the canto’s ‘constant term’ is ‘a swirling concatenation of creative and interpretative acts, a sort of heterogeneous chain of events’. Alan Rawes pushes Newey’s insight in a particular direction and claims that ‘an important feature of the canto’ is ‘that it is always unstable’. But is instability what we are seeing here, or a determinedly sustained ambivalence? Ambivalence seems to better fit the canto’s contradictory attitude towards reason. Byron’s relationship with reason in Childe Harold IV is a complicated one. The canto’s image of Horace fastens together Romantic notions of the subjective creativity of a poet and classical ideas of rationality. The speaker’s farewell to Horace seems to give preference to the Romantic—‘it is a curse / To understand, not feel thy lyric flow’ (77)—but, then, we have a critic who declares that ‘Byron’s speaker identifies himself with the cause of Reason, with the belief of the ‘‘Enlightened’’ men of the eighteenth century, that to know the truth is a good in itself from which other goods may follow’. The same reader goes on to attribute to Byron the conviction that ‘Reason is the divine faculty, it is what is God-like in man’. What invokes these contradictory readings of the poem, however, is not, I suggest, its instability, but its consistent double-mindedness. ‘It is not that Byron cannot make up his mind, but that he sees everything in essentially [ . . . ] two ways’, says Newey—one of the very few critics attuned to the canto’s radical doubleness. Thus, for example, in Venice, the speaker’s sympathy for the real place is stimulated both by actualities (117) and the fictions of Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller and Shakespeare (18), and he lives in the contradictions this generates. The mental images the speaker creates—through reason, imagination and/or feeling—are allowed to coexist with, even while contradicting, the immediate here and now, and vice versa. Byron can thus bring historical events closer and closer to his own subjectivity, and, in Byron’s case, Romantic sensibility ‘identifies individual experience with historical process’. The process of identification seems to be complete by stanza 25: But my soul wanders; I demand it back To meditate amongst decay, and stand A ruin amidst ruins.

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The claim made here is that the self has the attributes of and is equivalent to the setting. The internal is exteriorised, the external interiorised. There is a constant shifting of the balance within this parity, however. The world might be as perishable as flesh but it is ‘at our feet’ (78)—and the soaring spirit seems to observe it from above with a sense of superiority. At other times, the mind is ‘Expanded by the genius of the spot’ (155), and our grasp of ‘grandeur’ can only be ‘piecemeal’ and ‘gradual’ (157, 158). Such shifting balances within equivalences everywhere characterise the canto, and do not come to rest in a single dominant viewpoint. The only constant is the very fact of conjunction—‘and’ merges binary oppositions into a discourse of coexistence. As with objectivity and subjectivity—actuality and imagination—so with past and present. In Peter Manning’s words, ‘Byron replaces the conception of the past as essentially a static comparative framework to be imitated, whether respectfully or in parody, by a past that is directly to be reexperienced.’ The process of coming into contact with what has gone before and reviving it in one’s mind can provoke contradictory emotions even within a single experience: a feeling of endearment and mourning for the ‘crush’d relics of [ . . . ] vanish’d might’ (45), for instance, and a very different sense of continuity—the ancient world was a site of barbarism, tyranny and destruction very like the present. Things are different but do not change. The difference between past and present is both asserted and blurred to the point of vanishing from sight. The blurring of different times is, in stanza 144, linked to the recurring cycles in nature. The ‘rising moon’ and the twinkling stars are caught in ‘the loops of Time’ and form a ‘magic circle’ that revives the heroes of the past. The linear progress of time, whether personal and towards the next world promised by religion or public and towards a bright future of political utopia, is certainly not the underlying concept of Childe Harold IV. Freedom was the motto of the age but the disillusionment brought about by the aftermath of events in France gave a double perspective on human values and political preferences. The nominated contemporary ‘champion of freedom’ had turned into a tyrant, like others before him. Freedom had evolved into an abstract ideal: ‘See / What crimes it costs to be a moment free’ (85). With all the recent changes in

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the spheres of knowledge, religion and society, there is no secure standpoint for evaluating right and wrong. Political partisanship multiplies demagogues. The formation of new class divisions and the emergence of national consciousnesses are processes taking place at about the same time and in many ways contradicting each other. Truth is unattainable ‘opinion [is] an omnipotence’ and ‘right and wrong are accidents’ (93). Thus, one of the striking expressions of Byronic ambivalence is moral relativity, which Peacock probably had in mind when he referred to the poem as ‘‘‘poisoning’’ of the ‘‘mind’’ of the ‘‘reading public’’’ With no firm ground from which to judge the world, with ideals such as freedom seemingly beyond accomplishment, the speaker of Childe Harold IV expresses a fatalistic attitude not only towards phenomena of the mind but also towards the course of history: There is the moral of all human tales; Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption,—barbarism at last. And History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page. (108) These lines convey a cyclic theory of history, in the manner of Vico with his cycles of heroic and classical periods and declines into new barbarism. Here we can agree with Philip Shaw, who sees Byron ‘predisposed to representations of politics that emphasize its violent and tragic aspects’, and suggest that, as a consequence, for Byron ‘the realization of a progressive alternative seems remote’. Whether Vico’s ideas had any effect on Byron or not, Gibbon’s view certainly did. In spite of his appreciation of the past, or possibly because of it, the historian of Rome ‘finds the motive force’ of all history in ‘human irrationality itself’. Byron’s attitude to the past in these lines seems to pay tribute to the scepticism of the eighteenth century, to which we can add Voltaire’s conviction that the past can never be known as it actually happened. Byron thought the Frenchman ‘delightful’, even if ‘dreadfully inaccurate’, and bought the 92-volume edition of his works. Voltaire’s most famous and widely-read work, Candide, is an attack on metaphysical optimism and its main character rejects absolute truths as useless. Byron readily identified with Candide, and a fair portion of Childe Harold IV is tuned

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into that Voltairean mood that deplores the impossibility, or the irrevocable loss, of harmony and happiness: Our life is a false nature—tis not in The harmony of things,—this hard decree, This uneradicable taint of sin, This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree. (116) The speaker appears to get very close to Kant’s judgement ‘that the spectacle of human history is in the main a spectacle of human folly, ambition, greed and wickedness, and that any one who goes to it for examples of wisdom and virtue will be disappointed’. It is no more than the effect of time that makes things from the past appear precious: ‘Oh, Time! the Beautifier of the dead,/Adorner of the ruin’ (130). In fact, Roman times were savage, turning murder into a spectacle. The values of the first part of the poem, in which the past of Venice stands for worth, are further shaken. Judgments are questioned. Scepticism now seems to have won the day. Yet there is cause for optimism too in historical cyclic repetition. The powerful might fall, but the powerless might rise up; ‘Freedom, and then Glory’ have risen and will rise again. The world of today is not a permanent deterioration of a glorious past—there are different, better futures to look to, even if these too will be transient. Rome therefore projects contradictory messages. On the one hand, the Coliseum stands for a continuity of decay, both moral and physical: these three mortal things are still On their foundations, and unaltered all; Rome and her Ruin past Redemption’s skill, The World, the same wide den—of thieves, or what ye will. (145) On the other hand, there is the Pantheon, ‘sanctuary and home / Of art and piety’ (146). Ancient Rome seems to be double-faced, just like its animistic spirit of doorways, Janus. Its history is as ambiguous as his look. This is not a sign of the canto’s instability but of a consistently maintained ambivalence on the part of Byron’s speaker that seeks to stay faithful to what the poem sees as the only stable characteristics of the nature of things: uncertainty, contradiction and change. Early on in the canto, the antithetical relationship between the objective and the subjective appears fixed. The speaker’s visions of the mind ‘came like

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Truth—and disappeared like dreams’ and he would rather not replace them for other ‘overweening phantasies unsound’ (7). There is a reality out there. Poets might sometimes escape from it, creating in their imagination an alternative world of their own, but it exists all the same. Stumbling across the discrepancy between their imagination—even their reason—and actuality, poets are free, of course, to choose one or the other. Yet Byron does not choose in Childe Harold IV—indeed, he undermines the distinction between the objective and the subjective. We can ‘become a part of what has been,/And grow unto the spot, all-seeing but unseen’ 0380, his poem tells us, by attuning ourselves to, and sustaining an awareness of, the fundamental and irreducible ambivalences of human existence. Consciousness thereby merges actuality and mental projections, past and present, time and eternity, reconfiguring succession into simultaneity, blurring subjectivity and objectivity. Existence becomes an eruption of irreducibly multiple oneness. Byron’s sustained ambivalence in Childe Harold IV confronts us with this multiple oneness. That ambivalence is overlooked again and again in the clash of interpretations of the canto, which seek to make sense of it as a whole by reducing it to one or other of its viewpoints. Yet it is precisely to the inadequacy of any one viewpoint that Childe Harold IV points us. Source: Vitana Kostadinova, ‘‘Byronic Ambivlence in ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV,’’’ in Byron Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2007, pp. 11–18.

Howard H. Hinkel In the following essay, Hinkel asserts that writing poetry was Byron’s way of making sense of a world he found absurd. In 1821, only three years before his death, Byron wrote in his diary: ‘‘It is all a Mystery. I feel most things, but I know nothing except—.’’ He then covered the page with a series of blanks. The best of Byron’s poetry is a variation on that theme. The theme assumes nearly as many different emphases as the poet assumed poses, but the recurring motif, from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage through the fragmented Canto XVII of Don Juan, asserts an essentially absurdist view of the world. In one sense, Byron was born out of phase with time. While Coleridge and Wordsworth affirmed the organic unity of life and the blessedness afforded one who participates in an ultimately benevolent process, Byron traced the

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THE REJECTION OF MOST LITERARY STANDARDS COMPLEMENTED HIS REJECTION OF THE IDEA OF AN ORDERED UNIVERSE. WITH THE FREEDOM AFFORDED BY THE OTTAVA RIMA, BYRON DEVELOPED HIS LAST DEFENSE AGAINST INCOHERENCE.’’

shrineless pilgrimage of Childe Harold who searches relentlessly for he is not sure what. While Shelley—even in Byron’s presence— found ‘‘flowering isles’’ in the ‘‘sea of life and Agony’’ (imaginatively, if not actually), Byron allowed Manfred to die out of an unbearable, guilt-ridden existence. While Keats was steeling himself against misery with his doctrines of disinterestedness and ‘‘soul-making,’’ Byron prepared Don Juan to play cleverly and sometimes heartlessly with a world which shifted constantly beneath his feet. Unlike his contemporaries, who were capable of affirmation in the face of misery, Byron affirmed, then doubted his own affirmations. Unable to realize, intellectually or emotionally, the stability and sanctity of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s organically unified world, Byron faced a world in which there was yet no adequate defense against chaos. Like T. S. Eliot one hundred years later, Byron felt the need to shore some fragments against his ruin. In his poetry he first explores a fragmented world, then builds a refuge against it. Byron spent the balance of his poetic career haunted by what Harold Bloom has called the ‘‘specter of meaninglessness’’ (The Visionary Company, 1961). He used the force of his poetic genius to deal with this specter, first by shouting defiance of the world, then by mocking it, laughing that he might not weep. Ironically, the power of Byron’s opposition made the specter materialize; the poetry from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage through Don Juan progressively reveals an incoherent, essentially meaningless world. Although there are moments in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage when the pilgrim seems to have found what he seeks, something of extraordinary beauty and value, most of the pilgrimage wanders from one disillusioning experience to another. From the beginning there is a poignant sense of

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burned-out life, of energy so purposelessly spent that only a void remains. In the very first stanza the poet sets the tone by denying himself a muse: ‘‘Nor mote my shell awake the weary Nine / To grace so plain a tale—this lowly lay of mine.’’ This initial humility is the poet’s, but the pilgrim will eventually realize it as well. No muse could elevate and inspire the poem, for the subject itself is base. From ‘‘Childe Harold’s Good Night’’ till the end of Canto IV, the pilgrim wanders; less heroically than Tennyson’s Ulysses, he defines his existence in terms of quest and new experience. Each new experience, though, disappoints. The shining, enchanting beauty of Lisbon seen from afar becomes the wretchedness and poverty of the city seen in close-up. Heroic and legendary Greece has a modern sculptor; an Englishman, Lord Elgin, hacks away at Grecian monuments, forcing Byron to write ‘‘The Curse of Minerva.’’ Countless experiences and themes from the poem might be cited to support the claim that the poet is beginning to develop a nihilistic view of things: the lasting disparity between ideal and real, aspiration and achievement, imagination and reason; the sic transit gloria mundi theme which informs Cantos III and IV; the lonely soul theme which the alien Harold reiterates so boldly but sadly. But ultimately there is hope in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The poet found at least one way of dealing with a disappointing world: the creation of art. The fear of nothingness leads nowhere, so Byron seized, almost in desperation, the idea of living through imaginative structuring of experience: ’Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense, that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we image, even as I do now . . . (III, iv) This concept, reinforced by the ShelleyanWordsworthian optimism that appears in the middle of the canto, suggests that Byron had reached despair but passed beyond it. Shelley’s optimism, though, is unnatural to Byron, and there is a regression to bleakness in Canto IV. But the notion of living by creating gave Byron one defense against chaos; he finds another in Canto IV, a tremendous faith in the power of the human mind and will. As Childe Harold enters Venice in Canto IV, Byron is still sustained by his newly achieved conviction that the creative imagination gives structure and meaning to the poet’s existence.

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In an echo of the passage from Canto III, vi, Harold identifies ‘‘The Beings of the mind’’ as being of more than clay. They are ‘‘essentially immortal,’’ and they afford us eventually a more ‘‘beloved existence’’ (IV, v). Eventually, though, the creations, the ‘‘Beings,’’ yield importance to the mind itself. In stanza xxi Byron affirms an even greater strength in the mind: Existence may be borne, and the deep root Of life and sufferance make its firm abode In bare and desolated bosoms: mute The Camel labours with the heaviest, load, And the wolf dies in silence—not bestowed In vain should such example be; if they, Things of ignoble or of savage mood, Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay May temper it to bear,—it is but for a day. The poet’s eye is turning yet more inward, scanning the creations of the mind for their beauty and life, but praising the mind even more because it can will endurance for our mortal clay. No longer seeking to transcend bodily life by momentary engagement with the higher world of art, Childe Harold gradually adopts a quite acceptance of his unrewarding quest. In stanza cxxvii he says that it is ‘‘a base / Abandonment of reason to resign / Our right of thought— our last and only place / Of refuge. . . . ’’ This last proclamation reaffirms his suspicion, first voiced in stanza xxv, that perhaps the best he can do on his pilgrimage is ‘‘To meditate amongst decay.’’ The very power of art to revitalize life depends upon the mind’s receptivity; the mind itself is our last refuge. Byron’s belief in the shaping power of poetry undoubtedly influenced his notion of the indomitable force of the mind; poetry, which gives life to the poet, is of course a creation of the mind. But the Prometheus myth added another dimension to Byron’s developing conviction that the mind itself is man’s greatest resource. Prometheus had long fascinated Byron, enough so that he wrote an entire poem about the rebellious Titan. His defiance of Zeus, his opposition to a force supposedly greater than himself, made Prometheus attractive to Byron at this point in his development. The Titan epitomizes heroic volition,

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terrifying assertion of one’s own will. Zeus stood as a judge who enforced illogical and indefensible laws. Through an act of will, Prometheus became the soul judge of himself by refusing to accept any external standard or law. He became a law unto himself, and it is to this same position that the poet himself came. Having failed to find coherence and stability in a world of orthodox standards and conduct, Byron concluded that coherence could at least be achieved within the individual mind. With this pervasive sense of individual order, Manfred was composed. Simply stated, Manfred dramatizes the refusal of the mind to yield to anything outside itself. Manfred, then, at least in part, develops from Childe Harold whose last refuge is the mind itself. As did Childe Harold, Manfred sought for something more than the ‘‘humble virtues,’’ ‘‘hospitable home,’’ and ‘‘spirit patient’’ represented by the Chamois Hunter. But like Childe Harold, Manfred was destined to be an alien: ‘‘though I wore the form, I had no sympathy with breathing flesh’’ (II, ii, 56–57). Tormented by his sense of guilt for having loved ‘‘as we should not love’’ (II, i, 27), Manfred seeks forgetfulness. He is offered what he needs by the Witch of the Alps if he will only yield his will to her. Manfred’s reply to the Witch of the Alps might be the poet’s to the world: I will not swear—Obey! and whom? the Spirits Whose presence I command, and be the slave Of those who served me—Never! (II, ii, 157–159) Even at the moment of death when the spirits come to claim him, Manfred asserts the supremacy of his own will: I do not combat against Death, but thee And thy surrounding angels; my past power Was purchased by no compact with thy crew, But by superior science—penance, daring, And length of watching, strength of mind, . . . (III, iv, 112–116) Strength of mind, the impassioned assertion that the individual will is the most powerful of forces. Manfred’s anguish came not from any external imposition, but from within—and so does his death. The common mind (the abbot), shaped by orthodoxy, is at a loss to understand Manfred’s willful death. It is this same common

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mind, nourished by traditional values, which both Byron and Manfred repudiate. Childe Harold tentatively asserted the supremacy of the individual will; Manfred glorifies it. Heroic defiance cannot last indefinitely. Either it must consume its possessor, as it does Manfred, or be consumed, leaving a void behind. The tone of the poetry after Manfred suggests that the latter may have happened to Byron, that at least in his art the will to command experience absolutely slowly diminished. In the best poems, especially in Don Juan, there is a resignation which accepts incoherent meaninglessness and deals with it. In his epic, Byron’s outright defiance fades, and he doubts the sanctity of most things, the individual will and poetry included. Having lowered his two earlier defenses against ruin in the face of chaos, Byron adopted new ways of dealing with an essentially absurd world. Sentimental visions of innocence, shrineless pilgrimages, aesthetic imposition of order, heroic self-assertion, and Shelleyan transcendence all failed to uncover the coherent, ordered world he sought. By 1818, then, Byron concluded that no order was to be found. His consequent acceptance of chaos is even reflected in the form of his greatest works. The earlier poetry usually had been written in rhymed forms dignified by the weight of tradition. Pope and the heroic couplet stood behind English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, supporting an interesting but lame satire. Spenser and all his imitators gave aged authority to the stanza form of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Even the plays, although unique in many ways, show obvious indebtedness to the rich English and Greek dramatic traditions. But in English there was no ottava rima tradition, no precedent for the unlikely rhymes, the diversified metrics, sometimes Miltonic in grandeur, sometimes deliberately doggerel. Byron was on his own, free from serious concerns for propriety and structure. The rejection of most literary standards complemented his rejection of the idea of an ordered universe. With the freedom afforded by the ottava rima, Byron developed his last defense against incoherence. Childe Harold’s quest and Manfred’s peculiar knowledge had turned up relatively little to be celebrated in the world. The world, though, could be neither transcended nor ignored, but had to be faced. Laughter, even when it tended toward the hysterical, offered a way of coping without going mad.

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A cursory look at Beppo confirms that Byron had begun to laugh. The material for an explosive melodrama is here. After years away, Beppo returns home to find his wife, Laura, keeping the company of a ‘‘Cavalier Servente.’’ If Beppo had had Childe Harold’s idealism and Manfred’s grand passions, he could have turned his unexpected homecoming into an Italian domestic tragedy. The poem, though, gives nothing of the sort. The hero accepts his plight calmly, makes necessary adjustments. Laura occasionally enrages Beppo by henpecking him, but his fury is soon spent. Indeed, the Count, the ‘‘Cavalier Servente,’’ and Beppo ‘‘were always friends.’’ No heroic vengeance; no epic destruction of Penelope’s suitors. Beppo simply accepts things as they are, and his acceptance resembles Byron’s own; things may occasionally enrage him, but he is now amiable on the whole. Mazeppa reaffirms the notion that nothing now is very important. Much of the poem approximates the emotional depths Byron had examined in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Manfred. The tale relates events of passion, violence, and revenge, and Byron seems to have exposed his pulse in public once again. But finally Mazeppa is an elaborate joke, a shaggydog story constructed in 868 lines leading to a punch line which deflates the serious tone of the narrative. The fact that the King, the intended audience, slept through the balance of the narrative implies that the poet’s art is really a soporific. The poet may have participated in a greater world created by the imagination in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (III, vi), but in Mazeppa poetry has become dull entertainment which may or may not reach the intended audience; it really does not matter, though, because the joke is for the poet’s sake. With the peculiar calm which resulted from his realization of nothingness in the world, and with the relaxed freedom afforded by the ottava rima, Byron wrote Don Juan. To demonstrate in this poem the despair at a meaningless world is easy. Indeed, the unlimited scope of the poem makes it likely that nearly anything can be proved by reference to the text. But the idea of nothingness permeates the poem because it appears at so many strategic and dramatic moments. For example, the following stanza might be cited as evidence of Byron’s vision of nothingness: Ecclesiastes said, ‘‘that all is vanity’’—. Most modern preachers say the same, or show it

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By their examples of true Christianity: In short, all know, or very soon may know it; And in this scene of all-confessed inanity, By Saint, by Sage, by Preacher, and by Poet, Must I restrain me, through the fear of strife, From holding up the nothingness of Life? (VII, vi) Canto VII is of course one of the war cantos; consequently its dominant tone is seriously satirical. War is shown to be violent, and Don Juan, at least for a while, fights violently beside the best of the Russian troops. Yet the high seriousness of the tone and the subject matter is regularly undermined. While monstrous war goes on in Canto VII, in the next canto, after the Russians have besieged the city, the serious tone is interrupted by levity. In the best Roman-Sabine tradition, the raping begins: Some odd mistakes, too, happened in the dark, Which showed a want of lanterns, or of taste— Indeed the smoke was such they scarce could mark Their friends from foes,—besides such things from haste Occur, though rarely, when there is a spark Of light to save the venerably chaste: But six old damsels, each of seventy years, Were all deflowered by different grenadiers! (VII, cxxx) The flippant couplet alone turns a sad situation into a comic episode. In the next stanza, though, the narrator points out ‘‘that some disappointment there ensued,’’ and the following stanza tells why: Some voices of the buxom middle-aged Were also heard to wonder in the din (Widows of forty were these birds long caged) ‘‘Wherefore the ravishing did not begin!’’ (VIII, cxxxii) The nothingness which Byron holds up here is not the fact of war, but the inane responses to

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it. Against the cruelty of war and the subsequent inanity which informs man’s response to war, Byron protects himself with laughter. On the whole, the war cantos reveal a depth of compassion and sense of the sanctity of human life. But to be only serious about such matters is again to invite despair. Byron chooses to laugh, and then to move on to the Court of Catherine the Great. Rapid movement and laughter becomes his defense against senseless cruelty and inane human behavior. That laughter and acceptance of nothingness have replaced the earlier defense against ruin which Byron found in the creative act is reflected in his expressed attitude toward poetry in Don Juan. At the beginning of Canto VII the poet identifies his tale as a ‘‘versified Aurora Borealis / Which flashes o’er a waste and icy clime’’ (VII, ii). The light of his verse, though, is not to redeem or to elevate, but to lay bare a wasteland of a civilization that we may know it for what it is. The following passage tells what the Aurora Borealis elucidates: When we know what all are, we must bewail us, But ne’erthless I hope it is no crime To laugh at all things—for I wish to know What, after all, are all things—but a show? (VII, ii) Poetry now induces laughter; no longer does it allow its creator to participate in a better world of art, rather to live with his lesser world of factual nothingness—a ‘‘show.’’ Among myriad possibilities, several stanzas from Canto XIV reflect the persistency of Byron’s now casual attitude toward poetry. In stanza viii ‘‘Poesy’’ is ‘‘a straw, borne on my human breath.’’ Whimsical by intent, it acts ‘‘according as the Mind glows.’’ Like straw, poetry is essentially hollow, lacking the passionate emotion which surfaced so regularly in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Manfred. The couplet of stanza viii comments further on poetry: And mine’s a bubble, not blown up for praise, But just to play with, as an infant plays. After admitting in stanza x that ‘‘I can’t help scribbling once a week,’’ Byron expresses a defense of poesy that must have shocked his friend, Shelley:

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But ‘‘why then publish?’’—There are no rewards Of fame or profit when the World grows weary. I ask in turn,—Why do you play at cards? Why drink? Why read?—To make some hours less dreary. It occupies me to turn back regards On what I’ve seen or pondered, sad or cheery; And what I write I cast upon the stream, To swim or sink—I have had at least my dream. Writing is like a pointless game of cards or is a soporific, like reading and drinking. It pacifies. All these passages, and countless other, suggest that Byron had become obsessed with emptiness and futility. Art became a game, played only as earnestly as suburban housewives might play bridge, to keep blankness away. This affable but calloused appraisal of the world finally leads Byron to train his hero quickly for the insubstantial, hypocritical society he will find in the English Cantos. After several stanzas of cataloguing ignominious historical events and figures in England’s past and present, the poet instructs Juan in how to survive in the inanity of the English society Juan has entered: But ‘‘carpe diem,’’ Juan, ‘‘carpe, carpe!’’ To-morrow sees another race as gay And transient, and devoured by the same happy. ‘‘Life’s a poor player,’’—then ‘‘play out the play, Ye villains!’’ and above all keep a sharp eye Much less on what you do than what you say: Be hypocritical, be cautious, be Not what you seem, but always what you see. (XI, lxxxvi) All races and days in this society are transient, and Juan must learn self-annihilation and shape-shifting if he is to play in a frivolous world. This is self-annihilation, though, which is manifested in convenient refusal to be a person; Juan must always be whatever the situation demands. This capacity to disguise one’s essential self while playing various roles is identified in Canto XVI as ‘‘mobility.’’ While Lady Adeline entertains her husband’s political supporters,

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she assumes her role so elegantly that Juan ‘‘began to feel / Some doubt how much of Adeline was real’’ (xlvi). Furthermore: So well she acted all and every part By turns—with that vivacious versatility, Which many people take for want of heart. They err—’t is merely what is called mobility, A thing of temperament and not of art, Though seeming so, from its supposed facility; And false—though true; for, surely, they’re sincerest Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest. ‘‘Want of heart’’ is precisely what is wrong in the world Juan inhabits. Strong will and heart moved Childe Harold and Manfred through anguished existences, though, and Byron, like Juan and Lady Adeline, has learned that an emotional commitment to an essentially meaningless existence can only bring anguish. Don Juan will prosper in England; like Lady Adeline he learns to adjust to the moment at hand. Persistent and flippant inconsistency is the only way to deal with an insubstantial, incoherent world. Don Juan is something of a labyrinth, though, and around each corner and at each dead-end is more evidence that the poet has determined existence itself to be an incoherent maze. Rather than proceed with more particular illustrations, perhaps it is better to look at three general points about the poem to show that it is finally about nothingness. First, the very fact that the poem concerns everything suggests that it is ultimately about nothing. Byron admitted in a letter to his publisher (April 23, 1818) that the poem ‘‘is meant to be a little quietly facetious upon every thing.’’ A central theme is impossible to locate. At times the theme seems to be the old discrepancy between illusion and reality. Or perhaps it is, as several critics recently have argued, the theme of the Fall with elaborate variations. Or perhaps a desire to expose gross hypocrisy motivated the poem. Or perhaps. The possibilities are countless. The focus is finally nowhere. By being everywhere, Don Juan is not anywhere—it is constantly in the process of becoming, but it never simply is, nor could have been until it ended, and it could end only with Byron’s death. To look too closely at any single subject, or to narrate in a

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single tone of voice, would be to edge toward consistency, and consistency is more than the hobgoblin of small minds; it is madness. Byron’s ‘‘mobility,’’ though, allows him to keep playing opposites off against one another in a desperate defense against despair. If love becomes painful, it must be mocked. If war is violent and cruel, there must be women wondering when the raping will begin. If there is an Aurora Raby, there must be a Lady Adeline. Rapid movement with a shifting world is the only means of survival. Secondly, the character of Juan himself demonstrates the emptiness of the world Byron inhabited. Mobility becomes the habit of Juan’s soul. A reader spends an immense amount of time with Juan, but finally knows very little about his character. Even more important, Juan almost completely lacks the will which sustained Childe Harold and Manfred. As numerous critics have pointed out, the world acts upon him. Even his few willed acts, like the saving of Leila, are vague gestures that go nowhere. Like Auden’s unknown citizen, ‘‘When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.’’ When there is an empress to pamper him, he lets her. But that is Juan’s victory; the moment determines both his actions and his essence. Finally, the essential formlessness of the poem reflects Byron’s conviction that life is ultimately incoherent and chaotic. The poem literally sprawls from Spain to Greece, from Greece to Turkey, from Turkey to Russia, and from Russia to England. Byron was too much an artist to try to impose strict, traditional artistry on Juan’s meandering. He simply terminates episodes when they no longer interest him, and numerous digressions interrupt and defy a strictly coherent narrative. This formlessness, though, comes not from incompetence, but from Byron’s understanding of how he had to operate within his world in order to stay sane. From one canto to the next he wrote what pleased him, how it pleased him. If he decided that the reader did not need to know how Juan escaped from the Seraglio, Byron did not bother to tell. If Leila, who was the occasion for Juan’s one really heroic and compassionate act, virtually disappears from the poem though she remains with Juan, the poet does not care. What did it matter? The poem meant more to Byron as process than as achievement. With urbane laughter and the emotional detachment afforded thereby, Byron survived in his poetic world which earlier had nearly

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devoured him. Byron’s own comment that parts of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were written by a man much older than he would ever be is appropriate. Childe Harold’s idealism-to-anguish journey tired the poet; the endless growth and process of Don Juan not only kept him young, but sustained him in a world which he intellectually knew and experimentally proved to be imperfect. Source: Howard H. Hinkel, ‘‘The Byronic Pilgrimage to the Absurd,’’ in Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 4, Summer 1974, pp. 325–65.

SOURCES Ball, Patricia M., Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos III and IV and The Vision of Judgement, Basil Blackwell, 1968, p. 58. Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanza LXXII, Canto IV, stanzas CXXVIII-CXXX, CLXXVIII-CLXXXIV, in Lord Byron: Selected Poems, edited with a preface by Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning, Penguin, 1996, pp. 440, 552, 567–69. Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook: Italy, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook/geos/it.html (accessed September 27, 2009). Grant, A. J., and Harold Temperley, Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1789–1950), 6th ed., Longmans, 1969. Joseph, M. K., Byron, the Poet, Victor Gollancz, 1966, pp. 75–76. Manning, Peter J., Byron and His Fictions, Columbia University Press, 1966, pp. 96–97. Marchand Leslie, A., ed., Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982. Rutherford, Andrew, Byron: A Critical Study, Oliver and Boyd, 1961, p. 97. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ‘‘Ozymandias,’’ in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, selected and edited by Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers, Norton, 1977, p. 103. Woodward, Christopher, In Ruins, Pantheon Books, 2001, p. 13. Wordsworth, William, Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and Coleridge, edited with introduction, notes and appendices by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, Methuen, 1968, p. 266.

FURTHER READING Abrams, M. H., Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, Norton, 1971. This renowned study of Romanticism examines poetry and philosophy in England and Germany,

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showing how Romantic writers shared certain themes and styles. Although Byron is not the focus of the book, it does provide valuable context for understanding the literary movement in which Byron placed himself. Berry, Francis, ‘‘The Poet of Childe Harold,’’ in Byron: A Symposium, edited by John Jump, Harper & Row, 1975, pp. 35–51. In this essay, Berry argues that T. S. Eliot’s negative assessment of Byron, made in the 1930s and quite influential, no longer applies. Grosskurth, Phyllis, Byron: The Flawed Angel, Houghton Mifflin, 1997. This is a lively, well-written psychoanalytic biography that delves into Byron’s inner life.

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It is free of jargon and provides some valuable insights into this most fascinating of literary giants. Grosskurth gained access to the Lovelace papers, which previous biographers had been denied, and the information contained therein enables her to trace in detail the collapse of Byron’s marriage. Marchand, Leslie, Byron’s Poetry: A Critical Introduction, Houghton Mifflin, 1965, pp. 36–59. Marchand is one of the leading twentieth-century scholars of Byron, and in this introductory chapter on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he argues that it is the finest confessional poem in English Romanticism; Byron speaks with a universal voice, expressing thoughts common to all men.

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The Dead SUSAN MITCHELL 1983

‘‘The Dead’’ (1983), by the American poet Susan Mitchell, is a description of an episode in the existence of people who have died on earth but who continue to maintain their ties with loved ones who are still alive. Thematically, the poem recalls the classic work of literature, Inferno, by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), a section of which Mitchell has translated (Versions of the Inferno, edited by Daniel Halpern, Ecco Press, 1993). Mitchell has gained a significant reputation as a poet, though public recognition of her work, as of 2009, was limited. She is known for her introspection and interest in self-discovery, her freely meandering style, her eclectic range of influences, and her spiritual and esoteric subject matter. ‘‘The Dead’’ is typical of Mitchell’s work in its mystical theme. ‘‘The Dead,’’ appeared in Mitchell’s first collection of verse, The Water Inside the Water (Wesleyan University Press). It is also available in the HarperPerennial edition of The Water Inside the Water (1994). It is frequently anthologized and studied in schools and colleges.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Susan Mitchell grew up in New York City, where she was born in 1944. She was educated at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, where she gained a

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BA in English literature. She subsequently gained an MA from Georgetown University and an ABD from Columbia University. She has held teaching positions at Middlebury College, Vermont, and Northeastern Illinois University, where she was poet in residence. As of 2009, she was teaching in the MFA Writing Program at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, where she holds the Mary Blossom Lee Endowed Chair in Creative Writing. She divides her time between Florida and Connecticut.

Asked about her influences, Mitchell reported composers come to mind first: Barto´k, the late Beethoven quartets, and Elliott Carter. She writes (in the same email communication with the author): ‘‘In Rapture and Erotikon I began to bring in snatches of other languages as much for the music as for the sense.’’

Mitchell has won many awards for her poetry, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation (1992), and the Lannan Foundation (1992). She is the author of three poetry collections: The Water Inside the Water (1983), which centers on the mysteries of consciousness and existence; Rapture (1992), which focuses on finding the extraordinary within the commonplace; and Erotikon (2000), which explores sensuality and erotic experience. These collections were all published by Harper Collins. Rapture was awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1993 and was a National Book Award finalist.

At night the dead come down to the river to drink. They unburden themselves of their fears, their worries for us. They take out the old photographs. They pat the lines in our hands and tell our futures, which are cracked and yellow. Some dead find their way to our houses. They go up to the attics. They read the letters they sent us, insatiable for signs of their love. They tell each other stories. They make so much noise they wake us as they did when we were children and they stayed up drinking all night in the kitchen.

Mitchell’s poems have been published in literary reviews and magazines, including the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, New Republic, and Paris Review. Her poems have also been included in five volumes of The Best American Poetry and two Pushcart Prize volumes. She received Ploughshare’s Denise and Mel Cohen Award in 1992.

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POEM SUMMARY Lines 1–7

There is a line in ‘‘Night Music’’ (Rapture) where the speaker talks of Chaucer, Coleridge, and Chekhov and says: ‘‘Last night they awakened me/ with their listening.’’ The creative process for me is a process of listening, hearing what at first might not sound like a poem, being alert, being an antenna. The French poet Vale´ry wrote: ‘‘The ear speaks, the mouth listens.’’ I’ve always loved that.

‘‘The Dead’’ describes an episode in the afterlife of souls of people who once lived on earth but who are now dead. Shown interacting with the living, the dead are portrayed as having as busy and active a life on earth as those who are still alive. Line 1 describes the habit of the dead of coming to the river to drink at night. The image is unusual as it is not expected that dead people need to eat or drink as they do not have earthly bodies to sustain. The river referred to may be the river Lethe or the river Styx of ancient Greek mythology. The Lethe was one of the rivers of Hades, the underworld and abode of the dead. The ancient Greeks believed that the newly dead drank from this river to enable them to forget their lives on earth. The river Styx separated the world of the living, the upper world, from the world of the dead, the underworld.

Mitchell adds, ‘‘Perhaps listening is so important to me because I love music. I studied piano, starting when I was seven, and dance, starting a year or two later.’’

Line 2 describes the dead as offloading their fears and worries for their loved ones who are still living. It is not made explicit how they do this, but perhaps it is by talking to one another and

Mitchell is the translator of ‘‘Canto 21’’ and ‘‘Canto 22’’ of Dante’s Inferno, in Versions of the Inferno, edited by Daniel Halpern (Ecco Press, 1993). Commenting on her creative process (in a personal email communication with the author), Mitchell writes:

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lessening their individual burden of cares in this way. Equally, perhaps it is through the cleansing effect of the river, which washes away memories. It is possible that both factors come into play. The dead are shown as continuing to be intimately involved with the living. They show each other old photographs of loved ones who are still alive (line 3), just as in everyday life, aunts, uncles, and grandparents might proudly show each other photographs of their young relatives. The dead examine the lines in the hands of the living to tell their futures. This is a reference to palmistry, the art of telling the future by looking at the lines and other characteristics of a person’s palm. The qualities of crackedness and yellowness in line 5 may refer to the hands of the loved ones read by the dead, or to their futures, or to the old photographs that the dead show to one another, or to all of these. The image, which connotes age and decay, foreshadows a time when the loved ones featured in the photographs will also grow old and die, just like the dead. In lines 6 and 7, some of the dead are portrayed as entering the houses of their loved ones who are still living. They are shown as entering the attics of these houses, recalling the traditional notion of attics as ghostly places where the belongings of long-dead ancestors are stored.


Research beliefs about the afterlife in at least three different religious, cultural, or philosophical systems. Note the similarities and differences. As part of your research, you may wish to interview people who espouse the traditions you are studying. Give a class presentation or make a video or audio CD of your findings.

Research the topic of near-death experiences, which are experiences of people who have been close to death or who have been clinically declared dead but who have lived to report their perceptions. Include in your research both the subjective reports from people who have had such experiences and scientific research into the topic. Write an essay on your findings.

Interview a selection of people who have been bereaved and a second selection of people who work with the dying and dead. Identify any important issue or issues that arise from your research and either write a report, make a video or audio CD, or give a class presentation on your findings. Consider Mitchell’s ‘‘The Dead’’ and any two of the following poems and prose passages about death: William Blake’s ‘‘A Poison Tree,’’ Matthew Arnold’s ‘‘Dover Beach,’’ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘‘Bereavement,’’ John Donne’s ‘‘Meditation 17: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions’’ (‘‘No man is an island . . . It tolls for thee’’), and Anne Sexton’s ‘‘Sylvia’s Death.’’ Compare and contrast your three poems in terms of authorial voice, themes, style, verse form, and any other considerations that you think are important. Write an essay on your findings.

Lines 8–14 Having entered the attics of the houses of their loved ones, the dead read letters that they sent to their loved ones in life. The dead are searching hungrily in the letters for signs of the love that they felt for the recipients of the letters. The fact that they are searching for the signs of the love they felt implies that they no longer feel it as strongly but want to regain that depth of emotion. In line 10, the dead are shown as telling stories to one another, presumably about their loved ones or their own lives on earth. This is a raucous event. The dead make so much noise in their storytelling sessions that they wake the living from sleep (lines 11–12). This recalls a time when the dead were alive, when they held all-night drinking sessions in the kitchen and woke the children sleeping upstairs (lines 13–14).

THEMES Afterlife The main theme of ‘‘The Dead’’ is the afterlife. The poem assumes that people’s souls live on after they

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have died on earth. However, the dead are shown as having physical existence and bodies like those of people who are still living. They interact with the living and tell each other stories. They are

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A river at night (Image copyright Kokhanchikov, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

shown invading of the attics of the houses of their loved ones who are still living and reading the letters they sent to loved ones during their earthly lives, trying desperately to maintain their connection with the emotion of love. Hunger, thirst, and love are desires that are characteristic of earthly life. Most religious and spiritual traditions, including Christianity, the philosophy of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (428–348 B.C.), and the ancient Vedic tradition of India that predated Hinduism, adhere to the principle that earthly desires should ideally be transcended or left behind with the body after a person dies. If a soul retains such desires, then it remains imprisoned by its bonds of attachment to earthly people and things. The souls in ‘‘The Dead’’ fit into this category of attachment. The state is not seen as either good or bad, and no moral color is given to it. But it is certainly an uneasy state. The dead drink from the river, which may be interpreted as the river Lethe. This, according to ancient Greek mythology, would make them forget their earthly attachments. Perhaps the waters of the Lethe are having an

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effect on them and enabling them to forget. But the dead do not welcome this forgetting. Instead, they are desperately trying to recapture their past emotions, just as starving people try to satisfy their hunger. They are subsequently shown feeding their attachment and keeping it alive by telling stories, showing photographs, and invading the houses of their loved ones on earth. Far from being eager to let go of their earthly attachments, they are trying to strengthen the bonds.

Purgatory In the context of Roman Catholic theology, the souls in ‘‘The Dead’’ are in Purgatory, a halfway house between Heaven and Hell. Purgatory is the after-death destination for the souls of people who died in a state of grace or friendship with God but who are not sufficiently pure to enter Heaven. In Purgatory, the souls go through a process of cleansing or purging to rid themselves of their earthly desires and attachments and prepare them for eternal life in Heaven. The souls in ‘‘The Dead’’ are not yet free of attachments. If the river from which they drink is the Lethe, then

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this will help them to forget their earthly lives and attachments. But they are simultaneously keeping those attachments alive by telling stories and looking at photographs of the living.

Memory If the river in the poem is interpreted to be the river Lethe of ancient Greek mythology, the river of forgetting, then the poem can be said to express the tension between the knowledge of the dead people that they must forget their lives on earth and their desire to keep alive the memories of their loved ones who remain alive. As they thirst, they must drink, and as they must drink from the Lethe, they must forget. But they determinedly cling to their photographs of friends and relatives, their stories of their lives on earth, and their experience of earthly love. These activities do not satisfy their hunger and thirst for earthly experiences: They remain insatiable. The poem presents memory as something that both entraps the soul and enchants it, that both keeps the dead from progressing and yet nourishes their hungry spirits.

STYLE Irony ‘‘The Dead’’ depends for its dramatic effect on surprising reversals of expectations. This results in a literary device called situational irony, in which what actually happens is the opposite of what might be expected to happen. There are at least two cases of situational irony in the poem. In the first case, in everyday life, what is expected to happen is that the dead are silent and disappear from the world. What happens in the poem is that the dead are so active and noisy that they wake the living from sleep. Thus the poem subverts the cliche´ expression, usually applied to living people having parties or enjoying raucous entertainment, to make enough noise to wake the dead. Here, the dead make enough noise to wake the living. An extension of this idea of the vivid existence of the dead is their physicality. Again, this is counter to the usual notion of the afterlife. Some people believe that the dead can continue to exist on earth in the form of ghosts, souls that cannot break their ties of attachment to earth. But generally, ghosts are considered intangible and barely visible shadows of human beings. In contrast, Mitchell shows the dead as having close and

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tangible physical contact with the living, patting their hands and telling their futures. To what extent the living are aware of their interactions with the dead is another question. It is possible that the dead are effectively holding fortune-telling sessions and storytelling parties all around the living and that the living remain oblivious to much of this activity. The fact that the living are awakened by at least some of the dead’s activities shows that they are aware of them on some level. But the question of exactly what the living perceive and understand when they are awakened by the dead is not explicitly answered. Perhaps the living interpret the cause of their awakening as odd sensations, ghosts, disturbing memories or dreams about their dead relatives or simply poor sleep. But the poet is in no doubt. The cause of the dead’s rousing of the living is as straightforward and obvious as the episodes when the dead, then still living, woke the children sleeping upstairs with their noisy all-night drinking parties. The second case of situational irony concerns the role of the river in the poem. This river, from which the dead drink, is suggestive of the Lethe of Greek mythology, the river of forgetting or oblivion, which was located in Hades, the underworld and abode of the dead. The Greeks believed that some people who died on earth drank repeatedly from the Lethe, thus forgetting their lives on earth. Mitchell reverses this idea, showing the dead drinking from the river but determinedly fighting against the process of forgetting. They do their best to continue their relationships with the living and to keep the connections strong. The thirst referred to in line 1, therefore, becomes not just a literal thirst for water but a metaphorical thirst for continuing contact with the living. Also, the reference to the dead (lines 8–9) as being hungry for signs of their love for the living suggests that they do not want to forget. Instead, they feed their appetite for contact with their loved ones with photographs and stories about them. These examples of irony have the effect of shocking the reader into seeing death in a new way. Rather than an ending, death is presented as the beginning of another phase of life, complete with physical being, emotions, desires, and all the elements of earthly life.

Metaphor ‘‘The Dead’’ uses metaphors (a metaphor is a comparison not using the words like or as to convey the spiritual and emotional state of the dead).

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Here, hunger and thirst are not merely the literal hunger for food and thirst for water that sustain human beings on earth. The hunger and thirst felt by the dead is a spiritual and emotional need to continue to experience the love that they felt for friends and relatives while they were still on earth.

(Paradiso). An allegory is a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms. The ancient Roman poet Virgil is Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory, while Beatrice, a woman whom Dante loved, is his guide in Heaven.

If the river is understood to be the Lethe, then, in this poem as in Greek mythology, it may be understood metaphorically to stand for the process of the soul’s forgetting of its earthly life. This interpretation may be reinforced by the poet’s use of the word attic. Used as a noun, the word refers to the top story of a house, traditionally used for storage of family heirlooms. In the poem, the word can be taken literally to express the dead people’s habit of invading the attics of their loved ones on earth. However, employed as an adjective, attic means pertaining to or characteristic of Greece or Athens, and is typically used in connection with ancient Greece. Thus the poet’s choice of the word conveys a less literal meaning, inviting readers to bring to mind the mythology of ancient Greece.

In Purgatory, Dante encounters souls that are going through a purification process to make them ready for Heaven. Throughout the Purgatory and (Inferno, various shades (spirits of the dead) ask Dante to tell their stories on his return to earth. They appear to want to attain a kind of immortality through storytelling. In a similar way, the dead of Mitchell’s poem tell stories of the living, feeding their connection with people on earth and seeming to gain spiritual nourishment thereby.

Conversational Style ‘‘The Dead’’ is written in a casual and conversational style, approaching prose, that contrasts with its weighty subject matter of the afterlife. For those who are familiar with the possible influences on the poem of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Greek mythology, this contrast is the more striking. The juxtaposition of weighty subject and conversational style has the effect of reinforcing the poem’s meaning. The poem is about the everyday and mundane lives of the dead and how their existence is not so different from that of the living. Instead, the two worlds are intimately connected, in ways of which the living may be unaware, except when they are rudely awakened by the dead’s raucous activities. By using an everyday conversational style, the poet suggests that death is not something distant and alien but an intrinsic part of everyone’s lives.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Dante’s Divine Comedy ‘‘The Dead’’ is reminiscent of the second section of Dante’s epic poem, the Divine Comedy, called in English Purgatory (Italian: Purgatorio). The Divine Comedy is an allegorical description of the Christian afterlife in which the poet is guided around Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Heaven

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Greek Mythology and Belief In the mythology of ancient Greece (around 1100 – 146 B.C.), after a person died on earth, they would enter the underworld or Hades, the abode of the dead (Hades was also the name of the god of the underworld). The dead person was rowed by the ferryman Charon across the river Styx, one of the five rivers of Hades, which formed the boundary between the upper world of the living and the underworld. The five rivers of Hades, and their symbolic meanings, were Acheron, the river of sorrow or woe; Cocytus, the river of lamentation; Phlegethon, the river of fire; Lethe, the river of forgetting or oblivion; and Styx, the river of hate. The first region of Hades comprises the Fields of Asphodel, a region where souls that were neither extremely good nor extremely evil rested. Robert Graves noted in The Greek Myths that here, the shades of heroes wandered among the lesser spirits, who twittered like bats. Their one delight was libations (drink offerings) of blood offered to them in the world of the living. This awakened in them for a time the sensations of humanity. Graves’s description recalls the dead of Mitchell’s poem, with their chatter and insatiable thirst for earthly experience and emotions. Beyond the Fields of Asphodel was the Palace of Hades and his consort Persephone. Near the Palace were two pools: the pool of Lethe, where the common ghosts flocked to drink, and Mnemosyne, the pool of memory, where the initiates of the Mysteries (rituals and secret rites connected with the religious traditions of ancient Greece and Rome) drank instead. The ancient Greeks believed in reincarnation, the rebirth of a soul in another body. Therefore, lesser souls were thought to forget

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COMPARE & CONTRAST

1980s: The International Association for Near-Death Studies is incorporated in Connecticut in 1981 to study the phenomenon of near-death experiences, which are highly controversial. Today: Near-death experiences are more widely accepted and discussed, though researchers disagree about their origin. 1980s: In 1987, the Canadian biochemist and psychiatrist Ian Stevenson publishes Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation, a series of case studies which he believes show evidence of reincarnation. Today: In 2005, pediatric psychiatrist Jim Tucker publishes Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives (St. Martin’s Press). The book

their life’s lessons and experiences, with all their accumulated wisdom, between lives. Wiser spirits retained their memory so that they did not have to begin learning all over again in each new lifetime. They accumulated wisdom with each subsequent life. In the forecourt of the palace of Hades and Persephone sat Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, the three judges of the underworld. Here, the souls of the dead were judged. If they were neither extremely good nor extremely evil, they were sent back to the Fields of Asphodel. If they were evil, they were sent to Tartarus, a place of torment similar to the Hell of Christian belief. If they were virtuous, they were sent to Elysium, the Islands of the Blessed.

Memory in Ancient Greece In ancient Greece, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art website, memory was considered to be an important link between the living and the dead. The Greeks observed practices and rituals in order to keep alive the memory of the dead among the living. Elaborate tombs and statues

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reviews documentation of children’s reports of previous lives.

1980s: In the United States, an eclectic mix of spiritual beliefs and practices proliferates. According to the Pew report, ‘‘The Religious Composition of the United States’’) throughout the 1980s, between 5 and 8 percent of the American public is not affiliated with any particular religion. Today: Polls (cited by Cary McMullen in ‘‘Despite ‘New Atheists,’ 82% in U.S. Think There’s An Afterlife’’) find that 82 percent of Americans say they believe in an afterlife. According to the Pew report, 16 percent of American adults have no particular religious belief.

were erected on graves as memorials to the dead. The website states, ‘‘Immortality lay in the continued remembrance of the dead by the living.’’ Women ‘‘made regular visits to the grave with offerings that included small cakes and libations.’’ Mitchell’s poem offers a twist on this tradition in that it is the dead who keep alive the memory of the living through showing photographs and telling stories.

Purgatory in Different Cultures The idea of Purgatory as a place where souls are made ready to be received in Heaven or a paradisiacal state was not invented by the Christian Church but has roots dating much further back, at least to the ancient Greek idea of Hades. Purgatory plays a prominent role in Catholic theology but is rejected by Protestantism. The Eastern Orthodox Christian Church does not explicitly embrace the idea of Purgatory but does teach that there is a final purification for souls destined for Heaven and that the prayers of the living can help speed the process. Some writings of the Eastern

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Old letters (Image copyright Vladimir Wrangel, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

Orthodox tradition refer to the experience of Purgatory as Hades. The concept of Purgatory is also found in other religions. Both Judaism and some early Christian writings speak of Gehenna, a place where the souls of evil people go after death. This may be temporary, to achieve purification of the soul before it is released, or a permanent punishment. Islam teaches that Hell, called in Arabic Jahannam, can be a temporary or permanent state, depending on the nature of the sin committed.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW While Mitchell has a high critical reputation as a poet and has won many prizes, her work is not widely reviewed. This is especially true of the volume in which ‘‘The Dead’’ appears, The Water Inside the Water, as it was Mitchell’s first collection and was published in 1983, before her poetry gained broader critical recognition. The 1994 HarperPerennial reprint of the collection contains two reviews on the back cover.

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Mitchell’s fellow poet Stanley Kunitz is quoted as saying the collection is ‘‘extraordinary’’ for its ‘‘depth, range, and brilliance.’’ He added that it is ‘‘a book of memory and nightmare, changes and epiphanies’’ and he noted that Mitchell ‘‘has a heightened sense of reality, a fantastic eye, and a beautifully restless intelligence.’’ The poet Richard Eberhart noted the ability of Mitchell’s poems to fuse a ‘‘hard reality’’ with a ‘‘spirit of transformation’’ that ‘‘tends to make everything become something else.’’ Eberhart commented that this creates ‘‘an astonishment of mysteries enriching our consciousness,’’ adding that ‘‘Her poetry has a special quality of excellence, a particular pith, gifts of evocative powers.’’ Robin Becker, in a review of Mitchell’s later collection, Erotikon (2000), noted Mitchell’s employment of ‘‘Greek myth and classical allusions,’’ a comment that is relevant to ‘‘The Dead.’’ Becker also noted Mitchell’s ‘‘non-linear’’ style and ‘‘lyric simplicity and delicacy.’’ A review of Rapture (1992) commented on Mitchell’s ability to build her poems ‘‘in informal and colloquial blocks of language’’ (this is also

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true of ‘‘The Dead’’) and identifies an ‘‘unabashed self-absorption’’ at the center of her work. Mitchell’s introspection is also noted by Catherine Daly, in her essay about the influence of the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton on Mitchell and another poet, Carol Frost. Daly’s general comment about the poems of The Water Inside the Water could apply to ‘‘The Dead.’’ Daly noted that in the poems, ‘‘dreams and memory blur and combine in a sea of ‘deep images.’’’ Another critic who notes the dream-like quality of Mitchell’s verse is Tam Lin Neville, reviewing Mitchell’s later collection, Rapture, for the American Poetry Review. Neville noted that while Mitchell ‘‘sustains a marked inward intimacy, she is able simultaneously to ‘dream in public,’ driven by a strong desire to speak to others unlike herself.’’ Neville commented on ‘‘the remarkable naturalness of her style, which approaches prose in many places, without losing music.’’

CRITICISM Claire Robinson Robinson has an M.A. in English. She is a former teacher of English literature and creative writing and a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, Robinson examines how ‘‘The Dead’’ explores the nature of life and death. Susan Mitchell writes about the inspiration behind ‘‘The Dead’’ in an email communication with the author: I think of ‘‘The Dead’’ as more mythological than autobiographical. The dead and the living in this poem are archetypal; there are motions and actions without the particulars that would connect the dead and the living to my life. The river might be a real river somewhere in the world—or it might be one of the rivers of the Underworld separating the dead from the living.

However, Mitchell adds that the poem turned out to be autobiographical in a way that she could not have predicted at the time she wrote it: Strangely, and this is very strange, after my parents died, I found myself in the position of the dead in the poem, reading the letters I had sent, searching for photos; and these searches would wake me up at night. So the poem had anticipated my future, somehow knowing me better than I knew myself—as if it had read the lines in my palm.

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JUST AS THE DEAD CROSS OVER INTO THE WORLD OF THE LIVING, INVADING ATTICS AND READING PALMS, SO THE LIVING ARE ALREADY IN THE WORLD OF THE DEAD.’’

Mitchell’s comment illuminates an important aspect of the poem: the inter-relationships, crossovers, and transformations that occur between the dead and the living. The dead’s existence intersects with the lives of the living, and they work to maintain ties with the living. The dead are, in fact, more lively and vivacious than the living, who are portrayed as sleeping until rudely awakened by the dead. This theme, of life in death and death in life, links to the quotation from the Vedic tradition of ancient India with which Mitchell introduces The Water Inside the Water. The quotation is from Katha Upanisad, which consists of a dialogue between a young man who is still alive but who has been told to die by his irritated father, and Yama, the Lord of Death. The translation of Katha Upanisad cited by Mitchell reads: ‘‘He goes from death to death, who sees the many here.’’ The translation by S. Radhakrishnan in The Principal Upanisads sets the quotation in context and explains it. The section in which Mitchell’s quotation appears is titled, ‘‘Failure to comprehend the essential unity of being is the cause of re-birth.’’ The scripture explains that the nature of reality, beyond the diversity of appearances, is unity or oneness. The seeming differences between things are illusory: ‘‘Whatever is here, that (is) there.’’ Radhakrishnan translates the line cited by Mitchell as follows: ‘‘Whoever perceives anything like manyness here goes from death to death.’’ Going from death to death is another way of talking about reincarnation or rebirth, an idea that is embraced by many religious and spiritual traditions, including the Vedic tradition. The Vedas (Vedic scriptures) teach that the state of the soul of people at death determines what kind of life they will have in their next incarnation. Individuals whose soul is perfectly pure do not see the many, the world of diversity and separateness, as the true nature of things. The pure soul is at one with

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Susan Mitchell’s ‘‘The Explosion’’ is the next poem after ‘‘The Dead’’ in the collection, The Water Inside the Water (1983, HarperPerennial reprint, 1994). It is about the deaths of children in an explosion, possibly of the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, and the response of the children’s fathers to the deaths. Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘‘Daddy’’ (published in her collection Ariel in 1965, which was reprinted by HarperPerennial in 1999) is a partly autobiographical exploration of the poet’s complex relationship with her father, who died when Plath was young. The poem makes clear that even though individuals may be dead, their presence and influence lives on. Elisabeth Ku¨bler-Ross’s book On Death and Dying (1997) is a classic work by a pioneer in this field. Ku¨bler-Ross talked to the dying, something that was previously considered taboo, to produce a book that is widely used by social workers and counselors to inform their work with the dying and bereaved.

Brahman, the transcendent source of all creation. A person who dies in this state is thought not to need to reincarnate at all, but to drop the physical body and enjoy an uncompromised oneness with Brahman. According to Vedic belief, the soul that is not completely purified at the time of bodily death passes through different regions in order to purify itself. The nature of the regions visited depends on the state of the soul: Some are heavenly, others hellish. The region towards which the soul is drawn depends on its level of purity. The soul evolves through its experience of different regions to a level of greater purity. No soul is fated to stay where it resides after bodily death on earth. As in the Christian tradition of Purgatory, the soul can progress from a hellish state to a heavenly one and the direction is always towards greater purity.

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When A Friend Dies: A Book for Teens About Grieving and Healing (2005), by Marilyn E. Gootman, is a guide that provides practical advice for bereaved teens and young adults. The book includes reflections from teens whose friends have died.

Tears of a Tiger (1996), by Sharon M. Draper, is an award-winning young adult novel about a young African American high-school basketball star who struggles with guilt and depression following a drunkdriving accident that kills his best friend. He finds it impossible to ask for help and becomes increasingly isolated in his grief.

Death and Bereavement Across Cultures (1997), by Colin Parkes, is an exploration of death, dying, and mourning across many cultures and religions, including the Jewish, Tibetan Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, and Hindu traditions. It is considered an important resource for all those who work with the dying and bereaved.

An impure soul has many unfulfilled desires. It is fixated on diversity and the many, the everchanging external world of the senses and material things. A pure soul is without desire and knows only oneness with Brahman. The direction of all souls is towards greater purity and oneness with Brahman. The soul will choose experiences, either in its next incarnation on earth or between incarnations on hellish or heavenly planes of existence, that help it evolve towards oneness with Brahman. The quote from the Vedas, ‘‘He goes from death to death, who sees the many here,’’ has at least two meanings. The first has to do with reincarnation. The impure soul that is focused on the diverse and changing material world is fated to reincarnate as many times as is needed for it to learn to purify itself and focus on reality, which is oneness or unity. Repeatedly reincarnating in the

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The palm of the hand (Image copyright John Keith, 2009 Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

cycle of birth, death, and rebirth is going from death to death. Second, the impure soul goes from death to death in every second because of its outward focus on illusion, the world of material change, in which things decay and pass away and which is therefore bound by death. Thus the life of such a soul is also characterized by death. The dead of Mitchell’s poem exemplify both these meanings. They can be said to be still attached to the world of the living and unable to cut their ties to loved ones. Their desire is expressed

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metaphorically in terms of an insatiable hunger and thirst for the signs of the love they felt when alive. Thus in the Vedic system, they would be apt candidates for reincarnation and for conducting an existence characterized by death. What, in contrast, would be an existence characterized by life? In the Vedic system, the soul would be at one with Brahman, a state of eternity that transcends time and space. Past and future are illusory constructs that only exist in time and space, so the soul that is one with

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Brahman has passed beyond the level of time and space. It has no use for past memories or future predictions. The dead of Mitchell’s poem still exist on the level of time and space. Like living people on earth, they are bound up in memories, in the form of stories and photographs, and eagerly tell the future of their friends and relatives who are still alive. These are dead people who do not fully accept that they are dead, but cling on to the qualities and activities of the living. Conversely, it is a frequent experience of the newly bereaved, as Mitchell recalls, to hunt out signs and memories of their loved ones’ lives on earth. The description of the living people’s futures as cracked and yellow connotes decay and age. Thus even the time that has not yet come is given the characteristics of the time that is past. This is another sense in which the world of time and space is the world of death. It is not just the dead who exist in death’s realm: It is the living, too. Just as the dead cross over into the world of the living, invading attics and reading palms, so the living are already in the world of the dead. The first and last lines of the poem contain references to drinking: The first may refer to the waters of the Lethe, which could help them forget their earthly lives, while the second refers to their thirst for alcohol during their lives. The suggestion of addiction or desire for intoxication evoked by the reference to alcohol may symbolize an addiction to earthly experiences. In the poem, drinking operates as a metaphor for forgetting. It is often said that people drink in order to forget. While the dead were alive, they may have drunk alcohol in order to forget, and now that they are dead, they also drink the waters of the Lethe in order to forget. Yet at the same time, they tell stories and show photographs to enable them to remember. This suggests the cyclical nature of addiction, where addicts take steps to fight the destructive behavior but the stress of doing so quickly drives them back to feeding their addiction. This cyclical process reflects the cyclical nature of the birth-death-rebirth process of reincarnation. In Buddhism and Hinduism the cycle is referred to as the Wheel of Karma. Karma is the effect of a person’s actions, which are seen as bringing upon that person the inevitable results, good or bad, in this life or in a reincarnation. The dead of Mitchell’s poem are trapped on this Wheel of Karma, neither fully in this world

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nor the next. As in Buddhism and Hinduism, there is no moral judgment attached to this state. It simply is what it is until it is something else. Indeed, the play and interplay of these processes keeps the created world in motion. Seen in this light, the poem becomes an exploration of attachment in life and death. Source: Claire Robinson, Critical Essay on ‘‘The Dead,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

SOURCES Alighieri, Dante, Purgatorio, translated and edited by Robin Kirkpatrick, Penguin Classics, 2007. Becker, Robin, Review of Erotikon, in ‘‘The Poetics of Engagement,’’ American Poetry Review, November– December 2001, pp. 11, 13, 14. Daly, Catherine, ‘‘Miltons: Susan Mitchell’s Erotikon and Carol Frost’s Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems,’’ in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, Fall–Winter 2002– 2003, http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/dalyreviewmiltons.html (accessed August 29, 2009). ‘‘Death, Burial, and the Afterlife in Ancient Greece,’’ in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dbag/ hd_dbag.htm (accessed August 24, 2009). Eberhart, Richard, Review of The Water Inside the Water, HarperPerennial, reprint, 1994, back cover. Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths, Vol. 1, Penguin Books, 1955, reprint, 1982, pp. 120–21. Kunitz, Stanley, Review of The Water Inside the Water, HarperPerennial, 1994, back cover. McMullen, Cary, ‘‘Despite ‘New Atheists,’ 82% in U.S. Think There’s an Afterlife,’’ The Ledger (Lakeland, Florida), March 23, 2008, p. A1, http://www.theledger.com/article/ 20080323/NEWS/803230424/0/FRONTPAGE (accessed August 29, 2009). Mitchell, Susan, ‘‘The Dead,’’ in The Water Inside the Water, HarperPerennial, 1994, p. 20. ———, personal email communication with the author, August 31, 2009. Neville, Tam Lin, Review of Rapture, in American Poetry Review, Vol. 23, No. 1, January–February 1994, pp. 41–45. Review of Rapture, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 239, No. 12, March 2, 1992, p. 62. The Principal Upanisads, translated and edited by S. Radhakrishnan, George Allen & Unwin, 1953, reprint, 1978, p. 634. ‘‘U.S. Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Affiliation: Diverse and Dynamic,’’ The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, February 2008, p. 20, http://religions.pewforum. org/pdf/report-religious-landscape-study-full.pdf (accessed August 29, 2009).

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FURTHER READING Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008. The biologist Dawkins’s salvo against religious belief gained widespread media coverage. Dawkins pits religious beliefs about creation against Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Potential readers should be warned that the tone of the book is intolerant towards religious tradition. Garland, Robert, The Greek Way of Death, Cornell University Press, 2001. This is an accessible guide to attitudes to, and beliefs about, death in ancient Greece. It covers the period from the time of Homer in the eighth century to the fourth century B . C . Moody, Raymond, Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death, HarperOne, 2001. This classic book is an authoritative exploration of near-death experiences. It includes surveys and reports of people who had such experiences, scientific research findings, and Moody’s own insights. It has won praise for

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its adherence to scientific method and its compatibility with many religious systems. Plato, Symposium and the Death of Socrates, Wordsworth, 1998. This edition groups together arguably the greatest work of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, whose thought runs throughout Western culture and finds expression in much Eastern philosophy. It focuses on the sentencing of Plato’s teacher Socrates for impiety and Socrates’s reflections on death before taking his own life. The book contains the following dialogues by Plato: Symposium, Euthyphro, Socrates’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. Roof, Wade Clark, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion, Princeton University Press, 2001. This book is a compilation of surveys and personal interviews through which the author traces the spiritual beliefs and practices of baby boomers (people born in the post-World War II period) in the United States. The book shows the proliferation of multiple, complex spiritualities (including feminist, Latino, and ecological) that often overlap with established religious traditions.

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I’m Nobody! Who are you? Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ was included in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson and published in 1955; however, this poem like most of the approximately 1,775 poems Dickinson wrote appeared in earlier, partial collections, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mary Loomis Todd, and a handful (perhaps seven in all) appeared separately in periodicals during the poet’s life. In the Johnson edition, the poems are numbered, and ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ is number 288. Major collections of Dickinson’s manuscripts are housed at Amherst College and in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ consists of two quatrains and displays the poet’s characteristic use of dashes in place of standard punctuation and her idiosyncratic capitalization. The speaker addresses an implied listener with a question and comments on the difference between being a ‘‘nobody’’ and being a ‘‘somebody.’’ In this brief dramatic monologue, the poet equates the publicity that people of importance generate with their speeches to frogs that croak endlessly in a swamp, tirelessly identifying themselves by their sounds to those who can hear them.

EMILY DICKINSON 1955

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Emily Elisabeth (also spelled Elizabeth) Dickinson was born December 10, 1830, in Amherst,

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Emily Dickinson (The Library of Congress)

Massachusetts, to Emily Norcross Dickinson and Edward Dickinson. The poet was one of three children: William Austin (1829–1895), called Austin, was her older brother; Lavinia Norcross (1833–1899), called Lavinia or Vinnie, her younger sister. The Dickinsons were a wellestablished and respected family, descended from Puritans who arrived in North America in the seventeenth century and from Dickinsons who had lived in Amherst since 1742. The poet’s paternal grandfather Samuel Dickinson (1775–1838) was one of the founders of Amherst College, and it was he who built the brick colonial on Main Street, later called the Dickinson Homestead, where the poet was born. His eldest son, Edward, the poet’s father, was a lawyer and conservative Whig who served as college treasurer for four decades and served two terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, one term as state senator, and one term as a congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives. In Amherst, he was respectfully referred to as Squire Dickinson. William Austin, the poet’s brother, became a lawyer also and practiced law with his father. Emily Dickinson was born into a family whose male members were worldly and dominant and whose house was the center of Amherst society.

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Dickinson attended Amherst Academy for seven years and completed one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (1847–1848), where she made a reputation not as a keen student but as being unwilling to convert to a Christian faith. During the popular religious revivals of the 1840s and in 1850 when family members and friends joined the First Church of Christ, Dickinson firmly resisted the pressure to profess the faith and join the church. She began writing poetry in earnest about 1850 and became gradually more reclusive. By the age of thirty, the poet had stopped attending church and avoided other social gatherings. She had a lively social life, nonetheless, in the small circle of family, relatives, and few friends, and she enjoyed an active correspondence. Though she mainly stayed in her home and in Amherst, Dickinson made a few trips to other cities, visiting Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. The period of her greatest productivity is estimated to have extended from about 1858 to about 1864. During these years, she made fair copies of about 1,100 poems and gathered 833 of them into hand-sewn booklets. Also during this period, Dickinson contacted Thomas Wentworth Higginson about the worth of a few of her poems and thus initiated their acquaintance and correspondence. During her lifetime, fewer than ten poems were published. Beyond her private life as a poet, Dickinson devoted herself to her family and enjoyed the company of extended family members, especially her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Austin’s wife, who lived next door in the Evergreens, the home Edward Dickinson built for his son and daughter-in-law as a gift. The poet took part in various housekeeping activities, was known for baking excellent bread, and was an avid gardener, both in the conservatory attached to the house and on the Homestead property. Dickinson was also involved with her sister in caring for their mother who was bedridden from 1875 until her death in 1882. In 1884, Dickinson experienced the first attack of some illness, generally identified as kidney disease, and she died two and a half years later on May 15, 1886, at the age of fifty-five. The attending physician said the cause of death was Bright’s disease. Subsequently, some have questioned that diagnosis, and Alfred Habegger, in his biography of the poet, makes an argument against it and suggests the cause may have been hypertension.

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Shortly after Emily Dickinson’s death, her sister Lavinia discovered nearly 1,800 poems hidden away in the poet’s bedroom, some sewn into booklets, many on loose pieces of paper. With this discovery began an appreciation of the poet’s enormous creative output and a commitment by Lavinia and others to seeing the poetry in print. Questions of editorial practice and by whom and when these poems ought to be published also emerged. Many of the poems were edited early on by Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd; these were published in a series of three volumes. Higginson and Todd were subsequently criticized for having taken the liberty to regularize punctuation and capitalization to conform to standard practices of the time. Todd’s 1894 edition of Letters of Emily Dickinson came under attack in the twentieth century for editing practices that suggested an intentional effort on her part to shape the public record of the poet’s life. Two problematic biographical facts may offer some explanation for the censoring efforts, both connected to Susan Gilbert Dickinson. One was the fact that the married Mabel Todd had engaged openly in an extramarital affair with Austin Dickinson while he was also married. The other problematic fact was the nature of the intimate long-term relationship between the poet and her sister-in-law, to which much scholarship in the later twentieth century and the early 2000s has been devoted. The 1998 publication Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson spurred much speculation about the precise nature of the love these two women felt for each other. In addition, during the twentieth century, editorial theory and textual practices regarding the handling of manuscripts evolved considerably, and as the theory and practices changed so did the ways in which manuscripts were prepared for publication. (See the work of the Center for Editions of American Authors and the later Center for Scholarly Editions).

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Alison’s House is Susan Glaspell’s 1931 play based in part on Emily Dickinson’s life and the controversy that attended the posthumous publication of her work. Set in the Midwest and using characters with fictional names, Glaspell’s play takes place eighteen years after a famous poet’s death when family members gather in the historic home to prepare it for sale and a cache of poems is discovered. The play explores the opinions and feelings that family members and outsiders may have regarding newly discovered manuscripts and how these works should be handled given the privacy their author sought.

The Belle of Amherst, a one-woman play written by William Luce, opened on Broadway on April 28, 1976, to rave reviews. Julie Harris, who won a Tony for her performance, recorded the play for a PBS production, the DVD recording of which is available for purchase. Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Emily Dickinson, a 2003 film by Jim Wolpaw and Steve Gentile, presents various people’s views of the poet and her work. Among others, Julie Harris discusses playing the poet in the stage production The Belle of Amherst, and U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins discusses the poet and reads one of his poems about her. This film was partially funded by the Massachusetts Foundation for Public Broadcasting and is available online for purchase.

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I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody—Too? Then there’s a pair of us? Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know! How dreary—to be—Somebody! How public—like a Frog— To tell one’s name—the livelong June— To an admiring Bog!

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POEM SUMMARY

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In the first stanza of ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ the speaker announces she is a nobody, and she asks the person to whom she speaks if that person is a nobody too. The speaker suggests the two of them keep their identities a secret, since if they are found out, people in the public eye will draw attention to them.

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Emily Dickinson wrote three poems in which she describes frogs: number 288 (‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’), number 1359 (‘‘The long sigh of the Frog,’’), and number 1379 (‘‘His Mansion in the Pool’’). Write an essay in which you describe how the frog and the frog’s voice is characterized in each poem. Include in your essay what you think each poem means.

With a partner, choose three poems by Emily Dickinson and three poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and read these poems aloud to your classmates. Lead a discussion focused on identifying the similarities and differences between the selected poems. If you can, provide pictures of the manuscripts of some of each poet’s poems to show the differences. Select any poem by Dickinson that you really like and using the poet’s first line write an original poem of your own, using her poem as a model. Next write a one-page essay in which you explain what you learned from the experience and how it may have changed your understanding of the selected Dickinson poem. With team members, assemble images of Dickinson, her family, her home, Amherst

Stanza 2 In the second stanza, the speaker comments on what it must be like to be a somebody. She laughs at people of rank and public importance because being a somebody requires continually advertising oneself, quite like a frog, croaking throughout a June day to listeners, whom the speaker describes as an ‘‘admiring Bog.’’

THEMES Identity One subject in ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ is identity. One implicit question the poem

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College, and the town of Amherst, Massachusetts. Give a PowerPoint presentation, including these images, and discuss each of them. Introduce your classmates to Dickinson’s home and hometown as they were in her time and how they are today, transformed as a museum and tourist destination.

Do some research on housekeeping tasks of the mid-nineteenth century. Write a report in which you describe the various skills a woman living in Dickinson’s time would have used in keeping house and make a display board on which you arrange images associated with those skills. Housekeeping skills might include such activities as gardening, various kinds of needlework, baking, methods used for cleaning and laundry, and food preparation, including canning.

Research home funerals and burial practices in the mid-nineteenth century and then write a report on these practices and how they were followed for Emily Dickinson herself. Include relevant poems in your report, for example, number 364 (‘‘The Morning after Woe’’) and number 1078 (‘‘The Bustle in a House’’).

explores is how does a person identify herself in an introduction. Certain labels work by way of introduction, but no one label covers the individual’s whole personhood. The nature of identity involves more than just a person’s name, physical appearance, and affect. As soon as a person introduces herself, the other person may ask, ‘‘What do you do?’’ The inference is that identifying a person comes also through knowing what the person does for a living. A person might also identify herself by who her parents are, where she lives, where she went to school, and the like. In this poem, the speaker identifies herself by the low social rank she assigns to herself. In

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this two-level society of somebodies and nobodies, the speaker identifies with the nobodies. She means that she is not publicly recognized, that her identity is not widely known by others. Also implied is the idea that the speaker lacks influence and rank. A nobody is an anonymous person, one who blends in, conforms with the majority, and can go and come quietly without being recognized or talked about. The speaker is acutely aware that this anonymity can evaporate if the person’s uniqueness is drawn into public view. In that case, the person is ‘‘advertised,’’ and the exposure transforms the previously unknown person into someone in particular, a somebody. Thus, while the speaker initiates an introduction, she also asks the other person not to ‘‘tell’’ because telling others threatens to draw a wider level of attention than the speaker wants.

Privacy The poem is also about the ambivalence the speaker feels regarding the need for privacy and the desire to be known to another person. The speaker wants to be recognized by the person to whom she speaks. She wants to make a confederacy of two with the addressed person. They can agree privately to know each other and yet remain nobodies in part by not reporting their acquaintance to others. The speaker reveals her ambivalence by the double act of introduction and request for confidentiality. She wants her privacy preserved, but she wants contact with another person also. With the assurance of confidentiality, she can have a small social contact with a person of her rank. She can do this without fear of exposure to the wider society.

Exposure The act of exposure in this poem is clandestine. It is as though the speaker is whispering behind her cupped hand to someone she does not know who happens to be near her, perhaps at a public gathering. Identifying herself as a nobody involves exposing herself as someone. The irony here lies in the fact that as soon as the listener acknowledges the speaker, the speaker becomes someone in the eyes of the listener. So the self-effacing introduction the speaker uses works to uncover the speaker, draw attention to her, and elicits some form of recognition from the person whom she addresses. In this sense, then, the speaker’s identity is changed by the act of introduction.

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A loner (Image copyright Sereda Nikolay Ivanovich, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

STYLE Punctuation and Capitalization Thumbing through any collection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry immediately reveals certain oddities of the poet’s style. Her favorite mark of punctuation is the dash, and capitalization is idiosyncratic. Fragments and phrases occur more often than complete sentences. Clearly, the conventional mechanics imposed on prose and most poetry of Dickinson’s time are abandoned in these poems. Following the established rules of punctuation, capitalization, and grammar facilitate communication, helping the reader understand the text. Readers who know how marks of punctuation should be used also understand that these marks serve as signposts, identifying the relationship between words and groups of words. For example, a colon can introduce a list. But it can also be placed between independent clauses, in which location the colon announces that the

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first clause is clarified by the one that immediately follows it. Commas identify items in a list as parallel units. Commas also separate parallel phrases or clauses and dependent clauses from independent clauses. A semicolon announces that the independent clauses on either side of it are more closely related to each other than adjacent sentences are. Capitalization indicates the onset of a sentence and identifies proper names. Capitalization is not used for emphasis; italic print is. Grammatical writing assures that ideas are held in correct relationship to one another, that modifiers are adjacent to the subjects they modify, and that sentences deliver complete thoughts. Readers come to any text with the expectation that these formal matters will be handled in accord with conventional usage, and using these mechanics correctly increases clarity in the statement and comprehension in the reader. However, readers of Dickinson’s poetry immediately see that these formal conventions are abandoned. The conventional use of punctuation, capitalization, and sentence structure are set aside or ignored. The poet’s preference is to open the text as though it were a mosaic of bits surrounded by space. Dashes create the spaces and sometimes a phrase or single word substitutes for a complete and explicit statement. Transitions between phrases are omitted; thus, the relationship between parts is left unidentified. These stylistic features may enhance such interpretative subtlety as equivocation or nuance, yet readers may feel baffled by poetry that reads more like a verbal puzzle than a statement. After Johnson published The Complete Poems in 1955, in which the poems as closely as possible replicate the final manuscript version, readers and scholars alike began to see how the departure from rules opened the poetry to multiple possibilities or layers of meaning. Ambiguity and equivocation, double entendre, and elision, all became more evident. The artistic gains Dickinson made by departing from the strictures of convention began to be appreciated, and her originality began to be recognized.

Dramatic Monologue A dramatic monologue is a speech made by one speaker to an implied listener. It is dramatic because what is said suggests a scene or a social context and implies information about both the speaker and the one addressed. ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ is a dramatic monologue. The

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speaker addresses a person she does not know and does so with a tone that is both scoffing and confidential. She recognizes the person she addresses as having something in common with her. It is as though she wants to introduce herself in order to experience shared commonality and to do so in reference to people who are different from the speaker and the one whom she addresses. The speaker distinguishes herself and her listener from people who broadcast themselves, who speak in self-promoting ways in order to command admiration from others. The speaker is making fun of important people, the somebodies, equating their self-centered talk with how frogs in a swamp croak through a summer day. At the same time, ironically, she sets herself and her listener above those who are selfaggrandizing. She and her listener are not egotistical and overbearing like somebodies are. To a certain extent, then, the joke is on the speaker. In her small pond of whispered confidence, she is doing exactly what the somebody does: She is commanding the attention of another by addressing that person regarding her identity and imposing her opinions where they have not been solicited.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln (1809– 1865) suggested to his cabinet that a declaration freeing the slaves might advance the military purpose of the Union army in defeating the Confederate troops, already two years into fighting the Civil War. Right after the battle at Antietam on September 17, 1862, which was considered a Union victory, Lincoln made public the Emancipation Proclamation, announcing that all slaves of masters in rebellion against the United States were free as of January 1, 1863, if their masters remained in rebellion on that date. Interestingly, the proclamation did not free slaves in border states who were owned by masters who were not in active rebellion against the Union. Surprisingly, the approximately three million southern slaves were not immediately affected by the proclamation. However, as the Union army advanced into the South and captured areas, slaves in those areas were manumitted. Lincoln was elected for a second term, and

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COMPARE & CONTRAST

1860s: Men running for political office know if they are elected, their income is assured for the length of their term. Today: Men and women who run for political office must have exceptional wealth and raise great sums of money during their campaign in order pay for advertising and help them get elected to positions that may pay less than what they earn in private lives. 1860s: Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation frees the slaves owned by masters who are rebelling against the Union. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) prohibits slavery in the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) establishes that all people born in the United States are citizens. The Fifteenth Amendment (1868) establishes that all male citizens have the right to vote regardless of race or previous involuntary servitude. Thus, with these amendments, African Americans born in the United States gain full status as citizens and the same right of franchise that is extended to whites. Today: Hotly debated, the issue of a national universal health insurance program that would assure medical services for everyone is seen by advocates, such as Senator Edward

in his inaugural address on March 4, 1865, he affirmed his commitment to healing the nation’s wounds without penalizing the South beyond the enormous devastation it had already suffered. Within a month, Lincoln was assassinated. The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 18, 1865. It made illegal slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States.

Lyceums Lyceums were programs for adult education in which people attended lectures given by people of note who traveled from one town to another on what was called the lyceum circuit. This method for general intellectual development

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Kennedy (1932–2009), as a way to care for the invisible members of U.S. society, namely the poor.

1860s: Edward Dickinson is against slavery and the creation of new slave states in the West, but he argues against federal abolition of slavery because it would violate states’ rights. Today: States’ rights govern such areas as the application of the death penalty, legalization of same-sex marriage and medicinal use of marijuana, and the legal right to medically assisted suicide.

1860s: Edward Dickinson mortgages his home and borrows against his assets, leaving his family often in precarious financial circumstances. The Dickinson Homestead in the twenty-first century is a national treasure and museum. Today: Home foreclosures in the United States reach an unprecedented high as the economic downturn occurs and subprime and adjustable-rate mortgages mature and impose higher interest rates. With increased unemployment and reduced income, many people default on their mortgage payments and lose their homes to foreclosure.

was the brainchild of Josiah Holbrook (1788– 1854), who lived in Connecticut. Holbrook envisioned a lyceum in every town across the United States, and, indeed, by 1831, a national organization, the American Lyceum, had been established, and hundreds of towns had begun such programs. Lecturing on the lyceum circuit was a way of making a living or at least extra income, since lecture attendees paid a small admission price. Such important thinkers and writers as Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), and Henry Ward Beecher (1803–1887), participated. In fact, in 1857, Emerson lectured in Amherst and stayed overnight with Austin and Susan Dickinson.

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A frog in a bog (Image copyright Sebastian Knight, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

Emily Dickinson did not go next door to meet the lecturer.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Emily Dickinson’s importance as a poet was appreciated privately in her lifetime by family members and the few friends and associates to whom she sent her poems. Her public recognition as a poet awaited the 1890 publication of Poems, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. The New York Times advertised this first edition with the following claim: ‘‘the thoughtful reader will find in these pages a quality more suggestive of the poetry of William Blake than of anything to be elsewhere found.’’ When two more volumes were published by these editors (1891, 1896), Dickinson’s audience widened. But the attention was not all positive. In 1892, Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote a harsh criticism of Dickinson’s poetry. Aldrich was at the time the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and he used his position to broadcast his view that the poetry was both incoherent and formless.

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Several collections followed. One of these was Further Poems by that Shy Recluse, Emily Dickinson, which appeared in 1929. This collection had the following unwieldy subtitle: ‘‘Withheld from publication by her sister, Lavinia. Edited by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, and Alfred Lette Hampson.’’ This collection was reviewed by Percy Hutchison in the New York Times on May 17, 1929. Hutchison pointed out the Dickinson was not in the Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Sir Arthur QuillerCouch, although Longfellow, Emerson, and Poe were. Nor did Dickinson’s name appear in Barrett Wendell’s A Literary History of America, but these omissions did not mean the Dickinson was not a poet of great talent and importance. Hutchison described Dickinson as a ‘‘‘natural’ poet’’ whose poetry ‘‘is as spontaneous as the bird’s song.’’ He grouped Dickinson with the ‘‘great mystics in English poetry.’’ He conceded, however, that work expresses a personal mysticism from which the reader is ‘‘debarred.’’ Highlighting some of her explicitly spiritual poems, Hutchison concluded that Dickinson is ‘‘not a poet to be judged as other poets are . . . but marveled at.’’

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Thomas H. Johnson’s celebrated three-volume variorum edition, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Including Variant Readings Critically Compared with all Known Manuscripts (1955), established Dickinson as a major nineteenthcentury American poet and made impossible from that date forward any omission of her and her work from literary anthologies covering the nineteenth century. Johnson estimated the poems’ composition dates and assigned numbers to the poems, establishing the practice of referring to Dickinson’s poems either by number or first line. Throughout the remaining decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the numerous biographies of the poet and the swelling body of literary criticism proved Emily Dickinson’s permanent place among the most celebrated poets of all times. Many scholars attested to her genius, to the richness of her poetry. In one such tribute, Michael Ryan remarked that Dickinson ‘‘found the style that would suit her purpose.’’ And he went on, ‘‘Against all the blinding power of . . . conventions’’ Dickinson was able to ‘‘see the truth beyond’’ herself, she was able to ‘‘unhinge the way words can be used, and the world can be seen.’’

CRITICISM Melodie Monahan Monahan has a Ph.D. in English and operates an editing service, The Inkwell Works. In the following essay, she explores issues of publicity and privacy and the social mechanisms that affect them as these are suggested in Emily Dickinson’s ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ It is commonplace to characterize Emily Dickinson as a recluse, to see her as homebound and even agoraphobic, cringing at the thought of social contact, hiding behind doors, listening from the upstairs hallway. This image of the poet has been articulated in scholarly works, in various biographies, and even in children’s fiction about the so-called Belle of Amherst. Given this widespread and reductive perception of the poet, it is tempting to interpret ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ as an expression of Dickinson’s personal aversion to publicity and her probable criticism of individuals who command attention by tirelessly imposing their identity and their high rank on others. It is easy to imagine that the confidential, satirical voice in the poem is the poet’s voice, and perhaps in some ways it is. But

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‘I’M NOBODY! WHO ARE YOU?’ EXPLORES THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL DIALECTIC BETWEEN PRIVATE AND PUBLIC ASPECTS OF IDENTITY, THE DYNAMIC AND CONTRADICTORY WAYS IN WHICH PEOPLE CHOOSE TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS OR VENTURE TO EXPOSE THEMSELVES TO OTHERS.’’

the speaker is contained within the poem the poet wrote, and the irony in the poem is produced by the poet not the speaker. Certainly, it is useful to look at the poem in as many ways as it invites. While it may make some sense to refer to its speaker using the female pronoun, as is the pattern in this essay, it is important to realize that the poet is distinct from the poem, and the gender of the speaker is not indicated conclusively in the poem. That disclaimer notwithstanding, this poem is clearly an investigation of a topic closely associated with the biography of the poet: the ambivalence one can feel toward both anonymity and publicity and toward social ranks that privilege some and devalue many others. ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ is a dramatic monologue that seems to suggest both something about the setting in which the words are spoken and something about the speaker. For example, one might imagine a classroom or a church meeting. One might consider the implied differences between those who speak from the podium and those in the front rows who volunteer their opinions by standing up to address the stage presenters and the audience seated further back. One might assume that individuals seated in the very back or in the balcony seek to remain anonymous and listen as observers who choose not to draw attention to themselves. In this imagined scene, one might go ahead and imagine in the back row of such a gathering, one person might cup her mouth and whisper to the adjacent stranger, ‘‘I’m nobody!’’ and that person might nod and smile in recognition. Something familiar, perhaps a twinkle in the stranger’s eye, might cause the speaker to make a judgment

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Emily (1992), a fictional story for kindergartners through third graders, written by Michael Bedard and beautifully illustrated by Caldecott Medal-winning artist Barbara Cooney, is the story about a visit to the poet’s home paid by a neighbor woman and her daughter. In the story, the mother performs on the Dickinsons’ piano. The child wanders away and discovers the poet listening upstairs. In 1965, Aileen Lucia Fisher published a novel suitable for middle-school readers. Written from the point of view of the poet’s brother, We Dickinsons: The Life of Emily Dickinson As Seen through the Eyes of Her Brother Austin describes the family when the children were young and follows their experiences through the poet’s early forties and the visit of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The Sister: A Novel of Emily Dickinson (2006) was written in Spanish by Paola Kaufmann and translated into English by William Rowlandson. The novel is told from the point of view of Lavinia and begins ten years after the poet’s death, when Emily Dickinson is already famous and the sisters’ parents are dead. Vinnie remembers the family as they were, describing the household, explaining

and risk the following question: ‘‘Are you nobody too?’’ And this other person may nod affirmatively. If they are not quiet, these two will draw attention to themselves. Others may look at them disapprovingly, perhaps as impolite or even rude. Worse yet, they may be overheard in the front and drawn into the public conversation if someone at the podium were to ask, ‘‘Is there a question from the back?’’ In which event, the clandestine and anonymous club of two would suddenly be extinguished. The whisperer might be criticized for interrupting by people in the front rows. Such is one scene Emily Dickinson’s little poem ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ suggests.

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the poet’s reclusiveness as embarrassment over Austin’s flagrant affair with Mabel Loomis Todd, and describing Dickinson’s final illness and death.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, written by Jerome Charyn and published in 2010 by Norton, takes as its premise that the poet was not an old maid. Her brother referred to the poet as his wild sister, and Charyn takes him at his word. A student of American history, Charyn has written a novel that is both informative and entertaining. It includes many historical figures and some fictional ones and tells a story that is both disturbing and delightful.

Steve Kowit’s charming and useful In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop (1995) provides people who are interested in learning how to write poetry with excellent suggestions, writing prompts, and examples by lesser known poets.

Still an excellent resource for people who want to read all of her poems, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955, provides most of the poems, along with subject and first line indices.

The dramatic monologue also gives hints about the speaker and sometimes these hints are ironic, in the sense that what the speaker thinks is being revealed may be different from what the poet is suggesting or the reader intuits. One irony is that in identifying herself as a nobody to even one other person, the speaker is no longer a nonentity. The speaker is recognized via the introduction; the other observes the speaker as a person, with a certain affect and tone of voice. The introduction that proclaims no importance or rank or social connection invites recognition from the person who is addressed. As soon as that recognition occurs, the speaker has imposed

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on the listener, asserted herself uninvited and for the moment controls the listener’s attention. And where two conspire in mutual recognition and social interaction, there is publicity on a small scale, all the while the speaker is claiming the contrary, a shared invisibility and masked or camouflaged personhood. The uppity-ups on the stage and at the podium and those seated in the front rows are asserting their public importance by speaking out in loud voices to the entire audience, but these lesser known individuals in the back row or up in the balcony or out in the hall or whispering behind the kitchen door, they identify themselves, too. ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ explores the psychological and social dialectic between private and public aspects of identity, the dynamic and contradictory ways in which people choose to remain anonymous or venture to expose themselves to others. Individuals can pronounce their importance, assert their views, even pontificate, and likewise they can inhibit that impulse to disclose and appeal for audience. They can seek the large audience or just the ear of the person nearest to them. Each person is endlessly engaged in negotiating this path between privacy and exposure, between asserting the self and effacing it, between being anonymous and single and having identity and making connection with others. The speaker in Dickinson’s poem seems to be unaware of the irony, but readers can see it. The poem seems to suggest that there are two kinds of people, the somebodies and the nobodies, and the difference between these two groups is much determined by the way individuals talk. Some people take the floor; they stand in higher places, up on the stage, at the podium, in the pulpit. They demand because of their literal or moral high ground as teachers, ministers, or senators, the attention of the people within the range of their voices, groups of others who have varying levels of social, financial, or political importance themselves, but who by their role as listeners seem to confirm the importance of those are speaking. Others seek privacy, want to interact within the narrow circle of immediate family and servants and would prefer to decline party invitations or church meetings or other public hearings. They have their need to identify themselves, too, to pronounce their opinions and views to those around them, but they hold back, selectivity choosing their listeners, their friends, their confidants. It would appear the difference between these two groups is a matter of degree.

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It is a dicey proposition this finding one’s way to a comfortable balance between privacy and publicity. If one speaks to just one other person and is overheard by a more public person, the speaker may be drawn out of the back row and into public view. So one must be selective and guarded, careful in how and when and with what volume one speaks. Another risk is the seduction of being somebody, of having influence over others, of hearing one’s own voice booming across large groups of admiring fans. The high place of public admiration is greased by well-fed ego and pride, vainglorious self-importance, vanity. And everyone knows what comes after pride and its kin of self-delusions. In this, the poem offers a warning, even to the nobody who speaks its lines: ‘‘Watch yourself, even you may become prideful and fall,’’ it seems to say. And there is another irony: in the high places of social importance, social exposure, and social influence, human frailty can trip one up and then there is the fall into disgrace and possible obscurity, all part of the dynamic of privacy and publicity. Having stopped attending church many years earlier, Emily Dickinson died without ever professing faith in a given religion or joining a church. Her funeral was held in the study of the family home. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the poet’s long-time literary friend and later one of her editors, read, ‘‘No Coward Soul Is Mine,’’ by Emily Bronte¨, a poem that explicitly states faith in deity but criticizes dogma. After the service, Dickinson’s casket was carried by workmen out the backdoor of the house and across the grounds on foot to the cemetery. There was no public procession to the gravesite. Thus, Emily Dickinson was buried with a seclusion in which she is said to have lived. It took little time for the poet’s sister to discover the cache of writing Dickinson left in her bedroom upstairs. The often self-effacing and private Emily Dickinson left thousands of notes, letters, and poems. Ambivalent about exposure and publicity as she was, her papers sooner or later were edited, published repeatedly and in various forms, often quoted, and garnered worldwide attention, ranging from their use in self-styled greeting cards to the scrutiny of scholars that fitted them into theories she may not have appreciated nor understood. It can safely be said her writings were broadcasted across the globe. So there it is. In the poem studied here, in the life of the poet herself, there is traced the dilemma that in truth faces each person: the desire for

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privacy, the seduction of publicity. Implicit in the act of writing and again in the act of preserving one’s writing is the desire to communicate, to identify oneself, to define one’s point of view, to pronounce one’s interpretation of what matters in the world of one’s own experience, all of this is conveyed in the very existence of a cache of manuscripts. Among the manuscripts, one among many little poems, ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ announces in its irony the problem: How does one speak up and draw the curtain, look someone in the eyes and ask a question and avert one’s eyes at the same time? How does one take a backseat, label oneself a nobody, and at the same time voice a satirical depiction of the somebody up front as a frog, endlessly croaking to the bog? Perhaps it is correct to say the human search is for that elusive comfortable middle ground between complete anonymity and isolation, on the one hand, and full exposure and global recognition, on the other. One wants to be heard, to be in touch, even to put one’s talent forward, and yet one also wants seclusion and quiet, a time to be oneself out of others’ reach and in that seclusion, perhaps, to pay attention to the creative impulse that comes from within. It is a balancing act moment by moment. Perhaps many people would agree that Dickinson in writing her poetry proclaimed a protest against the cultural context that tried to define her. Writing must have also been for her an affirmation of her personhood. In this particular poem, the irony is that in distinguishing herself from the croaking somebodies, the speaker sets herself up as above others. Her statement proclaims her as a somebody. In a curiously similar way, perhaps, Emily Dickinson sought privacy in her own life and whispered a few poems into the public eye, and yet in the cache of poems she hoarded that were published after her death, she sent myriad messages to the world and demanded the attention that world continues to give. Source: Melodie Monahan, Critical Essay on ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

William Franke In the following essay, Franke makes the case that Emily Dickinson’s poetry is best understood as a type of negative theology or apophatic discourse. Emily Dickinson has long been regarded as a peculiarly enigmatic figure for her puzzling and oftentimes paradoxical poems, as well as for her evidently idiosyncratic religious faith. I

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DICKINSON’S POETRY IS PREGNANT WITH THE SENSE THAT UNSAYABILITY ITSELF CAN SIGNIFY AND THAT THE POEM’S VERY FAILURE TO SAY WHAT IT STRIVES TO SAY MAY HARBOR ITS MOST POWERFUL SIGNIFICANCE.’’

will make no attempt to investigate that faith, except as it is expressed in the poetry. However, if we focus on the faith together with the poetry as having the character of a negative theology, much that is enigmatic, without ceasing to be so, begins also to make a clear kind of sense. I contend that Dickinson’s poetry is best understood as a form of negative theology, or as what I will call ‘‘apophatic’’ discourse. My guiding idea is that Dickinson’s exploration of modes of negation in poetic language enabled her to discover and express what are, in effect, negatively theological forms of belief. I will use ‘‘apophasis,’’ the Greek word for negation, to designate the sort of radical negation of language per se, of any language whatsoever—rather than only of specific formulations and of certain types of linguistic content—that characterizes this outlook, or rather sensibility, which suspects and subverts all its own verbal expressions. This term ‘‘apophasis’’ and its adjectival form ‘‘apophatic’’ evoke in the first place the ancient Neoplatonic tradition of speculation concerning the ineffable One as supreme principle of reality. Likewise commonly designated as apophatic are certain traditions of medieval mysticism concerning an unutterably transcendent deity. In such traditions, the encounter, in incommunicable registers of experience, with the Inexpressible is marked by a backing off from language (apo— ‘‘away from,’’ phasis—‘‘speech’’ or ‘‘assertion’’). Of course, this backing off is itself then registered in language, language that in various ways unsays itself. The resultant apophatic modes of discourse, in their very wide diffusion throughout Western culture, especially in the domains of philosophy, religion, and literature, can be seen to have had a decisive bearing on Dickinson’s writing. This can be inferred from the poetry itself, whether it is conscious and deliberate on her

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part or not. The apophatic tradition, I maintain, whether directly or indirectly, influences Dickinson’s reflections on the limits of her ability to express the reality she endeavors to approach and the experience she aims to convey in her poetry. Precisely the impediments to expression become her central message in telling ways, for they tell obliquely of a ‘‘beyond’’ of language. Dickinson’s highly original writing makes her a maddeningly difficult poet, one whom eminent critics confess baffles them. Yet her poems become startlingly readable when read according to their apophatic grammar and rhetoric: the words and phrases fall into place—the place they make for what they necessarily leave unsaid but let show up distinctly silhouetted in their hollows and shadows. The poems selected to illustrate Dickinson’s apophatic poetics in this essay generally thematize a negative method of thought and perception, but they are only the most explicit representatives of a poetic corpus that is, throughout, profoundly apophatic in nature and inspiration and that rewards being read as such, while it stiffly resists readings that ignore this orientation.

Dickinson Criticism and the Apophatic Paradigm Although the poems often proved impossible for her contemporaries to penetrate, they have won immense appreciation in more recent critical appraisals, particularly those attuned to apophasis and the poetics of the unsayable. Even if rarely with explicit acknowledgment of the apophatic tradition as a primary context, this framework has already been operative in scholarship aiming to illuminate Dickinson’s poems. Readings of Dickinson pointing in this direction have insisted on compression and abbreviation as features that distinguish her style, especially as against the stylistic canons of her own time. Cristanne Miller’s analysis in Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar of Dickinson’s versification shows ellipsis—the omission and deletion of logical and syntactical links—to be its governing principle. Caria Pomare` finds in this elliptical technique the means of producing the silence that paradoxically gives Dickinson her distinctive voice. Margaret Freeman, who analyzes Dickinson’s poetry in terms of cognitive principles of discourse, similarly stresses omissions and absences as the signifying elements that grant the poetry its power, a power ‘‘through silence to capture the true essence of intimacy.’’ Beyond such attention to linguistic gaps and lapses, the apophatic logic informing Dickinson’s

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poetics has been discerned in a more conscious and comprehensive way by Shira Wolosky, particularly in her essays interpreting Dickinson’s poems in light of their translation into German by the post-Holocaust poet Paul Celan. Reading through this lens, Wolosky stresses the valence of silence not as affirming a metaphysical reality, a transcendent ultimacy beyond telling, but as indicating a cataclysm of history, an irruption of time into the presumably metaphysical order. This irruption is likewise beyond telling, though for a different reason: ‘‘silence represents the collapse of meaning within historical processes’’ (82). This view of silence builds a certain modernist bias into her readings. It foregrounds affinities with later writers more than with the ancient apophatic traditions from which these modes of expression hail. According to Wolosky, the realm beyond language has become contested and is agonized over by Dickinson and Celan alike: ‘‘What Dickinson’s and Celan’s poetry repeatedly traces is a rupture between earthly experience and transcendent reference’’ (68). Wolosky does situate Dickinson within a tradition of ‘‘theo-linguistic’’ thought deriving ultimately from ‘‘Hermetic and Platonic traditions’’ crystallized in classics such as Thomas a` Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, John Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici. She notes how such traditions were reflected in the preaching of Jonathan Edwards and in Horace Bushnell’s Dissertation on the Nature of Language as Related to Thought and Spirit in Dickinson’s immediate cultural milieu. Yet Wolosky, in ‘‘The Metaphysics of Language in Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan,’’ emphasizes particularly how this type of metaphysical framework is thrown into crisis and collapses in Emily Dickinson’s poems. However, this sort of critical negation of concepts is in fact traditionally how apophatic or negative theology frees faith and spiritual experience from rigid metaphysical and theological dogma: it does not necessarily interpret the crisis of modernity. This could be said also for even more modern poets such as T. S. Eliot (‘‘Burnt Norton’’ II and III) and Geoffrey Hill (for example, in Tenebrae, 1978): they continue and affirm this negative theological vein more than they negate it. The apophatic discursive paradigm that operates in Dickinson’s poetics, then, has perhaps still not been fully realized and reflectively thought through. And yet this paradigm can furnish a necessary key to interpretation of at

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least a central axis of Dickinson’s poetic modus operandi. My contention is that it will prove profitable to read Emily Dickinson in relation to a spiritual as well as an aesthetic tradition of apophasis. There are innumerable spiritual poets who have privileged the theme of silence, and certain of them have linked this theme with the spiritual traditions of apophatic mysticism. John of the Cross represents the confluence of the two, the poetics of silence and a theology of negation such as that expounded also, for instance, in The Cloud of Unknowing, and he is echoed by Silesius Angelus, who works Meister Eckhart’s mystic philosophy (transmitted via John Tauler) into spiritual (‘‘Geist-reiche’’) verse. In such poetry, I believe, can be found some of the strongest affinities to crucial aspects of Dickinson’s work. Her poetry, accordingly, is in some sense to be understood as a spiritual exercise, a use of poetry as a means of approach to an unknowable ‘‘divinity,’’ or at least as an instrument for registering an impossible, inarticulable absoluteness in her experience of the ultimate reality. The diffuse presence of apophatic ideas and conceits in Western cultural tradition, in many of its poets and philosophers and divines, as well as in writers and artists of various stripe, would have sufficed to enable Dickinson to pick up the requisite hints for developing her own perceptions and reflections along apophatic lines. Surely, if the links were explicit and direct, they would already have been made the object of intense scholarly study. The fact that apophasis has not been such a focus in Dickinson studies suggests rather that Dickinson develops these ideas largely by her own lights and on the basis of her own experience of language and its ‘‘beyond.’’ So perhaps it is not really that she belongs within this tradition, as one who integrally receives and hands down a certain knowledge or teaching or technique, so much as that she is an original discoverer of the aporetic condition and predicament of language, and conjointly of a faith in a beyond of language. This would make for parallels between her and poets like John of the Cross, poet of the dark night (la noche oscura), or Silesius Angelus, for whom the rose is without why (die Ros’ ist ohn warumb). Of course, in less concentrated form, apophatic topoi and techniques can be found in Romantic poets from Wordsworth to Shelley and Keats or Whitman. But none enacts this mode as intensely, incisively, and pervasively as Dickinson does: her poetics can hardly be understood without some reference to this paradigm.

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Harold Bloom employs apophatic terms to describe Dickinson’s poetry when he comments that her ‘‘unique transport, her Sublime, is founded upon her unnaming of all our certitudes into so many blanks; it gives her, and her authentic readers, another way to see, almost, in the dark’’ (308–09). And Marjorie Perloff acutely observes a number of the key characteristics of apophatic discourse in Emily Dickinson yet without actually viewing her in the context of, or even as associated with, this tradition. She does place Dickinson in the ‘‘other tradition,’’ other with respect to Romanticism and Modernism and their Symbolist aesthetic—another tradition that has long captivated Perloff’s interest (The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, vii). Tellingly Perloff writes, ‘‘She did not believe that words were in themselves irreplaceable’’ (‘‘Emily Dickinson and the Theory Canon’’). Dickinson’s poetics, Perloff points out, are contrary to the Symbolist doctrine of the mot juste, according to which ‘‘the chosen word is the only word that can convey a desired set of meanings.’’ Perhaps no word can be exactly right for Dickinson, and perhaps the words used do not ultimately matter, if her poems are concerned above all with what is beyond words, with what cannot be said. Perloff characterizes Dickinson’s poetry as ‘‘process poetry,’’ and she salutes the approaches to Dickinson’s ‘‘variorum poetics’’ by Martha Nell Smith, Susan Howe, Sharon Cameron, and especially Marta Werner. There has been a great deal of stir about the editing of Dickinson’s works, particularly in the wake of the newer facsimile and variorum editions of her poems and letters, leading to new and acute attention paid to her manuscripts, fascicles and folios. Werner writes, Driven on by the desire to establish a definitive, or ‘fixed,’ text—an end requiring among other things the identification and banishment of textual ‘impostors,’ errors and stray marks—a scholar-editor ends up domesticating a poet. How do we apprehend an author’s passage through a forever unfinished draft? . . . Today editing Emily Dickinson’s late writings paradoxically involves unediting them, constellating these works not as still points of meaning or as incorruptible texts but, rather, as events and phenomena of freedom. (5)

This is all implicitly apophatic in tenor in that it retreats from words as definitive, negating them as always inadequate; yet Werner, like Perloff and virtually all other critics, overlooks the traditional spiritual paradigm of apophasis,

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and their doing so is liable to give rise to certain distortions and confusions. For example, Perloff’s idea that Dickinson distrusts beauty and musicality and is seeking only truth in her poetry results from the effort to categorize Dickinson’s poetics by clear conceptual contrasts to other styles of poetics, particularly the Romantic and aesthetic. Yet Dickinson herself not infrequently praises beauty and music, albeit of a more sublime sort than the ordinary: The words the happy say Are paltry melody But those the silent feel Are beautiful— (F 1767; J 1750) Indeed melody and beauty both—like truth—are placed by Dickinson, in true apophatic fashion, beyond definition in a heaven that is indistinguishable from the unnameable divinity Himself: The Definition of Beauty, is That Definition is none— Of Heaven, easing Analysis, Since Heaven and He Are One— (F 797; J 988) Dickinson writes the same thing verbatim in exactly parallel fashion about melody in another variation of this verse: The Definition of Melody—is— That Definition is none (F 797; J 988) Dickinson does not mistrust beauty and music more than other forms of representation; she simply sees the Unrepresentable as hiding behind them all. Leaving this crucial distinction out of account, Perloff tends to overdraw the contrast with modernist and symbolist poetics. It is true that Dickinson’s poetics have an essential component well beyond aesthetic symbolism, but so did the poetics of many others among the canonical Romantics and modernists. And like them, Dickinson sometimes evinces a rather powerful desire for totalizing, even apocalyptic vision, though she is aware that it can be expressed only fragmentarily and actively. On another front, whereas Perloff strives to categorically differentiate Dickinson’s view of language from that of the deconstructive critics, and so claims that Dickinson does not cancel or take back meaning, this does happen repeatedly, not to say systematically, in Dickinson’s poems. The aim is not the deconstruction of

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metaphysics (to this extent Perloff is right) so much as spiritual experience at the limits of language— apophasis vis-a`-vis what defies linguistic formulation. There is, after all, a convergence between post-structuralist poetics of indeterminacy and Dickinson’s poetics, but Perloff struggles not to see it in order to make her case that Dickinson is not comprehensible in a deconstructive theoretical optics like the poetry typically cited as exemplary by post-structuralist critics. Perloff’s own theoretical perspective is informed especially by Language Poetry, by writers like Charles Bernstein, David Bromige, Ron Silliman, and others like Rosemarie Waldrop and Lyn Hejinian working poetically with Wittgenstein’s texts and philosophy of language (Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder). Jerome McGann in Black Riders (particularly the Afterword), describes how this type of poetry grows out of the ‘‘literalism’’ of modernism. Its inspiration lies largely in eliminating symbolic reference to everything beyond the text, particularly to a world or a subject, and thereby riveting attention rather to the literal scene of writing itself. At least prima facie, apophatic poetics, with its orientation to a beyond of writing and language, is diametrically opposed to such a perspective. It seems that Wittgenstein’s inspiration can be taken in both of these apparently antithetical directions: it has galvanized the writing of Language Poetry, but it can also turn us away from language toward the beyond of language. The latter is the dimension explored by the type of poetry I am calling apophatic. It is distinguished by its recalcitrance to any definitive linguistic formulation whatsoever of what it seeks to express. There is currently considerable excitement over discovering in Dickinson some of our own recently acquired obsessions and enthusiasms for the materialities of language, for the text’s literal surfaces, and for the self-reflexive scene of writing: current critics are keen to perceive the letter liberated from the spirit, from subjectivity and intentionality and such-like metaphysical ghosts. However, in the midst of this ferment, it is important not to lose sight of Dickinson’s continuity with the apophatic tradition as a specifically spiritual tradition endowed with a powerfully poetic dimension. Many poems become almost easy and perspicuous, and in any case understandable, once we see them as not about what they say but about what they cannot say. They point to a remoter abyss or ‘‘Sea’’ which language can mark but not articulate.

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This recess of speech darkly backgrounds almost everything in human life, including everyday emotions like gratitude. It lies beyond the reach (or ‘‘Plumb’’) of speech and the meanings or ‘‘Answer’’ that language can fish for with its verbal threads and cues, its ‘‘Line and Lead’’: Gratitude—is not the mention Of a Tenderness, But it’s still appreciation Out of Plumb of Speech. When the Sea return no Answer By the Line and Lead Proves it there’s no Sea, or rather A remoter Bed? (F 1120c; J 989) The difficulty, then, is not so much in the poem itself as in what it points out beyond itself and allows to be sensed or fathomed, but not to be comprehended. The extremely dense, discriminating, hair-splitting hermeneutics required by typical modernist poems, aiming at always greater precision, is not always called for nor necessarily conducive to letting Dickinson’s poems happen and have their most clear and intense effect. The assumptions of a mastery of language by the artist and of the formal perfection of the artwork cannot be applied so rigorously to Dickinson’s kind of writing. If, as Perloff persuasively argues, Dickinson has not been part of the canon of poets regularly referred to in discussions of poetic theory, this suggests that some important key to the theoretical significance of her poetry may have been missing from the tools of her interpreters. I wish now, by placing some poems into this framework, to illustrate the aptness the apophatic paradigm to unlock their most general intellectual significance and open to view the language-theoretical and spiritual underpinnings on which these poems are based.

Illustrative Poems The characteristically apophatic technique of the poems can be approached most simply and perspicuously on the poems’ own terms by attending first to the topic of silence along with the thematics of the intrinsic limits and foundering of language. There are numerous very short poems that effectively announce the theme of silence and suggest that its potency is infinitely greater than that of any possible utterance, for example: There is no Silence in the Earth—so silent As that endured

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Which uttered, would discourage Nature And haunt the World. (F 1004; J 1004) Silence must simply be endured. Any attempt to master it and give it utterance would be an artifice forcing it to be what it is not, manufacturing an unnatural unreality that would haunt the natural world. Other lines intimate the approach, venturing well beyond the natural world and all its appearances, to a faceless divinity, or Infinity, that can sanction silence alone as its expression: Silence is all we dread. There’s Ransom in a Voice— But Silence is Infinity. Himself have not a face. (F 1300b; J 1251) Silence, in its desolation and emptiness, is dreadful, and so naturally we prefer that it be ‘‘ransomed’’ or redeemed in human and natural terms by a Voice. ‘‘But,’’ just as God ‘‘Himself’’ does not have a face, so Silence itself can have no proper finite form or voice: it ‘‘is Infinity.’’ This indeterminacy of its object in terms of language and concepts is the predicament of apophasis, and it is perhaps finally to be preferred to the ‘‘Ransom in a Voice.’’ In any case, this silence is nearer to the nature of God Himself. It leads to the silence of the mystic, as well as to the mystic poet’s struggles and declarations of failure to find an adequate expression. Alongside such acknowledgments of a dimension of silence that is closest to the sacred source of all that is and of all that is said, Dickinson frequently alludes to indescribable moments of epiphany that she experiences as religious revelations and miracles and that transcend ordinary verbal expression. They consist in ‘‘thoughts’’ that are unique and incomparable, thoughts that ‘‘come a single time’’ and that cannot be reduced to any common currency of words. They must rather be tasted, like the communion wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist, which paradoxically is repeated, yet is always unique and incomparable: Your thoughts don’t have words every day They come a single time Like signal esoteric sips Of the communion Wine Which while you taste so native seems So easy so to be You cannot comprehend its price

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Nor its infrequency (F 1476; J 1452)

A Thought went up my mind today— That I have had before— But did not finish—some way back— I could not fix the Year— Nor Where it went—nor why it came The second time to me— Nor definitely, what it was— Have I the Art to say— But somewhere—in my soul—I know— I’ve met the Thing before— It just reminded me—’twas all— And came my way no more— (F 731; J 701) Dickinson’s poetry is pregnant with the sense that unsayability itself can signify and that the poem’s very failure to say what it strives to say may harbor its most powerful significance. She says as much in a poem like the following: If I could tell how glad I was I should not be so glad But when I cannot make the Force, Nor mould it into word I know it is a sign That new Dilemma be From mathematics further off Than from Eternity (F 1725; J 1668) This incapacity of speech, or apophasis, is a sign of how far removed from ‘‘mathematics,’’ that is, from any rationally calculable, articulable knowledge, is the intimation of the Eternity that Dickinson dwells on but cannot express. Still, her ‘‘hindered Words’’—a good expression for apophatic rhetoric—are the key to telling of this Nothing (nothing that can be said, which is nevertheless everything), and thereby to renovating the world: By homely gifts and hindered words The human heart is told Of nothing— ‘‘Nothing’’ is the force That renovates the World— (F 1611; J 1563) As so often, something which is indicated as Nothing makes the poem and clinches its significance.

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Negative Theology as Paradigm for Dickinson’s Poetics

Such thoughts that defy comprehension and articulation seem to be ‘‘native,’’ familiar, as if de´ja` vu, and yet, at the same time, they seem to escape, never to return: they are assignable to no time and as such are timeless and ineffable:

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Primed by glancing through examples like these, we are now in a position to appreciate how Dickinson’s poetry continually approaches and even coincides with characteristic themes of negative theology taken as a paradigm of spiritual understanding and experience. Negative theology is the kind of apophasis pertaining specifically to God, about whom we can only know (and therefore can only say) what ‘‘he’’ is not. God is Nothing (that can be said), even though he is the source and ground of all beings. Still, he has no finite content, no attribute whatsoever by which he could be anything that can be articulated in language. In various ways, Dickinson articulates the principle that the Nothing is the All, the Absolute (1071). Even more acutely, she says that this is so because the All is not: it is ‘‘The Missing All.’’ The Missing All, prevented Me From missing minor Things. If nothing larger than a World’s Departure from a Hinge Or Sun’s Extinction, be observed ’Twas not so large that I Could lift my Forehead from my work For Curiosity. (F 995b; J 985) This is exactly the status of the Neoplatonic One, which is no thing, but which everything that is anything emanates from and deeply depends on and indeed is in the abyss of its being. Whatever is something is incomparably less than this missing All, and therefore even the destruction of the entire finite universe, would be insufficient to distract the speaker’s attention from the contemplation of this infinite All that she knows is infinitely greater than anything finite whatsoever. The mystic philosophy devolving from Plotinus (205–270 A.D) known as Neoplatonism, as distinct from the Middle Platonism that evolved between Plato and Plotinus, inspired revivals far beyond the Hellenistic world of its origin, all through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as in the seventeenth century among the Cambridge Platonists and their successors even in the Romantic age. Thomas Taylor (1758– 1835) in particular was influential in disseminating Neoplatonic thinking among the Romantic poets from Shelley to Emerson.

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According to this philosophical outlook, which accentuates the theological inspiration of Plato’s thinking as oriented towards a transcendent, unifying principle of the universe as a whole, the One is All, the Absolute. But this also makes it Nothing, no thing that is determinate or finite, nothing that can be defined or said, for then it would not be absolute and unconditioned. As Dickinson writes: ‘‘The Object Absolute—is nought’’ (1071). While this Nothing in itself may be All or Absolute, whatever part or aspect of it is definable or even perceptible is not absolute. Something may be gained by perception for the appropriating subject but only at the cost of losing the Absolute as absolute, the perfect and divine, which thereafter we typically blame or ‘‘upbraid’’ for being so far removed from us: Perception of an object costs Precise the Object’s loss Perception in itself a Gain Replying to its Price— The Object Absolute—is nought— Perception sets it fair And then upbraids a Perfectness That situates so far— (F 1103a; J 1071) Dickinson here intuits that the presence of the Absolute as the absolute being of any object whatever is lost in being perceived and thereby reduced to the status of an object. The Object Absolute is the deeper reality of any object, but it is no object at all itself, and it is made to be naught by being objectified through perception. Dickinson postulates an indistinct kind of knowledge of aura or ‘‘glory’’ that does not circumscribe any object of knowledge, since an object could only be finite and consequently not be this Absolute. She figures such objectless knowing rather as an intuitive, mystic seeing: You’ll know it—as you know ’tis Noon— By Glory— As you do the Sun— By Glory— As you will in Heaven— Know God the Father—and the Son. By intuition, Mightiest Things Assert themselves—and not by terms— ‘‘I’m Midnight’’—need the Midnight say— ‘‘I’m Sunrise’’—Need the Majesty? Omnipotence—had not a Tongue— His lisp—is Lightning—and the Sun— His Conversation—with the Sea—

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‘‘How shall you know’’? Consult your Eye! (F 429a; J 420) Midnight and sunrise, as the zero degrees of night and day, are absolute and therefore not to be said but ‘‘seen.’’ On the basis presumably of this sort of ‘‘intuition’’ and not of ‘terms’ (420), Dickinson feels her way to the same kind of vocabulary, revolving around the ineffable One, as was used by the Neoplatonic negative theologians: I found the words to every thought I ever had—but One— And that—defies Me— As a Hand did try to chalk the Sun To Races nurtured in the Dark— How would your Own—begin? Can Blaze be shown in Cochineal— Or Noon—in Mazarin? (F 436; J 581) It is impossible to find the right word for the One, if it is thought of strictly as without any determination or multiplicity. In like fashion, the sun, symbolically the source of all, cannot itself be delineated or illuminated, since everything visible can be delineated or illuminated only by its light. Absolute brightness cannot be perceived apart from the colors or dyes that alone make it visible by toning down its total intensity, so as to bring it within the range of finite perception. A similar idea was expressed by another celebrated poetic Platonist in the familiar verses: ‘‘Life like a dome of manycolored glass / Stains the white radiance of eternity’’ (‘‘Adonais’’). But Shelley’s flowing eloquence and rhetorical grandeur are far removed from Dickinson’s laconic anti-rhetoric, with its hard-edged, rare-dye quality, that safeguards a peculiarly apophatic effect of the mystery of the unsaid. Whereas Shelley’s language becomes transparent like light, Dickinson’s poetry, with its rare words and rhythmic arrests—marked especially by her idiosyncratic use of dashes for spacings within and between lines—tends towards verbal viscousness and opacity. These poems offer some of the most poignant expressions anywhere in literature of how linguistic negation, the self-erasure of words that act to cancel themselves out or to proscribe verbal expression, becomes the positive source of all that is perceived and that can be said. They oftentimes place this experience in an aesthetic

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dimension of beauty, enchantment, and rapture, exclaiming, . . . However, this spell is itself but the sign of something yet more indefinite and inarticulable: There is a syllable-less Sea Of which it is the sign My will endeavors for its word And fails, but entertains A Rapture as of Legacies— Of introspective mines— (F 1689; J 1700) There is no adequate expression for this experience that issues rather in a ‘‘syllable-less Sea.’’ Yet the rapture left as a result or ‘‘legacy’’ of such experience testifies to interior riches that cannot be put into words, and so be exteriorized or objectified, but remain lodged, nevertheless, in ‘‘introspective mines’’—where ‘‘mine(s)’’ suggests perhaps something irreducibly private and personal, even though this very expression crystallizes the subjective sensation as a grammatical fact. Even some of Dickinson’s lighter poems can be illuminated by being placed in the context of this problematic of negative theology and its corresponding apophatic rhetoric. It is fundamental to the poetic theologic through which she sees the world. The reference to the unsayable and indefinable as the necessary background for all that she does say and articulate in her poems underlies even such a playful expostulation as: I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody—too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know! How dreary—to be—Somebody! How public—like a Frog— To tell one’s name—the livelong June— To an admiring Bog! (F 260; J 288) Anyone who is merely someone is boring by comparison with the infinite mystery of the person who recognizes herself as Nobody. Of course, this is what must not be told (‘‘Don’t tell!’’), for translated into words, it would be immediately betrayed: then it would be degraded to the level of the public gossip or ‘‘advertising’’ that passes so facilely from mouth to mouth, unthinkingly, like the croaking of frogs in a bog. What is articulated in this way becomes sound without meaning—the opposite of a plenum or surplus of meaning for

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which there is no adequate articulation. In this latter perspective, that of the experience of and even immersion in the unsayable, we may finally be indistinct from the divine, to the extent that we remain nameless—like the Unnameable God, the great Nobody, worshipped in mystic raptures of apophatic discourse across the ages. In her own ingenious accents, Emily Dickinson, too, is participating in this tradition. In poem after poem, she demonstrates a powerful belief in the infinite positivity of Nothing. Likewise in her life, by her fabled reclusiveness, she seems to have said nothing, the nothing that actually contains everything. Some will undoubtedly say that it is futile to speculate about what the poems do not say, and even more absurd and presumptuous if this be what they cannot say. True, it is not a matter of positive proof so much as of projection beyond what can be stated. This is nothing if not a spiritual exercise. Poetry of this order is, after all, a matter of faith, even if faith in what proves impossible to say. Where all categories of determination lose their grip in reference to what exceeds all terms of description and expression, religion and literature tend to coalesce: both aim at what neither can express, and an apophatic discourse is engendered as the effect of this impasse in the face of what Dickinson has christened, somewhat oxymoronically, ‘‘The Missing All.’’ Source: William Franke, ‘‘‘The Missing All’: Emily Dickinson’s Apophatic Poetics,’’ in Christianity & Literature, Vol. 58, No. 1, Autumn 2008, pp. 61–80.

Marsden Hartley In the following essay from 1918, Hartley praises Emily Dickinson’s poetry. He also takes a certain regional pride in her accomplishments and offers a glimpse of what was valued in arts and poetry during the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth. When I want poetry in its most delightful and playful mood I take up the verses of that remarkable girl of the sixties and seventies, Emily Dickinson—she who was writing her little worthless poetic nothings (or so she was wont to think of them) at a time when the now classical New England group was flourishing near Concord, when Hawthorne was burrowing into the soul of things, when Thoreau was refusing to make more pencils and was sounding lake bottoms and holding converse with all kinds of fish and other water life, and when Emerson, standing high upon his pedestal,

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LIKE ALL ARISTOCRATS, SHE HATED MEDIOCRITY; AND LIKE ALL FIRST-RATE JEWELS, SHE HAD NO RIFT TO HIDE. SHE WAS NOT A MAKE OF POETRY; SHE WAS A THINKER OF POETRY.’’

was preaching of compensations, of friendship, of society, and of the Oversoul. Emily Dickinson has by no means lost her freshness for us; she wears as would an oldfashioned pearl set in gold and dark enamels. One feels as if one were sunning in the discal radiance of a bright, vivid, and really new type of poet. For with her cheery impertinence she offsets the smugness of the time in which she lived. What must have been the irresistible charm of this girl who gave so charming a portrait of herself to the stranger friend who inquired for a photograph: ‘‘I have no portrait now, but am small like the wren, and my hair is bold like the chestnut bur, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves!’’ She had undeniable originality of personality, grace, and special beauty of mind. It was a charm unique in itself, not like any other genius then or now, or in the time before her, having perhaps a little of relationship to the crystal clearness of Crashaw—like Vaughan and Donne maybe in respect to their lyrical fervor and moral earnestness, nevertheless appearing to us freshly with as separate a spirit in her poetry as she herself was separated from the world around her by the amplitude of garden which was her universe. Emily Dickinson confronts you at once with an instinct for poetry to be envied by the more ordinary and perhaps more finished poets. Ordinary she never was; contain she never could have been. For she was first and last aristocratic in sensibility, rare and untouchable, often vague and mystical, sometimes distinctly aloof. Those with a fondness for intimacy will find her, like all recluses, forbidding and difficult. Here was New England at its sharpest, wittiest, most fantastic, most willful, most devout. Saint and imp sported in her, toying with the tricks of the Deity, taking them now with extreme profundity, then tossing them about

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like irresistible toys with an incomparable triviality. She has traced upon the page with celestial indelibility that fine line from her soul, which is like a fine prismatic light separating one bright sphere from another, one planet from another planet; and the edge of separation is but faintly perceptible. She has left us this bright folio of her ‘‘lightning and fragrance in one,’’ scintillant with star dust as perhaps no other before her, certainly none in this country. Who has had her celestial attachedness—or must we call it detachedness?—and her sublime impertinent playfulness, which makes her images dance before one like offspring of the great round sun, as zealously she fools with the universes at her feet and, with loftiness of spirit and exquisite trivialness, with those just beyond her eye? Whoever has not read these flippant renderings, holding always some touch of austerity and gravity of mood, or the still more perfect ‘‘letters’’ to her friends, has, I think, missed a new kind of poetic diversion—a new loveliness, evasive, alert, pronounced in every interval and serious, modestly so, and at a bound leaping as it were like some sky child pranking with the clouds and the hills and the valleys beneath them. Child she surely was always, playing in some celestial garden space in her mind, where every species of tether was unendurable, where freedom for this childish sport was the one thing necessary to her ever young and incessantly capering mind. It must be said, then, that ‘‘fascination was her element’’; everything to her was wondrous, sublimely magical, awesomely inspiring and thrilling. It was the event of many moons to have someone she liked say so much as ‘‘good morning’’ to her in human tongue; it was the event of every instant to have the flowers and birds call her by name, and hear the clouds exult at her approach. She was the brightest young sister of fancy, as she was the gifted young daughter of the ancient imagination. One feels everywhere in her verse and in her letters an unexcelled freshness, a brightness of metaphor and of imagery, a peculiar girl that could have come only from this part of our country, this part of the world, this very spot which has bred so many intellectual and spiritual entities, wrapped in the garments of isolation, robed with questioning. Her genius is in this sense essentially local, as much the voice of the spirit of New England as it is possible for one to be. If ever a wanderer hitched a vehicle to the comet’s tail, it was this poetic sprite woman; no

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one ever rode the sky and the earth as she did in this radiant and sky-bright mind of hers. She loved all things because all things were in one way or another bright for her, and of a blinding brightness from which she often had to hide her face. She embroidered all her thoughts with starry intricacies, and gave them the splendor of frosty traceries upon the windowpane, and of the raindrop in the sun, and summered them with the fragrancing of the many early and late flowers of her own fanciful conjuring. They are glittering garlands of her clear, cool fancies, these poems, fraught in some instances, as are certain finely cut stones, with an exceptional mingling of lights coursing swiftly through them. She was avid of starlight and of sunlight alike, and of that light by which all things are illuminated with a splendor not their own merely, but lent them by shafts from that radiant sphere which she leaned from, that high place in her mind. To think of this poet is to think of crystal, for she lived in a radianced world of innumerable facets, and the common instances were chariots upon which to ride wildly over the edges of infinity. She is alive for us now in those rare fancies of hers. You will find in her all that is winsome, strange, fanciful, fantastic, and irresistible in the Eastern character. She is first and best in lightsomeness of temper, for the Eastern is known as an essentially tragic genius. She is in modern times perhaps the single exponent of the quality of true celestial frivolity. She was like dew and the soft summer rain, and the light upon the lips of flowers of which she loved to sing. Her mind and her spirit were one, soul and sense inseparable. She was the little sister of Shelley, and the more playful relative of Francis Thompson. She had about her the imperishable quality that hovers about all things young and strong and beautiful; she conveyed the sense of beauty ungovernable. What she has of religious and moral tendencies in nowise disturbs those who love and appreciate true poetic essences. For Emily Dickinson had in her eyes the climbing lances of the sun; she had in her heart love and pity for the immeasurable, innumerable, pitiful, and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for solace. Like all aristocrats, she hated mediocrity; and like all first-rate jewels, she had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry; she was a thinker of poetry. She was not a conjuror of words so much as a magician in sensibility. She had only to see

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and feel and hear to be in touch with all things with a name or with things that must be forever nameless. If she loved people, she loved them for what they were; if she despised them, she despised them for what they did, or for lack of power to feel they could not do. Silence under a tree was a far more talkative experience with her than converse with one or a thousand dull minds. Her throng was the air, and her wings were the multitude of flying movements in her brain. She had only to think and she was amid numberless minarets and golden domes; she had only to think and the mountain cleft its shadow in her heart. Emily Dickinson is in no sense toil for the mind unaccustomed to the labors of reading: she is too fanciful and delicious ever to make heavy the head; she sets you to laughter and draws a smile across your face for pity and lets you loose again amid the measureless pleasing little humanities. I shall always want to read Emily Dickinson, for she points her finger at all tiresome scholasticism, and takes a chance with the universe about her and the first poetry it offers at every hand, within the eye’s easy glancing. She has made poetry memorable as a pastime for the mind, and sent the heavier ministerial tendencies flying to a speedy oblivion. What a child she was, child impertinent, with a heavenly rippling in her brain! These random passages from her writings will show at once the rarity of her tastes and the originality of her phrasing: February passed like a kate, and I know March . . . Here is the light the stranger said was not on sea or land—myself could arrest it, but will not chagrin him. The wind blows gay today, and the jays bark like blue terriers. Friday I tasted life, it was a vast morsel . . . A circus passed the house—still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out. If I read a book, and it makes my whole body so cold no fire will ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Is there no other way?

None but a Yankee mind could concoct such humors and fascinatingly pert phrases as are found here. They are like the chatterings of the interrupted squirrel in the tree-hole. There is so much of high gossip in these poetic turns of hers that throughout her books one finds a multitude of playful tricks for the pleased mind to

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run with. She was an intoxicated being, drunken with the little tipsy joys of the simplest form, shaped as they were to elude always her evasive imagination into thinking that nothing she could think or feel but was extraordinary and remarkable. ‘‘Your letter gave no drunkenness because I tasted rum before—Domingo comes but once,’’ she wrote to Colonel Higginson, a pretty conceit surely to offer a loved friend. These passages will give the unfamiliar reader a taste of the sparkle of the poet’s hurrying fancy. She will always delight those who love her type of elfish, evasive genius. And those who care for the vivid and living element in words will find her, to say the least, among the masters in her feeling for their strange shapes and for the fresh significances contained in them. A born thinker of poetry, and in a great measure a gifted writer of it, refreshing many a heavy moment made dull with the weightiness of books or of burdensome thinking, this poet-sprite sets scurrying all weariness of the brain; and they shall have an hour of sheer delight who invite poetic converse with Emily Dickinson. She will repay with funds of rich celestial coin from her rare and precious fancyings. Source: Marsden Hartley, ‘‘Emily Dickinson,’’ in Dial, Vol. 65, No. 771, August 15, 1918, pp. 95–97.

SOURCES Advertisement, ‘‘Poems, edited by two of her friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson,’’ in New York Times, December 20, 1890, p. 5. Dickinson, Emily, ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Little Brown, 1960, p. 133. Habegger, Alfred, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, Random House, 2001.

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Ryan, Michael, ‘‘Vocation According to Dickinson,’’ in American Poetry Review, Vol. 29, No. 5, September– October 2000, pp. 43–48.

FURTHER READING Frank, Elizabeth, ‘‘The Pagan of Amherst,’’ in New York Times Book Review, November 13, 1986. In the process of writing a review of Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s biography Emily Dickinson, Frank evaluates all the biographies of Dickinson prior to 1986. This review provides information that may help readers choose which of the many biographies of Dickinson they want to read. Jackson, Virginia, ‘‘Dickinson Undone,’’ in Raritan, Vol. 24, No. 4, Spring 2005, pp. 128–48. This article explains how Thomas Wentworth Higginson drew attention to his and Mabel Loomis Todd’s edition of the poetry by publishing Dickinson’s letters to him in the Atlantic Monthly. Jackson goes on to explain that from Higginson to modern critics, Dickinson’s poetry has posed serious challenges, first of which is how to frame and understand the poetry given its various forms of transmission. Martin, Wendy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, Cambridge University Press, 2002. This book is a convenient compilation of scholarly articles on the poet and her work. The selected essays are presented in three categories: biography and publication history; poetic strategies and themes, and cultural contexts. Wineapple, Brenda, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Knopf, 2008. Charmingly written, dramatic, and engaging, this book relates the story of how Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd became the first editors of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Wineapple handily explains the editorial difficulties presented by the manuscripts and what decisions were made and why in the process of publishing them.

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In Music After a literary career that spanned seven decades and included a Nobel Prize in 1980, Czeslaw Milosz saw his Provinces published in 1991 when he was eighty years old. With this collection, he continued to demonstrate a unique metaphysical approach to craft as he investigated realms of desire, aging, and the essence of being.

CZESLAW MILOSZ 1991

‘‘In Music,’’ first published in the New Yorker in 1991 and later that year in Provinces, finds the poet confronting the meaning of existence and the fate of the spirit upon the death of the body. In order to tackle such daunting yet vital philosophical questions, Milosz turns to Gnostic and Manichean theology. As the speaker in the poem imagines a scene evoked by a duet of flute and drum, elements of these creeds inform and enrich his vision of humanity and nature’s detachment from it. As the vision vanishes, the speaker contemplates humanity’s quest for meaning in a world that will not chronicle individual lives. Then, continuing to use Gnostic and Manichean tenets, the speaker attempts to discover the fate of the spirit once released from the body. Ultimately, ‘‘In Music’’ attempts to seek balance between a transcendent rebirth and the natural world left behind.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Czeslaw Milosz (sometimes printed as Miłosz) was born June 30, 1911, in Szetejnie, Lithuania,

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Russian revolutionary poets. In 1934, Milosz received a master’s degree in law, and in 1936, his second volume of poems, Trzy zimy (later translated as Three Winters) was published. This collection shows Milosz exploring verse that delves into metaphysics and mysticism and harkens back to his Lithuanian roots. Milosz was granted a position at Warsaw Broadcasting Station, which sympathized with the Polish resistance movement, and worked there until the beginning of World War II. In 1939, when poets were discouraged from publishing because of governmental restrictions, he published Wiersze (later translated as Poems) under the pseudonym Jan Syruc. This work has the distinction of being the first underground publication in Poland.

Czeslaw Milosz (Ó Christopher Felver / Corbis)

a region of Poland. His father, Aleksander (a civil engineer) and mother, Weronika, were also of Lithuanian descent. Although the traditions of Lithuania influenced Milosz as a child, he was also shaped by Polish culture and language. Milosz attended the King Sigismundus Augustus Secondary School, located in Vilnius, from 1921 to 1929. His religious education was varied and expansive. He studied Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, and Protestantism, yet also explored Lithuanian literature that relied heavily on mysticism and folklore. However, the most influential was Gnosticism, derived from Christian theology, which centers on philosophies of spirit and matter. Although he was exposed to and influenced by nationalist and other political views, this exploration of religious studies more significantly shaped his ideological development. Although Milosz enrolled at the University of Vilnius in 1930 as a law student, he continued to pursue the study of literature. His first collection of poems, Poemat o czasie zastygł ym (later translated as Poem About Congealed Time), published in 1933, was essentially an emulation of

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Milosz remained in Warsaw during World War II where he witnessed the German occupation of Poland, the obliteration of the Jewish ghetto (1944), and the futile attempts of the Polish underground army. These experiences factored prominently in his writing during and after World War II. Milosz and his wife later escaped to Krakow where he published his third volume of poetry, Ocalenie (later translated as Rescue), in 1945. With this publication, he was deemed one of the most important post-war poets. Milosz’s post-war writings were complex. His work was characterized by his traumatic experiences in Warsaw and his recognition of the dark side of the human condition and of human nature. This awareness manifested in his stark view of the world and of literature. However, his ever present religious, yet nondenominational, piety and his belief in literature as a cultural force leavened moments of darkness with empathy and hope. This ideology is evident in his 1953 publication of essays, Zniewolony umysł (later translated as The Captive Mind), which gained him attention in the West. Milosz’s political views were challenged as he simultaneously opposed Soviet communism and recognized it as the unavoidable political system of a period of European history. However, he began to distance himself from socialist realism, which asked writers to conform fully to the Communist Party’s strict regulations on the content and publication of literature. In 1950, he accepted a position as cultural attache´ from Poland and worked briefly in Paris and Washington, D.C. However, facing pressure from the Communist Party to conform to literary restrictions and

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becoming disillusioned with socialist politics, he abruptly left his position and officially defected to France in 1951, there to focus solely on writing. As a result, Milosz was considered a rebel and an outcast, and his work was banned in his native country. There was also resistance to his works in France, as many French intellectuals suspected him of being a communist spy. Despite these difficulties, he was able to publish twelve works between 1953 and 1960. In 1960, Milosz left France to accept a position of lecturer (and eventually professor) in the Slavic Department at the University of California at Berkeley. During this period, much of his poetry contained vivid imagery of the Pacific Coast and San Francisco blended with Lithuanian landscapes and mysticism. Another issue Milosz addressed at this time was the growing intensity (and distrust) of U.S. politics during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Students and scholars at Berkeley began an intensive campaign to translate his work into English, which led to Milosz giving public readings of his poetry. One of the most significant poetry publications during his tenure at Berkeley was Gdzie sł onće wschodzi i kiedy zapada (translated as The Rising of the Sun) in 1974. In this work, Milosz pursued his interest in metaphysics as well as the relationship between the past and present. It also showed his writing more openly about his religious beliefs as well as other theological viewpoints. Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. This award resulted in increased translations of his poetry and prose and solidified his position as one of the top writers in the United States. Milosz’s reputation in Poland was also restored. In 1980 and 1981, the Solidarity movement was successful in fighting strict censorship laws. As a result, his work began to be republished and circulated. After the collapse of Soviet communism (1985–1991), his work was widely available, and he again gained renown in Poland and throughout Europe. Subsequently, he was able to visit Poland freely. Milosz resigned from his post at Berkley in l980 yet continued to add to an already substantial body of poetic works between 1981 and 2001, including Dalsze okolice (translated as Provinces), in which ‘‘In Music’’ appears. After a literary career that spanned seven decades, Milosz died in Krakow, Poland, at the age of ninety-three on August 14, 2004.

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POEM TEXT Wailing of a flute, a little drum. A small wedding cortege accompanies a couple Going past clay houses in the street of a village. In the dress of the bride much white satin. How many pennies put away to sew it, once in a lifetime. The dress of the groom black, festively stiff. The flute tells something to the hills, parched, the color of deer. Hens scratch in dry mounds of manure.

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I have not seen it, I summoned it listening to music. The instruments play for themselves, in their own eternity. 10 Lips glow, agile fingers work, so short a time. Soon afterwards the pageant sinks into the earth. But the sound endures, autonomous, triumphant, For ever visited by, each time returning, The warm touch of cheeks, interiors of houses, 15 And particular human lives Of which the chronicles make no mention.

POEM SUMMARY The first stanza of ‘‘In Music’’ opens with sounds of an eerie melody from two instruments. Through the use of personification, a technique that gives inanimate objects human qualities, a flute is wailing as it is accompanied by the beating of a small drum. The flute as a mournful, weeping instrument and the drum are connected to line 2. This music is being played as a wedding cortege (procession as in a funeral) moves through the village. The description of the party as a funeral procession is unconventional since a wedding day is symbolic of the beginning of a life together for the betrothed, rather than the end of it. This somber scene, rather than that of a joyous group of attending family and friends, is made even more haunting by the crying flute. Lines 4 through 6 provide a description of the wedding attire of the bride and groom. The bride’s gown is made of white satin; however, in line 5 the speaker interrupts the pleasing image as he cynically wonders how much the bride had to sacrifice in order to sew the dress that she will only wear for one day in her life (suggesting that she is a virgin). Contrasted with the whiteness of the bride’s gown is the black of her husband’s suit, presented in line 6. The speaker adds that the groom’s attire is stiff, yet still celebratory. A literal reading of this image indicates that the

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Fire, a collection of poetry and essays, as presented by Milosz during a 1987 literary reading in Washington, D.C., is available as an audio book distributed by Watershed Tapes (C-200). The Internet Poetry Archive Website, accessed through http://www.ibiblio.org offers audio recordings of Milosz’s poetry in English and Polish, including ‘‘A Poem for the End of the Century’’ and ‘‘A Conversation with Jeanne.’’ The Website is sponsored by the University of North Carolina Press and the University of North Carolina Arts Council. A 1997 audio CD entitled Czeslaw Milosz is presented by Lannan Literary Videos and showcases the writer reading selected poems. Musician Aivars Kalejs performs ‘‘Three Poems by Czeslaw Milosz: I. Windows’’ on the compilation album entitled Vasks: Mate Saule. The album also features the Latvian Radio Choir and music by composer Peteris Vasks. Kalejs’s Milosz-inspired song, recorded on November 30, 2001, is also available as a MP3 download.

suit is new, only worn once, and perhaps has been starched for the event. The groom is celebrating the event but may be uncomfortable in his clothing. The figurative reading, however, suggests an image of death, that of a man wearing his best suit being laid to rest in a coffin. This jarring, unexpected image is consistent with the previous illustration of the funeral-like procession and the wailing flute. The music then returns in the final two lines of the stanza, shifting attention from the bride and groom. Again using personification, the flute’s notes speak of the hills in the distance, which are thirsty and brown, much like deer. This literally suggests that there has been a lack of rain and the landscape shows it. The ground is arid and hens scratch at piles of manure. There is no mention of the bride and groom or the

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attending party. The barren landscape may also act as a harbinger for the young couple. The hills will eventually turn green with rain. Nature will continue the cycle of death and rebirth through the seasons, yet the couple will die. Stanza 2 marks a departure from the concrete, sensory imagery presented in stanza 1 and acts as a philosophical meditation on that imagery. In line 9, the speaker reveals that the wedding party, the village, and the landscape are not real. Instead, it is his imagined vision that is elicited while listening to music. The speaker then refers to humans as the instruments who conduct their own music during their time on earth, which they naively think is long. In line 11, he explains that the music is figuratively the makings of their lives—their words, actions, ambitions, and work. However, they do not realize the fleeting nature of time and they die. In stanza 1, the speaker refers to people as a cortege; here, they are described collectively as a pageant that dies, is buried, and returned to the earth. The use of the word ‘‘pageant’’ has special significance. First, pageantry is associated with shows or exhibitions, often of a grandiose nature. Second, these shows can be set to music and may be presented through tableaux providing a loosely unified drama. This serves as an apt metaphor for life, as perceived by the speaker. In the remaining lines of the poem (lines 13– 17), the speaker reflects on the afterlife. Although death occurs and the body ceases to exist, the spirit survives and is immortal. The speaker equates this spirit to that of the sound of music, which can linger in one’s mind long after the melody ends. Then, using images of intimacy and the security of home in lines 14 and 15, the speaker observes that the memory of the dead as well as their spirit are kept alive by those left behind. The poem ends with the assertion that history will not document the lives of those who died or the lives of those who remember them. However, the life-affirming images of the warmth of human touch and the sanctuary of a home balance this outlook with optimism and serve as a bridge between the natural world and a transcendent state. Through a simple yet haunting musical evocation, the poem poses complex questions about the meaning of existence, the purpose of human life, and the nature of an afterlife. The poet offers no answers, perhaps implying that life’s mysteries are not within the power of a poem to solve.

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Compose an original two-stanza poem (of at least fifteen lines), emulating the content and style of Milosz’s ‘‘In Music.’’ In the first stanza, describe a scene conjured while listening to music. Attempt to incorporate vivid imagery that connects humans with elements of nature. In stanza two, provide a philosophical explanation for why these visions were elicited from music. Consider how this reverie could possibly tie into ideas about existence. Read Billy Collins’s poem, ‘‘Man Listening to Disc,’’ which describes the thoughts of a speaker listening to jazz as he walks the streets of his city. Write an essay in which you compare and contrast this poem to Milosz’s ‘‘In Music.’’ Consider each poet’s use of images of nature, what characterizes the reveries of each speaker and their effect on them, and what connections each makes with music and his sense of his place in the world. Read T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘‘The Metaphysical Poets’’ (1921), in which Eliot argues that metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century should be lauded for its unique qualities and its deviation from Elizabethan love poetry. Eliot also discusses the characteristics of metaphysical poetry and its power to influence future poets as an exciting approach to craft. Next, conduct research on Milosz’s views on metaphysical poetry. Then, in the voice of Milosz, compose a letter addressed to Eliot,

THEMES Existence and Meaning Using a vision evoked from the music of a flute and drum, the speaker suggests thought-provoking ideas on existence and meaning. He poses questions concerning the purpose of a life on earth that inevitably leads to death. This is demonstrated through the depiction of the wedding party

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in which Milosz responds to the ideas posited in Eliot’s essay. Consider whether Milosz would agree, overall, with Eliot’s ideas and if Milosz would deem the poem ‘‘In Music’’ a metaphysical work. Milosz’s ‘‘In Music’’ contains hints of Lithuanian mysticism. The poet writes that the time to live is short and eventually humanity will return to and become one with the earth. Conduct research on Lithuanian culture and folklore. Pay special attention to spiritual beliefs concerning the earth and other elements of nature as well as the relation between the living and dead. Write an essay in which you first present your research findings. Then, discuss your culture’s beliefs concerning religion/spirituality, its rituals, and how these beliefs shape your view of the existence or non-existence of an afterlife. Include how your cultural beliefs compare with those of Lithuanian culture. Read Anne Bradstreet’s young adult poem, ‘‘The Flesh and the Spirit,’’ which addresses the ongoing battle between good and evil through a personified dialogue between flesh/body and spirit/soul. Create an essay in which you compare and contrast the poet’s imagery of the flesh and spirit to that of Milosz’s ‘‘In Music.’’ Discuss how Bradstreet’s philosophy of the superior heavenly soul connects with Milosz’s depiction of the victorious spirit.

accompanying the bride and groom as a funerallike procession, suggesting that despite the happy years spent together as husband and wife, ultimately their union will end in death. He then generally observes that people naively believe life is long. However, despite the fact that they attempt to assign purpose to their existence through relationships and work, ultimately they die, without history documenting their personal lives. Overall,

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the speaker’s vision evokes the universal question of the meaning and purpose of people’s lives.

Cycle of Life and Death To compliment the poet’s musings on existence and meaning, images of the natural world are used to illustrate the cycle of life and death. The landscape surrounding the village is described as brown hills in need of rain. In the streets, hens scratch at dry manure. This scene is taking place in a dry period during the summer. However, when rain comes, nature will be replenished. Even the somewhat unpleasing image of manure can be considered life-affirming as manure contains seeds to feed hens and as it decays it fertilizes the earth. As summer turns to fall and fall to winter, the cycle of death and rebirth within the natural world continue. The certainty and unchanging nature of this cycle contrast with the lives of the wedding couple and people in general who, despite their efforts to control their destinies, ultimately do not survive just like creatures in nature, such as the deer and hens. The suggestion is that the speaker believes the order of nature is greater than the human lifespan. However, when people die, their bodies finally merge with the physical world, as they are buried and the bodies decompose.

Dualism: Flesh versus Spirit Various images within the poem hint at the philosophy of dualism, that human beings are comprised of two irreducible elements—matter (flesh) and spirit. The village houses are made of clay; a literal reading is that clay is an earthy material used to form brick, tile, and pottery. However, clay is often referred to as the human body, apart from its spirit. The structure of the home (clay/body) may house the spirit within, but it is a separate entity. The speaker notes that when death occurs, it is the end of the body, which is buried in the earth. Once the body ceases to exist, the spirit is released, as demonstrated with the image of music continuing after those conducting it have perished. The spirit’s freedom from the confines of the earthly body suggests that the speaker is exploring ideas concerning the afterlife. Although it cannot be proven that the spirit attains eternal life after death, a widely accepted religious belief, it is clear that the spirit is superior to the body, as evinced through the speaker’s description of its release resulting in victory.

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A flute being played (Image copyright Svemir, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

STYLE Personification Through the use of personification, a figure of speech which attributes human qualities to abstract ideas, animals, or inanimate objects, the flute is described as emitting wails, rather than the pleasant tones associated with this instrument. The image of a crying flute as it accompanies a newly wed couple disrupts what should be a happy moment for the bride and groom. The music animates the imagined and remembered scene, seemingly testifying to the life force that permeates the natural world and perpetuates its life-death-life cycles.

Imagery The images presented in the poem appeal to one or more of the five senses. The sound of the mourning flute is auditory, and the houses made of clay set against a brown, dry landscape are visual. Images of nature continue as hens peck at piles of manure, eliciting an earthy scent and sound. The earth is presented as a burial ground. In the midst of this scene set to music, the bride and groom are described solely through the colors of their attire—the folds of white satin starkly contrasted with the stiff black

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 1990s: Metaphysical poetry with its paradoxical imagery and cerebral wit is written in the late twentieth century, including Milosz’s Provinces (1991), Selected Poems of Yehuda Amichai (1996), and From the Devotions by Carl Phillips (1998). Today: Scholars recognize that the main goal of metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century is similar to that of contemporary writers—the desire to comprehend significant political, religious, and scientific advancements. Publications such as Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science (2006), by Robert Crawford, and American Poets of the Twenty-first Century (2007), edited by Claudia Rankin and Lisa Sewell, examine the role of modern poets as they continue to scrutinize cultural and political shifts. 1990s: Milosz’s Gnostic interest in souls as independent from matter is grounded in his religious studies during his secondary education. The expression of this interest surfaces in ‘‘In Music’’ and other poems included in

Provinces. However, literature of the Gnostic movement is thought to be non-existent by the end of the fifth century and is not a popular scholarly subject for study. A renewed interest in its tenets occurs in the late twentieth century with the findings of an ancient Gnostic library located in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, and Gnostic literature, specifically the Gospel of Judas, in El Minya, Egypt.

of the groom’s suit. Intimacy of warm cheeks and the comforts of home serve to leaven the somewhat bleak scene and elicit a sense of hope within the poem. The poet’s use of sensory imagery makes the poem more vivid and serves to ground readers in reality before shifting the focus to the more philosophical considerations of the closing stanza.

objective and/or scientific explanations of reality. This artistic movement was reflected in cultural and literary commentary, art, literature, and architecture. In postmodern literature, writers asserted that reality cannot be the one and the same for all individuals. These authors rejected universal explanations that could be applied across cultures, races, and religious sects. Instead, they explained that a true understanding of reality comes through individual beliefs about what the world means and each person’s place in it. Some postmodernist authors chose to create parodies of the quest for such meaning. Postmodernist writers also favored tangible experiences rather than abstract ideas. Although Milosz often took a metaphysical rather than concrete approach to his subject matter, he was influenced by

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Postmodernism Although dates for this movement are difficult to pinpoint, it is generally believed the postmodernism began in the post-World War II era (early 1950s) as a cultural reaction to

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Today: Several Gnostic churches exist in the United States, including the Ecclesia Gnostica in Los Angeles, led by Stephen A. Heller. Heller also oversees the Gnostic Society, which promotes the creeds of Gnosticism by maintaining the Gnosis Archive, a Website devoted to documenting source materials on Gnosticism (past and present). In popular culture, elements of Gnostic beliefs surface in New Age cults, as a result of the 1987 Harmonic Convergence (planetary alignment of sun, moon, and six of eight planets) and continues in the twenty-first century.

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A wedding procession in 1945 (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

postmodernist thought concerning personal truths and the meaning of individual lives within the larger context of history.

Postwar Literature (1945–1999) This particular genre appeared immediately following the end of World War II. It often reflected writers’ ideas about the West’s stature, politically and geographically, as a result of war. This literature also addresses the growing sense of disillusionment and cynicism in the aftermath of mass murder, the Holocaust, and the eventual collapse of Soviet communism in the 1980s. Writers such as George Orwell, Salman Rushdie, and Samuel Beckett also addressed cultural shifts regarding scientific, religious, and political developments in the postwar United States and in Europe. In Warsaw, during World War II, Milosz witnessed the defeat of the Polish underground army, the subsequent occupation of Poland by

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the German army, as well as the destruction of the Jewish ghetto and much of Warsaw in 1944, events that influenced much of his writing during and after World War II. Often his poetry addressed the trauma people experience during wartime. His disillusionment is expressed in his imagery, which shows the dark side of human existence. He also began to question Christian theology, posing difficult questions about the meaning of existence, the presence of God, and the belief in an afterlife.

Metaphysical Poetry Metaphysical poetry originated in the seventeenth century. John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, among others, are credited with writing a new kind of poetry that deviated from Elizabethan love poetry. Metaphysical poetry was characterized by complicated philosophical ideas and intellectual cleverness. Its figurative language was unconventional to the point of being bizarre. Metaphysical poets

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focused on the transcendent beyond the natural world and tried to imagine and convey a reality beyond the scope of human perception. Renewing interest in the genre, in 1921, T. S. Eliot wrote the essay ‘‘The Metaphysical Poets,’’ which praises seventeenth-century poets for revolutionizing poetry. Eliot argues that modern poets should use the metaphysical approach in their own work. Milosz’s interest in metaphysics began during his secondary school education (1921–1929), and he used this approach in his work during and after World War II. Much of his postwar poetry, including ‘‘In Music,’’ contains characteristics of metaphysical poetry.

Gnosticism Until the twentieth century, Gnosticism was considered a Christian heresy, an incomprehensible and remote school of thought. However, modern scholarship recognizes that Gnosticism predated and heavily influenced Christianity. Although once deemed an amalgamation of other creeds, Gnosticism is recognized as a separate and distinct religion. Gnosticism is includes the belief that matter is wicked and salvation of the spirit from matter can only occur through gnosis (knowledge of spiritual truth). Milosz was influenced by Gnostic tenets and often imagined the spirit’s release from matter, particularly in poems written during his later years as he faced his own aging process.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW ‘‘In Music’’ first appeared in the New Yorker on March 11, 1991, and it was published later that year as part of the collection Provinces. In this work, Milosz, then in his eighties, examined themes on aging and offered meditations on religion, the afterlife, and the world of art. The Virginia Quarterly Review observed: ‘‘As always in Milosz, these meditative poems are filled with specific reminiscences and sharp insights. Never does he delude himself.’’ The review also described this collection as containing ‘‘timeless poems that are marvelously translated by the author and Robert Hass.’’ However, not all critics were as impressed, with the translations. In a review of Provinces, David Dooley, writing for Hudson Review stated that he had ‘‘a couple of quibbles about the translations: ‘decoded’ . . . now carries with it the stench

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of academic jargon, and ‘supported’ in its current psychobabble sense . . . seems anomalous when applied to the Europe of several decades ago.’’ However, Dooley agreed that other poems cotranslated by Haas demonstrate the translator’s ‘‘good ear and fine sense of flow.’’ Dooley also emphasized the proficiency of Milosz who continued to add to an already massive body of work: ‘‘It isn’t Milosz the ‘eminent poet’ who impresses in Provinces, but the poet who continues to do good work when he might well have stopped.’’ Despite the challenges of capturing the Polish rhythms and tones of Milosz’s voice in an English translation, ultimately Provinces was highly regarded and well received. Bill Marx in Parnassus: Poetry in Review wrote that ‘‘Milosz’s transformative intelligence weaves a lyrical response to the changes wrought on the past by time.’’ Marx described the poet’s metaphysical meditations, evident in ‘‘In Music’’ as an ‘‘an inner landscape of clashing contraries and times. . . . deserts formed by perceptions of nature’s indifference are dotted with oases rooted in intimations of the transcendent.’’ Suzanne Keen, a reviewer for Commonweal, agreed that Milosz is a ‘‘poet who both soars above the earth and sees in it every detail.’’ Critics also noted that Milosz was writing more Christian-themed poems in his later years as seen in Provinces and in his previous volume, The Collected Poems 1931–1987. In ‘‘A Clamor of Tongues,’’ published in the New Republic, Donald Davie depicted these pieces as ‘‘serene and exhilarating, . . . It is not the serenity of a man who at last has all the answers, but of a man who acknowledges that some tormenting questions are unanswerable.’’ Milosz continued to use a metaphysical approach to his poems in Provinces, posing difficult questions concerning the transcendent nature of reality. Often the existence of God was questioned and the meaninglessness of existence described, as ‘‘In Music’’ and other poems illustrate. However, he ultimately would return to his Christian belief of redemption and the inherent goodness of humankind, and these sentiments often surface in even the bleakest poems. Helen Vendler, reviewer for the New York Review of Books, asserted that Milosz’s poetry ponders ‘‘how to permit, along with the subterranean fury and its icy calm, the simultaneous existence of luminosity, faith and hope.’’ Selected poems from Provinces later appeared in the 2003 New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001

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and also in the 2006 posthumous collection Selected Poems, 1931–2004. In a review of Selected Poems, Publishers Weekly proclaimed that the work ‘‘should renew national attention to a poet of international significance.’’

ITS FREEDOM FROM THE BODY IS A HUGE VICTORY. THE SPIRIT, DESCRIBED AS LINGERING SOUNDS OF MUSIC, IS AT LAST AN INDEPENDENT, IMMORTAL, AND BOUNDLESS ENTITY.’’

CRITICISM Wendy Perkins Perkins is a professor of English at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland and has published several articles on American and British literature. In this essay, she explores how Manichean and Gnostic philosophy are used in the poem ‘‘In Music’’ to convey a statement regarding existence and the fate of the spirit within the body. Many poets have taken a theological approach to their writing. For example, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s seventeenthcentury epic Paradise Lost incorporate religious beliefs in poetry that investigates human existence, morality, and life beyond material existence. Following in this tradition, Czeslaw Milosz investigated theologies, using them as his predecessors did as a vehicle to pose complex questions that cannot be answered. However, his diverse background in theological study makes his poetry unique. Although Milosz was Catholic, he did not limit his thought or work to Catholicism. As a young man, he studied various practices, including Gnosticism and Manichean philosophy. As a result of this varied education, Milosz often took a metaphysical approach to poetry. This perspective lends his speakers a sense of faith coupled with skepticism. As he entered his later years, Milosz often drew on Gnostic and Manichean ideas to explore the essence of being and the fate of the spirit within and beyond the body. Using these theologies in ‘‘In Music,’’ Milosz crafts a thought-provoking, multilayered approach to questions of existence and the afterlife. As Milosz pursued his early studies, he was increasingly drawn to the tenets of Gnosticism and Manichean philosophy despite being raised Catholic. Theologians believe that Gnosticism predates Christianity and various Gnostic sources are documented as far back as the second century B.C. Manichean philosophy is known to have originated in Persia during the third century A.D. Each practice discerns the body as

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separate from its spirit, and they both consider the fate of that spirit in the afterlife. Milosz was intrigued by how Gnosticism defined matter, specifically the human body, as having a propensity for evil and immoral acts. The body’s main function is to house the spirit, which is deemed superior to the body. Therefore, mortals serve no purpose until death, when the spirit within the body is released. Although the speaker of ‘‘In Music’’ does not overtly denounce the body (or people) as evil, his cynical, at times mocking tone implies that humans are essentially naive, doomed to believe their time on earth is long and that their lives have great meaning. In stanza 1, the wedding party envisioned by the speaker as he listens to the music of flute and drum is not described as a joyful group celebrating the union and new life of the bride and groom. Rather, it is depicted as a funeral procession, a cortege accompanied by the sobbing of a flute. The personalities and emotions of the bride and groom are not part of this portrait. Instead, they are described solely by their clothing. This suggests that their bodies are only for show, decked in trivial material, which the speaker cynically notes will only be worn for one day. The Gnostic philosophy is also used in stanza 2, as the speaker broadens his observations to discuss all people. Whereas the bride and groom are reduced to their attire, the futile quest of people in general to achieve meaning in their existence is evoked through only two images, that of lips and fingers. People, likened now to instruments, chatter endlessly with one another each day. The poet’s choice of diction for this image, that mouths ‘‘blow,’’ suggests that people, despite their good intentions, may brag about their accomplishments, thus exaggerating their sense of self-importance. It may also suggest that words, in the grand scheme of things, actually

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New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, published in 2003, features Milosz’s metaphysical and Manichean approach as well as his interplay of theology, science, and politics.

The Captive Mind, a collection of essays written by Milosz and published in 1990, discusses the conflicts faced by citizens living under totalitarian regimes. Milosz draws upon his own experiences with Soviet communism in Poland, including the hardships he faced as a writer under Soviet rule. He also discusses the downfalls of left- and right-wing beliefs and includes a warning to the West to learn from European history. As a result, this work generated much interest from its American audience. Native Realm: A Search for Self Definition (originally published in 1959 and translated in 1968), is an autobiographical account of Milosz’s travels and reflections during and after World War II. The author’s reflections focus on post-war Europe, the effects of war on citizens, and how history redefines cultural and personal identity. Milosz’s A Treatise on Poetry, originally published in 1956 then translated and published in 2001, examines the devastation of twentieth-century wars. Divided into four poems, the first part begins at the end of

mean nothing more than the air that comes out of people’s mouths. They also put their hands to work, believing that life is long, hoping to carve out their place in history, securing recognition and memory. The speaker wryly notes that despite this effort, history will not document their lives. They are then portrayed as a pageant, their days a procession that inevitably moves toward the grave. Milosz also uses a Manichean approach to compliment the elements of Gnosticism, specifically the Manichean doctrine of dualism. First,

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the nineteenth century and in subsequent poems discusses World War I and II as well as the collapse of Soviet communism in Europe. With this work, Milosz attempts to use poetry to chronicle significant historical events.

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, published in 1996, presents work by Jerusalem’s poet as part of the series Literature of the Middle East. Amichai takes a modern metaphysical approach in his poems, which focus on religious and political conflicts in Jerusalem. Similar to Milosz, the poet also studies the unpredictable nature of life and investigates a reality that exists outside objective experiences.

The Metaphysical Poets (1960), edited by Helen Gardner, is a Penguin Classic publication that presents selected works by seventeenth century writers, including John Donne, Andrew Marvel, and John Milton.

The young adult novel Man from the Other Side, written by Uri Orlev, tells the story of fourteen-year-old Marek who lives near the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. Marek and his grandparents risk their lives to hide a Jewish man in the days leading up to the Jewish uprising.

the universe is viewed as being controlled by two opposing forces, good and evil. This differs slightly from the Gnostic tenet, which asserts the evil nature of the body. Second, similar to Gnosticism, Manicheans believe that humans are comprised of matter (the body) and spirit. The poet’s use of color to describe the attire of the bride and groom conveys the basic dualism of reality and the binary construct of good and evil. The white satin of the bride’s dress represents purity and goodness (and perhaps naivety), whereas the black stiffness of her

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husband’s suit suggests iniquity. These images contrast with the supposedly happy occasion of a wedding. The speaker’s reference to the renunciations (a term often associated with ascetic self-denial) the bride endured to wear white, implies that she is a virgin, dutifully waiting until her wedding night to consummate the marriage. The groom is then viewed as the agent that can strip the bride of her virginity and, therefore, her innocence. Like Gnostics, Manicheans believe that humans are comprised of matter, or the body, the main function of which is to harbor the spirit. The speaker imagines the wedding party walking past the village’s clay houses. In one sense a literal description, the clay also suggests the Biblical Adam. Psalms 90:3 states that Adam is merely a body made of clay. He was made from dust of the ground (a reference to Genesis 2:7), and he will be returned to dust, just as the speaker observes that ultimately bodies return to the earth. The description of clay houses also seems to allude to another biblical metaphor in which the body is described as the physical shelter or home of the spirit. In the second book of Corinthians, Paul writes that the human body is a tent to live in, while awaiting true salvation in heaven. Paul declares that a man-made structure such as a tent can easily be destroyed (as a clay house can be), yet the spirits of true believers are indestructible. Here the poet briefly illustrates his Christian and Catholic faith, influenced by Manichean tenets. Milosz extends this Manichean dualism to the juxtaposition of humans and nature. As the people walk the streets of their village, the surrounding landscape is strangely detached from them. Although the speaker notes that they are walking past clay houses, he does not see them interacting with nature. The brown hills, the manure, and the hens are presented as a separate scene, without drawing the attention of the wedding party. The sole moment when nature and humans interact is when people die and their bodies are returned to the earth. This dualism expresses a tenet of Manichean thought that Milosz was particularly drawn to—that people have no separate intrinsic worth in the natural order of the things. Similar to Manichean practice, Gnosticism’s dogma is also characterized by dualism; however, this dualism concerns the concept of God. First, God is deemed the omnipotent and

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true being, the spiritual essence of all things, living and non-living. However, there is the false or flawed God who created an imperfect world. As such, Gnostics believe that humanity mirrors this dualism. In this regard, the speaker does present humans, including the bride and groom, as flawed characters, who have yet to realize that their ultimate purpose occurs after death rather than during their mortal span. However, despite their shortcomings, they still retain the light of a merciful and true God, embodied in their spirit. Finally, Milosz draws on Gnostic and Manichean doctrine to confront the notion of the afterlife witnessed through the emancipation of the spirit from the body. According to Gnostic belief, the spirit is held captive within this matter and can only be freed through gnosis (Greek for ‘‘knowledge’’), which refers to spiritual truths revealed to those who have fully given their lives to Gnosticism. It is only through gnosis that salvation is attained. Gnostics also believe that a soul has to experience several lives through reincarnation, emphasized by the speaker’s description of the spirit as a continuously returning force. In Manichean philosophy, the spirit is believed to be trapped within the body and can only be released upon death. Whereas Gnostics believe that salvation of the spirit occurs through gnosis, Manicheans believe it is achieved through asceticism. This strict selfdenial and sacrifice, which demonstrates personal conviction and spiritual discipline, is suggested in the renunciations endured by the bride in order to wear white. In both theologies, there is no specific reference to an eternal home for the spirit, such as heaven. Unlike the tenets of Milosz’s Catholicism, these theologies assert that the spirit has the power to exist either through reincarnation on earth or in a transcendental state beyond material existence. The Gnostic and Manichean belief in the power of the spirit surfaces in stanza 2. When the body is buried and the spirit is liberated from matter, the newly released spirit is grandiose. Its freedom from the body is a huge victory. The spirit, described as lingering sounds of music, is at last an independent, immortal, and boundless entity. But then speaker appears to doubt his assumptions, perhaps realizing that what is left for him is the natural world. He next connects images of humanity with spirit. This is unexpected since previous depictions of people in

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the poem stressed the futility of existence on earth. He now observes that the spirits are kept alive by those left behind. Life-affirming and positive images of warm cheeks and the cozy interior of a house enable the spirit to endure. It is here that ‘‘In Music’’ is most complex. The speaker has pondered whether life on earth has any real purpose and takes a detached, cynical view of human efforts to discover meaning. Although the speaker does acknowledge that specific lives may not be documented in history, he vacillates between faith and doubt. He ultimately returns to the goodness of humans, thereby validating their mortal lives. Although briefly presented, the implicit emotions of happiness, conjured by the touch of cheeks and the security of a home infuse this somewhat bleak outlook with hope. Despite Milosz’s metaphysical exploration, he affirms that the natural world continues after death. The use of Gnostic and Manichean theology gives this multilayered poem its rich imagery and underlying meaning. With the beginning notes of flute and drum in the first stanza, Milosz creates the speaker’s imaginative vision of a vanished reality. Gnostic and Manichean philosophies of dualism and redemption allow the speaker to seek an essential meaning in existence and, although not overtly stated, a personal meaning in his own life. Written when Milosz was eighty years old, the poem seems to reveal the poet’s search for the meaning of his own existence. The poem offers no definite answers and confirms no specific faith. However, through his use of theology, Milosz discovers an approach to craft that allows him to explore these complicated, yet fundamental questions. Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on ‘‘In Music,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

Laura Sheahen In the following essay, Sheahen describes the religious poetry of Czeslaw Milosz and puts his work in the context of his life as a Catholic.

Belief and Doubt in the Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz What are we to make of a genius who states categorically that he believes in angels, the Fall, the Gospels and the spirit of God brooding over human history—yet whose faith eludes us even at his most candid? One of the world’s and Christianity’s great poets, Poland’s Czeslaw Milosz, has left us. The

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IN MILOSZ’S POETRY, AS IN LIFE, THE QUESTION OF SUFFERING OVERSHADOWS ALL SPECULATIONS ON THE NATURE OF GOD.’’

Catholic who just a few years ago wrote of God: ‘‘Now You are closing down my five senses, slowly, / And I am an old man lying in darkness’’ died on Aug. 14 [2004]. His work remains, a solace and a challenge to believers everywhere. Along with Israel’s Yehuda Amichai, Milosz wrote some of the most searching religious poetry of the 20th century. The man may have found his certainties on that August day, and the angels of the Lord may have gone out to meet him; but here on earth, the questions raised in his poems still clamor. It is usually a dangerous game to assume that the ‘‘I’’ of the poem is the poet. With Milosz’s transparent first-person verse, however, we are more justified in thinking that the ‘‘I believe’’ refers to the man himself. Flip through his collected works, and every third poem seems to wrestle, Jacob-like, with religious mysteries. Yet the avalanche of Christian imagery and outright credos fails to settle several questions. What kind of God, loving or otherwise, does the poet believe in? Are humans more good than bad? Will anything overcome evil? In one sense, Christians could hardly hope for a more orthodox poet. ‘‘Only Christ is the lord and master of history,’’ says one ode. Speaking of God: ‘‘overwhelmed by pity, / you descended to the earth / to experience the condition of mortal creatures.’’ Milosz’s earthy, tactile poetry clearly reflects an incarnational theology, which he touches on in other meditations: Every day He dies The only one, all-loving, Who without any need Consented and allowed To exist all that is, Including nails of torture. Milosz confesses, in the original sense of that word, that his world swarms with spiritual beings: ‘‘Though of weak faith, I believe in forces and powers / Who crowd every inch of the air.’’

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His poetry covers not only these spiritual beings, but also the Bible, prayer, the afterlife and the whole wide sweep of Christian theology. On angels: ‘‘They say someone has invented you / but to me this does not sound convincing / for humans invented themselves as well.’’ On reading Scripture: ‘‘it is proper that we move our finger / Along letters more enduring than those carved in stone.’’ A friend’s suffering proves the existence of Hell: ‘‘You remember, therefore you have no doubt; there is a Hell for certain,’’ Milosz says in ‘‘Proof.’’

Milosz, then, was a different kind of religious poet. No wonder his verse, saturated with Catholic imagery, is not often used in homilies or quoted in devotional books. No wonder his remarkable and vivid lines are not (yet) used to buttress or ornament theological arguments. He was a seeker’s Catholic and a Catholic seeker, unsure of his beliefs even when professing orthodoxy, arriving at no certainties even when repeating age-old creeds. Milosz’s brilliant inconsistency mirrors our own: he wants to believe but only occasionally succeeds.

Milosz was fully engaged in the Christian literary tradition: his work speaks of translating the Psalms and New Testament Greek, quotes Martin Luther in epigraphs and mentions his indebtedness to Simone Weil. His poems are not simply Christian, but specifically Catholic in both outlook and details. There is an ode to Pope John Paul II, that ‘‘Polish romantic’’; a fond recollection of Milosz’s childhood priest; and references to monstrances, the Mass, the Virgin Mary and the role of the church (‘‘for years / I have been trying to understand what it was’’).

Milosz has more than usual justification for his ‘‘weak faith.’’ Born in Lithuania in 1911, he worked for the Polish resistance during World War II before defecting to the West in the 1950’s. A man who witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust and the war had a right to doubt. The miracle, indeed, is that he could believe at all. Though a childhood faith of incense-filled churches breathes through many of his poems, the same poems make clear that 20th-century history battered and scarred that faith until it was almost unrecognizable.

Perhaps Milosz’s most powerful declaration of faith appeared in his essay ‘‘If Only This Could Be Said’’: ‘‘I must ask if I believe that the four Gospels tell the truth. My answer to this is yes. So I believe in an absurdity, that Jesus rose from the dead? Just answer without any of those evasions and artful tricks employed by theologians: Yes or no? I answer, Yes, and by that response I nullify death’s omnipotence.’’

In Milosz’s poetry, as in life, the question of suffering overshadows all speculations on the nature of God. ‘‘How can it be, such an order of the world—unless it was created by a cruel demiurge?’’ one poem asks. Even if it was not, Milosz’ lines on Purgatory reflect his feelings about God inside history: ‘‘howlings and pain . . . Contradict continuously the goodness of God.’’

In this same essay, however, Milosz made a confession that frequently appears in his poetry: ‘‘I understand nothing’’—about God, religion, salvation, even ethics. ‘‘This is too difficult for me,’’ he says in the poem ‘‘How It Should Be in Heaven.’’ His is not just a failure of comprehension but of belief; he freely admits that as with most of us, his faith often wavers. Milosz’s poems spell out, even embrace, his religious contradictions: ‘‘I am fond of sumptuous garments and disguises / Even if there is no truth in the painted Jesus.’’ ‘‘I am unable to imagine myself among the disciples of Jesus / When they wandered through Asia Minor from city to city.’’ Finally, there is the perplexed admission that ‘‘I don’t know how to care about the salvation of my soul.’’ Writing poetry that is obsessed with the fundamental questions of Christianity, Milosz yet knew that a ‘‘desire for faith is not the same as faith.’’

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If God, Jesus and even angels are out there, is not their function, Christian theology argues, to save us? Milosz might answer that they may save us spiritually, but they will not save us from earthly suffering, even the most appalling and degrading suffering. While the devils and malevolent spirits that crowd Milosz’s poetic landscape can harm us, the celestial beings that populate it just as thickly cannot save us from this harm. Unlike most people preoccupied with God’s relation to human suffering, Milosz did not attempt explanations. The poem ‘‘A Story’’ describes a grizzly bear who has rampaged for years because of a blinding and incomprehensible pain: a toothache. Humans, too, are doomed to suffer inexplicable pain, ‘‘and not always with the hope / that we will be cured by some dentist from heaven.’’ Similarly, ‘‘I pray to you . . . / Because my heart desires you,’’ says another poem, ‘‘though I do not believe you would cure me.’’ In ‘‘Theodicy’’

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and other poems, Milosz chides ‘‘sweet theologians’’ whose rarified proof texts are so much straw in the face of human agony. The magnificent recent poem ‘‘Prayer’’ says flatly that Jesus’ ‘‘suffering / . . . cannot save the world from pain.’’ How much less, then, can ordinary religion be expected to help? In the ‘‘huge war’’ with ‘‘the Great Spirit of Nonbeing, the Prince of the World,’’ God, ‘‘is defeated every day / And does not give signs through his churches.’’ Does this imply God will win the war, if not the battle? We cannot speculate, because the party in question is missing in action: God ‘‘has been hiding so long it has been forgotten / how he revealed himself . . . in the breast of a young Jew.’’ The divine attributes of justice and mercy are similarly veiled: ‘‘God does not multiply sheep and camels for the virtuous / and takes nothing away for murder and perjury.’’ Milosz once called Job the most poetic book of the Bible, and Job’s cry resounds through his poems, with the same inscrutable results. In his 1980 Nobel lecture, Milosz said that ‘‘the demoniac doings of History’’ acquire ‘‘the traits of bloodthirsty Deity.’’ Even if these traits are deceiving, it’s impossible to assert, based on the evidence alone, that ‘‘history has a providential meaning.’’ In a poem that references the gulags, Milosz says ‘‘when out of pity for others I begged a miracle, / The sky and the earth were silent, as always.’’ Can we understand Milosz’s beliefs? In the poems, God seems simultaneously omnipotent and powerless, steadfast and capricious, allpervading and nonexistent. Evil is winning; good is winning. God has abandoned humanity; God breathes through everything we do. Prayer, if not pointless, is lacking in efficacy—‘‘you ask me how to pray to someone who is not’’—and yet so many of the poems are prayers. Milosz made no apology for his inconsistencies, for they are the stuff of real religion. He prefaced ‘‘Two Poems’’ with the statement ‘‘the poems taken together testify to my contradictions, since the opinions voiced in one and the other are equally mine.’’ Many contemporary thinkers have argued that doubt is integral to belief, and Milosz is no exception. Speaking to God, the title character of ‘‘An Alcoholic Enters the Gates of Heaven’’ says, ‘‘It seems to me that people who cannot believe in you / deserve your praise.’’ The ode to the pope suggests that ‘‘only the doubters remain faithful.’’

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The poet’s beliefs spark and glimmer and fall, only to rise from the ashes in the next poem. As his work shifted in and out of orthodoxy, how did Milosz keep the faith? Only in the most important sense: he kept talking to God. Though any Pole of his age would be justified in ending the conversation, Milosz miraculously did not succumb to permanent bitterness. ‘‘I have felt the pull of despair,’’ he said in the Nobel lecture, ‘‘yet on a deeper level, I believe, my poetry remained sane and, in a dark age, expressed a longing for the Kingdom of Peace and Justice.’’ Worshipping the God who nourished him ‘‘with honey and wormwood,’’ reciting prayers ‘‘against my abominable unbelief,’’ and perhaps ‘‘made wise by mere searching,’’ Milosz stood with those who ‘‘prais[ed] your name’’ even as they continued to suffer. Writing into his 90s, he identified himself as a ‘‘worker in the vineyard’’ and hoped he would ‘‘prove to be deserving.’’ Embracing the most painful contradictions, Milosz’s great poetic and spiritual achievement is that he refused, finally, to give God the silent treatment. Perhaps now his uncertain prayers are fulfilled, and he walks, as he hoped, ‘‘holding the hem of the king’s garment.’’ Source: Laura Sheahen, ‘‘A Different Kind of Faithfulness,’’ in America, Vol. 191, No. 14, November 8, 2004, pp. 8–11.

Jeremy Driscoll In the following essay, Driscoll, a Benedictine monk, gives a Catholic reading of Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry, particularly those poems which explore a Christian or Catholic theme. Joseph Brodsky once declared that ‘‘Czeslaw Milosz is one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest.’’ After his death on August 14 [2004], many of the obituaries and published tributes said the same thing. Milosz’s greatness was displayed not only in his poetry but also in his prose. In both he showed himself to be one of the bravest and sharpest thinkers of his time, as most critics have agreed. Yet there is an element of his greatness that has been generally avoided or underestimated even by his admirers. One rarely sees Milosz discussed as a Christian writer or his work as an expression of a profoundly religious imagination. How is it possible to praise Milosz as poet and thinker without coming to grips with his Christian vision? To do so is not just to ignore an essential dimension of his work; it is to miss the heart of his message.

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HIS FINE MIND AND HIS NATURAL SOPHISTICATION CAUSED HIM TO HESITATE BEFORETHE REQUIREMENTS OF FAITH. BUT IN THE END HE REJECTED THE OPTION OF TURNING HIS SOPHISTICATION AGAINST MORE SIMPLE BELIEVERS.’’

Czeslaw Milosz was born in Szetejnie in 1911 and raised in Wilno, both of which are in present-day Lithuania. His family was part of the large Polish-speaking population of that city. For this reason he identified himself as a Polish writer. Living there through his university education, he was present in 1939 when the Soviets invaded Lithuania, while Hitler simultaneously invaded Poland. At great personal risk, he escaped through the Soviet borders and worked for the Polish resistance in Warsaw throughout the war. Once the war had ended, he tried to make a life for himself in his own nation and was part of the diplomatic corps of Communist Poland’s postwar government. He was posted to the consulate in New York and the embassy in Washington. In 1951, while he was serving as the cultural attache´ at the Polish embassy in Paris, he defected. He remained in France until 1960, when he took a position at the University of California, Berkeley, as a professor of Slavic literature. In 1980, at the age of seventy, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Having lived in exile for fifty years, he moved from the United States to Krakow in 2001 and died there this summer at the age of ninety-three. He had remained productive until the end; a final book of poems, Second Space, is being published in English this fall. This bare-bones summary of his life shows that Milosz’s personal history included almost the whole of the twentieth century. He participated in some of its most dramatic episodes and lived within several of its colliding cultures, carving out homes in Lithuania, Poland, France, and the United States. These are the contexts in which his Christian vision was shaped and delivered. Although he often expressed this vision

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obliquely, he was relentless in his criticism of those who despised faith as an anachronism: ‘‘I am not afraid to say that a devout and Godfearing man is superior as a human specimen to a restless mocker who is glad to style himself an ‘intellectual,’ proud of his cleverness in using ideas which he claims as his own though he acquired them in a pawnshop in exchange for simplicity of heart. . . . The sacred exists and is stronger than all our rebellions.’’ Milosz believed that the role of the poet is crucial in any society—regardless of how little poetry is appreciated or its importance understood. Consider his apologia for the poetry he was writing during and after World War II, when the world was undergoing a shock and disillusionment perhaps unparalleled in human history. How should the poet react? Here is Milosz’s proposal: As is well known, the philosopher Adorno said that it would be an abomination to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz, and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas gave the year 1941 as the date when God ‘‘abandoned’’ us. Whereas I wrote idyllic verses, ‘‘The World’’ and a number of others, in the very center of what was taking place in the anus mundi, and not by any means out of ignorance. . . . Life does not like death. The body, as long as it is able to, sets in opposition to death the heart’s contractions and the warmth of circulating blood. Gentle verses written in the midst of horror declare themselves for life; they are the body’s rebellion against its destruction.

To retain simplicity of heart, to write verses for life against death—these gentle-sounding goals are not achieved without cost or without a sustaining faith. Yet here it is necessary to remind ourselves of the paradoxical way in which faith is practiced. Faith is practiced in the struggle with faith. Milosz had the courage to expose his struggle in all its intensity; thus the readers with whom he shared his troubles and doubts can trust, or at least consider with appropriate seriousness, his decision to stand within faith’s orbit. In a 1959 letter to the Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton, Milosz wrote, ‘‘As to my Catholicism, this is perhaps a subject for a whole letter. In any case few people suspect my basically religious interests and I have never been ranged among ‘Catholic writers.’ Which, strategically, is perhaps better. We are obliged to bear witness. But of what? That we pray to have faith? This problem—how much we should say openly—is always present in my thoughts.’’ Two things stand out in this candid letter. First, his careful consideration of how best to treat religious themes in his

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writing. Second, the depth of his humility and poverty before faith.

gradually. One can draw momentous conclusions from this.’’

In one poem, he addresses God wryly, saying, ‘‘It seems to me that people who cannot believe in you / deserve your praise,’’ and he confesses later in the same poem, ‘‘I pray to you, for I do not know how not to pray.’’ This struggle spanned his entire life. Only a few years ago, feeling his age, he wrote, ‘‘Now You are closing down my five senses, slowly, / And I am an old man lying in darkness . . . / Liberate me from guilt, real and imagined. / Give me certainty that I toiled for Your glory. / In the hour of the agony of death, help me with Your suffering / Which cannot save the world from pain.’’

Milosz believed that the religious question ought to be explored in the mainstream of literature and culture. As he grew older, he used the authority he had acquired to challenge those of his colleagues who believed that discussions of religion were beneath their dignity. ‘‘To write on literature or art was considered an honorable occupation,’’ he wrote in 1997, ‘‘whereas any time notions taken from the language of religion appeared, the one who brought them up was immediately treated as lacking in tact, as if a silent pact had been broken. Yet I lived at a time when a huge change in the contents of the human imagination was occurring. In my lifetime Heaven and Hell disappeared, the belief in life after death was considerably weakened. How could I not think of this? And is it not surprising that my preoccupation was a rare case?’’

In a piece written in 1991 he mused at length about the difficulty of sharing thoughts like these. ‘‘I feel obliged to speak the truth to my contemporaries and I feel ashamed if they take me to be someone who I am not. In their opinion, a person who ‘had faith’ is fortunate. They assume that as a result of certain inner experiences he was able to find an answer, while they know only questions. So how can I make a profession of faith in the presence of my fellow human beings? After all, I am one of them, seeking, as they do, the laws of inheritance, and I am just as confused. . . . ’’ But let us come to the content of what he believed: ‘‘To put it very simply and bluntly, I must ask if I believe that the four Gospels tell the truth. My answer to this is: Yes. So I believe in an absurdity, that Jesus rose from the dead? Just answer without any of those evasions and artful tricks employed by theologians: Yes or No? I answer: Yes, and by that response I nullify death’s omnipotence. If I am mistaken in my faith, I offer it as a challenge to the Spirit of the Earth. . . . ’’ Later in the same piece he asked, ‘‘Ought I to try to explain ‘why I believe’? I don’t think so. It should suffice if I attempt to convey the coloring or tone. If I believed that man can do good with his own powers, I would have no interest in Christianity. But he cannot, because he is enslaved to his own predatory, domineering instincts . . . Evil grows and bears fruit, which is understandable, because it has logic and probability on its side and also, of course, strength. The resistance of tiny kernels of good, to which no one grants the power of causing far-reaching consequences, is entirely mysterious, however. Such seeming nothingness not only lasts but contains within itself enormous energy which is revealed

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Czeslaw Milosz stood apart as a poet who dared to be preoccupied with such things. He believed that many of the horrors of the twentieth century had their roots in the effort to liberate people from religion. Milosz witnessed these efforts first-hand and reflected on their results: ‘‘Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murder we are not going to be judged.’’ The evidence of Milosz’s Christianity is spread throughout his poems and essays in fragmentary clues. Rarely did he discuss the topic systematically. His faith was often a kind of secret which, once noticed, could explain at least in part his choice of themes and subjects. But sometimes it would come to the surface of his work. In 2002, Milosz published a long poem that was meant to function as a testimonial, A Theological Treatise. Milosz was aware that he was risking his reputation by venturing to write about theology, but he chose to use his credibility and clout to address a theme that literary fashion silently prohibited. ‘‘Why theology?’’ he asks in the first paragraph of this poem. (There are twenty-three paragraphs in the whole treatise, each containing varying numbers of stanzas.) He answers, ‘‘Because the first must be first. / And first is a notion of truth.’’ The paragraph

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concludes with a plea and a stipulation: ‘‘Let reality return to our speech. / That is, meaning. Impossible without an absolute point of reference.’’ In this testimonial poem, Milosz directly acknowledges God as the absolute point of reference. Many of the Christian themes scattered throughout his writings are here gathered together. One such theme is the frank expression of his own struggle with various elements of Catholic life. He always took theology seriously, but he sometimes wrote about theologians with bitter irony. He found the clericalism in some sectors of the Polish Church to be exaggerated and distasteful. ‘‘I apologize, most reverend theologians, for a tone not befitting / the purple of your robes. // I thrash in the bed of my style, searching for a comfortable position, / not too sanctimonious, not too mundane. // There must be a middle place between abstraction and childishness / where one can talk seriously about serious things.’’ Milosz was wary of the comfortable abstract formulas offered by the academic theologian; they seemed to have little to do with the horrible questions his life story had forced him to confront. He recoiled from mechanical presentations of doctrine and easy explanations of suffering. When a clerical and theological style becomes stiff or sanctimonious, it cannot be taken seriously by people engaged in life-anddeath struggles. But a poetry that spoke only of this-worldly things—a poetry that was ‘‘too mundane’’—would fail to satisfy the deepest longings of the heart. Milosz rightly aims for a ‘‘middle place’’ where it is possible to ‘‘talk seriously about serious things.’’

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the secret / knowledge of many centuries, but out of the pain in my heart when I looked out / at the atrocity of the world.’’ Here Milosz is explaining and justifying his turn to Gnostic texts for help. He addresses himself to the ‘‘most reverend theologians’’ to complain that his need was not being met by their pat assurances. The pain Milosz refers to in this poem is not merely an intellectual sorrow: he is writing not just about the universal tragedy; he is writing about the tragedies of his own life. Wounded by the betrayals and injustices he has witnessed, he longs to understand the mysteries of evil and innocent suffering: ‘‘If God is all-powerful, he can allow all this only if he is not good. // Wherefrom then the limits of his power? Why such an order of creation? They all / tried to find an answer, heretics, kabbalists, alchemists, the Knights of the Rose Cross.’’ Here he cites the Gnostic sources to which he turned. Surely he was led in this direction by reading Jacob Boehme, who had so strongly influenced Adam Mickiewicz, the critical point of reference for all modern Polish poetry.

Yet Milosz believed, somewhat problematically, that the most serious things resisted any kind of definition. The mysteries of the faith were to be praised, described, but not explained. ‘‘Catholic dogmas are a few inches too high; we stand on our toes / and for a moment it seems to us that we see,’’ he writes in the Treatise. ‘‘Yet the mystery of the Holy Trinity, the mystery of Original Sin, / the mystery of the Redemption are all well armored against reason . . . // What in all that can be grasped by little girls / dressed in white for First Communion?’’

It would have been impossible for Milosz not to have gone this Gnostic way, at least to some extent. In addition to the Mickiewicz influence, his own temperament inclined him toward it. The horrors he lived through caused him to pose the same questions as these Gnostic texts, and orthodox Christianity was not giving him the spiritual answers he needed. But if the Christianity of his time and place was not delivering those answers, this does not mean that the answers were not there. And in Milosz’s struggle we see him betray an instinctive understanding that this may be the case. This explains why, in the midst of the Treatise’s lengthy discussion of Gnostic questions, he also narrates his own practice of Catholic life. He is being driven by something larger than himself, and it is nothing less than his whole Catholic faith, whether he always chooses it or not. He admits, ‘‘Alas, an American saying has applied to me, though it was not coined with kindly intent: / ‘Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.’’’ He is not always comfortable with his religious inheritance, and yet something compels him never to abandon it.

Milosz’s long testimonial poem also reveals his Gnostic leanings. The tendency makes for interesting poems, but it adds to his difficulties with Catholic theology. ‘‘Not out of frivolity, most reverend theologians, I busied myself with

Milosz often sensed a lack in his own faith, and he confesses this in the Treatise, as elsewhere (see ‘‘Distance,’’ above): ‘‘Why not concede,’’ he asks, ‘‘that I have not progressed, in my religion, / past the Book of Job?’’ This can best be understood in

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light of something he tells us later in the poem: ‘‘Only a dark tone, an inclination toward a peculiar Manichean / strain of Christianity, could have led one to the proper trail.’’ Here ‘‘the proper trail’’ means the proper interpretation of his work. All this comes in the paragraph that begins, ‘‘To present myself at last as an heir to mystical lodges . . . ’’ He is confessing much, disclosing much, at these points in his testament. He is providing his readers with clearer information about his spiritual life. Hence the ‘‘at last’’ which introduces this revealing paragraph. He is expressing relief as he finally reveals the sources and limits of his religious anxiety. What is significant for Milosz’s readers in this kind of writing is that he names in himself what is a fundamental religious question of our times; namely, getting past Job. Getting past Job—or for that matter, getting past a Manichean Christianity—is a serious religious challenge. The Christian tradition is in fact equipped to take the serious searcher past Job, but it was precisely this part of the tradition that was somehow not delivered to Milosz and which does not appear in the poem. I would suggest that it is only possible to move past Job by going through Job. There is a tradition of Christian exegesis which reads Job as a prophecy of Christ. One can even imagine Job’s complaint provoking the Incarnation and the cross as the response from God. The prefiguration becomes explicit at Job 10:4–5, where Job says to God, ‘‘Have you eyes of flesh? Do you see as man sees? Are your days as the days of a mortal?’’ In fact, in the Incarnation and the death of Jesus, God can now answer Yes to this question. This Yes is strongly underlined in the phrase from St. Paul in the Letter to the Philippians 2:8: ‘‘obedient unto death, yes, death on a cross.’’ In the same part of the poem where Milosz quipped about the little girls dressed in white for First Communion, he also warns, ‘‘And it will not do to prattle on about sweet little Jesus / in the hay of his cradle.’’ But, of course, sweet little Jesus in the hay is not the central announcement of Christian faith. The central announcement is Jesus Christ, ‘‘and him crucified’’ (1 Corinthians 2:2). Milosz’s warning against a sweet little Jesus is equivalent to Job’s demand for a serious answer to his serious question. But the death of Jesus on the cross is God’s serious answer. In the end, Milosz’s Treatise does not grapple deeply enough with this divine answer.

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To come back to Milosz’s words at this point in the poem, he notes a difference between himself and Job—namely, that Job thought of himself as innocent while the poet is not. ‘‘I was not innocent, I wanted to be innocent, but I couldn’t be.’’ But in the end it was not Job’s innocence that was important but rather the majesty and mystery of God, before which Job bowed down and became silent. In an earlier writing Milosz had shown himself to be aware that this was the key insight of Job, even if, in the poet’s version of the story, God says things that are rather more severe than anything to be found in the book of Job. In a little essay titled ‘‘Misfortune’’ in Milosz’s ABCs, Milosz writes, ‘‘To create a universe like the one we have is not nice. ‘And why should I have to be nice?’ asks God. ‘Where did you get such ideas?’’’ This is strong thinking. It is acquiescence to the impenetrable mystery of God, an acquiescence to whatever of God the death of Jesus on the cross is meant to reveal. When in the Treatise Milosz refers to his own practices as a Catholic, he speaks with a remarkable humility, contrasting his own weakness with the strength of the communion to which he belongs. This humility is especially striking since Milosz was, by temperament, a proud man, as he himself often acknowledged. His fine mind and his natural sophistication caused him to hesitate before the requirements of faith. But in the end he rejected the option of turning his sophistication against more simple believers. Near the very beginning of the Treatise he states, ‘‘The opposition, I versus they, seemed immoral. / It meant he [Milosz] considered himself better than they were.’’ At the end, having agonized through much of the poem over the questions posed by his Gnostic favorites, he comes back much more strongly to a defense of the categories of Christian worship. ‘‘Treat with understanding persons of weak faith. // Myself included,’’ he writes. ‘‘One day I believe, another I disbelieve. // Yet I feel warmth among people at prayer. / Since they believe, they help me to believe / in their existence, these incomprehensible beings . . . // Naturally, I am a skeptic. Yet I sing with them, / thus overcoming the contradiction / between my private religion and the religion of the rite.’’ This confession repeats a theme that Milosz has accented frequently in his poetry. Let three poems suffice as examples. In one he speaks

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approvingly of ‘‘Helene’s Religion’’: ‘‘On Sunday I go to church and pray with all the others. / Who am I to think I am different?’’ And yet, familiar disappointment in the Church rises to the surface as Helene says, ‘‘Enough that I don’t listen to what the priests blabber in their sermons. / Otherwise, I would have to concede that I reject common sense.’’ Then, speaking for and with Milosz himself, she continues: ‘‘I have tried to be a faithful daughter of my Roman Catholic Church. / I recite the Our Father, the Credo and Hail Mary / Against my abominable unbelief.’’ Here the solid regularity of Catholic practice faces down Milosz’s reflexive skepticism. In ‘‘With Her’’ Milosz speaks of hearing a passage from Scripture during Mass at St. Mary Magdalen in Berkeley: ‘‘A reading this Sunday from the Book of Wisdom / About how God has not made death / And does not rejoice in the annihilation of the living.’’ We should not be surprised that the words catch his attention. They directly address the key question that he and the Gnostics often posed; how to reconcile death and innocent suffering with the notion of a good God. The poem continues: ‘‘A reading from the Gospel according to Mark / About a little girl to whom He said: ‘Talitha, cumi!’’’ Then, with an unselfconscious humility, the poet witnesses to how he has received these words. He writes, ‘‘This is for me. To make me rise from the dead / And repeat the hope of those who lived before me.’’ Here Milosz is exactly a Christian—the scriptural word is received as a word for him in that moment, together with all those who have believed before him. The theological term for this is ‘‘communion of saints.’’ The poem ‘‘In a Parish’’ can serve as a third example of Milosz’s understanding of Catholic practice. He begins, ‘‘Had I not been frail and half broken inside, / I wouldn’t think of them, who are like myself half broken inside. / I would not climb the cemetery hill by the church / To get rid of my self-pity.’’ Here again is Milosz involved in Catholic practice, the visiting of cemeteries being an especially strong part of Polish Catholicism. But he is also bringing to explicit expression what is implicit in any Christian gathering, whether among the living or the dead— namely, the recognition that we are all frail and broken. This is, among other things, what brings Christians together across differences of background. As Milosz looks at the names on the tombs, from his own ‘‘half broken inside’’ he

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begins to establish a communion with those buried there, musing ironically on the meanings of the names he reads: ‘‘Crazy Sophies, / Michaels who lost every battle, / Self-destructive Agathas.’’ When a child is born we name him or her with an uncomplicated hope. But then the child grows up and a sadder story must be told. Still, Milosz sees all these lives under the sign that, for a Christian, ultimately explains existence: they all ‘‘lie under crosses with their dates of birth and death.’’ And in this moment the poet feels his vocation again. He asks, ‘‘And who / is going to express them? Their mumblings, weepings, hopes, tears of humiliation?’’ Milosz does not answer this question in the poem, but his work as poet has always been to give voice to precisely this: all the sad, neglected stories of so many men and women. But for Christian faith, under every cross and every sad story lies the hope of resurrection. It is this that Milosz ultimately expresses as he gives voice to the dead. The poem ends with him addressing them all: ‘‘Thus we go down into the earth, my fellow parishioners.’’ We may call this a sad story, but we should also note the communion expressed in going down to death with ‘‘fellows.’’ And how do we all go down? ‘‘With the hope that the trumpet of judgment will call us by our names.’’ Christian faith teaches that such a call will not summon us to some vague eternity. Instead, we shall be renewed as the particular persons we were meant to be, expressed mysteriously in our names, their deepest, truest meaning now revealed in the ‘‘judgment that will call us by our names.’’ And this in the ‘‘new heavens and new earth’’ promised by the Scripture (2 Peter 3:13). And so Milosz concludes, ‘‘Instead of eternity, greenness and the movement of clouds. / They rise then, thousands of Sophias, Michaels, Matthews, / Marias, Agathas, Bartholomews. / So that at last they know why / And for what reason?’’ These three poems may help us to understand Milosz’s ultimate message in the Treatise— namely, his choice to ‘‘sing with them,’’ his fellow Christians, despite the fact that he is naturally a skeptic, and despite his lengthy grappling with Gnostic theories. In the last stanza of the Treatise, Milosz addresses himself directly to the ‘‘Beautiful Lady, you who appeared to the children at Lourdes and Fatima.’’ Such a direct invocation involved a great risk; Milosz knew it might alienate many of his

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readers. They would wonder how such a serious writer could take seriously the Marian apparitions at Lourdes and Fatima. Believing in the authenticity of such apparitions is not even a requirement of Catholic faith. And yet here is Milosz admitting, ‘‘I too have been a pilgrim in Lourdes / by the grotto,’’ and further, ‘‘Lady, I asked you for a miracle.’’ And if these revelations of common piety upset his nonreligious admirers, he, too, was somewhat upset by the experience: ‘‘My presence in such a place was disturbed / By my duty as a poet who should not flatter popular imaginings, / Yet who desires to remain faithful to your unfathomable intention / When you appeared to children at Fatima and Lourdes.’’ We must take this as his last word in this long poem (that is in fact what it is). After rehearsing all his anguished questions and the Gnostic solutions to which he had sometimes turned along the way, he finishes with a serene prayer to the Beautiful Lady and takes children as his model. He no longer demands a transparent solution to the problem of innocent suffering. Instead, he expresses a humbler aim: to remain faithful to the ‘‘unfathomable intention’’ of the mother of Christ. Milosz had suggested earlier in this stanza that part of this intention has to do with beauty: ‘‘As if you wished to remind them that beauty is / one of the components of the world.’’ The Lady herself is beautiful, as is the place where she appears, ‘‘in Lourdes / by the grotto, where you hear the rustle of the river and, / in the pure blue sky above the mountains, a narrow scrap of moon.’’ Milosz wished to bear witness to the great Christian insight about beauty, so memorably expressed by Dostoevsky: beauty will save the world. For Milosz this was not an insight arrived at late in life; the Treatise presents us with the mature version of what we already saw in the poetry he was writing during the darkest period of the Second World War: ‘‘Gentle verses written in the midst of horror declare themselves for life.’’ As a young poet, Milosz knew that it was always the poet’s job to record and praise the world’s passing beauty. In the Treatise, the older Milosz reminds us that the poet receives this beauty from a permanent source beyond the world. If this message about beauty was indeed part of the Lady’s intention, we might go on to ask whether her intention might ultimately concern the revelation of her Son as the secret of her own and the world’s beauty. After all, everything

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about Mary leads us in this direction. NonCatholics often worry about an excessive Catholic devotion to Mary, and in some cases the worry is justified; but in Catholic teaching and tradition—and here Milosz is typically Catholic in making Mary his last reference—Mary, though beautiful in herself, leads us first and last to Christ, who is beautiful even in his dying. He is the Beauty that will save the world. Source: Jeremy Driscoll, ‘‘The Witness of Czeslaw Milosz,’’ in First Things, No. 147, November 2004, pp. 28–33.

SOURCES Davie, Donald, ‘‘A Clamor of Tongues,’’ in New Republic, Vol. 206, No. 11, March 16, 1992, p. 36. Dooley, David, ‘‘Poetry Chronicle: Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Mary Stewart Hammond, etc.,’’ in Hudson Review, Vol. 45, No. 3, Fall 1992, pp. 509, 510. Keen, Suzanne, ‘‘The Poet’s Geography,’’ in Commonweal, Vol. 119, No. 19, November 6, 1992, p. 34. Marx, Bill, ‘‘Gurus and Gadflies,’’ in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 18–19, No. 1–2, 1993, p. 100. Milosz, Czeslaw, ‘‘In Music,’’ in Provinces, translated by the author and Robert Hass, Ecco Press, 1991, p. 8. ‘‘Notes on Current Books: Poetry,’’ in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 68, No. 3, Summer 1992, p. 99. Review of Selected Poems: 1931–2004, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 253, No. 4, January 23, 2006, p. 187. Vendler, Helen, ‘‘Tireless Messenger,’’ in New York Review of Books, Vol. 39, No. 14, August 13, 1992, p. 46.

FURTHER READING Czarnecka, Ewa, and Aleksander Fiut, eds., Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, trans. Richard Lourie, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. In this book, Milosz discusses his early years, education, pre- and post-war observations, philosophical and religious opinions, approach to craft, and life after the Nobel Prize. Haven, Cynthia, L., ed., Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations, University of Mississippi Press, 2006. This book essentially acts as a follow-up to the work of Czarnecka and Fiut. It contains a collection of rare interviews with Milosz (including a previously unpublished one with former Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky), as well as updated commentary from critics, colleagues, and friends of the poet. Milosz’s views concerning the role of the poet are also highlighted.

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Lane, Bernard, ‘‘Miloszian Moments,’’ in Quadrant, Vol. 49, No. 9, September 2005, pp. 67–71. Along with biographical information, this essay explores Milosz’s fascination with the mysteries and strangeness of life, which resulted in his metaphysical approach to his work. Mozejko, Edward, ed., Between Anxiety and Hope: The Poetry and Writing of Czeslaw Milosz, University of Alberta Press, 1988. This collection of essays explores the central motifs and themes of Milosz’s poetry and prose. The poet’s use of contrasting images of futility and promise, evident in ‘‘In Music’’ and other poems, is also discussed. Stankiewicz, David, ‘‘When He Would Compose from Fragments a World Perfect at Last: Theology and Poetics in Czeslaw Milosz’s The Rising of the

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Sun,’’ in Religion & the Arts, Vol.9, No. 3–4, 2005, pp. 284–312. This essay looks at key elements of Milosz’s craft, including the use of theological thought and the philosophy of existence. It also offers a detailed examination of Milosz’s Manichaean outlook, which surfaced in many of his poems, including ‘‘In Music.’’ Stephan, Halina, ed. Living in Translation: Polish Writers in America, Rodopi, 2003. This collection of essays examines the experiences of thirteen Polish artists, including Milosz, who lived and worked in the United States. The work presents the challenges the writers faced as they adjusted to American culture, their roles as cultural mediators, and the effects of westernization on them and their work.

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Miniver Cheevy Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ (1910) is the portrait of a man who is discontent with the world he lives in and longs for the better times of bygone eras. He sighs and dreams about ancient Greece and the Renaissance and Camelot, longing for his idealized ideas about the civilizations and cultures that once were. Poor Miniver idealizes any time that is not his own. He sits and drinks and thinks about it.

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 1910

Edwin Arlington Robinson was considered a poet of darkness. He often looked at the depressing side of life, examining traits that make up the less admirable aspects of the human psyche. His best known poems, such as this one and ‘‘Richard Cory,’’ offer quick snapshots of the lives of individuals who are coping with despair, often hiding their misery from the world and from themselves. ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ available in the Everyman Library 2007 collection Robinson: Poems, but it is also frequently anthologized and can be found in many collections of American poetry.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Edwin Arlington Robinson was born December 22, 1869, the third son of Edward and Mary Palmer Robinson. He was born in Head Tide, Maine, but six months later his family moved to Gardiner, a town just a few miles away, which is portrayed in his poetry as Tilbury Town. His

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the book arrived from the publisher. The next year a revised version of this book was published under the title The Children of the Night. This book included some of Robinson’s best-known poems. His brother Dean died of a drug overdose in 1899. To support himself, Robinson worked on the construction of the first New York subway.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (Bettmann / Corbis)

father was a prosperous lumber man, taking advantage of Gardiner’s financial boom. His brother Dean was twelve years older than Robinson, and his brother Herman was four years older. The Robinson brothers were all voracious readers. As a boy, Robinson was obsessed with death. He read books picturing people with chronic diseases and wondered if he would die young like his best friend, who died of diphtheria at the age of eleven. He did play with other boys and with his brothers, though. He read his earliest poems to his friends, and when they were unimpressed he threw them into the furnace. After graduating Gardiner High School, Robinson spent a year studying classic Greek and Roman poetry before being admitted to Harvard. At the end of his first year, his father died. He returned to Harvard, but he was unable to finish his second year because of his family’s financial difficulties. While he was there, though, he published some poems in the Harvard Advocate. Back in Gardiner, in 1896, he paid for the publication of his first poetry collection, The Torrent and the Night; it was meant to be a surprise for his mother, but she died of diphtheria shortly before copies of

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Though he published a second volume, Captain Craig in 1902, Robinson still struggled in poverty until President Theodore Roosevelt, who had heard about Robinson from his son, wrote a glowing review of Captain Craig for a magazine. Roosevelt then secured a job for Robinson in the U.S. Custom House in New York, where the poet worked from 1905 to 1910. The financial security supported his writing. He published The Town Down the River, which included ‘‘Miniver Cheevy,’’ in 1910. He tried his hand at stage plays but was unsuccessful. His poetry received recognition, though. He attended the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat, in the summer of 1911 and returned every summer until his death. Robinson lived for years from the moneys he made from book sales and reading fees and also the largess of patrons. In 1921, he received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his Collected Poems. He received the Pulitzer Prize again in 1924 and 1927, making him one of only two American poets to win three Pulitzer Prizes, an honor he shares with Robert Frost. Robinson had long-term friendships with women but never married. He died of cancer in New York City on April 6, 1935.

POEM TEXT Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, Grew lean while he assailed the seasons; He wept that he was ever born, And he had reasons. Miniver loved the days of old When swords were bright and steeds were prancing; The vision of a warrior bold Would set him dancing. Miniver sighed for what was not, And dreamed, and rested from his labors; He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot, And Priam’s neighbors. Miniver mourned the ripe renown That made so many a name so fragrant; He mourned Romance, now on the town, And Art, a vagrant.

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Miniver loved the Medici, Albeit he had never seen one; He would have sinned incessantly Could he have been one.

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Miniver cursed the commonplace And eyed a khaki suit with loathing; He missed the medieval grace Of iron clothing.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Miniver scorned the gold he sought, But sore annoyed was he without it; Miniver thought, and thought, and thought, And thought about it.

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Miniver Cheevy, born too late, Scratched his head and kept on thinking; Miniver coughed, and called it fate, And kept on drinking.

Jorie Graham, Rita Dove, and Anthony Hecht are among those who read poems on the five-disc collection from HighBridge Company, titled The Classic Hundred Poems. This box set, released in 1998, includes a rendition of ‘‘Miniver Cheevy.’’

John Duke sings a musical version of ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ on But Yesterday Is Not Today: The American Art Song, 1927–1972. The compact disc released in 1996 by New World Records is a re-release of the 1977 LP. Jazz poet Ken Nordine gives a free-association interpretation of ‘‘Miniver Cheevy,’’ with a small combo accompaniment, on his album A Transparent Mask, released in 2001 by Asphodal. ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ is one of the poems read in the Poetry Out Loud Contest. A CD of selections from that competition was released in 2005 under the title National Poetry Recitation Contest. Narrated by former poet laureate Dana Gioia, readers on the disc include Khandi Alexander, Rita Dove, Anthony Hopkins, and David Schwimmer.

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POEM SUMMARY

Stanza 1 The first stanza of the poem introduces Cheevy, a man immediately associated with scorn (bitterness), having been born to it like a hereditary disease. His poverty is established in line 2, where he is described as being slim, or lean, apparently because he does not have enough to eat. This line also serves to establish that Cheevy has carried his scorn for years, for season after season. In line 3, the poem establishes that Cheevy’s scorn is not only aimed at the world around him, but at himself as well. He regret being born, and the fact that he was born actually makes him cry. In the following line, the narrator comments that Cheevy had reasons for his feelings.

Stanza 2 Having established that Miniver Cheevy is generally miserable, the poem goes on to show that he actually does like something. He likes the past. His interest is not in the immediate past, or in his own past, but in distant historical periods. The images of steeds and swords mentioned in line 6 invokes the European medieval period. Line 6 describes a little of Cheevy’s glorified vision of the past. In his imagination, the horses that knights ride are like trained show horses, performing fancy steps as they carry their riders along. The poem uses this image to make fun of Miniver Cheevy in line 8, saying that he would dance around while imagining these ancient men in armor mounted on their horses. Imagining the knights makes Cheevy happy and that he dances at the thought of them makes him appear a bit silly.

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Stanza 3 The first two lines of the third stanza imply that thinking about the past is hard work for Cheevy. He sighs, as if being forced to carry a heavy mental burden, and in line 10 his dreams are described as if they are actually labor for him. The last two lines of stanza 3 give some examples of the ancient times that Miniver Cheevy considers the only times worth living in. Thebes, a city of ancient Greece, figures prominently in Greek mythology. Camelot is the fabled kingdom of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Including Merlin the Magician, Sir Lancelot, and the knights’ quest for the Holy Grail, the stories of Camelot are famous for their idealistic knights who swear to

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follow a strict code of conduct, the code of chivalry, even at the expense of their own safety. Priam, referred to in line 12, was the king of Troy during the Trojan War, the subject of Homer’s epic poem Iliad. The jumbled order of ancient references reveals that Cheevy is less interested in historical facts than the famed stories about them.

In the last half of stanza 5, the poem shows how self-contradictory Cheevy is. On the one hand, he dreams of chivalric knights who followed strict codes of ethics. Here, however, he is so enamored with his ideas of the Medici that he is beguiled by the thought of sinning in order to be one. His interest, then, is not in exceptional conduct. He is infatuated with images he has of the past because it keeps his mind off the present.

Stanza 4 In the fourth stanza, Robinson engages in wordplay for humorous effect. The fame that Cheevy misses is so ripe that the people associated with it are fragrant. In one sense, the people Cheevy conjures as so clear in his mind that they seem like flowers in full bloom, smelling beautiful. In another sense, the ripeness suggests that the people lauded in history have reached their peak and are on the far side of it, and so their so-called fragrance is that of decay. In line 15, Cheevy regrets that ‘‘Romance’’ is ‘‘on the town.’’ It is an expression that has two meanings. The more positive meaning is that Romance is celebrated, living a luxurious lifestyle, as in the expression ‘‘a night out on the town.’’ Another meaning for this expression suggests that Romance is homeless. Either interpretation can apply; Cheevy could be sorry to hear that the idea of Romance is forgotten in modern society, but he could also regret that it is an idea celebrated by superficial individuals who do not understand history with the depth of understanding that he thinks he has. There is no ambiguity in line 16, where Art is clearly presented as being impoverished and homeless.

Stanza 6

Stanza 5

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Line 17 mentions another historical age that Miniver Cheevy idealizes: the age of the Medici, the Italian dynasty that ruled Florence and Tuscany in the fifteenth century. In Cheevy’s mind, what is attractive about the Medici is they were so wealthy and powerful they could be completely self-indulgent. They were patrons to Renaissance artists, too. Plus, the Medici family held onto their political power by corrupt means. Cheevy ignores the unpleasant realities of Medici history but imagines if he had been one of them he would have sinned as much as they did. In line 18, Robinson explains that the fact that Cheevy had no firsthand knowledge of the Medici did not stop him from idealizing them.

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This stanza continues to expose the contradictions of Miniver Cheevy’s worldview. He looks down on the ordinary fashions of his time, like a comfortable khaki suit; at the same time, he idealizes medieval armor, which was in fact the exact opposite of the ‘‘grace’’ that Cheevy imagines in his selfdeluding dreams.

Stanza 7 Lines 24 and 25 show the height of this man’s inconsistency. He would like to be rich, and the fact that he is not rich bothers him, but he also looks down on wealth. Finding nothing good in his actual life, he would like to advance to a better life, but, since that is unlikely, he is quite willing to dismiss what modern life offers. There are two reasons that Cheevy hates his life. One is that he is forced to live in the present, feeling cheated of the glories of the past, and he thinks that his knowledge of history makes him important. His resentment about being poor, however, simply makes him average. Cheevy is confused by the contradictory ideas he uses for escape. He thinks about his ideals and illusions and gets no where doing it.

Miniver Cheevy simply is not intelligent enough to understand that he is living a life of contradiction. He thinks that he is unhappy because he cannot experience the glory of the past. Stuck in the present, he can only enjoy the past vicariously, by dreaming about it. But such dreaming sets him up to be continuously frustrated in the present. The poem’s last line indicates that the real reason Cheevy cannot understand why he is the source of his own unhappiness: He drinks. He does not see the relationship between drinking, his scorn toward the world around him, and his inability to move forward with a life that might give him some satisfaction. Being unable or unwilling to see the source of his problem, he

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shirks personal responsibility by claiming that he was fated to be miserable.


THEMES Alienation Psychologists have called alienation the disease of the twentieth century, a result of the rapid development and expansion of the modern world. The idea began with Karl Marx, who, in the mid-1800s, pointed out that industrialization was bound to put human beings out of harmony with nature by separating the labor they do from the results of that labor, making them strangers to their collective accomplishments. By the end of the 1800s, there were other signs of this effect. The growth of urban areas further separated people from nature, and increasingly faster methods of transportation such as the railroad and the steamship disrupted people’s sense of roots and permanence. In this poem, Miniver Cheevy is alienated from his own society. He does not understand the world he lives in and feels detached from others. His interest in the past helps him avoid coming to terms with his place in a changing society. He is inactive, selfabsorbed, and he drinks. His attitude and alcoholism insulate him from his immediate setting and from people around him. Thus, he is detached from the time and place in which he actually lives and spends the time he has in escapist fantasies about the distant past.

What was it like to live in a small New England town in the first years of the twentieth century? Write a poem or short story about a person living today who dreams of living during Cheevy’s lifetime. Make clear the differences between what it was like and how it is romanticized by your modern character.

The poem draws attention to the selfindulgence of the Medici family. Do some research about the Medici, and then write a paper on their achievements and their crimes. Explain the misconceptions Cheevy has about them. The poem says that Miniver Cheevy was ‘‘born too late.’’ Do some research on the psychological effects of alcoholism and then write a paper that uses your research to explain why Cheevy has this belief about himself and how it serves his passivity and refusal to take responsibility for himself and his life.

The Past and the Present Like many people, Miniver Cheevy feels that he was born at the wrong time in history and that he would be happier if he lived in some other time. He does not like modern clothes or modern manners, and he does not even know how to earn a living. There is little about his contemporary world that he understands. Cheevy thinks that he would be fine, if only he were to living in some other historical period. He considers himself an expert on these other periods. The fact is the desire to live in another time is based on an escapist fantasy about that other time. The escapism is a way of note dealing with the problems the current setting and people present. As long as he fantasizes about the past, Cheevy can avoid confronting his immediate problems. As long as he avoids confronting the issues in his own life, he is unable to make positive change. He can think all day and all night about it; he can think and

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Ask at least ten people to explain some time in history that they would like to visit. Show your results visually, with pictures that represent the eras they talked about. Then present facts about those eras that make them less attractive to modern people. Find a song with lyrics that remind you of the same attitude that Miniver Cheevy has. Explain whether you think the songwriter’s expectations are more realistic than Cheevy’s or less, and why. Do some research on medieval knights and the Crusades. Write a paper on the Crusades emphasizing parts that Cheevy would be unlikely to idealize.

drink. But that will not change his circumstances. It only keeps him from facing his problems and dealing with them. In Cheevy’s case, thinking is a way of procrastinating, and drinking is a way of insulating himself. Cheevy imagines he would be better off in the idealized image he has of former times, but Cheevy is fooling himself. So long as he

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STYLE Masculine and Feminine Rhyme Masculine rhyme pairs single syllable words or the final syllables of multisyllabic words that have the same consonant sound and receive a stress in the line, as in ‘‘scorn’’ and ‘‘born.’’ Feminine rhyme pairs multisyllabic words in which two or more syllables have matching consonant sounds and the final syllable is unstressed, as in ‘‘seasons’’ and ‘‘reasons.’’ The even-numbered lines in ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ have feminine rhymes, and the oddnumbered lines have the masculine rhymes. The effect is that feminine rhymes trivialize, mock, or give a sense of light-heartedness, whereas masculine rhymes give a sense of seriousness and dignity. In the first stanza, for instance, Robinson uses these two rhyme patterns to communicate, on the one hand, the sadness of Cheevy, this ‘‘child of scorn’’ who wept that ‘‘he was ever born,’’ with the undercutting, minimizing feminine lines describing how Cheevy ‘‘assailed the seasons’’ and had his ‘‘reasons.’’

A knight on a horse (Image copyright arfo, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

In stanza 5, the poet uses a variation on the feminine rhyme with a feminine slant rhyme. A slant rhyme uses a consonant sound that is close but not an exact match, as when Robinson rhymes ‘‘seen one’’ with ‘‘been one.’’

Verbal Irony has this excuse for his misery, he can postpone indefinitely the question of why he does not feel comfortable in his own world.

Alcoholism ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ is, in part, the portrait of an alcoholic. Like most chronic alcoholics, Cheevy does not have a steady job. Another symptom of alcoholism is Cheevy’s erratic mood swings. He vacillates between sorrow and rage. Alcohol acts as a depressant on the central nervous system, so as Cheevy obsesses about being ‘‘born too late,’’ he drinks, and as he drinks, he gets more depressed. Alcoholism can cause severe depression, as well as the inability to think straight and problem solve. Given that Miniver Cheevy cannot control his life, it would make sense that he would look for some outside force that is causing his problems, which is something alcoholics often do. He believes that the problem is not within himself, but that it is in his situation, grasping the unlikely notion that he would be fine had he only been born earlier.

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Verbal irony is a way of using of words to convey the opposite meaning. When the poet writes that ‘‘Miniver mourned the ripe renown / That made so many a name so fragrant,’’ the explicit meaning is that Miniver regrets the loss of the fame that sweetened the names of heroes and perpetuated them, as a perfume sends out a scent. But the poet’s ironic message is that for others the renowned ones are now rotten and those heroic subjects have decayed and gotten smelly. Rhyming ‘‘fragrant’’ with ‘‘vagrant’’ further undercuts the value of what Cheevy longs for in the past. Another instance of verbal irony occurs when Robinson refers to a suit of armor as ‘‘iron clothing,’’ knowing that it would have none of the flexibility or functionality of actual clothing; it does not really have the ‘‘medieval grace’’ that the poem attributes to it, even though Cheevy might be inclined to look favorably on it. Overall, the entire poem takes an ironic attitude toward Miniver Cheevy, presenting him as a foolish and deluded person while he thinks that he is more insightful than most.

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COMPARE & CONTRAST

1910: A dreamer can look back to bygone eras he has read about in books, imagining what life was like at those times based on how they are described in literature.

Today: Forty-three states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. protectorates have lotteries. Casino gaming is legal nationwide and is permitted in most states. Many people long to receive a lot of money without working for it, imagining that such good luck will solve their problems.

Today: Multiplayer role-playing games such as World of Warcraft and the futuristic Halo let people simulate what it might be like to live in different eras.

1910: Most Americans of limited means can only imagine what Great Britain, Europe, and the Middle East are like; these are the settings of Miniver Cheevy’s fantasies. Today: People can book a flight to Greece or Florence online and experience firsthand on vacation the enduring artistic achievements in European countries. Similarly, they can visit the southwest counties of England and places associated with the legendary King Arthur. Other individuals can travel for free in their imaginations by enjoying travelogues on DVD from their local library. 1910: Every town has a character or two like Cheevy, who feels lost in the ever-changing modern world. Today: Technology in the computer age changes quickly. People struggle to keep with the newest applications. As a result, the sense of being lost in the modern world is common.

The use of alternating masculine and feminine rhyme and the use of verbal irony work together to convey two versions simultaneously of Miniver Cheevy. In one sense, Cheevy is a tragic fellow, a man out of step with his society, a dreamer, a ne’er-do-well, a drinker. In another sense, the poem presents the caricature of a fool: Cheevy is ridiculous and delusional, a man to laugh at. He avoids acting like a responsible adult; he dreams of what might have been and wastes his days doing it, only making the present worse by avoiding its challenges.

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1910: A man like Cheevy might want to acquire money but be unwilling to work for it.

1910: Knights on horseback are easy to imagine for most people, since most people use horses for travel, either riding them or using them to pull carriages. The horseless carriage, the automobile, is just coming into use. Today: Only a few people have firsthand knowledge of horse culture, but the fantasy of knights and damsels is kept alive in drama, cultural events, and interactive games.

1910: Cheevy might dream of the protection that armor could provide, though, as the poem implies, ‘‘iron clothing’’ is not practical or comfortable. Today: Soft body armor such as Kelvar combines the protection of chain mail with the pliability of fabric.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The New Generation of Poetry When ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ was published in 1910, the world of poetry was entering a new era. Literature in the first half of the nineteenth century had been shaped by romanticism, which emphasized man’s innate place in nature and stressed the harmony of the natural world. This approach was challenged, to say the least, by the realities at mid-century of the American Civil War. After it ended in 1865, realism and naturalism evolved in

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literature. Authors tried to mirror in their works what life was really like for ordinary people. Deterministic and pessimistic, these works depicted a world where individuals were shaped by forces beyond their control, by accident, by chance, by the factors of birth and class. Bleak urban settings were depicted in which individuals struggled in painful, isolated, and discouraging lives. As the twentieth century dawned, a growing discontent with these approaches gave way to the modernist movement. In 1912, Harriet Monroe founded Poetry, an influential magazine that served to define the pre-World War I American poetic vision. Poetry introduced works by Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Hilda Doolittle, and Vachel Lindsay, among others, who focused on real life subjects presented directly. In England, the imagist movement began, with its goal of creating unsentimental poetry that depicted the image for its own sake, free of moralizing or philosophical intent. The work of Edwin Arlington Robinson is often seen as poised between the old styles, with its echoes of the Victorian and its dark look at romantic ideals, and the experimental modernist poetry that became increasingly common after 1912.

An ancient Greek helmet (Image copyright janprchal, 2009. Social Change When ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ was published, the country was in the middle of a cultural shift. The last decades of the nineteenth century were called the ‘‘Gilded Age,’’ a phrase coined by Mark Twain, because those years were characterized by financial extravagance among the upper class. Business used coercive methods to shut out competition, creating monopolies in fields of such valued and necessary goods as food, petroleum, and transportation (mainly trains). Poverty, meanwhile, was widespread; immigration and the shift in population from farms to cities provided workers for quickly developing mills and factories, creating squalor and widespread disease in overcrowded urban centers. The disparity between the rich and the poor in the United States widened sharply as the twentieth century began. There was a clear shift in public sentiment. The unionization movement arose at the end of the nineteenth century, drawing attention to the condition of workers. The troubles of labor was spotlighted with the 1906 publication of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, which brought attention to the plight of employees in the meat packing industry. New regulations were passed in the wake

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of the Sinclair book that led to the Food and Drug Administration guidelines, designed to ensure the safety of food products. Anti-trust laws limited monopolies even before the turn of the century. Theodore Roosevelt, who made a national reputation for himself by fighting corruption in business, became president of the United States in 1901 when President William McKinley was assassinated. After decades in which workers were ignored and left at the mercy of economic pressures, the legitimate discontent of industrial workers was finally brought to public attention.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Though he struggled at the start of his career, Edwin Arlington Robinson rose to national attention after President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a review of Robinson’s second poetry collection, The Children of the Night, in 1905. Not long after

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that, the poet was able to support himself as a writer, and his reputation grew. A sign of the respect accorded to Robinson when he was at his professional height was highlighted by W. R. Robinson, who started his 1967 book Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poetry of the Act by quoting a famous critic of his day: ‘‘Comparing Edwin Arlington Robinson to Amy Lowell and Edgar Lee Masters, in his mind the ranking contemporary poets, Edward Sapir said in 1922, ‘Mr. Robinson is the one American poet who compels, rather than invites, attention.’’’ When he died in 1935, Robinson was one of the best known U.S. poets. He had won the Pulitzer Prize three times, a feat only matched by his contemporary, Robert Frost, and was producing new work to the end of his life. The publication of his Collected Poems two years after his death helped continue the interest that had been stirred up by his obituaries. Noted critic and poet Yvor Winters wrote in the 1940s that ‘‘Robinson’s best poems appear to deal with particular persons and situations; in these poems his examination is careful and intelligent, his method is analytic, and his style is mainly very distinguished.’’ As the middle of the century passed, however, Robinson’s reputation faded. Critics still took him seriously, but audiences moved on to other works. Denis Donoghue noted in a 1964 book the change from 1933, when Robinson was one of the most famous living poets: ‘‘Today,’’ Donoghue wrote, ‘‘his good gray name is attached to a handful of short poems that are exhibited in the respectable anthologies. But he is no longer an audible voice in poetry.’’ John Lucas noticed the same drop in general interest in Robinson in 1984 and asked some college students why they seldom read his poetry. ‘‘‘Well, you see,’ one of them explained, ‘we know just about where he stands.’’’ Lucas went on to explain, ‘‘The implication was that once you had got your author firmly placed, any need to read his works had more or less disappeared.’’ Lucas then went on to provide an argument for why Robinson is still relevant, but such arguments are designed for the established literary connoisseurs, missing the general readership that Robinson once enjoyed.


Aside from ‘‘Miniver Cheevy,’’ Edwin Arlington Robinson’s most famous poem is ‘‘Richard Cory,’’ about the suicide of a respected, wealthy man, who is the envy of ordinary townspeople. Both poems, along with several dozen others about interesting individuals such as ‘‘Aunt Imogen’’ and ‘‘Bewick Finzer,’’ are included in the posthumous collection Tilbury Town, published in 1967 by Macmillan.

Mark Twain described dreamers like Cheevy when he wrote his 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In Twain’s comic adventure, a contemporary individual suffers a head wound and wakes up 1300 years in the past, in the time of Camelot, to find out that his modern knowledge is not as helpful as he assumed. Twain’s novel remained in print well into the early 2000s. Robinson’s poetry was often compared to that of Edgar Lee Masters. Both poets wrote short biographical poems about small-town individuals struggling in their ordinary lives at the turn of the century. Masters’s 1915 collection Spoon River Anthology is a series of poems which are presented as first-person testimonials on grave markers. The voices of the dead townspeople speak the truth from beyond the grave about their lives. Many novels feature young adults who find out that time travel is not as glamorous as it seems in theory. One of the best is Caroline B. Cooney’s Both Sides of Time (1997), about a girl who finds her desire to go live in a more romantic age fulfilled when she is spirited back one hundred years, only to become involved in love and a murder.

CRITICISM David Kelly

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Scott Donaldson’s Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (2006) presents Robinson in the light of new information, highlighting his poetic gifts and depicting with sensitivity his personal life.

Kelly is a writer who teaches creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College in Illinois.

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In the following essay, he describes how Robinson’s technical style allows him to use language that might seem excessive in another poem. In ‘‘Miniver Cheevy,’’ Edwin Arlington Robinson created a character who comes across as an actual, living person. Most readers are likely to be haunted by the sense of familiarity that happens when they encounter good literature. They are likely to feel that Cheevy is someone they know. Not that they have actually met him, but everyone knows people of his type: a blowhard, a malcontent who finds fault with everything around him, and believes that he cannot be satisfied because he is living in the wrong time. Others might have read some of the same history books, though not as many of them. Others might have studied antiquity, but the Miniver Cheevys of the world feel that they are the only ones who can truly understand it. To them, the only explanation for their existence must be some unaccountable glitch in the nature of time itself. The fact that Cheevy is a familiar character is not, in itself, enough to account for this poem’s continuing impact. In theory, being recognizable should have the exact opposite effect. Readers should be able to look the poem over once, catch the pathos of how Miniver Cheevy misses the point of who he really is, and then move on quickly. That is not the case, though. Over the years, the situation Robinson describes in this poem has persisted, proving itself relevant for each generation. The poem has retained its impact. It is Robinson’s artistry, not his subject, that keeps ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ alive while one poetic trend after another passes by. Regarding Robinson’s poetic style, one element that draws attention is his word choice, especially his verbs. Cheevy does not lose weight, he grows lean. He does not disapprove, he ‘‘scorns.’’ He ‘‘assails,’’ ‘‘weeps,’’ ‘‘dreams,’’ ‘‘rests,’’ ‘‘mourns’’ (twice), and ‘‘curses,’’ and he ‘‘thought, and thought, and thought, / And thought’’ about the nature of his life but does nothing to change it. Something that might please another person could get Cheevy dancing. He does not just want to travel back in time to the Renaissance, he wants to sin incessantly in order to be included among the Medici. Creative writing textbooks in the early 2000s command beginning writers to spice up their prose with active verbs and to avoid using passive verbs, and Robinson illustrates the benefits of such a principle.

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In addition to his chosen verbs, Robinson chose nouns that make his subject come alive: ‘‘scorn,’’ ‘‘swords,’’ ‘‘steeds,’’ ‘‘renown,’’ ‘‘grace,’’ and ‘‘gold’’ are all effectively used. The adjectives he used are fitting as well, including ‘‘lean,’’ ‘‘bright,’’ ‘‘ripe,’’ ‘‘fragrant,’’ and ‘‘sore annoyed.’’ This poem provides a fine example of how a writer can command the reader’s attention with effectively chosen words. Thus, the familiar character is rendered through the use of a familiar rhetorical device. It is well done, but still, there has to be more to Robinson’s achievement. If it were as easy as replacing the mundane words in a poem with thought-provoking substitutes, there would already have been tens of thousands of poets pushing Robinson out of the literature anthologies. There are at any given time countless writers following the textbook advice about snappy verbs and suitable nouns, and few have yet achieved anything with the same kind of energy that lights up ‘‘Miniver Cheevy.’’ There must be other factors at work. After word choice, the next most arresting technical achievement of ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ is its stanza form. In his quatrains, Robinson follows a consistent pattern, lacing his consistency with enough flexibility to keep the poem interesting. The line lengths vary, but they do so in a regular pattern. The lengths of the lines differ within each stanza of the poem, but they are consistent from stanza to stanza. The first line of each stanza has eight syllables; the second lines generally have nine, except in stanza 4, where the second line has ten syllables, and in stanza 8, where the second line has eight. Even in variation he shows balance, adding an extra syllable at the end of the first half of the poem and subtracting one at the poem’s end. All of the third lines, like the first lines, have eight syllables. The shortened final line of each stanza has five syllables. This works for the comic effect, continually cutting short the established pattern of eight to nine syllables per line, creating an anticlimax whenever the reader has come to expect a longer line. Still, even though the last line might divert from the expected line length in each stanza, it maintains its five syllable count. This consistency works well with the word choices in ‘‘Miniver Cheevy.’’ There comes a time in the reading of almost any bad poem when a reader shifts attention from the poem to the poet who wrote it. Certain kinds of language can cause this shift in attention.

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Certain kinds of work choice can make readers feel that the author is talking about a level deeper than their interpretation can reach, but it is easy to cross a line. As with any spice, language that comes on too strong ends up being more about itself than the work it is intended to serve. Poets can damage their poems by letting readers catch the slightest sense that they are working hard or showing off. The structure of ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ shows the controlling hand of a true artist who does the difficult while making it look effortless. It does not feel like Robinson wrote the poem by following a formula or like the numbers of syllables in each line of each stanza had to be tailored to fit a pattern. It feels like a poem with line lengths that ebb and flow in an inevitable manner. Even those readers who are not aware of it know, at some deeper level, that Edgar Arlington Robinson is in command of his poetic faculties, and so they accept words from him that a younger, less powerful, poet might use in desperation. Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on ‘‘Miniver Cheevy,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

Nathan A. Cervo In the following essay, Cervo gives a close analysis of word choice in ‘‘Miniver Cheevy.’’ Between Oliver Wendell Holmes’s ‘‘The Chambered Nautilus’’ (1858) and T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘pair of ragged claws’’ (‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’’ 1915) falls Edwin Arlington Robinson’s ‘‘Miniver Cheevy’’ (1910), the name of whose central figure may be explicated as a thematic play on the words ‘‘foraminifer’’ and ‘‘chivy’’ (or ‘‘chivvy’’). Between the approvingly expanding mollusk (a metaphor for Holmes’s soul) and the psychophanous sidling crustacean (a symbol of Prufrock’s desire to avoid responsibility by being negatively transfigured into a lower life form), the protozoan (Miniver) creeps about gathering food (for ‘‘thought,’’ 27, 28) by way of the slender, rootlike pseudopodia temporarily protruding through the foramens, or minute holes, it bears in its calcareous shell. (The calcareous, or chalk, motif appears later in the film Mrs. Miniver, where the dramatic, and apparently ironic, motion is from Dunkirk toward the white cliffs of Dover.) In Robinson’s poem, Miniver chivvies the townspeople—that is, teases or annoys them by persistent small attacks emanating from the tents, so to speak, of Sir Thomas Malory (moral superiority

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of Arthurian romance to the modern mill town), Matthew Arnold (the philistine is the implacable foe of the artist), Nietzsche (conventions manufacture conduct; the Over-Man creates it), Oscar Wilde (life imitates art, not the other way around), and Freud (the daydreamer as omnipotent infant and artist in the milieu of civilization and its discontents). Fancifully arrayed in ‘‘iron clothing’’ (24)— Robinson’s version of a foraminifer’s shell— Miniver may be said, from the townspeople’s point of view, to be all wet as he creeps about on the false feet (pseudopodia) of literary and historical allusions, gathering sustenance for his virtual self-image. When he daydreams about ‘‘Thebes and Camelot, / And Priam’s neighbors’’ (11–12), one, prompted by Miniver’s perceived lack of character, may suppose that he dwells on Oedipus (cf. ‘‘child of scorn,’’ 1), Sir Gawain, Paris, and Helen. Just as Don Quixote, when mad, construed windmills to be giants and attacked them, Miniver ‘‘[g]rew lean while he assailed the seasons’’ (2). One consequence of Miniver’s grueling—‘‘[g]rew lean’’—encounter with the feverish nothingness of fantasy is somatic marasmus—bodily inanition directly proportional to psychic inflammation. Another is his eschewing the meatiness of present reality in favor of a thin porridge, a gruel whose chief and quite meager ingredient is whining. As inert whiner, who ‘‘would have sinned incessantly / Could he have been [a Medici]’’ (19– 20), Miniver actually is sinning ceaselessly by cadging for drinks instead of working, by dissolving action in ‘‘thinking’’ (30) about ‘‘gold’’ (29), and by spitefully and fatalistically committing his parodistic actions to the ruination of his health (‘‘Miniver coughed,’’ 31; the cough suggesting pulmonary tuberculosis and/or the pneumonia to which alcoholics are prey). In effect, he interchangeably transubstantiates ‘‘whine’’ into alcohol. The alcohol he destructively imbibes is always his version of sacramental wine; or, in Miniver’s case, whine. The last word of the poem, ‘‘drinking’’ (32), suggests that the metaphorical foraminifer Miniver, his character shot with holes, has gone down the drain and into the drink (a sizable body of water). Morally speaking, he has returned by way of undisciplined imagination to the amniotic fluid which he is pleased to identify as ‘‘Camelot’’ (11). To allude to a later poem by Robinson: ‘‘Gawaine, aware again of Lancelot / In the King’s garden, coughed and followed him’’ (‘‘Lancelot’’ 1–2, 1920). Source: Nathan A. Cervo, ‘‘Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy,’’ in Explicator, Vol. 62, No. 4, Summer 2004, pp. 213–15.

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Louis Coxe In the following essay, Coxe decries the neglect of Edwin Arlington Robinson as a poet and identifies strengths that he sees in the poet’s works. To the contemporary reader it seems strange that Allen Tare, in 1933, should have referred to E. A. Robinson as the ‘‘most famous of living poets’’ and again as the writer of ‘‘some of the finest lyrics of modern times.’’ As far as most of us are concerned, Robinson ekes out a survival in ‘‘anthological pickle,’’ as he called it, and few readers try to go beyond, for if any poet has been damned by the anthologists it is Robinson. Why the decline in his reputation? Did critics puff him far beyond his desserts? Can a critic today judge him on the basis of the old chestnuts, ‘‘Miniver Cheevy,’’ ‘‘Flammonde,’’ ‘‘Richard Cory’’? Should criticism reiterate that he ruined himself writing those interminable narratives and dismiss him as a ‘‘transition figure’’ between somebody and somebody else, both presumably more ‘‘important’’? Yvor Winters, in his recent book, has gone far to disestablish the transitional and place the essential Robinson; yet neither he nor Tate has told why he considers the poems he praises praiseworthy. In his brief study, Winters has given an excellent analysis of Robinson’s failings and failures, but there is still the problem of the kind of excellence readers who come to Robinson these days should expect. Vicissitudes of temper and fashion apart, I think much of the neglect of Robinson’s work has derived from the deceptively old-fashioned appearance it presents and from the very stern cosmology out of which the poetry arises. The texture of the poetry is of a sort we are not used to; the subject matter can be misunderstood. Above all, Robinson’s technique lends itself to abuse (and he abused it frequently) so that often the reader may not detect that under an apparently calm surface many forms are in motion. Robinson is a poet with a prose in view. Read ‘‘Eros Turannos’’ or ‘‘For a Dead Lady’’ or ‘‘The Gift of God’’ and you will feel that the scope of a long-naturalistic novel has emerged from a few stanzas. Yet Tate, in his brief essay, says that Robinson’s lyrics are ‘‘dramatic’’ and that T. S. Eliot observes this to be a characteristic of the best modern verse. I really do not know what the word dramatic means in this regard; Robinson’s poetry is not dramatic in any sense of the word commonly accepted, unless it be that Robinson, like James, likes to unfold a scene. To look for anything like drama in the poems is idle, in that the excitement

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DESPITE THE ALMOST INSUPPORTABLE DURESS OF ROBINSON’S ATTITUDE, WE CAN HARDLY ACCUSE HIM OF CYNICISM OR HOPELESSNESS. IN EVERY INSTANCE HIS VIEW OF PEOPLE IS WARM AND UNDERSTANDING, NOT AS THE PATRONIZING SEER BUT AS THE FELLOW SUFFERER.’’

they convey is of a muted sort, akin to that which James himself generates. This poet wears no masks; he is simply at a distance from his poem, unfolding the ‘‘plot,’’ letting us see and letting us make what applications we will. This directness, this prose element, in Robinson’s verse is easy enough to find; less so to define or characterize. One can say this, however, just as Pope was at his best in a poetry that had morality and man in society as its subject matter and its criterion, so Robinson is happiest as a poet when he starts with a specific human situation or relationship, with a ‘‘story.’’ By the same token, he fails most notably when he engages in philosophic speculation, when he writes poems, such as the ‘‘Octaves,’’ or many of the sonnets, that have no real subject matter, no focus of events or crisis seen objectively. The parallel between his method and that of Pope is patently incomplete, yet each poet, basing his whole scheme on certain immutable moral convictions and concerning himself primarily with man as a social creature, strove for a poetry that would be external, transparent, unified. Neither made elaborate experiments with form, but each was content to exploit with dexterity a few common meters, because for both Pope and Robinson the real business was what was finally said and communicated. Both used their individual idioms, each far removed from anything we find today: spare where we are lush, general where we are specific, detailed where we are reticent or silent. The twentieth century has learned to dislike abstractions as the result of being badly cheated by them, yet the fear should perhaps be of the susceptibility to fraud, however pious. Whatever Robinson’s weaknesses, his frauds are few and those few easy to expose. The best poems work toward a condition of

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total communication by means of suggestion and statement, with no regard for the poet as speaker; that is, the attitudes out of which the poems emerge we take as our own, and there is no need to ascertain those of the speaker, since Robinson is everywhere the same. His irony is not ‘‘in’’ the poem but external, one constituent of a cosmology that sees the human condition as comic in the largest sense—sees life as a desperate business but essentially, immutably unalterable. This is not childish disillusionment; it works out in the poetry as a cosmology that seems to us, scions of the liberal-romantic stock, bitter, profitless, perhaps old-fashioned. And because Robinson so early in his career found and grasped his ultimate beliefs, the modern reader does not find what he must naturally look for: progress, novelty, enlightenment. This poetry does not intend certain things, and discussion of the kind of verse Robinson wrote may clear the ground and allow the reader to go to the poetry with some idea of what not to expect or look for. Many critics have spent too much time saying that Robinson was obsessed with failure, thereby accounting for his lapse into the profitless slough of the long narratives. Yet none has shown how vital a force the failure is as theme, how it contains within itself a possibility of vision and maturity as well as of pathos. To Robinson life and humanity were failures inasmuch as they consistently fall short of, not the ideal, but their own proper natures. Robinson was never so romantically disillusioned that he could be for long disturbed over the discrepancy between actual and ideal, illusion and reality; for him the real irony, the comedy, lay in man’s willful misconception of life and his role in it. The very willfulness may have a magnificence of its own, as in ‘‘The Gift of God,’’ and the people in his poems who come through to an awareness of the true proportion do not simply rest there in smug knowledge, but rather for the first time see that it is from such vision of things as they are that a man starts: He may by contemplation learn A little more than what he knew, And even see great oaks return To acorns out of which they grew. What may be irony from one point of view may be comedy or pathos, perhaps a kind of muted tragedy, from another. At all events, the point of view is essentially the same, with only a pace back, forward, or to one side that gives the particular vision its specific color and shape.

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The attitudes which have dominated the writing of our century have been rather different from Robinson’s. We seem for the most part willing to contemplate life as a tragic affair, to command the ironic tone in our writing in order to express successfully the tragic division we see gaping between what we are and what we would be. Yet one wonders at times if we actually do believe this or whether it is another kind of myth-making, a device for getting poetry written and read, like Yeats’s visions. If we really do believe, then we must accept the consequences of our faith; for in a world that is ultimately tragic, happiness is irrelevant, despair the resort of the thin-skinned, and total acceptance the only modus vivendi. The acceptance itself must entail a kind of transubstantiation; the Aristotelian essence of life turns to something else while the ‘‘accidents’’ of evil and death remain. This is the realm of miracle, and the poetry of Robinson has nothing to do with it, for his work merely tries to come to a naked vision of the human condition without lusting after schemes of revision, without trying to discover something that is not and can not in nature be there. In ‘‘Veteran Sirens’’ all the terrible irony of mankind’s willful refusal to face facts emerges in the pitying portrait of superannuated whores: The burning hope, the worn expectancy, The martyred humor and the maimed allure, Cry out for time to end his levity, And age to soften his investiture. And we are all life’s whores. What strikes Robinson as ironic is not the old discrepancy between illusion and reality, not the wastage of time, but the supreme dissipation of the expense of spirit in a waste of shame, folly, and deceit. The stern, still-Calvinist view of carnal sin here has become a trope for life, for the way we all bargain with life for a living and are finally cheated. The best of Robinson’s poems have to do with such plots, such expense of the soul’s life, and usually have as their center the single, crucial failure of a man or woman to commit that destruction of the beloved self, to make that complete disavowal of a precious image which alone and finally leaves the individual free. The price of such freedom comes high, ‘‘costing not less than everything,’’ and is paid for by a crucial failure in which the image referred to is destroyed, in many such cases along with the life itself. In Amaranth, for instance, Atlas and Miss Watchman, both self-deluding artists, are destroyed along with their work; although Fargo, who sees the truth,

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manages to alter his whole nature and his way of life. The variations on the theme are many. The tone can be somber and tragic, or it can be pastoral and elegiac as in ‘‘Isaac and Archibald,’’ or angry and bitter as in ‘‘For a Dead Lady.’’ Yet all tones, all attitudes, are part of the one dominating view as the language, however bald or rich by turns it may be, serves the one narrative and ratiocinative end. If Robinson’s attitudes are not common ones, similarly his idiom finds little immediate sympathy in modern readers. Unfortunately we have been accustomed to read Robinson as though he were Edgar Lee Masters from Maine, a crabbed New Englander who should have read Walt Whitman, and unconsciously we judge him by a standard we would reject were it applied to T. S. Eliot or John Crowe Ransom. Here is an old language, reborn, sometimes abstract and involved, usually sparing of metaphor, although the imagery when it occurs is crucial, perhaps the more so because of its very compression and sparseness. Above all, Robinson organizes his poems to a disarming extent, often building a structure that is so symmetrically proportioned that only the closest reading discovers the articulation. Such a reading I shall attempt here in the hope that the effort will supply an insight into the poems themselves as well as a justification of the foregoing remarks. ‘‘Eros Turannos’’ emerges to the mind as a narrative, compressed and suggestive yet without the trickery that occasionally irritates us, as in the case of ‘‘The Whip’’ or ‘‘How Annandale Went Out.’’ Most noticeably, the language is general, the tone expository, the purpose of the poem communication rather than expression. Adumbrated in the first stanza, certain images, whose latent power and meaning are reserved until the final lines, have the function of motifs, repeated constantly and expanded as the poem opens out into suggestion. There are three such images or symbols: waves, trees, stairs leading down. Throughout, these symbols control and provide a center for the meanings possible to the poem, and from the mention of ‘‘downward years’’ and ‘‘foamless weirs’’ in the first stanza to the triple vision of the last four lines these elements recur, the same but altered. As in the case with so many Robinson poems, the reader must supply, from the general materials provided, his own construction, yet the poet has seen to it that there can be only one possible final product. The poem contains two complementary parts: the abstract, generalized

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statement and the symbolic counterpart of that statement, each constituting a kind of gloss upon the other. Each part moves through the poem parallel to the other, until at the end the two become fused in the concrete images. In addition to the three symbols mentioned, we find also that blindness and dimness, summed up in the single word veil yet continually present in the words mask, blurred, dimmed, fades, illusion. All this culminates in the sweeping final image: ‘‘Or like a stairway to the sea / Where down the blind are driven.’’ Yet such inner order, such tight articulation as these examples may indicate, derives no more from the concrete than from the generalized. Contrary to Marianne Moore’s professed belief, not all imaginary gardens need have actual toads in them, nor, conversely, do we have to bother with the toad at all if our garden is imagined truly enough. What we must have is room—for toads or nontoads, but room anyhow, and Robinson seems to say that there will be more room if we don’t clutter the garden with too many particular sorts of fauna and flora. For in ‘‘Eros Turannos’’ we are not told the where or the wherefore; only, and it is everything, the how and the just so. In the hinted-at complexity of the woman’s emotion, in the suggested vagueness of the man’s worthlessness, lies the whole history of human trust and selfdeception. None shall see this incident for what it really is, and the woman who hides her trouble has as much of the truth as ‘‘we’’ who guess and guess, although the poem implies, coming no nearer to the truth than men usually do. ‘‘Eros Turannos’’ is the Robinsonian archetype, for in it we can find the basic elements, the structural pattern, that he was to use frequently and with large success. The most cursory reading affords a glimpse into the potential power as well as the dangers of such a form; Robinson’s use of it provides examples of both. In the poem in question he reaches an ultimate kind of equipoise of statement and suggestion, generalization and concretion. The first three words of the poem set the tone, provide the key to a ‘‘plot’’ which the rest will set before us. ‘‘She fears him’’: simple statement; what follows will explore the statement, and we shall try to observe the method and evaluate its effect. She fears him, and will always ask What fated her to choose him; She meets in his engaging mask All reasons to refuse him; But what she meets and what she fears Are less than are the downward years

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Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs, Of age, were she to lose him. The epigrammatic tone of the verse strikes one immediately. We are aware that here is a kind of expository writing, capable in its generality of evoking a good deal more than the words state. Important though unobtrusive imagery not only reinforces and enriches the exposition but by calculated ambiguity as well sets a tone of suspense and fatality. The man wears a mask: he conceals something that at once repels and attracts her; notice the play on ‘‘engaging’’ and the implications that involves. The motif is an important one for the poem, as is that contained in the metaphor of ‘‘weirs,’’ since these two suggestions of deception, distrust, entrapment, blindness, and decline will be continually alluded to throughout the poem, to find an ultimate range of meaning in the final lines. The second stanza will in such expressions as ‘‘blurred’’ and ‘‘to sound’’ keep us in mind of the motifs mentioned, without actually requiring new imagistic material nor forcing us to reimagine the earlier metaphors. The intent here is not to be vague but to retain in the reader’s consciousness what has gone before as that consciousness acquires new impressions. Hence, in stanza three, Robinson can now introduce a suggestive sketch of the man’s nature while he reminds of the woman’s and continues to explore it: A sense of ocean and old trees Envelopes and allures him; Tradition, touching all he sees; Beguiles and reassures him; That engaging mask of his becomes apparent to us here in this man who finds a solace and security in the love of his wife and in her solid place in the community, and yet the sinister note first sounded in the image of ‘‘weirs’’ is lightly alluded to in the phrase ‘‘a sense of ocean.’’ Moreover, that he too is ‘‘beguiled’’ presents a possibility of irony beyond what has yet been exploited. The stanza extends the narrative beyond what I have indicated: And all her doubts of what he says Are dimmed with what she knows of days— Till even prejudice delays And fades and she secures him. The possibilities are many. We grasp readily enough the pathos of her situation: a woman with a worthless husband, proud and sensitive to what the town is whispering yet ready to submit to any indignity, to close her eyes and ears, rather than live alone. Surely a common enough theme in

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American writing and one that allows the poet to suggest rather than dramatize. Again, in ‘‘dimmed’’ we catch an echo of what has gone before, and in the last two lines the abstract noun ‘‘prejudice,’’ with its deliberately general verbs ‘‘delays’’ and ‘‘fades,’’ presents no image but rather provokes the imagination to a vision of domestic unhappiness familiar to us all, either in fiction or empirically. And of course the finality of ‘‘secures,’’ ironic neither in itself nor in its position in the stanza, takes on irony when we see what such security must be: the woman finds peace only by blinding herself and by seeing the man as she wishes to see him. Stanza four once again recapitulates and explores. Statement alternates with image, the inner suffering with the world’s vision of it: And home, where passion lived and died, Becomes a place where she can hide, While all the town and harbor-side Vibrate with her seclusion. If this stanza forms the climax of the plot, so to speak, the next comes to a kind of stasis, the complication of events and motives and themes we see so often in Henry James. The outside world of critical townspeople, hinted at before, now comes to the foreground, and we get a complication of attitudes and views—the world’s, the woman’s, the man’s, our own—and the poet’s is ours, too. Yet even in a passage as seemingly prosaic and bare as this, Robinson keeps us mindful of what has gone before. In stanza four such words as ‘‘falling,’’ ‘‘wave,’’ ‘‘illusion,’’ ‘‘hide,’’ and ‘‘harbor’’ have served to keep us in mind of the various themes as well as to advance the plot, and in the fifth stanza Robinson presents us with a series of possible views of the matter, tells us twice that this is a ‘‘story,’’ reiterates that deception and hiding are the main themes, as in the metaphorical expression ‘‘veil’’ as well as in the simple statement, ‘‘As if the story of a house / Were told or ever could be.’’ And at last, in the final lines, thematic, narrative, and symbolic materials merge in the three images that accumulate power as they move from the simple to the complex, from the active to the passive, from the less to the more terrible: Though like waves breaking it may be, Or like a changed familiar tree, Or like a stairway to the sea Where down the blind are driven. For the attentive reader the narrative can not fail. Robinson has given us the suggestive outline we need and told us how, in general, to think

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about this story. He has kept us constantly aware of place, time, actors, and action even though such awareness is only lightly provoked and not insisted on. In the last stanza the carious downward flow of the poem, the flow of the speculation, reaches an ultimate debouchment—‘‘Where down the blind are driven.’’ Apart from the metrical power, the movement of the poem is significant. Robinson has packed it with words that suggest descent, depth, and removal from sight, so that the terrible acceptance of the notion that we must ‘‘take what the god has given’’ becomes more terrible, more final as it issues out in the logic of statement and imagery and in the logic of the plot. If much of the poem’s power depends upon the interaction of statement and suggestion, still another source of energy is the metric. Robinson here uses a favorite device of his, feminine rhymes, in alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines, and gives to soft-sounding, polysyllabic words important metrical functions. As a result, when he does invert a foot or wrench the rhythm or use a monosyllable, the effect is striking out of all proportion to its apparent surface value. Surely the plucking, sounding quality of the word ‘‘vibrate’’ in the last line of the fourth stanza is proof of this, though equally effective is the position of ‘‘down’’ and ‘‘blind’’ in the final line of the poem. Contemporary verse has experimented with meters, rhyme, and rhythm to such an extent that one has to attune the ear to Robinson’s verse. At first it sounds jingly and mechanical, perhaps inept, but after we make a trial of them, the skill, the calculation, have their way and the occasional deviations from the set pattern take on the greater power because they are derivations: Pity, I learned, was not the least Of time’s offending benefits That had now for so long impugned The conservation of his wits: Rather it was that I should yield, Alone, the fealty that presents The tribute of a tempered ear To an untempered eloquence. This stanza from ‘‘The Wandering Jew’’ shows the style. This is mastery of prosody; an oldfashioned command of the medium. The reversing of feet, use of alternately polysyllabic and monosyllabic words, of syncopation (‘‘To an untempered eloquence’’) are devices subtly and sparingly used. The last stanza of the same poem gives another instance, and here the running-on of the sense through three-and-a-half lines adds to the effect:

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Whether he still defies or not The failure of an angry task That relegates him out of time To chaos, I can only ask. But as I knew him, so he was; And somewhere among men today Those old, unyielding eyes may flash, And flinch—and look the other way. Deviation implies a basic pattern, and although in many cases, particularly in the blank verse narratives, syllable-counting mars the prosody, nonetheless the best poems subtly attune themselves to the ‘‘tempered ear,’’ syncopate on occasion, and jingle to good effect. This analysis is technical and only partial; it seems to presuppose that we must lapse into Mr. Brooks’s ‘‘heresy of paraphrase.’’ Granted. Yet this but begs a question, inasmuch as all of Robinson’s poetry assumes that one will want to find the paraphrasable element the poet has carefully provided. These are poems about something, and what the something is we must discover. That is why we should consider Robinson as a poet with a prose in view, according to the description of prose earlier suggested. ‘‘Eros Turannos’’ is about the marriage of untrue minds, but specifically it is not about just untrueness and minds; it is about untrue man A and suffering, self-deluding woman B, as well as about those worldly wise men who conjecture and have all the dope. Notably unsuccessful in speculative verse, Robinson excels in just this naturalistic case history, this story of a Maine Emma Bovary. If the theme is still failure, Robinson rings a peculiar change upon it, since at last the poem forces us to accept the implication that there is and must be a ‘‘kindly veil between / Her visions and those we have seen’’; that all of us must ‘‘take what the god has given,’’ for failure is, in Robinson’s world, the condition of man and human life. We do the best we can. In ‘‘Old Trails,’’ the best one can is not often good, and what is indeed success in the world’s eyes has a very shoddy look to those who recognize the success as merely ‘‘a safer way / Than growing old alone among the ghosts.’’ It is the success of Chad in The Ambassadors, who will go home to the prosperous mills and Mamie and Mom, not that of Strether, who could have had the money and the ease but took the way of ‘‘growing old among the ghosts.’’ But a briefer, more compact poem than ‘‘Old Trails,’’ one that deals with another aspect of the theme, is the sonnet ‘‘The Clerks,’’ which for all its seeming spareness is a very rich, very deft performance.

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The octave opens colloquially, gives us a general location and an unspecified number of clerks; the speaker is the poet, as poet and as man. Robinson draws an evocative, generalized sketch of the clerks’ past, of their prime as well as of the slow attrition of time and labor, and affirms that despite the wear they have sustained these men are still good and human. It is in the sestet that the poem moves out into suggestion, that it implies a conceit by which we can see how all men are clerks, timeservers, who are subject to fears and visions, who are high and low, and who as they tier up also cut down the trim away. To call the poem a conceit is no mere exercise of wit, for Robinson has clearly punned on many unobtrusive words in the sonnet. What is the clerks’ ‘‘ancient air’’? Does it mean simply that the men are old and tired, or that their manner is one of recalling grand old times of companionship that never really existed, or that one must take ‘‘air’’ literally to mean their musty smell of the store? These possibilities are rendered the more complex by the phrase ‘‘shopworn brotherhood’’ immediately following, for then the visual element is reinforced, the atmosphere of shoddiness and shabbiness, of Rotary-club good-fellowship, and the simple language has invested itself with imagistic material that is both olfactory and visual. And of course, one may well suspect sarcasm in the assertion that ‘‘the men were just as good, / And just as human as they ever were.’’ How good were they? Yet lest anyone feel this is too cynical, Robinson carefully equates the clerks with ‘‘poets and kings.’’ As is the case with ‘‘Eros Turannos,’’ this poem proceeds from the general to the specific and back to the general again, a generality now enlarged to include comment on and a kind of definition of the human condition. Throughout, there have been ironic overtones, ironic according to the irony we have seen as peculiarly Robinsonian in that it forms one quadrant of the total view. Here, the irony has to do with the discrepancy between the vision men have of their lives and the actuality they have lived. The poet here implies that such discrepancy, such imperfection of vision is immutably ‘‘human’’ and perhaps, therefore and ironically, ‘‘good.’’ That the clerks (and we are all clerks) see themselves as at once changed and the same, ‘‘fair’’ yet only called so, serves as the kind of lie men exist by, a lie that becomes an ‘‘ache’’ on the one hand and the very nutriment that supports life on the other. You, all you who secretly cherish some irrational hope or comfort, you merely ‘‘feed yourselves with your descent,’’ your ancestry, your career, your abject position miscalled a progress. For all of us there

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can be only the wastage, the building up to the point of dissatisfaction, the clipping away to the point of despair. Despite the almost insupportable duress of Robinson’s attitude, we can hardly accuse him of cynicism or hopelessness. In every instance his view of people is warm and understanding, not as the patronizing seer but as the fellow sufferer. Such feeling informs the poems we have discussed and fills ‘‘The Gift of God’’ with humanity no cynic could imagine, no despair encompass. For in this poem the theme of failure turns once more, this time in an unexpected way so that we see Robinson affirming self-deception of this specific kind as more human, more the gauge of true love than all the snide fact-finding the rest of the world would recommend. The poem is about a mother’s stubborn, blind love for a worthless (or perhaps merely ordinary) son, and this in the teeth of all the evidence her neighbors would be delighted to retail. Again, the poem is a compact narrative; again the irony exists outside the poem, not in its expression. As in so many of the best poems, Robinson says in effect: here is the reality, here is the illusion. You compare them and say which is which and if possible which is the correct moral choice. The metaphorical material we can roughly classify as made up of imagery relating to royalty, apotheosis, sacrifice, and love. From the first few lines we are aware of a quality which, by allusion to the Annunciation and the anointing of kings, establishes the mother’s cherished illusion and thereby makes acceptance of the emergent irony inescapably the reader’s duty. He must compare the fact and the fiction for and by himself; Robinson will not say anything in such a way as to make the responsibility for choice his own rather than the reader’s. He will simply render the situation and leave us to judge it, for all of Robinson’s poems presuppose an outside world of critics and judges, of ourselves, people who see and observe more or less clearly. His irony is external; it lies in the always hinted-at conflict between the public life and the private, between the thing seen from the inside and from the outside; with the poet as a speaker presenting a third vision, not one that reconciles or cancels the other two, but one which simply adds a dimension and shows us that ‘‘everything is true in a different sense.’’ If the dominant motifs in ‘‘The Gift of God’’ are as indicated above, the progression of the poem follows undeviatingly the pattern suggested. In the first stanza Annunciation; the second, Nativity; the

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third, vision; the fourth, a stasis in which the mother seems to accept her son’s unusual merit and her own vision of him as real; the fifth, a further extension of vision beyond anything actual; the sixth, the culmination of this calculated vision in the apotheosis. More than a schematized structure, the poem depends not only on the articulation of motifs and a plot but equally on symbolic material that interacts with the stated or implied events in the ‘‘plot.’’ Thus, from the outset the poet has juxtaposed the illusory vision and the ‘‘firmness’’ of the mother’s faith in it. The language has a flavor of vague association with kingship, biblical story, and legend, notably conveyed by such words as ‘‘shining,’’ ‘‘degree,’’ ‘‘anointed,’’ ‘‘sacrilege,’’ ‘‘transmutes,’’ and ‘‘crowns.’’ Yet in the careful arrangement of his poem Robinson has not oversimplified the mother’s attitude. She maintains her ‘‘innocence unwrung’’ (and the irony of the allusion is not insisted upon) despite the common knowledge of people who know, of course, better, and Robinson more than implies the innocence of her love in the elevated yet unmetaphorical diction he uses. Not until the final stanza does he open the poem, suddenly show the apotheosis in the image of ‘‘roses thrown on marble stairs,’’ subtly compressing into the last three lines the total pathos of the poem, for the son ascending in the mother’s dream is ‘‘clouded’’ by a ‘‘fall’’; the greatness his mother envisions is belied by what we see. And who is in the right? For in the final turn of the plot, is it not the mother who gives the roses of love and the marble of enduring faith? Is the dream not as solid and as real as human love can make it? If we doubt this notion, we need only observe the value Robinson places on the verb transmutes in stanza five: ‘‘Transmutes him with her faith and praise.’’ She has, by an absolute miracle of alchemy, transmuted base material into precious; by an act of faith, however misplaced, she has found the philosopher’s stone, which is love wholly purged of self. What we have come to realize is that, in these poems we have been considering, we are concerned with narrative—narrative of a peculiar kind in which the story is not just about the events, people, and relationships but about those very poetic devices which are the vehicle of the narration and its insights. In ‘‘The Gift of God’’ symbol and theme have a narrative function; they must do in brief and without obtrusiveness what long passages of dialogue, exposition, and description would effect in a novel. As a result, the reader is compelled to take the entire poem in at once; he either ‘‘understands’’ it or he does not. Naturally there are subtleties that

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emerge only after many readings; yet because these poems are narratives, Robinson mast concentrate upon communication, upon giving us a surface that is at once dense yet readily available to the understanding. As one apart, immune, alone, Or featured for the shining ones, And like to none that she has known Of other women’s other sons, The firm fruition of her need, He shines anointed; and he blurs Her vision, till it seems indeed A sacrilege to call him hers. This is on one hand a simple telling of the plot: the mother sees her son as unique and feels unworthy to be his mother. Simple enough. But the story is more than this, more than a cold telling of the facts about the mother’s vision of her son. We see on the other hand that it is her need of the son, and of the vision of him, which complicates the story, while the suggestion of kingship, ritual, and sacrifice in the diction, the implication of selfimmolation and deception, further extends the possibilities of meaning. All this we grasp more readily than we may realize, for Robinson prepares for his effects very early; and while he extends meaning is careful to recapitulate, to restate and reemphasize the while he varies and complicates: She sees him rather at the goal, Still shining; and her dream foretells The proper shining of a soul Where nothing ordinary dwells. In these lines Robinson affirms the mother’s illusion: it is a ‘‘dream’’ that ‘‘foretells,’’ and recapitulates the theme of kingship, of near divinity in the repetition of ‘‘shining.’’ The stanza that follows gives the poem its turn, states specifically that the son is merely ordinary, that the mother deludes herself, that her motive in so doing is ‘‘innocent,’’ and in stanza five the poem, as we have seen, turns once more, pivots on the verb ‘‘transmute,’’ turns away from the simple ironical comparison we have been experiencing, and reveals a transmuted relationship: son to mother, vision to fact, and an ultimate apotheosis of the mother under the guise of a mistaken view of the son. The poem is about all these things and is equally about the means of their accomplishment within the poem. This is a poetry of surfaces, dense and deceptive surfaces to be sure but none the less a poetry that insists upon the communication of a whole meaning, totally and at once:

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She crowns him with her gratefulness, And says again that life is good; And should the gift of God be less In him than in her motherhood, His fame, though vague, will not be small, As upward through her dream he fares, Half clouded with a crimson fall Of roses thrown on marble stairs. The recapitulation, the tying together, of the symbolic and thematic materials serves in this, the last stanza, a narrative as well as an expressive purpose. The tone is epigrammatic rather than prosaic and must shift delicately, come to the edge of banality, then turn off and finally achieve a muted sublimity that runs every risk of sentimentality and rhetoric yet never falters. The verse requires of us what it requires of itself: a toughness that can encompass the trite and mawkish without on the one hand turning sentimental itself or on the other resorting to an easy irony. The technique is the opposite of dramatic in that Robinson leaves as much to the reader as he possibly can; he uses no persona; the conflict is given not so much as conflict-in-action before our eyes as it unfolds itself at once, passes through complications, and returns to the starting point, the same yet altered and, to some degree, understood. To this extent Robinson is ratiocinative rather than dramatic. What we and the characters themselves think about the ‘‘plot’’ is as important as the plot, becomes indeed the full meaning of the plot. Observably this ratiocinative and narrative strain tends toward a kind of self-parody or formula. Robinson resorted to trickery too often in default of a really felt subject matter, as in ‘‘The Whip.’’ Yet we must not feel that between the excellence of such poems as ‘‘For a Dead Lady’’ and the dullness of Kings Jasper there lies only a horde of mediocre peoms; on the contrary, there is no American poet who has approached Robinson in the number of finished poems of high merit. Winters’s list seems to me an excellent one, though it may seem overly strict to some. In any case, it clearly indicates that Robinson is the major American poet of our era, with only T. S. Eliot as a peer. Of possible rivals, there is none whose claim rests on the number of finished poems nor on wholly achieved effects nor on the range and viability of subject. Of coarse, this is a controversial statement in many quarters, and odious comparisons are far from the purpose; nevertheless, until such time as serious readers of serious poetry make an attempt to read and evaluate Robinson’s poetry, they must

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take somebody else’s word for it. The poetry is there—a fat volume with all the arid narratives at the end for convenience, the better poems scattered throughout. It may be that the time has come for readers of poetry to place Robinson where he belongs, or to read him at any rate. I have attempted to reveal some of the more striking virtues of the poetry and to dispel some misconceptions, and while I suppose there are readers who do not like Robinson’s kind of poetry, I have tried to show what we must not look for in it. It is to me important to get beyond fashion if we can and take stock of our best writers, not being deterred by what we have been trained to think about them nor discouraged by faults that loom large to us because they are not our own. If we can understand if not believe in his external irony, his cosmology, then we shall be equipped to recognize his worth in the same way that we recognize that of Swift, for example, or Mauriac. Time and fashion will have their effects, true enough, but unless we can rise above the predilections of the moment in our reading, there is little possibility of our understanding what we read. Source: Louis Coxe, ‘‘Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Lost Tradition,’’ in Enabling Acts: Selected Essays in Criticism, University of Missouri Press, 1976, pp. 7–26.

SOURCES Anderson, Wallace L., ‘‘The Poetic Context,’’ in Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Critical Introduction, Houghton Mifflin, 1967, pp. 1–20. Donoghue, Denis, ‘‘A Poet of Continuing Relevance,’’ in Edwin Arlington Robinson, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1988, p. 29, originally published in Connoisseurs of Chaos, Columbia University Press, 1984. Lucas, John, ‘‘The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson,’’ in Edwin Arlington Robinson, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1988, p. 137, originally published in Moderns and Contemporaries, Barnes & Noble Books, 1985. Robinson, Edwin Arlington, ‘‘Miniver Cheevy,’’ in The Concise Columbia Book of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 140–41. Sapir, Edward, ‘‘Poems of Experience,’’ in Freeman, Vol. 5, April 19, 1922, pp. 141-42, quoted in W. R. Robinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poetry of the Act, Press of Western Reserve University, 1967, p. 1. Winters, Yvor, ‘‘The Shorter Poems,’’ in Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Francis Murphy, Prentice-Hall, 1970, p. 57, originally published in Edwin Arlington Robinson, New Directions, 1946.

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FURTHER READING Hagedorn, Herman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Macmillan, 1939. Published soon after Robinson’s death, this first biography of the poet gives readers a sense of the way he was viewed in his own time. Kennedy, X. J., ‘‘The Enduring Specter of E. A. Robinson,’’ in New Criterion, Vol. 25, No. 8, April 2007, pp.20–26. Kennedy evaluates the lasting significance of Robinson’s work in this important essay. Squires, Radcliffe, ‘‘Tilbury Town Today,’’ in Edwin Arlington Robinson: Centenary Essays, edited by Ellsworth Barnard, University of Georgia Press, 1969, pp. 175–83.

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This essay discusses how the United States changed in the hundred years after Robinson’s birth, placing Robinson’s small-town characters in a larger social context. Stanford, Donald E., ‘‘Edwin Arlington Robinson,’’ in Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry, University of Delaware Press, 1983, pp. 137–89. Stanford tries to deduce Robinson’s poetic theory by closely examining his poetry. Trachtenberg, Alan, ‘‘Democracy and the Poet: Walt Whitman and E. A. Robinson,’’ in Massachusetts Review, Vol. 39, No. 2, Summer 1998, pp. 267–80. Trachtenberg compares Whitman and Robinson regarding their views on democracy and the ordinary man and their contributions to the development of a poetry of the people.

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Odysseus to Telemachus Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus’’ was written in 1972 at the time when Joseph Brodsky emigrated from Russia to the United States. It was translated into English by George L. Kline and included in the English collection A Part of Speech, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 1980, where it is the final piece in the poem cycle entitled, ‘‘A Song to No Music.’’ The epistolary poem borrows several specific elements from the Homeric epic Odyssey. It is addressed by Odysseus to his absent son Telemachus. The setting is Aeaea, the land ruled by the sorceress Circe, who has changed Odysseus’s sailors to pigs. In the Homeric epic, when Odysseus is in Aeaea, Telemachus is at home on the island of Ithaca with his mother Penelope.

JOSEPH BRODSKY 1972

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Joseph (also spelled Iosif) Alexandrovich Brodsky was born May 24, 1940, into a Russian Jewish family living in Leningrad, Russia (then part of the USSR). His father was an officer in the old Soviet navy, and after he was stripped of his rank, the family became poverty-stricken. Brodsky attended school until about 1956, after which he held a wide variety of jobs, including operating a milling machine, working in a prison morgue, and assisting in a geological study. Through these early years, he engaged in an energetic and

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Joseph Brodsky (AP Images)

extensive endeavor of self-education, teaching himself English and Polish and studying religion, classical mythology, and philosophy, and by the late 1950s, he was writing poetry in Russian and translating into Russian from the original Polish the poetry of his favorite poet Czeslaw Milosz. Between 1962 and 1964, Brodsky had a romantic relationship with Marina Basonanova, who refused to marry him but bore him a son Andrey (also spelled Andrei) to whom she gave her maiden name. In 1964, Brodsky was charged with parasitism and tried by Soviet authorities. (Parasitism is a general crime of acting in ways that is a detriment to others or taking advantage of others.) The penalty he received was five years of internal exile in a labor camp, but he served only about eighteen months. The penalty was commuted as a result of protests made by famous Soviet and foreign literary persons, including the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1967, Brodsky’s first collection, Elegy for John Donne and Other Poems, was published by Longman in London. Refusing to subject his work to press censorship in the Soviet Union, Brodsky was expelled in 1972. He emigrated from Russia to the United States where, in

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1977, he became a naturalized citizen. Thereafter, he published a lot in both Russian and English. Four poetry collections appeared in the 1970s. At the same time, individual pieces appeared in such publications as the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and Los Angeles Times. In 1980, A Part of Speech appeared, containing the poem cycle ‘‘A Song to No Music,’’ which concludes with ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus,’’ and also the poem cycle ‘‘A Part of Speech.’’ Two other collections appeared in the 1980s. In 1992, Brodsky published Watermark, a collection of essays about his seventeen winters in Venice, and in 1995, On Grief and Reason: Essays appeared. Other collections of essays followed. During these decades of exceptional productivity, Brodsky taught at a number of prestigious U.S. institutions, beginning with the University of Michigan, and he also received many high honors. He was poet-in-residence at Queens College in New York and held visiting faculty positions at Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges, Columbia University, and Cambridge University. In 1978, he received an honorary degree from Yale and was admitted to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His 1986 collection Less than One received the National Book Critics Award. The next year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. For 1991 and 1992, he served as the poet laureate of the United States. In 1990, Brodsky married Maria Sozzani, and the couple had a daughter, Anna. In 1996, Joseph Brodsky died in New York of a heart attack. He was fifty-six years old. His collected poetry, Collected Poems in English, 1972–1999, edited by Ann Kjellberg, appeared in 2000.

POEM TEXT My dear Telemachus, The Trojan War is over now; I don’t recall who won it. The Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave so many dead so far from their own homeland. But still, my homeward way has proved too long. While we were wasting time there, old Poseidon, it almost seems, stretched and extended space. I don’t know where I am or what this place can be. It would appear some filthy island,

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with bushes, buildings, and great grunting pigs. A garden choked with weeds; some queen or other. Grass and huge stones . . . Telemachus, my son! To a wanderer the faces of all islands resemble one another. And the mind trips, numbering waves; eyes, sore from sea horizons, run; and the flesh of water stuffs the ears. I can’t remember how the war came out; even how old you are—I can’t remember. Grow up, then, my Telemachus, grow strong. Only the gods know if we’ll see each other again. You’ve long since ceased to be that babe before whom I reined in the plowing bullocks. Had it not been for Palamedes’ trick we two would still be living in one household. But maybe he was right; away from me you are quite safe from all Oedipal passions, and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

In 1988, Harperaudio produced an audio cassette, Joseph Brodsky Reads His Poetry.

The film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) is a modern retelling of Homer’s Odyssey. The film is set in Mississippi during the Great Depression.

Based loosely on Homer’s Odyssey, but including some material from Virgil’s Aeneid, director Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 film Troy stars Brad Pitt as Achilles and reenacts the siege of the walled city in Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The 2007 DVD travelogue God’s Lair: Chios and Inousses films a visit to the area where Homer is said to have been born. An undated audio file from A Century of Recorded Verse, volume 4, records Brodsky reading ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus.’’ This recording is available at various sites online.

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Stanza 1 The title of the poem and the first-line salutation announce ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus’’ as a letter, written from the father Odysseus to his son Telemachus. It begins with the point that the siege of Troy is concluded and the remarkable admission by Odysseus that he cannot remember who won. Odysseus laments that many Greek soldiers’ bodies remain on the battlefield. The journey home to Ithaca has been longer than Odysseus anticipated. It seems to him that perhaps Poseidon, god of the sea, has stretched the waters to extend the trip. In this last observation, Odysseus suggests collusion between space and time to heighten the subjective sense one has of being far removed from home.

Stanza 2 Odysseus laments his poor memory and his confusion regarding his location. Listless, disheartened, and vague, Odysseus admits he cannot tell one island from another, does not know the island where he is, and does not know its ruler. He repeats that he does not know the outcome of the siege of Troy. He cannot calculate his son’s age either. Homeric hints in this stanza regarding a queen and pigs identify the island and ruler for readers who know Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus’s lassitude suggests he may be drugged.

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Stanza 3 Regret increases in the final stanza, as Odysseus reflects on how much time he has missed of his son’s life, and he imagines that Telemachus is now grown up. But for the trick of Palamedes, which entrapped Odysseus and enlisted him against his will in the siege of Troy, father and son would have shared these many years together; Telemachus would have grown to adulthood with his father in his life. Now, Odysseus thinks maybe his being away from his son has been for the best. This way the fatherless Telemachus has been able to grow up free of oedipal feelings and blessed by guilt-free dreams.

THEMES Effect of Time on Point of View The Odysseus of Brodsky’s poem has reached a point in his life when he ponders what all his

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Do some research in art history, locating images of Attic pottery and classical sculpture that depict characters and scenes from Greek mythology and the Trojan war. Make a PowerPoint presentation for your class in which you show these images and discuss them with your fellow students.

Read about Heinrich Schliemann and his early archeological efforts to locate Troy and inquire about any archeological digs in your area. Write a report on Schliemann’s life and what parts of the Homeric myth were verified by artifacts discovered at the site. Include in your paper description of archeological work, if any, done in your area.

Find images you can copy of ancient Greek weaponry and armor and make a poster that shows how the ancient Greeks and Trojans prepared for and conducted warfare.

Research the story of the Trojan horse and its use in the fall of Troy. Then write a short story in which your characters allude to the Trojan horse and concoct a similar trick of deception in order to defeat their enemy. With two or three classmates present a Waging Peace panel discussion in which students

efforts have added up to. Energy spent now and well-aware of the costs of warfare in human life and its effect on families back home, Odysseus questions the value of his endeavor and his journey. Gone so long from home, he tries in vain to imagine his son and the fatherless life the boy has lived. There is an existential despair in this Odysseus that leads him to suspect it does not even matter who won the war. What matters now is the carnage, the fallen soldiers, the time lapsed and now lost in his absence from home and son. The suggestion is that a younger Odysseus just setting off or engaged with his fellow Greeks in warfare might have felt the rush of

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role-play key people in the Trojan conflict and in a mutually respectful dialogue discuss their grievances, acknowledge their wrongs, and come to a diplomatic agreement that settles the conflict without military engagement.

Write a paper in which you describe the costs of warfare, including weaponry, loss of human life, and urban and environmental destruction. Be as inclusive as possible, estimating such costs as to children’s health and education in the invaded country and the psychological impact on a surviving population and including descriptions of damage to ecosystems as well as urban centers. Then identify and describe global agencies that assist war-torn countries in rebuilding efforts. Give statistics on the budgets of such agencies and evaluate their effectiveness.

Study the Oedipus complex based on Sigmund Freud’s explanation and write a paper in which you discuss relevant parts of Brodsky’s biography and how the theory and those relevant parts suggest a psychological interpretation of ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus.’’

excitement and the self-justification of victory in the heat of battle. But now weary with an overlong, circuitous journey home, caught now in a nowhere both psychological and geographic, Odysseus sees the past very differently, questions its reputed value, and fails to see why his years have been spent as they have been. In all, the point of view in this poem is of an older man reflecting on what might have been had he been allowed to take a different path. Regret more than guilt is the emotion he experiences in looking back. To make matters worse, his lack of energy erodes any hope a possible future might hold for him.

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These references to trickery are in keeping with classical Greek conceptions about fate and supernatural powers that shape human affairs. However, they also serve this Odysseus psychologically. By projecting responsibility onto agents beyond his control, Brodsky’s speaker exonerates himself regarding the way things have turned out. The speaker’s use of these references illustrates the self-serving way an older person might interpret the past in terms of chance or accident in order to avoid the guilt of holding himself responsible.

STYLE Epistolary Form and Direct Address

Calypso takes pity on homesick Odysseus and agrees to allow him to return to his wife Penelope. (Ó Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy)

Trickery as a Determining Factor in Events Each stanza suggests the malignant effect of supernatural trickery on human intention and accomplishment. The first instance is the reference to Poseidon, which theorizes that while the Greeks were fighting on the Trojan plains, the god of the sea stretched the sea, setting up the sailors to face a much longer westward trip toward home than they experienced in their journey east to Asia Minor. The wasteland of an island Odysseus describes in the second stanza includes vague reference to pigs and a queen. In the Homeric legend, the sailors are turned to swine when they visit the region ruled by Circe. Odysseus is alone on this rocky, filthy land, and his crew has been transformed by sorcery to animals. In the last stanza, Odysseus mentions that he would have never left his son and their home on the island of Ithaca had it not been for the trickery of Palamedes. Odysseus feigned madness in order to avoid being enlisted in the Greek military, but the cunning Palamedes exposed the ruse and forced Odysseus to join.

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Anyone who has read an old letter knows how such a document drops the reader instantly into a specific moment in the past. The direct address of a letter creates a sense of immediacy and confidentiality. The experience is something akin to eavesdropping; the reader is placed in the position of an unintended recipient of a private communication. Then, too, the text addresses a particular reader, and the relationship between the writer and the intended recipient is established immediately. There is a sense on the letter writer’s part that personal disclosure is possible now, given that only this one recipient is expected to read the message. Yet, the reader of Brodsky’s poem is not that recipient but someone removed from the moment of composition and the assumed moment of receipt of communication. Thus, the particularity of that moment in time (when the letter is written) and that envisioned second moment in time (when the intended recipient reads the text) are experienced together in all those subsequent moments when any reader of the poem experiences directly this supposed private address. The epistle form allows the poet to capitalize on that immediacy and privacy and that level of heightened disclosure and intimacy and to utilize these features of a private letter in the composition of his poem. The purposes served are multiple and intriguing. As imagined by Brodsky, this Odysseus is shown in a late-in-life moment of introspection and brooding. Without his armor, without his men, no longer defined vis-a`-vis an enemy, he is inexplicably confused and selfdoubting. The poem thus exposes the hidden vulnerability of the victor, who after battle ponders

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his losses. The classical construct serves as a vehicle for exploring the feelings that might very well hound a man who has committed so many years to national interests and in the process forsaken the needs of his family and his own private youthful aspirations. That Brodsky chose this persona to speak this particular poem suggests that the imagined moment for Odysseus resonated with the poet in a personal way. It makes sense to imagine that the poet, facing permanent exile from his native home and alienation from his son who lives there, found it meaningful to envision Odysseus in this new way.

Classical Allusion Allusion is a deliberate reference to a literary or historical character, event, or object. Classical allusions refer to characters, events, objects, or ideas in ancient Greek and Roman art, literature, and philosophy. Such allusions tap the knowledge readers have of earlier art, of works of literature, of mythology, and of cultural and scientific ideas and historical events. Writers use allusions deliberately in order to place the present work within a given cultural landscape, to define their own composition in terms of or in contrast to earlier material, and to exploit reader recognition in order to generate a deeper sense of the work’s meaning. The effectiveness of allusion, thus, depends on the reader’s ability to recognize its application and significance in the present text. Using names from Greek mythology allows Brodsky to frame his poem with what readers already know about these mythic characters. The choice allows the poet to characterize his speaker and the speaker’s son in light of the ancient models, exploiting similarities and simultaneously distinguishing these modern characters from their archetypes. Much of ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus’’ draws on the epics Iliad and Odyssey, attributed to the early Greek poet Homer (c. 800 B . C .–c. 750 B . C .), specifically in the use of Odysseus as the speaker and his son Telemachus as the one addressed in the epistolary poem, along with oblique references to the siege of Troy, Circe, and the sailors having been turned to swine. However, information about Palamedes is not found in Homer’s epics, and so Brodsky draws from the Roman works of Virgil (70 B . C .–19 B . C .) and Ovid (43 B . C .–A . D . 18) for the allusions to the trick Palamedes played on Odysseus. In addition to these references, Brodsky alludes to Oedipus, whose famous acts of slaying his father and marrying

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his mother are retold by Sophocles in the tragic trilogy, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. Brodsky’s use of the allusion to Oedipus incorporates the theory espoused by psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who called a son’s competition with his father for his mother’s love an Oedipus complex.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Emigration from USSR Under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev (1906– 1982), who headed the Soviet government from 1964 to 1982, the strict regulations that governed residents and controlled their activities and their relocation loosened slightly. During the 1960s and 1970s, increasing numbers left the country. Many of these departing people belonged to three somewhat overlapping groups: Russian Jews seeking residency in Israel; dissidents and other so-called politically undesirable individuals, who either sought freedom in the West or who were forced into exile; and highly educated people who were part of a mid-twentieth-century movement of Eastern bloc intellectuals to the West, commonly called the brain drain. As a Jew by birth though nonreligious, as a creative writer whose work was considered objectionable by the Soviet government, and as an intellectual who sought freedom of expression, Joseph Brodsky shared characteristics with these groups of emigrants. In the mid-twentieth century, anti-Semitism in the USSR was explicit and pervasive, and many Russian Jews were nonpracticing or secular as a result. However, after Israel won the 1967 Six-Day War, pro-Zionist feelings surged among these Russian Jews and many sought to emigrate. Found guilty of the charge of parasitism and later objecting to the strict Soviet censorship of his work, Brodsky emigrated in 1972. Like other artists and intellectuals, he well understood the oppression of the Soviet state and the drawbacks of certain aspects of Soviet life. Exile from his native Leningrad gave him access to freedom of expression and the press in the West at the same time that it cost him his native home and continued daily relationship with family and friends. Emigrants who left the Soviet Union under similar circumstances included Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was forced to leave in 1974. During the 1960s, an estimated 4,000 people were allowed or

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COMPARE & CONTRAST

1960s: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, as reported in the United States in 1964, provides a pretext for President Lyndon Johnson to escalate U.S. military engagement in Southeast Asia, supposedly to protect any government threatened by communist aggression. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed by Congress August 7, 1964, gives Johnson the legal right to increase military involvement in Vietnam.

Early 2000s: In 2005, declassified reports made by a National Security Agency study show that the U.S. report of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was incorrect and exaggerated. Many believe that President Johnson escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam under false pretenses.

1960s: Written between 1958 and 1968 and published in the West in 1974, The Gulag Archipelago, memoir of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), gives first-hand description of the massive Soviet system of forced labor and concentration camps. The book circulates through the underground press in the USSR and other eastern bloc countries. Early 2000s: Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is required reading in some high schools in Russia. Solzhenitsyn dies in 2008.

1960s: As U.S. military involvement in Vietnam escalates, young Americans take to the streets in protest. Some burn draft cards and U.S. flags. In November 1969, an estimated 500,000 people participate in an antiwar protest march on Washington, D.C.

forced to leave the USSR, but that number jumped to about 250,000 during the 1970s.

The Trojan War The Trojan War was a conflict of some considerable duration that occurred probably near or in the early twelfth century B . C . and was fought by

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Early 2000s: Between January and April 2003, an estimated 36 million around the world take part in an estimated 3,000 protests against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. 1960s: Estimates of Vietnam war casualties are 58,183 U.S. military dead and in excess of 3.1 million Vietnamese dead, including both military and civilian mortalities. Early 2000s: In 2006, military and civilian Iraqi deaths since the March 2003 invasion are estimated by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to be approximately 655,000; however, the Iraqi government is reported to dispute this claim, estimating losses at about 40,000. In 2009, Global Security reports that U.S. military dead number 4,262, and U.S. wounded total 30,182. 1960s: In 1962, Linus Pauling wins the Nobel Peace Prize for working with Russian, British, and U.S. leaders to bring about the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, ratified in 1963. Early 2000s: In October 2009, Barack Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize, the third sitting U.S. president to do so. Former Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, is quoted as saying Obama ‘‘has shown an unshakable commitment to diplomacy, mutual respect and dialogue as the best means of resolving conflicts.’’ However, with the president’s decision to send 30,000 U.S. military troops into Afghanistan, some critics wonder if Obama’s earlier resolve has weakened.

people living in and around Troy, an ancient city in western Asia Minor, in modern-day Turkey, and various Greek generals from the Peloponnesus and mainland of Greece. Troy controlled important trade routes through and across the Hellespont (also called the Dardanelles Strait), a long narrow waterway connecting the Aegean Sea

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Fragment of an intricate design depicting Telemachus and Penelope (Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images)

and the Sea of Marmara. Troy was located slightly inland from the southern opening of this waterway. In this extended conflict, the Greeks were victorious, and Troy was burned to the ground. Across subsequent centuries, the events and historical figures associated with this ancient conflict became the stuff of national legend and myth. Through these centuries of telling and retelling, these stories were elaborated and enhanced; they took on epic proportions, involving Greek gods and supernatural events, all intended to honor the Greeks, depicting them as great warriors and bestowing on them the blessings of the gods. Before poetry was written, these stories were transmitted orally, but sometime about the eighth century B . C ., they were written down. The ancient Greek poet Homer, who may have died about 750 B . C ., is credited with writing the tales down in two epic poems, Iliad, which tells the story of three weeks during the ten-year siege of Troy, and Odyssey, which tells the story of the ten-year journey of Odysseus from Troy back to his island home of Ithaca, in the Ionian Sea off the west coast of Greece. Through the early centuries of the Christian Era, many people enjoyed the stories of Troy as

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examples of ancient Greek mythology and given the supernatural elements that the epic poems contained assumed the works were fiction. But Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890), an extraordinary self-educated German and early archeologist, read Homer as incorporating historical facts, and he set out to prove it by locating the site of the destroyed city of Troy, using the Iliad as his guide. Schliemann’s discoveries proved that the epics were indeed based on actual events.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Before he emigrated from the USSR to the West in 1972, Brodsky was a struggling underground poet, and the bulk of his work, published both in Russian and in English, appeared after that departure. Selected Poems appeared in 1973 to rave critical reviews in the United States. In his assessment of this work and Brodsky as a poet, Arthur A. Cohen first listed how many great Russian poets and poetry have been lost because of Soviet tyranny, and then he stated: ‘‘Among us, by the accident of history . . . is the greatest poet of his generation, the Soviet Jewish exile,

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Joseph Brodsky, whose Selected Poems is a revelation of the power of the word living in the cracks of silence.’’ According to Cohen, Brodsky is the ‘‘creator of a new language, master of traditional forms and inventor of new ones,’’ a poet whose ‘‘poem does not end with a resolution, but with a renovation of the problem.’’ The Russian edition of A Part of Speech appeared in 1977 and the English version in 1980, though the two collections do not contain the identical group of poems. ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus’’ comes from the 1980 collection. In a New York Times review of this English publication, Clarence Brown remarked that a mere eight years after he was exiled from Russia, Brodsky had become ‘‘a fixture of our literary landscape.’’ Brown pointed out that many excellent British and American translators, along with Brodsky’s own efforts at translating into English, contributed to this collection’s ‘‘impression of uprootedness.’’ Notwithstanding the complex process of moving poetry from native Russian to English, Brodsky had, according to Brown, produced ‘‘the most powerful, the most technically accomplished, erudite, wide ranging and consistently astonishing Russian poetry being written today.’’ This kind of critical reception was typical of the response Brodsky received for his massive outpouring of poetry and essays, written and published in either English or Russian during the 1970s and 1980s. Nonetheless, in 1988, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Brodsky was generally not widely known in the United States. In ‘‘The Nobel Prize-winner Nobody Knows,’’ Gloria Donen Sosin remarked on this irony: ‘‘A poet is not only without honor in his old country, the Soviet Union, but until the award was announced, he had been banned. And in his new home, the United States, he was almost unknown.’’ Sosin explained further that had Brodsky been allowed to publish in the Soviet Union of the 1960s and early 1970s, upon receiving the Nobel Prize, he would have seen his books sell out all over the country and a stadium fill to hear him read; Sosin remarked that, by contrast, in the United States, poetry books sell poorly and only a small audience will attend a poetry reading. In the late 1980s, Sosin hoped Brodsky would gain wider recognition both in his native country and, having won the Nobel Prize, in his adoptive home, the United States. It ought to happen, Sosin argued, since Brodsky’s

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‘‘poetry contains wonderful imagery, and his essays are warm and remarkable for their richness of language. His command of English, not his mother tongue, is phenomenal.’’ Sosin’s hopes for Brodsky’s future fame were fulfilled. In the early 1990s, he served as U.S. poet laureate and received additional honors and recognition. Then, suddenly and far too soon, he died at the age of fifty-six. Tatyana Tolstaya described the shock of this loss in her tribute included in The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships: When the last things are taken out of a house, a strange, resonant echo settles in, your voice bounces off the walls and returns to you. There’s the din of loneliness, a draft of emptiness, a loss of orientation, and a nauseating sense of freedom: everything’s allowed and nothing matters . . . That is how Russian literature feels now: just four years short of the millennium’s end, it has lost the greatest poet of the second half of the twentieth century, and can expect no other. Joseph Brodsky has left us, and our house is empty.

In his native land of Russia, in his adopted land of the United States, Brodsky made an enormous contribution to arts and letters. The space he vacated in dying remained palpable well into the twenty-first century.

CRITICISM Melodie Monahan Monahan has a Ph.D. in English and operates an editing service, The Inkwell Works. In the following essay, she discusses three instances in which writers used ancient Greek myths in modern times. In his celebrated study of myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell explains how it is that myths take different forms across the centuries: The outlines of myths and tales are subject to damage and obscuration. Archaic traits are generally eliminated or subdued. Imported materials are revised to fit local landscape, custom, or belief . . . in the innumerable retellings of a traditional story, accidental or intentional dislocations are inevitable.

The truth behind the metamorphosis of the archetypal pattern is that the mythic story preserves since archaic times something that remains true about the human condition and thus is relevant to artists in their own time. The ancient story

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CLASSICAL MYTHS HAVE EVOLVED OVER THE CENTURIES, MORPHING LIKE CLAY IN THE HANDS OF GENERATIONS OF ARTISTS, WHO RE-CREATE THEM AT A NEW TIME AND PLACE.’’

preserves this truth like a piece of dried fruit does its pit or a pod its seeds. Through centuries of germination and seasons of growth, the original essence is revised and evolved, given a new reading in a new context, and pondered all over again by readers who are countless generations removed from those early listeners who circled a fire and heard the even-then ancient history of their gods. Two themes that repeat in these mythic stories have to do with heroic resistance and return. Heroic resistance can take the form of the hero’s superhuman yet often futile effort to rise up against a force greater than the hero. Yet the hero by definition feels morally obliged to undertake perilous and doomed effort. Return is often enacted by the hero’s journey back home, older and wiser, laden with lessons learned and a message for his native community. Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) in his dramatic monologue ‘‘Ulysses,’’ Jean Anouilh (1910–1987), in his tragedy Antigone, and Joseph Brodsky in his ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus’’ use mythic stories and their themes and illustrate in different ways and for their separate purposes Campbell’s statement about how and why myth is appropriated and changed. Tennyson, who became poet laureate of Great Britain in 1850, knew his Homer, and he knew his Dante. When he set out in 1833 to write the dramatic monologue ‘‘Ulysses,’’ Tennyson borrowed from both of these literary forefathers. From Homer, Tennyson used Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, imagining in a fresh way what it would be like for the returning king to have given twenty years to military life and exploration and then return to the ‘‘still hearth’’ and ‘‘aged wife’’ of an uneventful island life where people do not even recognize him, much less know him as the great warrior and explorer he has proven himself to be. From Dante’s Inferno, Tennyson appropriated a different version, in which Odysseus is persuaded not to return to Ithaca but rather to keep traveling beyond his island home

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into the uncharted western seas in search of new adventures. In Tennyson’s handling, this Odysseus recognizes he cannot ‘‘rest from travel’’ and that he must ‘‘drink / Life to the lees.’’ In an argument that must have resonated with midnineteenth-century readers in an ever-expanding British Empire, Tennyson has Ulysses assert that the quests for new experiences and more knowledge are endless endeavors that ought to fill one’s life until one dies: all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move. Tennyson depicts Ulysses as unwilling to accept the inactivity of a warm fire and the socalled golden years in companionship with his now elderly wife. This mythic hero has been reshaped in Tennyson’s handling into a man who recognizes that he cannot rest on his laurels and now take on the (to him humiliatingly) petty tasks of heading an island government. Moreover, this Ulysses recognizes that, in his absence, his son, Telemachus, has become an adult and is quite suited to handle such local issues of business and governance. Telemachus can have that job, for Ulysses is committed to seeking new horizons, literally and figuratively, until he dies. This king sails off at sunset (literally late in the day and figuratively late in his life), without as much as a hug good-bye for his wife or son. To its contemporary readers, the poem may have sounded a sincere clarion call for the British to continue their expansionist policies, spreading their enlightenment and paternalism across what was to them a benighted globe. For the poet privately, the poem had another meaning: Tennyson is reported (in a footnote to the Norton edition) to have said that his poem ‘‘expressed his own ‘need of going forward and braving the struggle of life’ after the death of Hallam.’’ (Arthur Hallam was Tennyson’s beloved friend and was engaged to the poet’s sister; tragically, Hallam died from a stroke at the age of twenty-two.) So for Tennyson, the fusion of two borrowed parts of the myth about Ulysses was meaningful, both in a public and in a private way. Little over one hundred years later, in 1942, Jean Anouilh (1910–1987) was prompted to write an adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone, the third in a trilogy of plays that together tell the ancient story of Oedipus, his rise and fall and the aftermath concerning his sons and his

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The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships (2006) is an interesting compilation of essays by writers about the influences they felt from other writers. Included is an essay by Joseph Brodsky on Isaiah Berlin and a lyrical intimate portrait of Brodsky by Tatyana Tolstaya. Famed travel writer Paul Theroux recounts his mid-1990s journey around the Mediterranean in The Pillars of Hercules (1995). Theroux describes conflict in Croatia, anarchy in Albania, and Israel in a state of siege. Lillian Schlissel’s Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey presents in historical context a compilation of diaries written about the 1840s movement of Anglo-Americans into the Oregon and California territories. Published by Schocken Books in 1992, this collection is part of the Studies in the Life of Women, under the general editorship of Gerda Lerner. Swimming Across: A Memoir, published by Warner Books in 2001, is the readable and fascinating story of the early life of Andrew S. Grove, who became the chairman of Intel. Born into a secular Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, in 1936, Andris Grof lived in hiding through the Nazi occupation and subsequent communist regime, before immigrating to the United States as a young adult. A thrilling tale of suffering, escape, and survival, Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk:

daughters. The historical catalyst for this French revival was the collaboration of some French people with the Nazis in 1942 and the subsequent Nazi occupation of France with the consent of the fascist Vichy government. By previous agreement, the Nazis took Paris without a struggle, saving the city from the destruction other European cities experienced. Yet this surrender was an affront to individuals in the French resistance movement, some of whom made heroic, yet

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The True Story of a Trek to Freedom, published by Lyons Press originally in 1956 and several times thereafter, is the first-hand account of a Polish soldier arrested by the Soviet secret police and ultimately shipped with hundreds of other Poles to one of many Stalinist labor camps in Siberia. Rawicz relates his cunning escape with several others and their two-year trek south through Mongolia and across the Himalayas into India and his final arrival in England.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990) is a fictionalized collection of essays, enriched by O’Brien’s own experiences as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam.

Rocket Boys: A Memoir (1998) is the inspiring account of Homer H. Hickman Jr. about his 1960s childhood in a mining town, a miner’s son who is entranced by the space race and dreams of rockets and astronauts. Hickman grew up to be a NASA engineer, fulfilling his hopes to participate in the space age. This is a story that appeals to young readers who like to build things and adults of all ages. The story was made into a 1999 film, October Sky, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

In Retrospect: The Tragedies and Lessons of Vietnam (1995) is Robert McNamara’s regretful and apologetic reassessment of the Vietnam War and his role in shaping U.S. military policy in it.

futile and oftentimes fatal, protests. Public parallels to the famed Antigone’s refusal to obey King Creon were obvious to Anouilh. The nature of Anouilh’s purpose and message are matters of some debate, especially given his political neutrality and somewhat conservative bent. Nonetheless, the Nazis initially found the play sufficiently objectionable to censor it, and it was not performed until 1944, literally

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months before Paris was liberated. Increasingly in post-World War II France and elsewhere in the Allied countries, Anouilh’s Antigone was revered as a singular affirmation of the ideals to which the eponymous heroine gave her life. In Sophocles as well in the slightly altered Anouilh version, the new government is run by Creon who becomes king of Thebes after the sons of Oedipus, the reigning elder Eteocles and his rebel brother Polyneices, kill each other in a duel. Carrying out the letter of the law in a most matter-of-fact way, Creon proclaims that Eteocles will have a state funeral, but Polyneices will have none, his body left to rot in the open air, the feast of preying birds. Unlike her mild and compliant sister, Ismene, Antigone holds her family loyalty and her religious beliefs above Creon’s state edict, and so she attempts to bury her brother, and for this treason, she is buried alive in a cave. Before she can be rescued, she takes her own life. Creon is left to ponder the ways in which laws may conflict with religious precepts, and Antigone is remembered as the heroic individual who remained true to her family and traditional values despite the imposing threat of an immoral state law. Joseph Brodsky was highly schooled in classical literature, not in the formal sense of classroom study but in the personal sense of selfdirected reading of Roman and Greek classics, translated into his native Russian. He used classical models to outline and convey the messages in his essays and poetry. Indeed, in his essay ‘‘Letter to Horace,’’ Brodsky admits that poets write to their predecessors: ‘‘when one writes verse, one’s most immediate audience is not one’s own contemporaries, let alone posterity, but one’s predecessors. Those who gave one a language, those who gave one forms.’’ In other words, classical texts were Brodsky’s template, and his use of this body of literature is both explicit and implicit in ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus.’’ The plausible psychological connections between Brodsky’s own experience in 1972 and that year’s composition of this epistolary poem are easy to draw. Invited by the Soviet government (meaning exiled by it), Brodsky left once and for all his native country, his parents, relatives, his natural son, and his friends. He knew he would not be able to return. The distances across space and time to separate him from his birthplace were vast, as he must have imagined them in 1972. That year, he envisioned an Odysseus on the inhospitable rocky island of Aeaea,

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suddenly without his crew and subject to an unknown, mysterious ruler. The poet’s personal situation must have invited the mythic hero to take on these new particulars: an Odysseus old and forgetful, strangely incompetent, undermined by self-doubt and regret, a man who suddenly finds himself with idle time to reflect on all the time he has been away from his son and how that son has grown up in the absence of his father’s companionship and beyond the shadow of his father’s power and reputation. It is easy to read this poem as a mirror, reflecting what is likely to have been Brodsky’s sense of his situation, his sense of failed self-determinism, at the time of its composition. But as always with myth, there is more. For Brodsky, the ancient literature served as a reliable and self-defining context. According to Zara M. Torlone’s analysis, Brodsky ‘‘stood at the end of a brilliant tradition and yet said something new both in form and content. . . . [his] persistent pursuit of classical themes reflects his desire to ‘inhabit’ literature that came before him in a way that connects the past and the present.’’ In other words, the use of the classical model is a psychological and cultural bridging device, something that affirms a larger context for both the poet and his work, a time-and-space continuum from which Brodsky and all other learned individuals cannot be exiled. Language and culture provide a constant home. Given this context, then, and beyond the poem’s psychological significance, ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus’’ examines how the passage of time affects a person’s assessment of events and how the reality of war robs it of any idealized glory. Torlone explains that ‘‘Brodsky uses Odysseus’ oblivion about the outcome of the war to create a text replete with subtle but powerful political overtones.’’ So unlike Homer’s cunning Odysseus, who was steadfast in his commitment to return home and successful in reaching there, the Odysseus created by Brodsky solemnly considers how many soldiers never return home. The poet may have thought of the 20 million Russians who never returned from World War II; he may have thought about the tens of millions lost in the Stalinist gulag. But his contemporary American readers may have pondered what the poem suggests about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. These readers and succeeding ones may have pondered the number of soldiers killed whose bodies never reached home and the missing in action and never

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heard of again. These American readers may have come to imagine the stretched seas that slowed the return for injured veterans, many of whom arrived stateside without respectful reception. Brodsky’s Odysseus is apathetic and disoriented, undone by the awareness that war has no glory and military action serves no humane purpose. Preserving their bits of historical fact, classical myths have evolved over the centuries, morphing like clay in the hands of generations of artists, who re-create them at a new time and place. These ancient myths persist because they tell the universal story and because, if it is universal, that story is always true. For Tennyson, Anouilh, and Brodsky, the old story provided the vehicle of each writer’s transformation of the personal into the political and the political into the truth of art. Source: Melodie Monahan, Critical Essay on ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

Zara M. Torlone In the following excerpt, Torlone discusses three poems of Joseph Brodsky that use classical motifs and argues that classicism is used to reflect modern themes. Russian poetry has always displayed a special fondness for references to classical culture. Valentina Polukhina observes in her book on Joseph Brodsky that this predilection for abundantly quoting the classics is primarily due to a kind of inferiority complex that the Russian intelligentsia experienced when thinking about the West; classical references associate Russian literature with Western culture. Russian writers maintained intellectual curiosity toward works created by the authors of the West, especially by the classical poets whose influence on Russian poetry extended to Alexander Pushkin. However, Likhachev viewed this dependence on classical background as a positive, claiming that ‘‘the more dependent a culture is, the more independent it is.’’ This classical strain within Russian literature provided Russian poets, particularly those of the 20th century, an opportunity to discover and interpret antiquity in a way that created a special allegorical language readily understandable to those who were initiated into the complexity of learned allusions. For Russian poets, the frequent references to antiquity were not only a matter of establishing cultural continuity but became the means to present the writer’s own epoch in a veiled but recognizable way.

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THE BITTERNESS OF ESTRANGEMENT FROM THE HOMELAND IS CONVEYED THROUGH THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE HEROIC INTO ITS OPPOSITE: THERE IS NO ROAD THAT LEADS BACK HOME, EVEN FOR ODYSSEUS.’’

Joseph Brodsky was keenly aware of this legacy and was faced with the uneasy task of appropriating Russian classical literary heritage and adapting it to the writing of poetry in a new world. Brodsky himself admitted that he is ‘‘infected by the routine classcism’’ as an heir to a long-standing literary tradition. However, there is another aspect to Brodsky’s adherence to classical antiquity, which is also important for our understanding of his interest in Greek and Roman themes. In his ‘‘Letter to Horace’’ he writes: For when one writes verse, one’s most immediate audience is not one’s own contemporaries, let alone posterity, but one’s predecessors. Those who gave one a language, those who gave one forms. Frankly, you know that far better than I. Who wrote those asclepiadics, sapphics, hexameters, and alcaics, and who were their addressees? Caesar? Maecenas? . . . Fat lot they knew about or cared for trochees and dactyls! And you were not aiming at me, either. No, you were appealing to Asclepiades, to Alcaeus and Sappho, to Homer himself. You wanted to be appreciated by them, first of all. For where is Caesar? Obviously in his place of smiting the Scythians. And Maecenas is in his villa. . . . Whereas your beloved Greeks are right here, in your head, or should I say in your heart, for you no doubt knew them by heart. They were your best audience, since you could summon them at any moment. It’s they you were trying to impress most of all. . . . So if you could do this to them, why can’t I do that to you?

This text provides many clues for understanding Brodsky’s classical poetics. The addressee of this letter is chosen with purpose. Brodsky can be perceived as a Horace of sorts in the realm of Russian poetry, a poet who stood at the end of a brilliant tradition and yet said something new both in form and content. In addition, the letter reveals Brodsky’s main preoccupation also expressed in

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his Nobel Prize speech where he lists the poets who conditioned and molded his talent. These poets were his own ‘‘beloved Greeks’’: Mandelshtam, Tsvetaeva, Frost, Akhmatova, and Auden. They were his ‘‘best audience’’ that he was eager to impress. Brodsky’s persistent pursuit of classical themes reflects his desire to ‘‘inhabit’’ literature that came before him in a way that connects the past and the present. Thus Brodsky’s allusions to antiquity play a crucial role in appreciating Brodsky’s poetics and imagination. However, his ‘‘routine classicism,’’ like many of the innovations that Brodsky has brought into the realm of Russian poetry, is a striking departure in the Russian treatment of classical themes. Brodsky’s classical metaphors do not ‘‘speak for themselves,’’ but as David Bethea observes, they ‘‘have coalesced into a kind of ‘system,’ but one whose verbal layering and retrieval, whose archaeology if you will, is consistently non-rational, paradoxicalist, fragmentary (both in image and method), and defiant of any explanation from origins.’’ Brodsky senses very clearly the untrodden paths in the interpretations of the classics, and these are the paths he is most eager to take. In his analysis of Brodsky’s classical allusions, Kees Verheul writes: In some cases the classical paraphernalia have a merely ‘‘decorative’’ function, helping to establish a particular neo-classical quality. But when it really belongs to the essential aspects of the poetic structure, the classical background has a direct bearing on the presentation of the theme; it may be used either to give it a certain universality or put it in a special historical perspective.

Michael Kreps offers a fairly circumstantial but insightful observation that ‘‘as a result of Brodsky’s poetic reinterpretation there is a ‘making contemporary’ of myth, its appropriation by modern culture; the reader, through the myth, hears the poet’s narrative about time and about himself.’’ As much as Brodsky is ‘‘a modern descendant of classicism,’’ he is one of its most unconventional interpreters. This article will focus on three of Brodsky’s most ‘‘classical’’ poems that deal with the many dimensions of classical myth: ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus,’’ ‘‘Dido and Aeneas,’’ and ‘‘To Lycomedes on Scyros.’’ In all the works discussed, the classical allusion appears familiar only prima facie and results in an accumulation of striking subtextual images depicting the situation of the poet himself. Furthermore, classical myth in Brodsky acquires new, unexpected colors, and

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the familiar figures of antiquity become the reflections of modern man and his meditation on homeland, fame, duty, and love.

Odysseus to Telemachus The epistolary genre of this poem presents Odysseus in an un-Homeric manner. The Odysseus of this poem is significantly different from the Homeric hero obsessed with the idea of nostos (homecoming)—and perpetually conniving and plotting against people and gods who try to detain him or offer a false nostos. Brodsky’s Odysseus is a weary traveler and an indifferent man who surprisingly looks back at Greek military glory without remembering who won the war and what part he himself played in the conquest of Troy. The poem deals with the subject that is central to Brodsky’s poetics in general: ‘‘What interests me most of all, has always interested me, on this earth . . . is time and the effect that it has on man, how it changes him, grinds away at him. . . . ’’ Homer’s poem is certainly concerned with the same idea, but the Homeric treatment of the hero’s journey depicts a fierce, not fatigued, Odysseus. In Homer the twenty years that passed between Odysseus’ departure from Ithaka and his voyage home have hardly altered his desire for coming home. The time away from his kingdom only intensifies his desire to return and reclaim his legacy as a king, husband, and father. But Brodsky’s Odysseus has seemingly succumbed to the Sirens’ song or tasted the sweet flowers of Lotus. He states thrice that he does not remember the past or who won the war, and that he has lost his way in space and time. The most poignant moment of this disorientation is Odysseus’ inability to remember the age of his own son. The idea of time loses its relevance to Odysseus in this poem. The indifference to the passage of time is played out in the poem on several levels. The phrase ‘‘waste time’’ in the first part of the poem has in Russian a double meaning: not only to lose time but also to lose the awareness of it. Another interesting detail is that Brodsky uses the word ‘‘rastianut’’ (to stretch) in relation to space although in Russian it is used in relation to time. However, in Odysseus’ wanderings the space becomes as stretched out as the time, and the characteristics of time become applied to space in the unusual sense of the metaphor. The dizzying effect of this metaphor is the disorientation of Odysseus in whose mind time and space become one just as the sea and the horizon

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become inseparable. The expression ‘‘rastianut’ vremia’’ in Russian is also used in the meaning of ‘‘wasting time,’’ and here the transferred metaphor is again effectively employed. Not only time but also space is wasted since Odysseus in his wanderings strays from the path homeward and encounters places and people opposed to his homecoming. Odysseus’ Homeric predecessor does not suffer from the same loss of orientation and memory. In fact, Odysseus, even during his prolonged dalliances (Calypso’s island for example), maintains an acute understanding of the passage of time and its inability to mitigate his longing for home.

most desired destination after the Phaiakians deliver him, sleeping, to Ithaka in Book 17. However, unlike Homer’s Odysseus, he is not in the state of despair, panic, or even fear but accepts this disorientation and confusion as a part of his separation from what he once loved but now has lost. This apathy with which Brodsky endows his Odysseus surfaces in two other poems. One is Brodsky’s ‘‘July Intermezzo’’ written in 1961 (You will return home. So what . . .):

L. Zubova asserts that the dejected hero Brodsky depicts is ‘‘more a deflation of the literary Odysseus than an aggrandizement of his own.’’ Any hint of the heroic is deliberately eliminated from the poem. Brodsky uses Odysseus’ oblivion about the outcome of the war to create a text replete with subtle but powerful political overtones. The poet obliquely recalls the devastation of the Second World War in which twenty million Russians never returned home. Odysseus’ dismissive utterance ‘‘only the Greeks can leave so many corpses so far from home’’ is a bitter commentary directed against the Soviet state machine that sacrificed its own citizenry to ensure victory. His almost cynical statement is kin to the words with which Homer’s Odysseus addresses his nurse after slaughtering the suitors in his house. The mature Odysseus of the Homeric poem refuses to gloat over the slain suitors for there must be no glory in killing anyone:

Another is his 1962 poem ‘‘From the Outskirts to the Center’’:

It is not proper to rejoice over the slain men. (22.412)

Similarly, the Odysseus of Brodsky’s poem refuses to recall his heroic halcyon days with any wistfulness. The message is the same: there is no glory in any kind of war. Many critics have viewed the Odyssey as a response to the heroic code in the Iliad. The idea of glory undergoes a transformation from the lofty ideals of military excellence to mundane notions of simple human happiness, for the hero’s only concern is to return home to his wife. However, the Odysseus of Brodsky is denied even that fundamental desire. In fact, he is completely devoid of any kind of the passion and longing that was such a central element of the Homeric character. Brodsky’s ‘‘all islands resemble each other’’ evokes the failure of Odysseus to recognize his final and

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How nice that there is nobody to blame How nice that you have no ties to anyone How nice that nobody is obliged to love you Until death.

How easy I feel now Since I haven’t parted with anyone. Thank God that I have been deprived of my fatherland. In both of the poems, the bitterness of separation and exile is mixed with relief that there are no unbreakable attachments keeping him anywhere. The homeland is viewed as a burden rather than a desired destination. The letter of Odysseus to his son should be viewed from another perspective which further reveals the nature of Brodsky’s interest in the figure of Odysseus: the problematic effects of the passage of time following the end of a lengthy war. The hero is subjected to the adverse forces of time and violence, the reflection of which can be found in Brodsky’s ‘‘A New Life’’ (1988): ‘‘Imagine the war is over, peace rules. . . . And if anybody asks a question, ‘Who are you?’ answer, ‘Who am I? / I am Nobody.’ As Odysseus replied to Polyphemus’’ (III: 167, 168–69). In his response to Polyphemus, the withholding of his identity by Odysseus was an act of selfpreservation. In his letter to Telemachus, Odysseus wants to diminish himself to the state of ‘‘nobody’’ because the war is over and he has lost his heroic identity, and the twenty years that have passed while away from his family have reduced him to a ‘‘nobody’’ as a human being. The Russian subtext is also palpable here. The survival of the individual in the totalitarian regime is conditioned by the reduction of his own individuality to nothing. The evolution of the loss of his self-identity is complete only when there is no such identity left. Polyphemus, the maneating monster, is comparable then to the state-machine that makes people pretend

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that they are nobody because that is the only way to avoid annihilation. However, Odysseus still feels an emotional connection to his son as evidenced by his opening words ‘‘my Telemachus,’’ which in Russian and English is both possessive and a term of endearment. That is why the ending of the letter, which is supposed to be the final legacy of the father to the son, seems abrupt. If the self-alleged Nobody uses the possessive pronoun charged with emotional connotation, then the self-identity is still present. The final lines, however, spell out for us why this subtle selfidentification is not pursued any further. In the final lines of the poem, we encounter two names that are equally important in the message Odysseus is trying to convey to his son. One is Palamedes, the hero who exposed Odysseus’ deception when the latter pretended to be mad to avoid going to Troy. In revenge, Odysseus forged a letter from Priam to Palamedes, planted gold in his tent, and exposed him as a traitor of the Greek army. As a result, Palamedes was put to death by his own army. In Brodsky’s poem, Odysseus admits that Palamedes was right all along in forcing Odysseus to join the Trojan campaign and depriving his son of a relationship with his father. The explanation of this sudden reversal is clear in the allusion to Oedipus. Odysseus has found probably the most important redeeming feature of his absence from the life of his son, namely, that there will be no worry about the rivalry between father and son. This perspective of Odysseus was never an explicit part of the Homeric poem. In fact, the Odyssey begins with the Telemachy [the first four books of the epic] when the son comes of age by going on a journey to become more like his father so that he can be ready to meet him, having fulfilled his father’s expectations. In Homer, the continuity of the male offspring is the single most important legacy that a man can leave behind. In Brodsky’s poem, this continuity can only be a source of discord; ironically, sons are better off without their fathers. There is little doubt that the poem also deals with Brodsky’s conflicted feelings towards his son Andrei. ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus,’’ written in 1972, is a moving farewell to his son whom he left in Leningrad after emigrating to the United States. At the time when Brodsky left Russia forever, his son was still a small boy not unlike Telemachus. This letter then can be interpreted as a muted quest for the justification of why the abandonment by the father is best for the future of the

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son. Brodsky’s emigration is interpreted not in the terms of neglect but a liberation of his son from a painful legacy. In the society where homo homini lupus, to be the son of a dissident poet is a sure way to be trampled by the state machine. To be a son of Nobody is by far a better choice. The reference to Oedipus, however, is more ironic and more disturbing. Brodsky chooses to evoke the fate of Oedipus not in Sophoclean but rather Freudian terms: the patricide and the incest become a conscious choice rather than crimes committed in ignorance. The undercurrent of this reference, however, leads to the same conclusion as the reference to Palamedes: sons are better off without their fathers. In 1993, some twenty years after ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus,’’ Brodsky writes ‘‘Ithaka,’’ a poem which serves as an epilogue to his earlier poem: To return here after twenty years, to find barefoot in the sand your own foot prints and the mongrel dog’s barking fills the entire wharf not because he is happy but because he has gone wild. If you wish to, throw off those rags soaked in sweat but the servant who can recognize your scar is dead, and the one, they say, who waited for you is nowhere to be found for she put out for everybody. Your son has grown tall: he is a sailor himself and he looks at you as if you were scum. And the language they all shout in is a futile labor, it seems, to decipher. Whether it’s not that island or it is indeed because you drowned your eye in blueness, your eye became fastidious: from the patch of earth, it seems, the waves will not forget the horizon, dashing on. The parallels between this poem and the earlier letter are apparent, but the style and the language have changed. The first poem is filled with the sadness and irrevocability of the time lost. ‘‘Ithaka’’ is a reflection of an Odysseus whose spirit has degenerated into blind cynicism. Penelope becomes a whore, Eurycleia is dead, Argus has gone wild, and Telemachus, although

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grown tall and a traveler like his father, speaks another language and views his father with disdain. The Oedipal worry of the earlier poem/ letter becomes realized. The beginning of the last stanza ‘‘whether it’s not that island’’ echoes ‘‘all islands resemble one another.’’ The final loss of vision, the blindness caused by continuous travel over the blue of the sea towards the blue of the sky, recalls the earlier phrase ‘‘the eye soiled by the sea horizon.’’ The extension of mythological Homeric allusion is taken to its extreme: the great hero Odysseus, the sacker of the cities, the man of intense and obsessive curiosity, the devoted husband and protective father, the proud king of Ithaka, now has become the outsider, the stranger. The disguise that Odysseus employs in Homer to accomplish his transition from a war hero to the reinstated king of Ithaka becomes the essence of Brodsky’s Odysseus. There is little doubt that Brodsky’s sense of his own imminent exile comes into play here. The bitterness of estrangement from the homeland is conveyed through the transformation of the heroic into its opposite: there is no road that leads back home, even for Odysseus. The classical allusion thus receives a distinct local color characteristic of Russian exile poetry in general: the journey back is impossible. This poem is also concerned with another idea pivotal to Brodsky’s poetics: the painful price of greatness. Odysseus’ disorientation in time and space marginally touches upon this theme which is explored in much more elaborate detail in two other Brodsky poems which employ classical references. In the poem, ‘‘Dido and Aeneas,’’ Brodsky offers an original interpretation of Book IV of Vergil’s Aeneid.

‘‘Dido and Aeneas’’ The great man stared through the window but her entire world ended with the border of his broad Greek tunic, whose abundant folds resembled the sea on hold. And he still stared out through the window, and his gaze was so far away from here, that his lips were immobile like a seashell where the roar is hidden, and the horizon in his goblet was still. But her love was just a fish—perhaps which might

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plunge into the sea in the pursuit of the ship, and knifing the waves with the supple body, perhaps yet overtake him—but he, he in his thoughts already strode upon the land. And the sea became a sea of tears. But, as one knows, precisely at the moment of despair, the auspicious wind begins to blow. And the great man left Carthage. She stood before the bonfire, which her soldiers had kindled by the city walls, and she envisioned between the flame and smoke of the fire how Carthage silently crumbled ages before Cato’s prophecy. Vergil’s Dido is never a shadow of Aeneas’ greatness. On the contrary, she is his rescuer, his only chance to recover after the shipwreck and continue the search for ‘‘the new Troy.’’ Initially, he is only a suppliant at her mercy, nothing but a hospes (guest) later elevated to the status of a consort. She is the queen, one who has the power and strength to make the decision which she lives to regret: to succumb to Aeneas’ charm and heroic past. She is also the heart of their affair, whether she is confiding to Anna her feelings, confronting Aeneas, or ascending the funeral pyre she builds for her own destruction. In the fourth book of the Aeneid, for the first time Aeneas’ claim to greatness is called into question when juxtaposed with the character of Dido. Dido’s only weakness is her love for Aeneas which drives her to neglect her primary responsibility as a Carthaginian queen and the building of her city, her greatest accomplishment (non coeptae adsurgunt turres. Aen. IV. 86). Even at the time of her suicide, she remains a powerful figure which Vergil compares with the most famous tragic figures of Greek tragedy, who happen to be male: Pentheus and Orestes. Her suicide is not depicted as weakness but as a further proof of Dido’s (and thus Carthage’s) long-lasting strength and resistance. Dido is never depicted as vanquished. However, in Brodsky’s poem, Aeneas is the focus of the work and Dido his shadow, almost an annoying obstacle to his divinely inspired designs. Here Brodsky’s classical theme evokes two radically different views of love: ‘‘his’’ and ‘‘hers.’’ The two contrasting perspectives are described in terms of ‘‘movement’’ and ‘‘immobility.’’ The recurrent

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imagery of the sea only intensifies Aeneas’ temporary immobility: his tunic is like a sea that has stopped its continuous motion, his lips resemble a seashell, the horizon reflected in his goblet is the sea horizon, and he himself is a ship which Dido (the fish) is ready to follow. The contrast to this picture of his immobility is immediately followed by the description of her emotional state. Her love is full of motion, speed, and impulsiveness. But as his plans are set into motion, her mobility will freeze. The phrase ‘‘whole world ends with the border of his tunic’’ acquires both temporal and spatial meaning. The folds of his tunic on which her adoring eyes linger reflect his temporary halt in time and space contrary to his predestined duty. The imagery of the tunic also predicts Dido’s limitations and her future inability to follow Aeneas on his journey. The Vergilian Dido who confronts Aeneas after his attempt to leave her secretly without any explanation is replaced by the Dido of Brodsky’s poem who only gazes speechlessly as a fish which moves its lips but is unable to utter a sound. Brodsky juxtaposes ‘‘he already strode upon the land’’ with the comparison of Dido to a fish. Fish don’t live on land; thus Aeneas belongs to a realm where Dido has no natural place. The sea which he is about to embark upon turns out to be a sea of tears, and the tears are Dido’s. Aeneas of Brodsky’s poem is departing on an important journey where there is no place for her. In fact, Dido is referred to only as ‘‘she,’’ whereas Aeneas is twice described as a ‘‘great man.’’ The Aeneas of Vergil is known by his epithet ‘‘pius,’’ for his dedication to destiny and divine will enables him to endure the vicissitudes of life. However, Aeneas’ predestined fate leaves very little room for individual choice. Otis observes that ‘‘there could have been no Rome, as Vergil conceived it, without men like Aeneas, men of supreme pietas.’’ His human side is revealed only in very few instances during the course of the Aeneid and every time his humanity is dominated by his sense of duty which suppresses his vulnerability to love or pain. This aspect of Aeneas is his most attractive yet most ambivalent trait in Vergil. However, greatness of character, at least in Book IV of the Aeneid, is attributed not to Aeneas but Dido. At the end of the book, embittered and suicidal, she exclaims: . . . This is what I pray for, these last words I utter with the last of my blood. You, o Tyrians, treat with hatred the offspring and all of the future progeny of the Trojans, and bestow this duty on my ashes. Let there be no love and no

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pact between our people. There will be some avenger born out of my bones, who will pursue the Dardanian settlers with burning torch and sword, now, later on, and as long as the strength allows. I pray that our shores be against theirs, the waves against the waves, the arms against the arms. They themselves will fight and their descendants will.

In her darkest hour, Vergil’s Dido sees an everlasting rivalry and hostility between Carthage and the future city of Rome as she struggles to regain her dignity as a Carthaginian queen. Dido, and subsequently Carthage, are defeated by destiny, and the failed love between Aeneas and Dido is only a casualty in the process. But the Aeneas of Book IV emerges as less of a hero because of his sense of duty when measured against the intensity of Dido’s character. It is Dido who fits the reader’s preconceptions of the heroic because she is more articulate in her choices and her legacy. Brodsky’s Dido acquires a different dimension. The Vergilian bonfire upon which she will throw herself in her final hour of ultimate despair becomes a conflagration that will consume Carthage. In the departure of Aeneas, she does not foresee the Punic Wars and foresees even further the undoing of her own Carthage, reduced to ashes. Her vision foreshadowing Cato’s ‘‘Carthago delenda est’’ is consistent with the Dido of the whole poem. Without Aeneas there is no Dido, and without Dido there is no Carthage. The dramatic destruction of the woman foretells the historical catastrophe of the city. The theme of revenge is notably absent. In this brief poem, Dido becomes the passive victim of the ‘‘great man’s’’ decisions. On a purely lyrical level, a common theme of poetry is the instability of human relationships, which are too often defined by betrayal, abandonment, loss, and suffering. The Vergilian grandiosity of epic design has no place in Brodsky’s lyric intending to show the final separation between a man and a woman. Aeneas pays a private price for national greatness, one of personal loss and forsaken love. Aeneas’ choice, however, is never questioned, which conveys the inescapability of Brodsky’s own choices. The theme of Aeneas betraying his savior Dido is closely connected with his mission as a founder of Rome. Accordingly, Brodsky’s Dido foresees Carthage crumbling in the fire that is her own funeral pyre. The achievement of the supreme goal is possible only through ultimate

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sacrifice. Such sacrifice also entails the idea that the hero (or the poet) acts alone. The rewards for what the Russians call podvizhnichestvo (martyrdom achieved through heroic feat, expressed in Russian with a word of the same root—podvig) preclude personal happiness. Brodsky identifies with Aeneas through the act of podvizhnichestvo, but there is an undisguised feeling of uneasiness and self-contempt connected with abandonment of the hero’s human ties. This idea of podvizhnichestvo overlapping with the presence of antiheroic shame finds yet another more articulated reflection in the following poem which invokes the myth of Theseus.

To Lycomedes on Scyros I abandon this city, as once Theseus abandoned the labyrinth, leaving the Minotaur to rot, and Ariadne to murmur words of love in Bacchus’ embrace. This is my victory! An apotheosis of moral virtue [podvizhnichestvo]. But God has arranged our meeting at just that moment when in the middle of it all, with our endeavors accomplished, we now stroll through the vacant lot, with booty in our hands leaving forever these places, with no intention of ever coming back. At the end of the day, a murder is a murder. The duty of mortals is to take up arms against all monsters. But who has said that monsters are immortal? For secretly God—lest we arrogantly assume ourselves to be different from the vanquished— takes away any reward when the exultant mob is not looking and bids us to be silent. And we walk away. This time, for sure, we do leave for good. Men can return to where they committed crime, but men do not return to the place of their humiliation. On this point God’s design and our feeling of humiliation coincide so completely that we leave behind our back the night, the rotting beast, the exultant mob, our homes, our hearthfires, and Bacchus in a vacant lot kissing Ariadne in the dark. But one day the return is inevitable. Back home.

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Back to the native hearth. And my own journey will pass through this very city. So God grant that I shall not carry with me then the doubleedged sword— since cities start, for those who inhabit them, with central squares and towers— but for the traveler—with their outskirts. The title of this poem is striking. Lycomedes is an obscure mythological figure, a legendary king of Scyros famous mostly for the fact that Thetis, in order to hide her son Achilles, puts him among the daughters of Lycomedes disguised in girl’s dress. However, a more obscure mythological tradition related by Plutarch asserts that after the rebellion in his native Athens, Theseus was banished and went to Scyros and was murdered there by King Lycomedes. Brodsky’s choice of Lycomedes as an addressee of Theseus’ letter is unusual and must be viewed as an integral part of the main theme of the poem. But before any analysis of Brodsky’s treatment of the myth, some background is necessary. Classical antiquity offers several versions of the abandonment of Ariadne by Theseus. In both Heroides 10 and Metamorphoses 8.175ff., Theseus deserts Ariadne before the arrival of Bacchus. In Catullus 64, Theseus is not justified in his forsaking of Ariadne. The beautiful cover on the marriage bed of Peleus and Thetis represents in detail Ariadne’s agony after Theseus has left her alone on the island of Naxos where Bacchus would come to her. Catullus’ description, however, is mostly concerned with Ariadne’s state of mind, and the deeds of Theseus are understood only from her point of view. She, like Vergil’s Dido, is seduced only to be abandoned. She looks toward the horizon where the diminishing sail of Theseus’ ship can still be seen. From the other side of the island the Bacchantes are leading the way for Bacchus, her new lover. Theseus is reviled by Ariadne as perfidus in a manner similar to Dido’s treatment of Aeneas. His disregard for Ariadne and her plight is punished with the suicide of his father, for in his temporary oblivion Theseus also forgets to exchange the black sails of mourning for the white ones announcing the happy news of his return (247–248): . . . Theseus ferocious with death, the same sorrow that you brought to the daughter of Minos

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because of your forgetful mind, the same sorrow he himself received. The situation presented is proleptic. The sorrow of the suffering woman dominates the scene. Like Dido to Aeneas, Catullus’ Ariadne is the savior of Theseus. He owes everything to her, and his betrayal is the ultimate act of ingratitude. Hyginus in his account of the same myth somewhat mysteriously relates that Theseus acted to avoid opprobrium futurum. Apollodorus states: Theseus arrives at Naxos by night with Ariadne and the youths. There Dionysus fell in love with Ariadne, kidnapped her, took her away to Lemnos, and lay with her.

. . . In Russian poetry, the myth of the love of Ariadne and Theseus is employed before Brodsky. In 1927, during her exile in Paris, Marina Tsvetaeva published a classical play in verse, Theseus, which consisted of two parts, ‘‘Ariadne’’ and ‘‘Phaedra.’’ Like Catullus, in the ‘‘Ariadne’’ she concentrates on a broken relationship; but unlike all ancient accounts, both protagonists experience the same strength of love. At the moment when Theseus declares to Ariadne (in her sleep) his vow of fidelity, he is interrupted by the mysterious voice ordering him to surrender Ariadne to Bacchus. This voice which appears to be divine urges Theseus to give Ariadne up so that she may enter a world of the divine as a consort of Bacchus. The play concentrates on the mature Tsvetaeva’s favorite themes: the agonies of passion and the failure of lovers to be joined together. Another psychological theme that Tsvetaeva’s play emphasizes and explores is more relevant to Brodsky’s rendition of the Theseus myth: the isolation of the hero in the world and the anti-heroic side of every triumph. The Ariadne of his poem is a willing participant in Theseus’ demise, for while he is exiled she enjoys Bacchus’ embrace, forgetful of Theseus as he exits the scene. The word ‘‘vorkovat’’’ (rendered into English by ‘‘murmur’’) has an erotic connotation in Russian. Ariadne is whispering ‘‘sweet nothings’’ in Bacchus’ arms, overwhelmed by her new lover. Brodsky further explores the myth with Vergilian echoes as a paradoxical ethical law emerges, according to which heroic accomplishments are followed by the humiliation of the hero, rather than the reward. The fulfillment of destiny is again based on an ultimate sacrifice. For Aeneas, this was the loss of Dido; for Theseus, Ariadne. But in the fulfillment of the heroic act lies also the

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undoing of the hero as an individual. That is where the choice of Lycomedes as an addressee of the letter becomes clear. Lycomedes is the one at whose hands Theseus will die. Thus he represents to Theseus another version of the Minotaur, but this time the hero emerges from the confrontation vanquished. Theseus leaves the labyrinth foreseeing his imminent defeat, and the triumph is replaced with resignation. He is ready to meet in Lycomedes his darkest hour. The idea of podvizhnichestvo as in the case of Aeneas and Dido becomes again intertwined with the humiliation of the heroic achievement. The myth of Theseus, who after killing the Minotaur loses his beloved Ariadne to Bacchus, serves as a mask ‘‘for the real situation of the lyric ‘I’’’ and has already been noted by Kees Verheul. In the first two lines the protagonist presents his destiny as similar to that of Theseus. However, later in the poem the similarity is never mentioned. The protagonist becomes anonymous, and the classical metaphor tells the story that the poet wants to convey about himself. The poet becomes the hero. The constant struggle of the poet with the state is translated into the killing of the Minotaur. In his book on Brodsky, Michael Kreps observes that a mythological hero and his situation become attractive to any poet because they offer a ready formula for a conflict charged with psychological turmoil. The name of the hero becomes a sign conveying the undertext of trials and emotions perceived by a poet as his own. The pivotal point of this confession disguised beneath a classical mask starts in the last phrase of the first stanza ‘‘with no intention of ever coming back.’’ The poem was written in 1967, a year which in the poet’s life signified ‘‘a moment for summing up both his youth and his poetic apprenticeship.’’ For the three preceding years, Brodsky had been subjected to severe government persecution and was forced to flee from city to city hiding from the police. Although political motifs are very rare in Brodsky’s early work, the allusion to the Minotaur in this poem can and should be read in political terms. The Minotaur is seen by the Russian reader not only as mandevouring monster from the remote island of Crete, but as a beast of the totalitarian regime that is about to consume them. This feeling is especially intensified with the phrase ‘‘we mortals have a duty to take up arms against all monsters’’ and then with the hopeful phrase ‘‘who claims that monsters are immortal?’’ The word choice

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of these lines deserves explication. Initially, the word ‘‘monster’’ appears in Russian as ‘‘chudovishe,’’ which is a neutral word that can be applied equally either to a scary creature or to a dominating police state. However, in the latter usage, also translated into English as ‘‘monsters,’’ Brodsky chooses the syncopated version of the same word ‘‘chudishe,’’ which usually is applied ironically as a cartoonish version of the real monster. The monster that brings death becomes reduced to an awkward, almost funny creature which should not be feared but ridiculed. The late sixties in Russia was a time that still wistfully remembered the ottepel (the ‘‘thaw’’) after the freezing, terrifying years of Stalin’s rule. The monster, however, even if weakened and already ridiculous, was only half dead, and the ‘‘reward’’ for even the suspicion of dissidence was either a ‘‘journey’’ to prison in the outskirts of the Soviet empire or for the fortunate ones exile to the West. Brodsky would experience both, for the poem is prophetic of his final exile from Russia in 1972. ‘‘This time again we go for good,’’ echoes the last phrase of the first stanza ‘‘with no intention of ever coming back.’’ The reason for such a drastic cutting of all ties is rather simple: one cannot return to the place of humiliation—the notion applicable to both a hero and a poet. The home left behind is lost amid the ‘‘rotting beast’’ and the ‘‘exultant mob.’’ The first phrase once again reiterates the idea of a half-dead beast (the decaying Soviet machine). The second phrase, on the other hand, emphasizes the gap between the aspirations of the intelligentsia and those who eagerly and sincerely hailed the leaders of the Communist party on the steps of Lenin’s mausoleum while parading past them on national holidays. Strangely enough, however, the very last stanza brings back the Odyssean motif: ‘‘But one day we must all go back. Back home. Back to our native hearth.’’ These lines are marked with the disappearance of anger, irony, and even resignation. The reason for such a sudden change of heart is not stated but is self-evident, as in Odysseus’ case: the poet’s self-identity is connected with the land from which he comes. The humiliation once endured cannot be given a priority. The only remnant of anger and frustration is present in the lines ‘‘so God grant that I / shall not carry with me then the double-edged sword,’’ but even here the melancholy of the hero’s (poet’s) ‘‘new’’ status as an outsider is clearly expressed. Brodsky’s Theseus

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has very little in common with any Theseus in the classical accounts: he is neither a treacherous man, nor is he a coward running away from the divine wrath. Nor is he experiencing any sudden loss of memory. Theseus emerges as almost a tragic hero of sorts, one that stands for the figure of the poet himself: bitter, exiled, and contemplative. In another poem, ‘‘The year 1972,’’ Brodsky will return to the theme of Theseus one more time: Like Theseus from Minos’ cave emerging into the open air and carrying the skin, I don’t see the horizon, but a minus sign applied to life behind. Sharper than his sword is this blade. By it the best part is cut off. Thus is wine taken away from the sober And salt from the bland. I feel like crying. But what’s the use? As David Bethea observes, there is no mention of Ariadne this time. The emergence of Theseus from the cave represents for Brodsky exile into the West and ‘‘the minus sign’’ is the only mention of the losses and betrayals of his prior life. This clinging to the myth of Theseus allows Brodsky to convey the painful experience of separation from his loved ones and to express through the images of sword and blade the idea of impotence, mostly linguistic, since the exile from Russia is associated for him with the loss of his most powerful weapon, his verse. The poems discussed in this essay do not comprise a cycle in the traditional poetic sense. . . . In each of the poems discussed, we can see sets of allusions and verbal images that connect us both with Brodsky’s poetics and his epoch. The poems are somber and the unifying theme is that of failure and bitterness. The reasons for that lie not only in the autobiographical circumstances that conditioned these early poems of Brodsky, but also in the whole Russian approach to poetry, which is very rarely uplifting and encouraging. The poet commits an act of conscious rebellion when he composes poetry removed from the panegyrics of the party-line poets. Svetlana Boym calls dissident art the ‘‘art of estrangement.’’ Classical myth offered the poets of the Soviet era a practical road to alienation from their own epoch, alienation that should not be interpreted as escapism. Classicism becomes a useful means of disguising discontent with the existing situation under the costumes of classical antiquity, a

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mask that initially seemed innocuous to Soviet censorship concerned mainly with more aggressive, explicit outbursts of dissidence. The fates of three famous heroes are united by the idea of abandonment and exile which seems to be persistent in Brodsky’s poetry prior to his emigration. The heroic characteristics usually associated with the plights and achievements of Odysseus, Aeneas, and Theseus undergo a transformation into an ‘‘alter ego’’ of the poet and focus on the dimension of the mythological plot that is anti-heroic, an aspect charged with loss, shame, and abandonment rather than homecoming, moral virtue, and victory. Brodsky rewrites familiar myths, providing the reader with an original interpretation and modernization of the myth. In the context of the Soviet era, it was not the heroic but rather the anti-heroic vision of Greece and Rome that appealed to Brodsky’s poetic imagination, reflecting the thoughts of the poet on the verge of exile and estrangement in a world which he does not accept and which does not accept him. Through his eyes we see the aftermath of the heroic plight—alienation and ‘‘spiritual exile’’— experienced by many intellectuals in Russia during the 1960s. Brodsky’s treatment of his classical heroes rests on this notion of a poet as a private individual amid the imposed collectivity of Soviet everyday life. Classical heroes become illuminated descriptions of the imagined ‘‘civilization’’ and the choices it offers to its sons. This civilization strikingly resembles the poet’s own and at the same time establishes his place within the continuity of literary tradition. Source: Zara M. Torlone, ‘‘Classical Myth in Three Poems of Joseph Brodsky,’’ in Classical and Modern Literature, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 95–114.

Martin E. Marty In the following brief essay, Marty reflects on the life and talent of Joseph Brodsky. Perspective on events and on oneself is hard to gain, hard to retain. When we brush up against famous people we usually see that fame and celebrity have distorted their perspective and sense of proportion. When we run into exceptions, it’s a delight to appraise them. In recent years I’ve read a good deal of the work of Joseph Brodsky, the late Nobel Prize-winning poet, but I’d not read much about him. Now I am likely to pursue details about his life, having read Michael Hofmann’s review in the Times Literary Supplement (January 10) of So Forth

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and On Grief and Reason, both by Hamish Hamilton. Hofmann calls Brodsky ‘‘a flaneur,’’ ˆ and says that the poet’s ‘‘presence in a place always struck me as a magnificent gift.’’ This ‘‘autodidact and globe-trotter’’ was what Robert Lowell called a ‘‘spendthrift talker.’’ Hofmann says the poet was ‘‘bewilderingly well read and au fait, generous, unsnobbish, stern, funny, modest and doctrinaire.’’ His summary judgment: ‘‘The word of such a man on literature and on literacy is worth more than anyone else’s—and not least because of his life.’’ He was born in what the poet might have called ‘‘Theningrad,’’ during the siege in 1940, and lived a full life, much of it in the U.S. There were travails: ‘‘It is hard to think of a man, as it were, surviving such a life, but to Brodsky it was no big deal.’’ One of his poems reflects: ‘‘It’s strange to think of surviving, but that’s what happened.’’ He hated ‘‘larmoyance’’ (look it up; I had to) and ‘‘display.’’ I was struck mainly by Brodsky’s perspective on the vocation of those who lecture or preach. We’re impressed with ourselves, but in the view of eternity, it’s forgettable. ‘‘As far as this room is concerned, I think it was empty just a couple of hours ago, and it will be empty again a couple of hours hence. Our presence in it, mine especially, is quite incidental from its walls’ point of view,’’ Brodsky said in his Nobel acceptance speech. That would not be a bad set of words to tape on lecterns and pulpits: the walls forget the speaker’s ego and achievement. What matters is the lives of the people who exit the rooms. And the walls remain standing—for other speakers, in different decades and succeeding centuries. Hofmann says, ‘‘I am not sure which came first with Brodsky: the modesty or the metaphysics of absence. Success is a chimera, so is fame.’’ Then Hofmann quotes more of Brodsky, who makes sense for all us who are not superstars or the pope or Billy Graham: ‘‘On any street of any city in the world at any time of night or day there are more people who haven’t heard of you than those who have.’’ Another good quote for lecterns, pulpits and auto dashboards. I recently bought Brodsky’s To Urania (Noonday). Its first poem makes autobiographical references, including some to his suffering and survivorhood, and observes: ‘‘Those who forgot me would make a city.’’ He ends with two lines that stick in the mind: ‘‘Yet until

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brown clay has been crammed down my larynx,/ only gratitude will be gushing from it.’’ When my own gratitude gushes daily, it is inspired by the rare Brodskys of the world, poets or not—people of fame who provide perspective. Source: Martin E. Marty, ‘‘The Wall’s Point of View,’’ in Christian Century, Vol. 114, April 2, 1997, p. 351.

SOURCES Brodsky, Joseph, ‘‘Letter to Horace,’’ in On Grief and Reason: Essays, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995, p. 439. ———, ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus,’’ in A Part of Speech, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980, p. 58. Brown, Clarence, ‘‘The Best Russian Poetry Written Today,’’ in New York Times, September 7, 1980, pp. 11, 16. Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1973, p. 246. Cohen, Arthur A., Review of Selected Poems, in New York Times, December 30, 1973, pp. 161, 162. ‘‘President Barack Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize,’’ Associated Press, October 9, 2009, available at http://news. yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_nobel_peace (accessed October 9, 2009). Sosin, Gloria Donen, ‘‘The Nobel Prize-Winner Nobody Knows,’’ in New York Times, January 3, 1988, p. WC20. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, ‘‘Ulysses,’’ in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2, 7th ed., Norton, 2000, pp. 1213–14. Tolstaya, Tatyana, ‘‘Tatyana Tolstaya on Joseph Brodsky,’’ in The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships, edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, New York Review Books, 2006, p. 219. Torlone, Zara M. ‘‘Classical Myth in Three Poems of Joseph Brodsky,’’ in Classical and Modern Literature, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 95–114.

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FURTHER READING Brodsky, Joseph, On Grief and Reason: Essays, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995. This collection of essays gives interested readers some insight into the mind, range of associations, and personality of Joseph Brodsky. The first essay, ‘‘Spoils of War’’ describes the items that arrived in Leningrad after World War II that conveyed the West to Brodsky when he was a child. Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1972. Joseph Campbell’s work in mythologies of the world is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the role of myth in religious thought and psychological theory. This important work by Campbell discusses the global patterns in stories told round the world. Campbell touches on myths about Odysseus and Oedipus. Ceram, C. W., Gods, Graves, and Scholars: The History of Archeology, Vintage Books, 1986. First published in 1949 in German and revised and published several times in the United States by Knopf, Ceram’s book remains one of the best studies of nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century archeological explorations. It includes Heinrich Schliemann’s efforts to discover Troy, Jean-François Champollion’s translation of the Rosetta Stone, and Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankamun’s tomb. Torlone, Zara M., ‘‘Classical Myth in Three Poems of Joseph Brodsky,’’ in Classical and Modern Literature, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 95–114. Torlone’s essay is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how classical myth is appropriated by Brodsky. Torlone also explains the original Russian text and how certain Russian words were translated into English to create the English text.

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Of Modern Poetry WALLACE STEVENS 1942

Wallace Stevens often created dialogues between the figures in his poems as they wrestled with intricate philosophical questions concerning the nature of reality. J. Hillis Miller in ‘‘William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens,’’ writes that Stevens’s poetry can be considered ‘‘as one immense long meditative poem, broken somewhat arbitrarily into sections. This poem is the record of that unending dialogue of imagination and reality that was the life of the mind for Stevens.’’ The dialogue between imagination and reality is enacted in ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ one of the pieces in Wallace Stevens’s Parts of a World (1942) and one of his most eloquent and thematically significant poems. The poem has been widely anthologized and can be found in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954). ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ is a meditation on the search for significance and the role that the imagination plays in that search. Using theatrical metaphors, the speaker insists that traditional poetry, with its predetermined scenes and script, cannot provide a sense of meaning in the actual contemporary world, and so a new modern poetry must take on the challenge. Stevens outlines in the remainder of the poem arguments for a poetry that pays attention to the details of the living world, which includes both the personal and the political. Modern poetry, he insists, must observe the reality of the place and also the subject of that place, for example, the look of a man skating or a woman dancing or combing her hair. Ultimately, Stevens illustrates how the interplay of poem, poet, and reader can

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his father convinced him to pursue a degree in law. In 1903, Stevens graduated from the New York School of Law, and in 1904, he was admitted to the New York Bar. During the next few years, he worked in various law firms, and in 1908, he accepted a position as an insurance lawyer for the American Bonding Company. Stevens remained in this profession throughout his working life but continued his love affair with the written word and so began his fruitful association with several prominent writers and painters in New York’s Greenwich Village, including William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, and Alfred Kreymborg. By 1913, Stevens resumed writing poetry and one year later began seeing his work published in literary magazines. In 1915, he wrote his first major poems, ‘‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’’ and ‘‘Sunday Morning.’’ The next year, he tried his hand at playwriting, which resulted in his prize-winning play, Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise.

Wallace Stevens (The Library of Congress)

result in understanding and a sense of contentment, which, he insists, must become the ultimate goals of modern poetry.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania, to Garrett and Margaretha Stevens. Stevens’s father, who was a lawyer, shaped his son’s education and career choices. He built an extensive library in their home, which he encouraged his son to use, and instilled in him the value of education. Stevens did well in school, and by the time he graduated high school, he had made a name for himself as a writer and orator. In 1897, Stevens began his studies at Harvard. During his time there, he had articles and poems published in the Harvard Advocate. After his third year, Stevens had to abandon his education because of financial difficulties. He soon landed a position as a reporter at the New York Tribune, which afforded him the opportunity to observe the city as subject matter for his poetry. After Stevens grew bored with reporting, he briefly gave up his dream of being a writer when

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Harmonium, his first collection of poetry, was published in 1923 but aroused little interest. After the publication of his next collection, Ideas of Order, however, Stevens acquired a reputation among a small but influential group of writers and critics as an important, new American poet. Stevens wrote ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ one of the collected pieces in his Parts of a World (1942), during the latter part of his career when his poetry was increasingly more meditative. Stevens’s poetry eventually earned him critical acclaim and several awards, including the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1950, the National Book Award for best poetry in 1951 for The Auroras of Autumn, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and another National Book Award in 1955 for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. During the early 1950s, Stevens suffered from cancer and was repeatedly hospitalized. He died of the disease on August 2, 1955, in Hartford, Connecticut.

POEM SUMMARY The first line of ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ is a sentence fragment focused on the creative powers of the mind searching for something that will bring a form of satisfaction. The first line breaks after the word ‘‘finding,’’ which highlights the act of finding rather than what is found, suggesting that the

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Wallace Stevens: Voice of a Poet, a full length compact disk, was released in April 2002, by Random House. Stevens reads selections from his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954). Wallace Stevens Reads: The Idea of Order at Key West, Looking Across the Fields and Watching Birds Fly, and Other Poems, released by Harper Collins in 1993, is an audio cassette collection of poems read by Stevens.

act of finding something significant is never completed or the significance found is never permanent. Since the first line does not make up a complete sentence, it could also be read in the form of a question about what will satisfy the mind’s poem. The title and the first line read together announce the connection between finding significance in the world and modern poetry, which is the focus of the entire poem. In the second line, a distinction is drawn between the act of the mind searching in the past and in the present. In the past, the mind has not always had to find what will satisfy it because it relied on conventional forms of poetry already determined to be appropriate. These conventional forms are represented in the poem by a theatrical script and scene that are read and played over and over again. The suggestion that the poem of the mind is searching for something new relates to the title, which focuses on modern rather than an earlier form of poetry. The word modern could refer to modernism, a literary movement that reached its height in the United States during the 1920s. Modern could also mean contemporary in this instance. The fifth line starts more than half way across the page, announcing an important break. The speaker states that at one point the conventions that guided the mind’s search for significance were changed, but by using the word theater, with its accompanying scenes and scripts, he

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suggests that new conventions were established. Yet he does not dismiss the old completely, saving it as a souvenir. The new way for the mind’s poem to find significance, which is announced in the seventh line, is for it to interact with real experience in the moment. The creative mind has to be open to its surroundings, to speech, and to men and women who are living in the present. It also has to engage with the political as noted when the speaker insists that the mind must find significance in the face of war. The speaker is most likely referring to World War II since the poem was written in 1942, one year after the United States entered the war. At the end of the tenth line, the speaker returns to theatrical metaphors, insisting that the mind’s process of creation necessitates constructing a new stage and that the mind, which is the creator of the poem, must be an actor on that stage. The mind/actor repeats words to itself as it constructs the modern poem. Here the speaker introduces the third element in the process, the reader, who though invisible, is listening to the actor speaking. During this process, the poem’s audience becomes one with the poet and the poem. In the closing lines of the middle section, the speaker describes how the mind/actor forges this link between him or her and the audience. The poet first becomes a metaphysician, someone who explores the fundamental nature of reality, searching for significance in the shadows, and then a musician playing a stringed instrument that helps stir the audience’s imagination, thus forging a sympathetic connection between the two. The final section of the poem, indicated again not by a new stanza but by an indentation, reiterates the connection that the modern poem must make with the living: with a man skating and with woman dancing and one combing her hair. This connection will provide the poet and the audience with the satisfaction they desire.

THEMES The Power of the Imagination In ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ Stevens insists that the poet’s dilemma is finding what will provide a sense of satisfaction in the modern world and that only through the power of the imagination will this dilemma be resolved. The first line announces the important role the imagination

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Write a meditation, either a story or a poem, on your own creative process. You might consider asking yourself if you believe, as Stevens does, that it is essential to connect with the living world when you write a short story, a poem, or a play. Similarly, you could consider if you agree that the main goal of creative writing is to discover and communicate a certain meaning regarding the world. If you have difficulties expressing yourself through creative writing, explain in a short essay what those difficulties entail. Research modernist poetry as a form and prepare a PowerPoint presentation of your findings, perhaps including modern poems with older forms of poetry. Then lead a class discussion on how ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ fits it to this literary movement. Read Stevens’s poem, ‘‘Sunday Morning,’’ which describes the thoughts of a woman trying to engage with her world. Write an essay in which you compare and contrast this poem to ‘‘Of Modern Poetry.’’ Consider each poem’s use of imagery and what characterizes each speaker’s meditation. Read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s essay ‘‘A Defence of Poetry’’ (1840) and compare his and Stevens’s views on the power of the imagination. Research how Shelley’s attitudes reflect those of the English romantic movement. Write a research paper comparing and contrasting Stevens’s views on the role of the imagination with those expressed by the English romantic poets. Read Langston Hughes’s autobiography The Big Sea (1940), which depicts the difficult childhood of this celebrated African American poet. Hughes also chronicles his life as a rising young poet during the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. Lead a discussion on what Hughes says in the book about his own creative processes.

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A woman working in an armaments factory during World War II (Hudson / Hulton Archive)

plays in this process. Stevens focuses on the act of the mind as it creates a poem that will suffice. The focus on the creation rather than on the end result continues throughout the poem. Stevens’s purpose here is to examine the act of imagining itself. Stevens argues in the poem that the poetry of the past does not actively engage the imagination because it, like a play, contains a set script and scenes that are repeated over and over. These do not respond to current, living experience. He then provides a prescription for the modern poet who must focus on the real details of the immediate personal and public scene. The poet must imaginatively engage with the observed world with an open and receptive mind as the poem is constructed. If the poet can accomplish this dialectic between reality and imagination, between self and world, the poem will provide both the poet and the audience with a sense of satisfaction. During the creative process, the poet and the audience are inextricably linked in the interplay of expression and response. The poet, identified here as an actor, begins the imaginative process when he or she whispers into the ear of the mind what has been observed. The audience (or reader)

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becomes an active part in this process as it listens to or reads the whispered words, bringing its own imaginative response into play. In this sense, then, the emotions of the poet and the audience become intertwined as both take part in the creation of the poem.

The Past versus the Present Stevens rejects the poetry of the past in ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ suggesting that it has lost its relevance and is only a souvenir. Traditional poetry had significance in its own time, but that significance has become meaningless in contemporary life. Poets did not have to actively engage their imagination to find meaning in the past since meaning was already established in previous poems, and so, he suggests, they just repeated what had already been written. Stevens insists that a new age requires new poetry that reflects it. The modern poet must learn a new language and must focus on living men and women. This poet must also consider how one can find meaning in war. Only by living in the present can the poet compose modern poetry that is sufficient for current times.

STYLE Metaphor Stevens uses metaphor (a figure of speech in which one object is compared to something seemingly unrelated) to explain the process of artistic creation. He uses a constellation of metaphors associated with the theater. He uses these metaphors to describe the poetry written in the past. That poetry has set scenes and script, which are repeated again and again. The poet who relied on old fashioned techniques was like an actor who is just mouthing the words someone else has written. That play with its predictable scenes and script is not relevant in modern times. Stevens then suggests that a modern theater was created when poets began to compose a new type of poetry, one that engaged with contemporary life. This poetic theater requires an actor/ poet who learns a new script based on the world of real men and women and current events such as war. These metaphors help to dramatize the process of creation, making the abstract ideas more understandable. Stevens describes the imaginative collaboration between actor/poet and audience in the

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construction of the play/poem. Then he adds new metaphors in an effort to express the role of the poet. In line 20, the actor/poet takes center stage as a metaphysician and a musician. The metaphysician explores the fundamental nature of reality and is then able to illuminate its darker, more mysterious places. The musician plays a stringed instrument that stimulates the audience’s imagination. The music also helps express what the poet has learned about reality as well as a sudden rightness about its significance.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Modernist Poetry Modernist poetry was written in the United States and Europe during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The modernist movement affected painting, music, and architecture, as well as poetry and other literary genres. Modernist literature in the United States, which reached its peak in the 1920s, expressed the disillusionment many Americans experienced, especially after World War I, regarding established social, political, and religious doctrines. Poetry in this movement, as with other works of modernism, experimented with new ideas in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy that had become popular in the early part of the century. One of the most important poems of this period is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which echoes the disillusionment and anxiety many people felt in the early 1900s. Modernist writers challenged assumptions about how people attain objective knowledge of the world. They insisted that the viewer and the subject viewed are inextricably linked, and so the viewer cannot make objective statements about the subject; change the viewer and the subject also changes. William James, a prominent philosopher and brother to author Henry James, wrote during this period that reality was not an objective given but something subjectively perceived through each individual’s consciousness. Stevens explored this new philosophy in several of his most famous works, including ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ ‘‘Sunday Morning,’’ and ‘‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’’ all of which challenge the traditional idea of the objective reality of human experience. Stevens focused on the tension between the imagination and reality and the poet’s position between the two. Miller argues

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COMPARE & CONTRAST

1930s and 1940s: A decade of military aggression in the 1930s culminates in World War II. This global conflict results from the rise of totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan. One week after Nazi Germany and the USSR sign the Treaty of Nonaggression, on September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland, and World War II begins when Great Britain and France declare war on Germany. Today: The United States is engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrorist activities

that ‘‘Stevens’s poetry, both in theory and in actual practice, is a poetry of evanescence—brief glimpses of something that vanishes before it can be seen, caught, named, tamed, pinned down.’’ In this sense, Miller reveals how Stevens’s poetry reflects the modernism by which the poet himself was shaped.

World War II The world experienced a decade of aggression in the 1930s that culminated in World War II. This global conflict was caused by the rise and aggression of totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan. These militaristic regimes gained control, in part, as a result of the Great Depression that affected most of the world in the early 1930s and, in reference to Germany, from the strict conditions defined by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles (1919) following World War I. The dictatorships established in each of these three countries envisioned military takeovers of neighboring countries. In Germany, Hitler strengthened the army during the 1930s. In 1936, Benito Mussolini’s Italian troops took Ethiopia. From 1936 to 1939, Spain was engaged in civil war involving Francisco Franco’s fascist army, aided by Germany and Italy. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria, and in March 1939, it occupied Czechoslovakia. Italy took Albania in April 1939. One week after Nazi Germany and the USSR signed a Treaty of

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in various parts of the Middle East indicate considerable instability in the area.

1930s and 1940s: Modernist American writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Wallace Stevens focus on the subjective nature of experience. Today: Contemporary American writers consider how humans perceive reality. Writers present various theories, influenced by ethnicity, gender, and class.

Nonaggression, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. On September 3, 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany after a German Uboat sank the British ship Athenia off the coast of Ireland. Another British ship, Courageous, was sunk on September 19. All the members of the British Commonwealth, except Ireland, soon joined Britain and France in their declaration of war. The United States entered the war four days after Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW After the publication of several volumes of poetry, Stevens had established a reputation as one of the finest American poets, and that assessment continued into the early 2000s. The growing regard for his poetry was due in large part to major critical direction from scholars such as Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom. Bloom wrote in his book Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds that ‘‘Stevens is, after Whitman, Dickinson, and Henry James, the greatest master of nuance in the American language’’ and that ‘‘gradually he came to be seen as the poet of his era, displacing Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams.’’

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Depression-era food line (FPG / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

Christian Wiman, in his comments of Stevens for the Atlantic Monthly, claimed that scholars have appreciated Stevens’s poetry more than the reading public. He praised Stevens’s ‘‘dense, highly wrought’’ poems that are ‘‘full of otherworldly beauty’’ but faulted them for their ‘‘hothouse, overintellectualized quality.’’ Many other critics, however, disagreed. J. Hillis Miller, in his article on William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens for the Columbia Literary History of the United States, found ‘‘a thematic continuity’’ in Stevens’s ‘‘abiding concern with the interactions of imagination and reality, or mind and world.’’ David Clippinger wrote in his article on Stevens in Twentieth-Century American Nature Poets, ‘‘Stevens is now regarded alongside Pound as on of the main pillars in twentieth-century American poetry.’’ Clippinger claimed that Stevens’s ‘‘place as a major poet is assured by the sheer force of his poetic statements about the world and the latent power of the imagination.’’ He concluded that his poetry has become ‘‘a paradigm for the ‘Thinking Life’ that provides a sense of solace and completeness that is so elusive

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when one lives in a reality devoid of imagination and poetry.’’ Ned Balbo in ‘‘Wallace Stevens and the Abstract’’ for Art Journal, asserted that Stevens’s ‘‘poems are gorgeous in the literal sense of the word: filled with sumptuous images, exotic references, and vivid, fully imagined settings; they provide a banquet of language that can be humorous, ironic, earnest, or all of these.’’ Stevens’s first volume of poetry, Harmonium, published in 1923, is considered one of his finest. David Perkins, in his chapter on Stevens for A History of Modern Poetry, stated that many of the poems in this volume are ‘‘brilliant’’ in their creation of ‘‘a comic world of artificial simplicity, high spirits, humourous exaggeration, parody, Dandy sophistication, affectation, archness, burlesque, and fairytale fantasy.’’ ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ has earned less commentary than Stevens’s more famous poems, such as ‘‘Sunday Morning’’ and ‘‘The Idea of Order at Key West,’’ but some critics have singled it out as a fine expression of Stevens’s philosophy on the

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relationship between the poem and its reader. Clippinger, for example, finds the poem to be ‘‘the poetic pinnacle of Parts of a World.’’


CRITICISM

Wendy Perkins Perkins is a professor of English at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland and has published several articles on American and British literature. In the following essay, she examines the relationship between poet, poem, and reader in Stevens’s poem and his views on the power of the imagination. In his ‘‘Adagia,’’ a set of musings on poetry and the imagination collected in Opus Posthumous (1957), Stevens wrote about the importance of the relation of art to life, since with the modern disillusionment with conventional beliefs and institutions, ‘‘the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, . . . for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support they give.’’ The search for an imaginative connection to the real world can be aided by the poet, who can provide a sense of order and peace, even if that peace is only temporary. This power of the poetic imagination is a dominant theme in ‘‘Of Modern Poetry.’’ Here Stevens reveals how the artistic expression of poetry, especially that which he considers ‘‘modern,’’ can facilitate a deeper experience for readers as they connect with and thus more fully comprehend their world. In the opening lines of the poem, the speaker notes the need the human mind has to make meaningful connections with the world, especially those that provide some type of satisfaction. This need is central to ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ in its focus on the modern age, a period of uncertainty and confusion. Since the opening statement is not a complete sentence and it is placed at the beginning of the poem, it can be viewed as the poem’s controlling idea in conjunction with the title. The first statement and the title together announce the poem’s intention to reveal significant connections through modern poetry, which, the speaker later points out, involves the interaction between the creation, expression, and response to that poetry. The second line establishes the difference between traditional poetry and what the speaker calls ‘‘modern.’’ The idea of ‘‘modern poetry’’ implies a break from the past in an effort to find fresh ways to explore the connections between the poet, the reader, and their world.

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T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1925), considered to be one of the finest examples of modernism, experiments with similar poetic techniques to those used by Stevens. Stevens’s The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (1951) focuses on the interplay between the poet and the poem.

Stevens’s ‘‘The Idea of Order at Key West,’’ contained in his book Ideas of Order (1936), presents a different view of the interplay of imagination and reality through the consciousness of a woman who represents the poet in the poem.

Twenty-seven of Stevens’s poems that may appeal to children and young adults have been collected in Poetry for Young People: Wallace Stevens (2004), edited by John N. Serio and illustrated by Robert Gantt Steele. Among these poems are ‘‘From a Junk,’’ which focuses on a boat on a moonlit sea and ‘‘Ploughing on Sunday,’’ a poem that celebrates rural landscapes.

Australian poet John Allison wrote A Way of Seeing: Perception, Imagination, and Poetry (2003), which explains how readers can use their imagination to engage with their world in ways that scientific observation cannot match. To illustrate his thesis, Allison includes passages by William Shakespeare, William Blake, John Keats, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Octavio Paz. Countee Cullen, a popular poet of the Harlem Renaissance, often focuses on poetic expression, as in his poem ‘‘Yet Do I Marvel’’ (1925), which explores the complex relationship between a black poet and his world.

C. M. Bowra’s The Romantic Imagination (1969) discusses how the English romantic poets viewed the power of the imagination.

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The poetry of the past fails to be relevant to the modern reader, the speaker insists, because it has become like a script or a set scene in a play, repeating only what has been written or spoken before. The mind does not have to engage with this poetry, and so those works do not suffice, because they do not provide an understanding of present experience. Rejecting the prescriptions of this old form of poetry accomplishes an important task: It forces the mind to become more active in its search for new ways to make relevant connections. Stevens focuses the remaining lines in ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ on the act of the mind as it creates and responds to modern poetry and outlines what that poetry must contain if it is to inspire the mind’s serious engagement with it. The poetry of the past becomes a souvenir, not completely discarded, but serving only as a reminder of what was valued in relation to previous experiences. New poetry will help readers discover what will suffice. In that sense, it will have two functions— aesthetic and human—both of which can help the search for significant connections to the world and a resulting sense of order and peace. This rejection of past poetic practices informs not only the poem’s subject matter but also its structure. Traditionally, poets provided a detailed description of a person, object, or landscape in conjunction with their responses to their subject. In ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ however, Stevens presents a meditation on how the poet observes the subject and how the audience responds to that subject but does not include a detailed description of that subject. Thus, the poem becomes a meditation on the fertile power of the human mind in the act of observing, creating, and responding. Stevens delineates this process beginning on line 7 when the speaker insists that modern poetry has to fully engage with the present. Stevens presents this engagement in an encompassing vision of the connection between the imagination of the poet and that of the reader in response to what the poet has written. The connection is established when the mind of the poet and reader find moments of accord with the real world, moments of intense sensation when the mind is in tune with a man and woman of the time and the details of place. The speaker notes that at times the mind must also engage on a more philosophical level with the present. The speaker insists that the war must be thought about, in conjunction with the immediate surroundings.

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In line 10, the speaker returns to images of the theater, not to reiterate the tired poetic forms of the past, but to create a new metaphor for modern poetry that involves an actor/poet who, after engaging his or her senses in an active response to the real world, whispers into the mind’s ear what it needs to create poetry on a modern stage. The poet does this in a slow, meditative way, which gives more weight to what is uttered. The sympathy between the words and the thoughts becomes apparent in the acknowledgement that the actor’s whispers are exactly what the mind wants to hear. When those whispers are heard, the audience responds to them in the same personal sense as has the poet, hearing not only the expression of the poet, but the expression of their own thoughts and emotions as well. At this moment, the poet and audience unite in their response to the poetry as their separate emotions fuse. Though each creates a subjective vision inspired by the poem, poet and audience become inextricably linked in the imaginative process as they discover what will suffice for each of them. Beginning in line 19, the speaker introduces the poet as a metaphysician and a musician in this process of creating sounds from a stringed instrument that provides metaphysical reflections in the mind of the poet and audience alike. The role of the poet who writes modern poetry is to observe the mystery of the living world and then to illuminate the dark places for the audience. If the poet is able to express a sense of rightness in these sounds and resulting reflections, the poet will lead the audience to a creative fusion in the mind. In the poem’s final lines, the speaker provides examples of what may inspire this fusion: activities as simple as a man skating and a woman dancing or a woman combing her hair, at play and at rest in the present. The imaginative sympathy that can arise between the poet, the poem, and the audience leads to the discovery of satisfaction, which by the end of the poem becomes the definition of what will suffice: the ultimate goal, the speaker insists, of modern poetry. Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

Susan K. Andersen Andersen is a writer and teacher with a Ph.D. in English literature. In this essay, she considers Wallace Stevens’s definition of modern poetry in ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ as an act of mind that

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War II, a time when many writers wrestled with existential anxiety about the lack of order in the universe. STEVENS THOUGHT THAT THE MODERN POEM MUST FOCUS ON THE MOMENT OF ITS OWN CREATION AND THUS ALLOW THE AUDIENCE TO SHARE IN THE PROCESS OF SYNTHESIS.’’

simultaneously unites poet and world and audience in a moment of shared being. Modernism in the first half of the twentieth century was an energetic attempt by artists to create a new synthesis for western civilization, which had been fragmented by the trauma of industrial materialism and world war. Though modern poetry severely criticized modern life, it took its methods and themes from that life, trying to shape something meaningful out of them through art. Modernism turned to the artist to supply the meanings that had failed to be produced by religion and politics. In ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ Wallace Stevens does not so much explain what modern poetry is as demonstrate what it is. A modern poem is not descriptive or contemplative, according to Stevens, it is an act of the mind to create a new reality. The act of the poet’s imagination is an act of consciousness, and it meets the consciousness of the audience in one moment of wholeness in which artist, audience, and the world are fused. Stevens thought that the modern poem must focus on the moment of its own creation and thus allow the audience to share in the process of synthesis. ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ walks readers through such a moment as a demonstration. Stevens’s frequent themes of the interaction between the mind and world and the power of art to change things are highlighted in this poem. ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ asserts new ground for poetry in a new time. Modern poetry is not about certain ideas, doctrines, or even historical events, but about the processes of the mind and the creative act itself. The creative act distinguishes humans from other species. If the human race is capable of the destruction of war, it can also make new things and create order from chaos. This is the new frontier the poet can and must explore. Stevens miraculously was able to make his positive statement about the enduring value of poetry during World

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Stevens saw the modern world as a challenging time for poets, forcing them to seek what is appropriate for making a poem. In the poem, he contrasts the present with the past when poets did not need to find anything. The material was all given to them to work with. A certain cultural milieu with agreed upon ideals, such as in Elizabethan England, for instance, meant that, according to Stevens, all poems were variations on one another and the accepted beliefs of the day. The poet only had to follow the script. Thus, William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser often used the same images (the sun as a symbol for reason), the same themes (love and mortality; England as a utopia), the same poetic genres (the sonnet, the song); they referred to the same world order, the same Protestant doctrines. The modern world has no such unity; it is in a state of fragmentation, a commercial enterprise without belief in anything beyond the material. God and religion are no longer the ground of poetry. There are no agreed upon values or common artistic forms. How is a poet to make sense of it, create art? And above all, what is art and the task of art in such a time? The first line of the poem is Stevens’s definition of a modern poem that bypasses culture, country, form, and theme: A poem is an act of the mind that reveals itself in the process of finding what words will work. Every poem must find its own ground. The shift is thus from an old preconceived order to the poetic mind searching for some new ordering of experience in the moment. ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ is both ultimatum and credo: Poets have no choice but to seek, to find, to move ahead. The past is not seen as a legacy for them, but more like a scrapbook of interesting memories. The shift from the past to the present is so radical that the whole theater or arena of poetry has changed. Stevens uses the theater as an extended metaphor to include the complete scope of poetry: the subject matter, the writer, and the audience. The image of an actor on stage playing a guitar is a metaphor for poetry, which Stevens also used in the poem, ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’’ (1937). There Stevens worked through several tentative definitions of poetry, leading to a similar idea as in ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ namely, that there is an interplay between poet and things as they are and that interplay produces a modern poem.

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Using theater as a metaphor for poetry has several advantages. Theater implies a performance, a live action, rather than an intellectual exercise on paper. It implies communication, a public force. The script of the past, however, is replaced by improvisation. There are no guidelines. It is as if the actor goes out on the stage by himself to discover what he will be inspired to say. Identifying the poet as an actor also implies that the poet is using a persona to speak through. It is not personal confession. The speaker-poet makes it clear that poetry has to be about what humans are facing now; it has to confront living men, women, and places, and difficult issues, such as war, using the speech of the time. Stevens implies more, though, than just being up to date or contemporary. He also means the poem has to be written and experienced in the Now. The only way it can do that is to make a new stage, a new platform for itself. The platform is the mind, consciousness itself, the only medium that connects the poet, subject matter, and audience at the same time. The poem is stripped down to its essentials so readers/listeners may witness the creative act. The poem, ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ then performs the process of the poet putting those three items together: poet, audience, and subject matter, using the metaphor of the actor acting on a stage and an audience listening, to show how it is done. The middle paragraph of the poem constructs that new stage for speaker and audience and then puts them all there at the same time. It uses the flow of the words to gather them and to create a momentum that unifies the separate consciousness of poet and audience members into one consciousness experiencing the poem together. The words sweep them along adroitly through their stately rhythm and repetition. At the same time the phrasing slows down or speeds up the poem’s progress to create a deliberate meditation, forcing them to consider phrase by phrase how the poem is constructed. The phrasing is controlled with punctuation, making short sentences or long sentences with clauses. After short emphatic declarative sentences explaining what the modern poem has to do (use living speech and speak to men and women of the time), the poem shifts into two long meditative sentences demonstrating the creative mind at work. The audience cannot read or hear these sentences logically, for they keep extending and postponing their meaning. The phrases do not match up to produce a logical statement. They are tentative chords on the guitar,

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searching for the right tone. The audience has to let go and get the phrasing as the intuitive music in the inner ear of the mind. The only way a poem can unify poet and audience is to appeal to the intuitive apprehension of words. They cannot understand the union of words that is a poem; they can only experience it. The longest sentence in the poem is the ear of the mind passage. Before the poem is spoken aloud, it hears itself in the ear of the mind. How can a poem hear itself? The poet is explaining where a poem comes from. It may be an act of the mind, but it is not an act of the will, forcing out some predetermined words. It is not a surface verbal representation of events or scenes. A poem comes from deep within the mind, like a meditation. In that meditation, everything is there at once, including the poet’s intention to speak words to an invisible audience he already feels. By telling the audience that the poem is hearing what it wants to hear, Stevens indicates that the poet’s will and reason are not involved. He is trying to stay out of the way of the words as they come spontaneously. They are a product of the interaction of the mind and what it perceives. The poet is hearing language as though it is constructing itself in this act of the mind. When the language comes without effort like this, it is so right, that anyone can hear the rightness. An example of this is the first line of the poem, which has become a famous definition of poetry. The language is perfect and transparent, with no struggle about trying to match it with what the poet meant to say. Another example of the rightness of the language is that the poem performs what it is saying; it performs its own insistence on both precision and spontaneity by controlling the phrasing and slowing the audience down to one word or phrase at a time, all while it is sweeping them on past logical comprehension in the long ear of the mind passage. The words of the poem perceived at this deep level in the poet’s mind contain an invisible audience within them, the potential audience, no matter who it might be. The invisible audience is the poet’s awareness of the audience as he is about to speak, but it can be taken in another sense as well. The words themselves are so right and powerful that they seem to take into account all the potential responses of an audience. This potential audience within the words is listening to itself rather than to the words. This means the audience is waiting there, even as the words are being formed. The audience wants to hear something, feel something,

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and miraculously, the listeners will find what they need; they will find themselves in the words as they are spoken out, as though they were there at the inception speaking them with the poet. The words will be as from the combined mind of poet and audience together, and they suffice, like an Aha! Stevens gives a simile for a poem as two people conversing with each other, where the spoken words bring the emotions of two people into one feeling. Language can unite people; it can create a shared experience. This is an important assertion for modern poetry. Often modern poetry has been associated with despair and alienation, as in T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. In a time of chaos, Stevens insists that the poet can put the pieces back together for himself and others with an act of the mind. The second long sentence returns to the metaphor of the actor on stage. The actor/poet is like a metaphysician working in the dark as he speaks. A metaphysician is someone in touch with an immaterial reality, beyond the physical. This image suggests a mystical origin of the experience of words. They are coming through the speaker from someplace he cannot name, over his head, beyond his rational control. Yet Stevens does not place modern poetry within the realm of religion. He does not name God or gods as the source of the words. It is the human mind itself, the imagination that can perform this mystical act of renewing the world in words, pulling out of the dark, or the very air the audience breathes, what is happening and making meaning out of it. The way the mind does this is likened to someone playing an instrument to produce the right sounds. Language is a music that has a physical sound that gradates the feeling into a flow the audience can hear, but somehow that gross physical language (the twanging of the guitar) is able to express the mind with perfect accord. The language fits, not from some preconceived notion, but because it produces satisfaction, agreement, illumination, and this is regardless of the topic, whether it is about a man skating or a woman dancing. The modern poem is a shared moment of being that erases the boundaries between speaker and listener and between the world and the mind. J. Hillis Miller in his essay, ‘‘Wallace Stevens’ Poetry of Being’’ in The Act of the Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, comments on Stevens’s poems as improvisations that are ‘‘a revelation of being.’’ Being is the common aliveness poet and audience perceive connecting themselves and

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the environment. The poet perceives this being around him, but seeing is not enough, Miller states: ‘‘Being must be spoken.’’ By speaking the being-ness or life force in everything, the words enliven this experience in others. It is true that there could be different interpretations of the poet’s words, just as in a conversations people interpret differently. Each could go away thinking different statements were spoken, but both parties feel the union, the life they share in common. Stevens’s later poetry moves away from the sense of dualism found in earlier poems such as ‘‘Sunday Morning’’ (1923) or ‘‘The Idea of Order at Key West’’ (1936), where human imagination and nature are different and opposing realms. In various poems, Stevens takes a contrary position in the argument of whether nature or imagination, object or subject, is the dominant reality. It is analogous to the debate in physics of whether an atom is a wave or a particle. It is both in quantum physics. Similarly, Stevens wants a quantum explanation of poetry. He wants the audience to witness the original Big Bang of a poem’s origin. In the later poetry, Miller argues, Stevens moves beyond dualism to the unity of opposites (world and mind; poet and audience) in the moment of totally experiencing the Now: The mind dynamically interacting with the objective world is the field of modern poetry. Miller claims it was Stevens’s search to find a poetry that could unify life, and his genius led him to accomplish this in his later works, with ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’’ being the turning point. In ‘‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’’ (1947), Stevens speaks of poetry as refreshing perception so that the audience can go back to the beginning, to the moment of how people themselves create the world around them. Miller paraphrases this as the poem’s having a vision of things in the radiance of their presence, without any intervening film between man and the pure sensation of things as they are. A poetry that can accomplish this, Stevens says in ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ has to show the act of the mind perceiving the world. Modern readers and writers do not have ready-made meanings handed to them; they must continually make their world and its meaning, not to recover a lost unity, but to discover it as they go. Source: Susan K. Andersen, Critical Essay on ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

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IN ‘THE AURORAS’ AND ‘AN ORDINARY EVENING’ STEVENS EXTENDS THE QUOTIDIAN IMPLICATIONS OF KEATS’S VERY EARTHLY HEAVEN, FINDING RECOMPENSE NOT IN THE REPETITION OF THE HEREAFTER BUT IN THE RETURNS OF THE HERE AND NOW.’’

Siobhan Phillips In the following essay, Phillips asserts that daily routine and ordinary patterns were important to Wallace Stevens and helped to shape his poetry. No twentieth-century poet attended more to daily routine than did Wallace Stevens. From a 1927 letter that outlines his schedule (Collected 941) to a 1955 message in which he describes ‘‘trying to pick up old habits,’’ from the ‘‘Exchequering’’ (34) quotidian of ‘‘The Comedian as the Letter C’’ to the recurrent daily syllables of ‘‘The World as Meditation’’ (442), ordinary patterns are vital to both his life and his art. Stevens sometimes struggled with diurnal repetition and sometimes tried to escape it, but he never took such regularity for granted; in his writing and living, he would redeem rather than evade quotidian necessity. Through this effort he realizes a vital philosophical possibility: his ordinary rounds provide a response to dualism that resists idealist and empiricist extremes. To recognize this response in Stevens’s humdrum routines is to extend recent critical recognition of the poet’s sense of the ordinary. Such attention is salutary, but only specific analysis of repetition demonstrates why the ‘‘normal’’ (Stevens, Letters 767) or the ‘‘commonplace’’ (643) should be so important to this poet. A focus on everyday repetition, moreover, helps to suggest why the ‘‘mode’’ (Collected 403) of the ordinary should be central not only to Stevens’s work but also to twentieth-century literature in general. As Stevens’s diurnal rhythms inscribe a practicable interdependence of imaginative freedom and realistic fact, they demonstrate how an enduring experiential order can fill a modernist epistemological need. In so doing, the poet evinces a modern citizen’s vision of the common as well as a modern artist’s choice

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of the commonplace; his use of the quotidian allows a seemingly esoteric craft to join, elucidate, and celebrate democratic life. Beginning with ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’’ and culminating in ‘‘The Auroras of Autumn,’’ Stevens’s everyday poetics would show his fellow citizens the creative possibility in basic patterns. Such patterns are hardly a novel subject for Stevens criticism, and many readers have noted the poet’s literary focus on environmental cyclicity, including the recurrence of days and seasons. Like his workday routine, his poetic rounds bespeak a basic conviction that human life and work exist in continuous relation with worldly process. This relation could seem to endorse Stevens’s pragmatist affinities: to exemplify John Dewey’s contentions in Art as Experience, for example, that imaginative work continues ‘‘normal processes of living’’ (10) and joins the ‘‘basic rhythms’’ (151) of one’s environment. Equating experience and poetry, however, the environment and the poem, underestimates Stevens’s ordinary art: while Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, like his pragmatist philosophy in general, manifests little concern with individual creativity, Stevens’s experiential artistry reinforces subjective power. Pragmatist literary criticism wonders whether ‘‘there is something tantalizingly oxymoronic in the phrase ‘pragmatist imagination’’’ (Levin 195) and considers how identity can emerge through rather than against ‘‘the contexts that mediate and shape’’ it (176), but Stevens’s daily habits solve the problem of this paradoxical emergence, thereby detailing the ‘‘poetics of transition’’ that both Jonathan Levin and Richard Poirier describe. Stevens’s version of poetic pragmatism suggests how an ostensibly empiricist acceptance of process can allow an ostensibly idealist achievement of subjectivity. The need for both is apparent from Stevens’s earliest treatment of daily repetition, which fears that ordinary rhythms would erase individuality. For ‘‘The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,’’ trapped in the ‘‘malady of the quotidian’’ (Collected 81), only a stop to the world’s returns would allow his individual ‘‘orations.’’ The poem knows, though, that ‘‘time will not relent.’’ ‘‘The Comedian as the Letter C,’’ the first version of which appeared the same year as the first version of ‘‘The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,’’ therefore tries to accept daily necessity, testing whether a poet can evacuate egotism and imagination in favor of self-effacement and acquiescence. James Longenbach, the best

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critic of Stevens’s ordinary habits, would see the resulting amenability as an attainment of Stevens’s prized ‘‘ordinary world,’’ the place where ‘‘Stevens wrote all his best poems’’ (93). It seems, however, more like a first, failed version of that realm, as the comedian’s quotidian denies poetry altogether; his everyday course must choose between the mind’s ‘‘flights’’ (Stevens, Collected 31) and reality’s facts. Stevens more successfully realizes the promise of the ordinary in ‘‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,’’ when the speaker can do ‘‘all that angels can’’ and also remain ‘‘like men’’ (350): desire for an unrecurrent ‘‘final slate’’ (81) from ‘‘The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad’’ yields here to an appreciation of ‘‘going round’’ (350) as a ‘‘final good,’’ and ‘‘Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event’’ (32) from ‘‘The Comedian as the Letter C’’ becomes a ‘‘master[y]’’ of ‘‘repetition’’ (350). Stevens’s daily recurrence, his conscious human mimicry of a diurnally rotating globe, masters a rhythmic interdependence of mind and world. Stevens’s search for the ‘‘inaccessible jewel’’ of the ‘‘normal,’’ therefore, is a ‘‘difficult pursuit’’ (Letters 521) rather than an easy assumption, as it inscribes a quest for the most central and problematic relation in his poetry. That relation is also the most central and problematic relation in criticism of his poetry, and various readings of Stevens have suggested virtually every possible account of the mind-world dichotomy. None, though, has fully articulated how the ‘‘habitual, customary’’ (767) mode that was to Stevens ‘‘a large part of the normality of the normal’’ can obviate the realistic submission of the comedian as well as the romantic rebellion of the man whose pharynx was bad. In ‘‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’’ and ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’’ Stevens explores the means: the repetition of daily time combines renewal and replication, beginnings and returns, so that each new morning offers both a fresh conception to create and a known standard to expect. One might repeatedly invent, but invent what will be; repeatedly imagine, but imagine what will truly appear. Mornings and evenings might be promises, that is, and ‘‘promises kept’’ (403), to use the phrasing of ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.’’ Extending the ordinary world on which ‘‘Notes’’ concludes, this later poem provides the fullest explication of the recurrent temporality that to Stevens makes up the quotidian: a round of ‘‘blue day’’ (400) and ‘‘branchings after day,’’ a calendric cycle of ‘‘feasts and the habits of saints’’ (402), a fluent

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alternation in which ‘‘sun is half the world’’ (411) and dark ‘‘is the other half.’’ As Christopher Miller notes (200), this poem is governed by Stevens’s ‘‘figure like Ecclesiast’’ (Collected 409), whose chant finds a ‘‘sense in the changing sense//Of things’’; no less than the biblical text, Stevens’s ordinary scripture focuses on the same-butdifferent repetition endemic to everyday time. The pattern, Stevens writes, offers a ‘‘permanence composed of impermanence,’’ So that the approaching sun and its arrival, Its evening feast and the following festival, This faithfulness of reality, this mode, This tendance and venerable holding-in Make gay the hallucinations in surfaces. (403) The faithfulness of diurnal time renders ‘‘hallucinations’’ and actual ‘‘surfaces’’ inseparable; every nocturnal ‘‘phrase’’ of the ‘‘spirit’’ (403), as the next canto specifies, can turn to a sunlit ‘‘fact.’’ Through ‘‘propounding’’ (404) of natural cycles, subjective ‘‘making in the mind’’ (403) is objective truth. The process is not absolute, Stevens knows. Earthly changes do not proceed with the monotonous exactitude of lunar cycles, just as earthly repetition, in ‘‘Notes,’’ remains ‘‘eccentric’’ (350) rather than strictly measured. Stevens’s quotidian provides the poet’s favorite paradox of consistent innovation or dependable novelty; its pattern is not the relentless dailiness of ‘‘The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,’’ then, but the ceaseless nightand-day renewal of ‘‘The Well Dressed Man with a Beard’’ (224). And if in ‘‘Notes’’ the ‘‘first idea’’ is an ‘‘immaculate beginning’’ (330), in ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’’ ‘‘original earliness . . . is a daily sense’’ (410). One might use that sense of originality every day, ‘‘re-creat[ing]’’ what is ‘‘possible’’ (411); daily time provides a repeated chance for the ‘‘new orations’’ (81) that ‘‘The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad’’ covets and for the ‘‘original relation’’ (Emerson 7) that American romanticism has sought since Emerson. As they realize ‘‘Conceptions of new mornings of new worlds,’’ in the phrase of ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ (401), these diurnal returns do not enervate creativity but demand and endorse it. Each sunrise marks a reliable revelation as ‘‘that which was incredible becomes / In misted contours, credible day again.’’ That ‘‘again’’—that faithful ‘‘tendance’’ (403)— is vital. Only an order in which ‘‘old stars are planets of morning’’ (301), as in ‘‘Description Without Place,’’ a rotation in which the known past enables the unknown future, allows the incredible to

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become the credible, imagination to become fact, ‘‘brilliantest descriptions of new day, / Before it comes’’ to be a ‘‘just anticipation.’’ As Stevens writes in ‘‘Evening Without Angels,’’ describing an ‘‘accord of repetitions,’’ this order means that ‘‘desire for day’’ will be ‘‘Accomplished in the immensely flashing East’’ (111). Repetitive poetics therefore avoids what ‘‘Notes’’ describes as a nocturnal pseudomajesty, a solipsistic imagination that is no more than ‘‘Cinderella fulfilling herself’’ (350). If fiction expects the morning to come, the stroke of midnight will not dispel one’s poems as fairy-tale delusions; rather, the new day will confirm them as fact. This is the poetic abstraction that the first section of ‘‘Notes’’ would enact, a ‘‘calendar hymn’’ (330) in which the ‘‘hoobla-how’’ (331) of night makes a ‘‘strange relation’’ with the ‘‘hooblahoo’’ of day. It is the change that the second part of ‘‘Notes’’ would find, a repetition that is not the monotonous drone of the same but the interdependence of ‘‘day on night, the imagined // On the real’’ (339). It is, finally, the pleasure that the last section of ‘‘Notes’’ achieves: even in a world that is ‘‘not ourselves’’ (332) the ‘‘freshness’’ (344) of worldly transformation can be ‘‘the freshness of ourselves.’’ ‘‘Time will write them down,’’ Stevens says of these refreshments; in the timely ‘‘round’’ (350) of natural repetitions, a poet can make reality his own. This discovery aligns Stevens with some of his philosophical predecessors, thinkers who also accepted a post-Kantian and post-theological setting while still seeking both certainty and freedom. George Santayana’s ‘‘animal faith,’’ for instance, ‘‘posits existence where existence is’’ (104), and William James defines our ‘‘accord’’ with reality as ‘‘the one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to the world’’ (579); in daily recurrence Stevens makes a modernist practice of Santayana’s positings and manifests both the effort and the accomplishment of James’s accord. If the poet knew as early as ‘‘Sunday Morning’’ that humanity’s ‘‘unsponsored, free’’ existence nonetheless resides in an ‘‘old dependency of day and night’’ (56), his later verse builds from that dependence all that a sponsorless, skeptical Sunday seems to lack. Stevens’s poetry, therefore, also anticipates Stanley Cavell’s thought, which finds a solution to skepticism in an ‘‘attainment of the everyday’’ (New 77) and a ‘‘willing repetition of days’’ (Quest 178). Cavell’s philosophy helps to explain why language should be central to this repetition; his

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development of ordinary language philosophy discovers that ordinary, iterable words provide the same access to an unknowable reality as do ordinary, iterable days. The experience of Stevens’s actual world is thus a ‘‘vulgate of experience’’ (Collected 397), a ‘‘lingua franca’’ (343) that would ‘‘compound the imagination’s Latin’’; with its concluding description of an earthly ‘‘Fat girl’’ (351), ‘‘Notes’’ demonstrates that everyday repetition allows one to name and rename reality. For Stevens, to remake language that has been used before, to find the novel resonance in familiar signification, is to wield ‘‘proper’’ (349) speech; as the etymological play of ‘‘proper’’ itself suggests, the resulting words can be both appropriate to the world and appropriated by the mind. Such confidence links Stevens to contemporaries like Jean Paulhan, moreover, as well as to later thinkers like Cavell: in The Flowers Tarbes, Paulhan, whose work Stevens knew well, argues that a reassertion of rhetoric can overcome the ‘‘terror’’ (79) of dualistic skepticism with a conscious adoption of the familiar and precedented. Like Stevens, Paulhan emphasizes repeated ‘‘rediscover[y],’’ within standard forms, of ‘‘the original joy of the first commitment, when our spirit accepted having a body’’ (93). The ‘‘nobility’’ that he finds in this recurrent originality endorses the ‘‘mastery’’ that Stevens knows in his faithful rebeginnings. For both writers, accepting repetition allows necessity to empower subjective freedom and distinct subjectivity to know necessary truth: in his approach to everyday time, Stevens joins this twentieth-century philosophical project. We should not be surprised, therefore, that Stevens wished to ‘‘write of the normal in a normal way’’ (Letters 287) or advised a friend to ‘‘keep on going round and round in the same old way’’ (Huntington WAS 3483, 18 Nov. 1940) or held so fast to his own routine way of life. Indeed, Stevens’s rounds allow us to amend the long debate about whether he is a poet of idealist abstractions or realistic fact; his quotidian repetitions describe a world of repeated interdependence between the imagined and the actual. Recurrence reveals how the commonplace can be ‘‘a middle ground,’’ in Longenbach’s words, ‘‘that was not a compromise between extremes’’ (viii). Emphasizing recurrence thus counters a critical tendency to read Stevens’s attention to the commonplace as an aversion to the imagination. The result often supports the antisubjectivist version of the poet that is now dominant: even Longenbach, for example, describes the ordinary as less a middle ground

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than a locus for Stevens’s ‘‘carefully modulated effort to assert the historicity of poetry and the political power of poets’’ (279), and Filreis equates Stevens’s interest in routine with his interest in ‘‘historical conditions’’ (Actual xviii); Liesl Olson opposes Stevens’s interest in the ordinary with his possible investment in ‘‘imaginative vision’’ (‘‘Ordinary’’ 159). Such readings overlook the fact that Stevens’s quotidian world could be timely but not political and creative but not ethereal: what ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ calls a ‘‘total doublething’’ (Collected 402) of both subjectivity and empiricism. Only by describing this everyday realm accurately can we understand why the quotidian should be so vital an end, and so unifying a means, for Stevens’s art and life. Only by such description, moreover, can we understand Stevens’s naturalism, so often slighted. Naturalism distinguishes my analysis of Stevens’s everyday poetics from critical accounts that note his vacillations ‘‘up and down between imagination and reality’’ (Richardson, Early 241): the movement between these two, in Stevens’s view, is not a psychological variable but an environmental fact. A recurrence of real and unreal constitutes one’s real setting; the physical globe is that ‘‘gay tournamonde’’ (406) sought by the professor in ‘‘An Ordinary Evening,’’ that ‘‘world in which things revolve’’ (Huntington WAS 3305, 27 Jan. 1950) as Stevens specifies in a letter about his neologism. The line that follows this term in Stevens’s poem, ‘‘In which he is and as and is are one,’’ enacts tournamonde revolutions with its smooth shifts of vowel. It also shows the possibilities of such shifts: a movement between ‘‘is and as,’’ actual and imagined, as steadily recurrent as the rotations of the earth. Stevens values a ‘‘physical world,’’ as ‘‘Esthe´tique du Mal’’ explains, where ‘‘desire’’ will never become ‘‘despair’’ (286), and a repetitive physical world allows such assurance. Stevens knows that he shares this world with all of his fellow humans; a quotidian order joins his poems and his days to the general dayand-night pattern of earthly existence. His ordinary poetics therefore grounds his first-person plural—the ‘‘we’’ (350) that emerges through the repetitions in ‘‘Notes,’’ for example. The pronoun points to another Deweyan vision, the dream of a social realm that can nurture rather than suppress individualism. Stevens’s engagement with that philosophical goal, however, again relies on a poetic method: on his employment of a repetitive order that can unite humdrum life and artistic creativity.

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Stevens discovers this crucial unity through and with his discovery of a public voice, for it is in an early passage of confident first-person plural, the conclusion of ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar,’’ that the poet of ‘‘The Comedian’’ becomes the poet of ‘‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.’’ This 1936 work would speak to a ‘‘generation’’ (150), the same generation that tells him, ‘‘Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry’’ (136). He speaks instead of the commonness of poetry— and the poetry in common life. The final canto confronts the threat and finds the pleasure in that ordinary existence, beginning with the everyday workweek: That generation’s dream, aviled In the mud, in Monday’s dirty light, That’s it, the only dream they knew, Time in its final block, not time To come, a wrangling of two dreams. Here is the bread of time to come, Here is its actual stone. The bread Will be our bread, the stone will be Our bed and we shall sleep by night. We shall forget by day, except The moments when we choose to play The imagined pine, the imagined jay. (150–51) As this canto demonstrates, Stevens’s public address relies on the most seemingly private of activities: dreaming. Here the difference between a quotidian of avilement and a quotidian of contentment is the distinction between two different kinds of dreams. The first is a single conception, the dreamer imagining only an absolute ‘‘Time in its final block’’ and thus seeing only degradation in the ‘‘dirty light’’ of an everyday pattern. The second is a binary wrangling that constitutes a continuous ‘‘time to come’’ and seems to inhabit an everyday pattern. The ‘‘two dreams’’ of this second sort of time, that is, could be compared to the two dreams of ‘‘Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion,’’ which names them as ‘‘night and day’’ (71); and the ‘‘stone’’ of its practice revises an earlier section of ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar,’’ where ‘‘The earth is not earth but a stone’’ (142). When Stevens advocates this second time, ‘‘time to come,’’ in the final four stanzas, he presents an everyday order of slumber and waking that takes its rhythms from earthly repetitions. If his generation lives and dreams by this daily bread, the muddy light of actuality will not ‘‘avile’’ the illusions of darkness. Rather, reality will repeat one’s dreams; one can, as

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in the last stanza, see daytime facts as one’s own nighttime creations. Such a transformation would achieve what ‘‘The Blue Guitar’’ seeks: a ‘‘dream no longer a dream, a thing, / Of things as they are’’ (143). It turns Stevens’s desire for an accord between poetry and truth into his recognition of an interrelation between night and day. Indeed, Stevens’s work rewrites incessantly and explicitly the traditional equation of poetry or imagination with other nightwork: when Crispin denies himself imagination, to take one of many instances, he expunges ‘‘dreams’’ (32). Criticism has neglected this conflation, or perhaps considered it too obvious to mention, but it is basic to Stevens’s quotidian poetics: by rendering dreams part of an ordinary mode, Stevens naturalizes and democratizes creative power. In so doing, he rewrites the romanticism of an early model, Keats, who compares sleep and poetry almost as frequently as Stevens does and whose moongoverned ‘‘Endymion’’ was a particular favorite of Stevens. Like that work, Stevens’s early poems and journal entries worry over the division between the night’s illusion and the day’s reality. By the time of ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar,’’ however, Stevens arrives at a conception of the imagination much like the one Keats evolved: Keats describes how Adam found his dream to be true at the moment of waking (Keats, Letters 36), and Stevens describes dream becoming fact just ‘‘as daylight comes’’ (Collected 143). In his everyday poetics, however, the transformation is not Keats’s divine revelation but the simple naturalism of night turning to morning. Therefore, one need not be an Adamic believer or even an Adamic artist to know imagination made real; one need only be an ordinary human being, living in and by a pattern of sleep and rising. This is the broad polity claimed in the final ‘‘we’’ (151) of ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’’; in ordinary time, Stevens tells his fellows, all human beings may be accomplished dreamers. This accomplishment supplants both religious and political fulfillment. We can see Stevens’s displacement of the first through his response to another modern version of Keats’s dream theory: Freud’s work also begins with an illusory power basic to the human psyche. His description of the wishful dreaming in ordinary sleep may be likened to Stevens’s description of the desirous dreaming that is ordinary poetry, and in both Freud’s psychoanalysis and Steven’s poetics this common process extends artistic agency to all human beings. Stevens himself repels any direct association: in a

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1934 survey, for example, he dismissed psychoanalytic influence, adding that he had ‘‘not read Freud except the Interpretation’’ (Collected 771). To make exception for the Interpretation of Dreams is certainly to qualify the dismissal, and in a lecture less than two years later, at about the time he was writing ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar,’’ Stevens wrote that Freud’s work had ‘‘given the irrational a legitimacy that it never had before (783).’’ But Stevens wished to defend that legitimacy against Freud’s own distrust of dreaming. He does so most explicitly through confrontations with The Future of an Illusion, where Freud critiques the mass-scale wish fulfillment of religious faith; Stevens argues that an abandonment of religion, and a resulting ‘‘education’’ or ‘‘surrender’’ to ‘‘reality’’ (651), need not be a surrender of illusion altogether. Human dreams can be something other than the delusive yearning for heaven that Freud describes, Stevens argues in ‘‘Imagination as Value’’; illusions might be a verified desire for what this world grants. In a ‘‘science of illusions’’ (728), Stevens explains, ‘‘deliberate fictions’’ could accord with that ‘‘true work of art’’ that is one’s ‘‘time and . . . place.’’ This is the ordinary dreamwork that Stevens would describe in ‘‘An Ordinary Evening,’’ written just after this lecture. In this poem the ‘‘search for God’’ yields to a ‘‘search / For reality’’ that is also the ‘‘daily’’ (410) search of the recurrent quotidian. Stevens first suggests this substitution in ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’’ 12 years earlier, with the poem’s concluding address to a generation. This audience seeks, in its request to the poet, something ‘‘to take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns’’ (137), and Stevens in his final canto responds: Sunday’s eternal sacrament is replaced with Monday’s daily bread, the mark of a Christian covenant with the ‘‘actual stone’’ (151) of the earth, and the single conclusion of eternity—‘‘Time in its final block’’ (150)—with the continuing wrangle of a routine ‘‘time to come’’ (151). Such substitutions, Stevens assures his fellow citizens, grant a continuing power to dream—a power that their distrust of religious illusion has stifled: in canto 5 they are without any illusions at all, on a ‘‘flat and bare’’ (136) earth where ‘‘night is sleep’’ and their sun is shadowless. In this they prefigure those ‘‘Plain men in plain towns’’ from ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’’ men who have ‘‘fought / Against illusion’’—have read Freud’s Future of an Illusion, perhaps—and fall asleep at night merely ‘‘snuffed out’’ (399). If those citizens find ‘‘appeasement’’ for such a state in the ‘‘savage and subtle and simple harmony’’ of their indigenous situation, a ‘‘matching and mating of

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surprised accords’’ that is manifest in temporal cycles, the men of ‘‘Blue Guitar’’ find succor in a similarly indigenous music, and in another ‘‘nuptial song’’ (148) of harmony. Stevens’s instrument, by the final canto, takes up the earthly rhythm of day and night, supplanting the hymns of heaven with the song of ‘‘things as they are.’’ He thus turns a future of aviled illusions into a future of everyday dreaming. This ‘‘time to come’’ replaces a political heaven as well as a religious one, supplanting the communist program that seems, at times, to be an even more dangerous rival for Stevens’s poetry than the Christian church. Indeed, in ‘‘Imagination as Value,’’ Stevens writes that ‘‘communism exhibits imagination on its most momentous scale’’ (730) and ‘‘promises a practicable earthly paradise’’ (731): communism, it seems, does all that his verse would. This possibility would have been even more present to Stevens’s mind at the time of ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar,’’ when he had just written ‘‘Owl’s Clover,’’ a long meditation on the role of art in society (152–70). Critics disagree about the relation between this earlier work and ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar.’’ Many see the latter as a welcome triumph for the Stevensian imagination, after the ambivalent social conscience in ‘‘Owl’s Clover,’’ while others emphasize the poetic value of ‘‘Owl’s Clover’’ and the continuing topicality of ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar.’’ It is not just politics that link the two, however, but dailiness: the transition from one work to the other signals Stevens’s deeper allegiance to ordinary time. Indeed, it was communism’s engagement with time that spurred Stevens’s engagement with communism; he regarded this ‘‘great force in politics and in life’’ (Letters 486) with an unexpected respect in part because its emphasis on futurity challenged the sense of expectation central to his own work. Communism offers a ‘‘new romanticism’’ (351), in Stevens’s words, by manifesting that anticipatory desire vital to Stevens’s prologues and preludes; when ‘‘Owl’s Clover,’’ ostensibly mouthing a communist position, asserts that ‘‘Everything is dead / Except the future’’ (154), it could be speaking a central claim of Stevens’s verse. The poem finds, however, that this communist future is not quite the poet’s. Communism builds ‘‘what ought to be’’ (154) rather than what could be or will be, and desires what should be possible rather than what is. Its envisioned tomorrow is terminal, a ‘‘Statue at the World’s End’’ or a Utopia

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when time will cease. The last canto of ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’’ shows that the single dream of communism, no less than the single dream of Christianity, can make of ordinary life a single frustrated hope: the quotidian malady of a long ‘‘avil[ement]’’ (150) that waits for time to cease. Stevens turns from the statuary of ‘‘Owl’s Clover,’’ then, an art as static as any ‘‘final block,’’ to the music of ‘‘The Blue Guitar,’’ an art not only accommodating but also depending on temporal process. The desire it plays is not ‘‘final’’ but continuous; the dream it dreams is not ‘‘only’’ but recurrently renewed. In place of a politically Utopian paradise, a timeless state ‘‘without past / And without future’’ (170), this art posits an ordinary globe of repeated pasts and futures: ‘‘Things as they were, things as they are,//Things as they will be by and by’’ (146). ‘‘Here’’ (151), Stevens’s lineation emphasizes in the concluding canto, here is the better life that political desire would enact, in the ordinary repetitive pattern that humans already inhabit. The final stanzas demonstrate the satisfaction it makes possible, through the pivotal breaks of ‘‘time//to come,’’ ‘‘will be // Our bed,’’ and ‘‘except // The moments’’ (150–51): a slightly unsure pause, before a comforting turn, suggests the expectation and fulfillment recurrently found in everyday life. When Stevens writes in a letter, therefore, that he believes the better life communists desire is possible ‘‘within the present frame-work’’ (Letters 351), his statement may bespeak more than the conservatism of a comfortable insurance executive. It might also bespeak an honest assessment of that framework’s possibility. Trusting it could well seem hollow, and the choice to ‘‘play’’ (Collected 151) reality as one’s own dream could easily seem like a willed self-delusion: the pretense that Stevens recommends in a late letter, perhaps, when he writes that while things ‘‘never go well . . . you have to pretend that they do’’ (Letters 866). Yet he adds, in this letter, his belief that ‘‘good fortune can be worth it,’’ an admission suggesting the rewards as well as the rigor of the process. To see the solar ‘‘fortuner’’ (Collected 34) of Crispin’s quotidian as one’s own imagined ‘‘good fortune’’ is to know a happiness more resilient than any promised by politics. One will find a ‘‘peace, a security, a sense of good fortune and of things that change only slowly,’’ as Stevens writes in another correspondence, ‘‘so much more certain than a whole era of Communism could ever give’’ (Letters 609–10). Stevens has ‘‘no sympathy with communism, instead of expectation’’ (350), as he writes in 1940, because for him communism

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forbids the best expectation; the poet of ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’’ would replace the unreliable teleology of political systems, as well as the illusory teleology of religious creeds, with the certain futurity available in common life. He thus ends The Man with the Blue Guitar, the volume that includes both the title poem and ‘‘Owl’s Clover,’’ with ‘‘The Men That Are Falling,’’ presenting a daily, earthly dream as both a political and a religious satisfaction. Its hero is a socialist soldier as well as a religious believer, and yet he ‘‘loved earth, not heaven’’ (174); he desires his actual time and place rather than a Christian afterlife or political paradise. His yearning is therefore a ‘‘desire . . . beyond despair’’ (173); his dream can become ‘‘life’s voluble utterance’’ (174), ‘‘syllables,’’ Stevens writes, ‘‘That he spoke only by doing what he did.’’ The challenge of the poem, and of Stevens’s quotidian poetics, is to make one’s own ordinary ‘‘doing’’ into this sort of art, this sort of religion, and this sort of politics: a daily desire for ordinary reality. What Stevens calls the ‘‘demnition grind’’ (Letters 766) of the quotidian will then allow what the hero finds in ‘‘The Men That Are Falling’’: ‘‘fulfillment of desire, / In the grinding ric-rac’’ (174). This fulfillment means martyrdom, however; Stevens’s dreamer ‘‘loved earth, not heaven, enough to die’’ (Collected 174). To replace a timeless future with an ordinary ‘‘time to come’’ (151) is to forgo the promise of eternal life for the certainty of eventual death. Stevens’s everyday poetry does not ignore this implication, but it finds a different sort of eternality in his ordinary world and everyday dreaming. He does so most fully in ‘‘The Auroras of Autumn,’’ with its brotherhood of sleepers accepting a fateful ‘‘tomorrow’’ (362); here a mastery of repetition masters even a mortal dawn (355–63). The development marks Stevens’s movement from Transport to Summer and ‘‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’’ to The Auroras of Autumn and its title poem. As the seasonal progress of the titles suggests, and as numerous readers have noted, the latter confronts the threat of age and death inherent in earthly change. In ‘‘Notes’’ these changes seem to promise an earthly eternality, through the ceaseless renewal of days and seasons, but ‘‘The Auroras of Autumn’’ doubts this endurance, for it admits the gap that the repetitions of ‘‘Notes’’ would heal: the divide between the world’s ‘‘freshness’’ (344) and one’s own. This gap is evinced in the questions of that fateful ninth canto:

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Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring? Of what disaster is this the imminence: Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt? The stars are putting on their glittering belts. They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash Like a great shadow’s last embellishment. (362) The world grows no older with each return; there is always another sunrise or spring. Humans, however, age with each repetition, and must expect, eventually, a final evening or autumn. The bare limbs of human life do not presage a vernal return when we shall be ‘‘hanging in the trees’’ with new fruit; they show the ‘‘imminence’’ of that mortal ‘‘disaster’’ that ‘‘hanging’’ also evokes. Our advancing barrenness presages a last, terminal ‘‘embellishment’’— what ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’’ calls a ‘‘total leaflessness’’ (407). From his earliest work, Stevens knows this diminution to be inherent in human memory. In ‘‘Anglais Mort a` Florence,’’ for instance, a doomed protagonist with a ‘‘self returning mostly memory’’ recognizes that ‘‘A little less returned for him each spring’’ (119), and in the description of spring in ‘‘Notes’’ Stevens asks ‘‘why / Should there be a question of returning or / Of death in memory’s dream?’’ (338). We remember today as a repetition of yesterday, thus registering temporal progress, while each of the world’s unremembering iterations, by contrast, enacts a fresh ‘‘beginning’’ rather than a comparative ‘‘resuming.’’ In ‘‘Notes’’ Stevens wonders if humans can experience this unending refreshment by eradicating recollection. He realizes, however, that such a solution has its difficulties: memory allows the ‘‘dream’’ as well as the death, the distinction of imaginative consciousness as well as the distinction of mortal termination. Recollection of past days, after all, allows the creation of days to come; in ‘‘Notes’’ it is ‘‘later reason’’ (346) that allows human beings to ‘‘make of what we see, what we see clearly / And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.’’ One effort of ‘‘Notes’’ is the struggle to maintain this power while resisting its fatal implications: the strain is evident in a contemporaneous lecture when Stevens mentions ‘‘the question of the relationship of the imagination and memory, which we avoid’’ (681).

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Stevens could not avoid this question long. ‘‘Esthe´tique du Mal,’’ a few years later, explicitly considers the interrelation of imagination, memory, and death; and by the time of ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’’ Stevens’s ordinary returns can admit that divide between self and world that predicts mortality as well as permits creativity. Description of recurrence in this latter poem acknowledges the difference between human time and the earth’s mode: while the world’s ‘‘oldestnewest day is the newest alone’’ (406), humanity hears ‘‘old age’’ (407) in the evening wind. But human time in ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ could also be like the world’s: like Stevens’s Omega, a lunar figure of imagination and memory, human life might be ‘‘refreshed at every end’’ (400). To know this promise, humanity’s ‘‘serious reflection’’ (408) must be ‘‘composed/Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace,’’ as Stevens writes after reconsidering his ‘‘total leaflessness’’ (407): one must consider human death neither as the ‘‘clipped’’ (37) relation of the ‘‘Comedian’’ nor as the tragic doom of the ‘‘Anglais,’’ but as one more iteration in the world’s commonplace pattern. Thus ‘‘The Auroras of Autumn’’ follows the evening wind with the belief that whatever is imminent, however disastrous, may come tomorrow in the simplest word, Almost as part of innocence, almost, Almost as the tenderest and truest part. (362) Here any future, even death, is but a diurnal refreshment in the life of the world; this sunrise enlarges Stevens’s ordinary mode beyond the limits of individual existence. It must enlarge Stevens’s ordinary habits as well, though, and to frightening proportions: to submerge a personal life in the cycles of an impersonal earth, one’s willing of what is to come must accord with what ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ calls the ‘‘the will of wills’’ (410). One’s desire must desire its own elimination. Because ‘‘Auroras’’ knows the means and cost of that self-abnegation to be an evacuation of memory, this poem faces the problem of recollection that ‘‘Notes’’ avoids. However painful the process, the ‘‘tomorrow’’ (362) of ‘‘Auroras’’ would eradicate the sense of having-been that proves one’s division from the world’s ‘‘new-come bee’’ (338). ‘‘Farewell’’ (355, 356, 357) to that sense, Stevens writes; farewell to the past; farewell to all reminders of ‘‘something else, last year / Or before’’ (356). The repeated good-byes of ‘‘Auroras’’ render yesterday no more than ‘‘an idea’’ (355, 356, 357); they elegize

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elegy, we might say, using the genre’s characteristic repetitions to eradicate rather than preserve what has been. Stevens had long known that ‘‘practice’’ for death, in ‘‘a world without heaven to follow’’ (104), must be the ‘‘Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu’’ that an earlier poem describes, and he repeats in ‘‘Notes’’ the importance of ‘‘throw[ing] off’’ (330) what one has ‘‘like a thing of another time.’’ ‘‘Auroras,’’ however, casts away not just a particular event but an entire personhood: the very idea, self-constitutive and self-confirming, of an individual history. However much one desires it, this identity cannot be preserved; neither a mother’s adulation nor a father’s authority will survive the changes of fate. One must abandon these narcissistic props, forgo the assumption that human life is a scripted story designed by parental solicitude; the only true theater is the indifferent, impersonal process of the northern lights themselves. This earthly transience will destroy the ‘‘scholar of one candle’’—the distinct self, holding his own light, who sees the fires of necessity ‘‘flaring on the frame / Of everything he is’’ (359). ‘‘And he feels afraid’’ (359), writes Stevens. ‘‘Auroras’’ presents the greatest risk in Stevens’s poetry. But it also presents the greatest reward. Through bidding farewell to the idea of this ‘‘single man’’ and his single past, Stevens finds a new identity and a new past. If one no longer seeks to retain a specific childhood, the poem finds, a changeful fate does not seem like vituperative opposition. Rather, it can be the object of one’s quest. Free of human parentage, a poet can take necessity itself as both birthright and heritage. He finds, in so doing, precisely the security that he had thought lost, the ‘‘transparen[t] . . . peace’’ of a childhood union and the reassuring beneficence of a ‘‘mother’s face’’— the very ‘‘purpose of the poem’’ (356), Stevens writes. This is the same ‘‘vivid transparence’’ and ‘‘peace’’ (329) that impel ‘‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,’’ as the envoi to that work suggests, and the same that the poet anticipates in the crystalline harmony of its conclusion. In canto 9 of ‘‘Auroras’’ he may finally ‘‘partake thereof’’: Lie down like children in this holiness, As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep, As if the innocent mother sang in the dark Of the room and on the accordion, halfheard, Created the time and place in which we breathed . . . (361) Eden is no longer the paradise from which humanity has been exiled, but the innocence of

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one’s present setting and of any possible imminence. The scene realizes the project of a poem as early as ‘‘Sunday Morning,’’ where Stevens first wrote that we see in death that inevitable ‘‘fulfilment to our dreams / And our desires,’’ our ‘‘earthly mothers’’ (55). He had long known that inhuman, earthly matter could provide human meaning. ‘‘It is the earth itself that is humanity’’ (388), he writes in ‘‘World Without Peculiarity.’’ The conscious abandonment of peculiarity in ‘‘Auroras’’ shows how this can be so—and how the result is neither vague panpsychism nor pure materialism but a durable post-theological basis for identity. In ‘‘Auroras,’’ Stevens’s accession to impersonal fate discovers a personal history; his accord with the future finds a restorative repetition of the past; his acceptance of transience grants the confirmation of a return. Like all Stevens’s worldly returns, this fateful tomorrow is neither absolute replication nor absolute flux, neither the ‘‘volume of the past,’’ we might say, nor ‘‘fleeting thing[s].’’ These last phrases come from Kierkegaard’s Repetition (133), a work that ventures the same sort of paradox and the same sort of possibility as does Stevens’s poem. Like Stevens, Kierkegaard looks to repetition, the ‘‘actuality and earnestness of existence,’’ as the solution to dualistic anxiety, and like Stevens, Kierkegaard defines such practice in contrast to recollection; his repetition would replace living backward, in self-serving allegiance to what has been, with living forward, in selfless trust in what will come. Only this relinquishment grants one a past and a self, Kierkegaard explains, in the continuous movement of a faith that, resigning everything, gains everything again (40–43). Stevens’s own faith in existence has none of the Christian theology that marks Kierkegaard’s belief. Yet we can see in Stevens’s strenuous affirmation of an existential ‘‘predicate’’ (Collected 361)—his trust in whatever unfolds from the bare ‘‘it is, it is’’—the expectant futurity that for Kierkegaard defines religious conviction. The result is a very Kierkegaardian return, reversing the normal economy of memory and expectation to allow for a better instance of the identity as well as the innocence that these can provide. In Stevens’s sense of repetition as in Kierkegaard’s, one gains what one has been—and what one has desired, imagined, willed—through affirming what one will be. This comparison not only helps to clarify the stakes of Stevens’s everyday repetition but also

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reveals how everyday repetition differentiates his work from more commonly evoked philosophical paradigms. Nietzsche, most importantly, asserts as strongly as Kierkegaard and Stevens that humans must ‘‘become who we are’’ (Gay 189), and many scholars have shown how Stevens’s innocence shares much with Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche affirms his through a love of fate similar to Stevens’s, and the physical immortality that his amor fati claims is an extremity of recurrence that he names the ‘‘eternal return’’ (Zarathustra 257). Nietzsche’s repetition, however, ends in a selflessness almost mystical, an ecstasy from which Zarathustra sees ‘‘space and time’’ sparkle ‘‘far away’’ (259). Kierkegaard’s, by contrast, takes up a concrete, individual existence, a practice in which his hero ‘‘calmly goes his way, happy in repetition’’ (Fear 132). A similar confidence and calm constitute the achievement of Stevens’s late work, where awareness of an eternally returning tomorrow deepens the importance of ordinarily repetitive days, and the turbulent conclusion of ‘‘The Auroras of Autumn’’ leads to poems of ‘‘A Quiet Normal Life’’ (Collected 443). Many late letters emphasize the ‘‘round and round and round’’ (Huntington WAS 372, 18 Nov. 1949) of that regimen; he tells one correspondent ‘‘we are well by day and by night’’ (WAS 3811, 5 Oct. 1954) and celebrates to another the ‘‘ease’’ that comes from ‘‘going to bed and getting up early’’ (Letters 826). Stevens even refuses a chair in poetry at Harvard, in one letter, because he does not want to forgo ‘‘the routine of the office’’ (853). As ‘‘Auroras’’ suggests no less than ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ or ‘‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,’’ Stevens’s office routine was already a poetic appointment; and his commitment to such ‘‘regimen,’’ as he explains in a letter written soon after ‘‘Auroras’’ (615), was a ‘‘Seel-ensfriede’’ by which he could enjoy ‘‘the mere act of being alive.’’ The poet of that ‘‘personal absurdity,’’ a great modernist writer and successful insurance executive who walked to work at the Hartford every morning, seems less a Nietzschean prophet or superman than a Kierkegaardian knight of faith. He is also the ‘‘Ruler of Reality’’ (Collected 414) that Stevens imagines in ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’’ canto 27. Echoing ‘‘Auroras,’’ this slighted section further details the salvation a poet can find in the ordinary mode of ‘‘An Ordinary Evening.’’ The poem’s final persona here rests contented besides the ocean of mortality from ‘‘Auroras’’ or the ‘‘fire-feinting sea’’ (285) of necessity from ‘‘Esthe´tique du Mal.’’ His rule is one more

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mastery of repetition, in which his thoughts play consort to the ‘‘Queen of Fact’’: Sunrise is his garment’s hem, sunset is hers. He is the theorist of life, not death, The total excellence of its total book. (414) The largest order of existence, these lines suggest, is a tournamonde world, a day-and-night pattern of sunrise and sunset or imagination and actuality. Death is only a part of the vital totality: every ‘‘Ordinary Evening,’’ even a fatal one, yields to another aurora. Even the ‘‘outlandish,’’ in the words of ‘‘The Auroras of Autumn,’’ comes as ‘‘another day // Of the week’’ (361–62). Such days, moreover, confirm one’s own theories and histories. ‘‘He has thought it out, he thinks it out,’’ Stevens writes of his ruler, ‘‘as he has been and is (414).’’ The periodic syntax of this canto—the recurrent ‘‘again’’ of the scholar’s writing, as well as the parallel clauses of the text that he writes— rhetorically enacts the assurance in a life of returns, where any fact to which one wakes is a reality one’s ‘‘fore-meaning’’ helps to create. ‘‘The Auroras of Autumn’’ suggests the same with its own description of life’s ‘‘total excellence’’ (414), an innocence ‘‘Like a book at evening beautiful but untrue, / Like a book on rising beautiful and true’’ (361). These lines make the beautiful truth of ‘‘Auroras’’ into one more everyday Keatsian dream, rising to its own proof; indeed, cantos 8 and 9 cast one’s entire life as such a dream, an existence in which one imagines, ‘‘sticky with sleep’’ (362), the innocent tomorrow of a return to dust. Keats implies this, seeing the pattern of Adam’s dream and waking as the pattern of ‘‘human Life and its spiritual repetition’’ (Letters 37). In ‘‘The Auroras’’ and ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ Stevens extends the quotidian implications of Keats’s very earthly heaven, finding recompense not in the repetition of the hereafter but in the returns of the here and now. The paradisal song of an ‘‘innocent mother’’ in ‘‘Auroras’’ plays nothing more or less than an earthly ‘‘time and place’’ (361), the same ‘‘poem of the earth’’ (730) that Stevens imagines in ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ and plays on the ‘‘Blue Guitar.’’ The tender truth of that song’s innocence, ‘‘Auroras’’ therefore promises, inheres in even the most ordinary rhythms, and Stevens suggests as much in late letters, when he writes that daily rounds are a ‘‘profound grace’’ as well as a ‘‘destiny’’ (843), or explains that ‘‘A walk to the office restores one’s innocence’’ (Huntington WAS 3753, 23 Apr. 1951).

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‘‘[A]nd almost the best innocence of the U.S.A.,’’ that letter adds: an earthly heaven is a common, democratic one. ‘‘The Auroras of Autumn’’ suggests this fact when it moves smoothly from an affirmation of necessity to an invocation of community—a group of ‘‘halehearted landsmen’’ (361). Stevens would overcome the alienation of singularity with an identity grounded in a collective setting; thus this poem, Stevens’s most personal, must also be his most public. Conviction of worldly innocence means the assurance that ‘‘We were as Danes in Demark all day long’’ and ‘‘knew each other well.’’ ‘‘We thought alike,’’ Stevens writes, And that made brothers of us in a home In which we fed on being brothers, fed And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb. (362) To take one’s time and place as inheritance and dwelling is to acknowledge indigenous fraternity with everyone on earth. In one of Stevens’s favorite puns, this shared native place is a honeycomb—‘‘decorous’’ in its beauty as well as its appropriateness—that both feeds and manifests human be(e)ing. It is also a language: these landsmen think alike and think of each other in ‘‘the idiom of an innocent earth’’ (361). The line might remember Paulhan’s comparison of language and honey, ‘‘which bees make apparently without thinking about it’’ (Paulhan 8); Stevens would certainly have appreciated that the English word commonplace, like the lieu commun that Paulhan praises, equates a shared rhetoric with a shared setting. In ‘‘Auroras,’’ this idiom furthers the daily music of the blue guitar or the ‘‘blazoned days’’ (332) of ‘‘Notes,’’ affirming that humankind’s creations join the maternal song of its environment: as Keats argues in ‘‘The Fall of Hyperion,’’ any person can be a poet, or tell his dreams, ‘‘if he had lov’d / And been well nurtured in his mother tongue’’ (361). When Stevens specifies that tongue as the song of an ‘‘innocent mother’’ (Collected 361), the love it would speak as desire for an earthly parent, he extends Keats’s commonplace poetics to include the entire ‘‘drama that we live’’ (362)—as a mortal existence, in its imagination of innocence, overcomes its guilty fear of any conclusion. The Rock, Stevens’s last collection, describes that lifelong dream, beginning with ‘‘An Old Man Asleep’’ (427) and ending with an old man just waking up. It repeatedly manifests the quotidian mode that starts in ‘‘The Man with the Blue

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Guitar,’’ deepens its joyful possibility in ‘‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,’’ and strengthens its existential power in ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’’ and ‘‘The Auroras of Autumn’’: an everyday practice evident, for example, in the routine matins of ‘‘Song of Fixed Accord’’ (441) or the habitual morning expectation of ‘‘The World as Meditation’’ (441–42) or the sunlit ‘‘over and over’’ (449) of ‘‘St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside.’’ To trace Stevens’s use of everyday repetition is to see why such works should seem so quietly fitting as culmination to his art—and so serenely adequate as preparation for his death. If ‘‘Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right’’ (913), as Stevens writes in his ‘‘Adagia,’’ an understanding of the daily deepens our understanding of both his poetry and its necessity. Source: Siobhan Phillips, ‘‘Wallace Stevens and the Mode of the Ordinary,’’ in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 54, No. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 1–30.

SOURCES Balbo, Ned, ‘‘Wallace Stevens and the Abstract,’’ in Art Journal, Vol. 53, No. 1, Spring 1994, p. 97. Bloom, Harold, ‘‘Wallace Stevens,’’ in Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, Warner Books, 2002, pp. 364, 365. Clippinger, David, ‘‘Wallace Stevens,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 342, Twentieth-Century American Nature Poets, edited by J. Scott Bryson and Roger Thompson, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2008. Miller, J. Hillis, ‘‘Wallace Stevens’ Poetry of Being,’’ in The Act of the Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, edited by Roy Harvey Pearce and J. Hillis Miller, Johns Hopkins Press, 1965, pp. 147, 151–52, 154, 160, 161. ———, ‘‘William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens,’’ in Columbia Literary History of the United States, Columbia University Press, 1988, pp. 985–86, 991. Perkins, David, ‘‘The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens,’’ in A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After, Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 278, 279.

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Stevens, Wallace, ‘‘Adagia,’’ in Opus Posthumous, edited with an introduction by Samuel French Morse, Knopf, 1966, p. 159. ———, ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. D, 7th ed., edited by Nina Baym, Norton, 2007, pp. 1453–54, originally published in Parts of a World, Knopf, 1942. Wiman, Christian, ‘‘Influential Poets,’’ in Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 298, No. 5, December 2006, p. 75.

FURTHER READING Burney, William, Wallace Stevens, Twayne, 1966. Burney compares ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ to other works in Stevens’s later period, which often become meditations on the relationship between poet, poem, and reader. Doggett, Frank, and Robert Buttel, eds., Wallace Stevens: A Celebration, Princeton University Press, 1980. This collection of essays examine Stevens’s innovative style and themes. The essays also address Stevens’s enduring stature. Eeckhout, Bart, Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing, University of Missouri Press, 2002. Eeckhout discusses Stevens’s scholarly reception and the ideology that becomes the focal point of his poetry. Litz, A. Walton, Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens, Oxford University Press, 1972. In his study, Litz argues that Stevens’s poetry connects readers with their personal as well as their cultural experiences. Sharpe, Tony, Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Sharpe draws on Stevens’s journals and letters to create a portrait of the poet, intending to show how the poet’s experiences shaped his work. Timberman Newcomb, John, Wallace Stevens and Literary Canons, University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Newcomb explores how the form of Stevens’s poetry relates to its themes, especially his focus on the poet’s imaginative recreation of reality.

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River of August ‘‘River of August’’ was written in 1963 by Korean poet Pak Tu-Jin. (Pak is the family name and TuJin is the given name. Koreans put the family name first. Tu-Jin may also be spelled as Tu-jin and Tujin and Pak as Park because of variations in translation.) The poem was written to commemorate the occasion of the eighteenth anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan on August 15, 1945, and it was published in Pak’s fourth book of poetry, The Human Jungle. A nature poet, Pak uses the image of a river to represent the lives of the Korean people as they traveled through the painful, humiliating occupation by Japan and the horrors of World War II to a new destiny. Having almost lost their own culture, they were positioned after liberation, according to Pak, to reclaim their heritage and recommit to building a future together as a nation. The conclusion of the poem implies that the possibilities are endless for a free and honorable people. However, Pak wrote the poem during a time when, once again, there was political upheaval in Korea, so he was using this poem to remind Koreans of the promise of August 1945 and to try to reignite that spirit of hope and national pride.

PAK TU-JIN 1963

Since Pak’s books are not readily available in the United States, perhaps the easiest way to find a copy of the poem is to use a journal database to locate the Korea Journal. ‘‘River of August’’ appears in the February 1965 issue along with three other of his poems ‘‘The Way to the Green Mountains,’’ ‘‘Like a Tree,’’ and ‘‘River of Solitude.’’

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Pak Tu-Jin was born on March 10, 1916, in Anseong, Kyonggi province, forty miles to the south of Seoul in South Korea. His family was too poor to send him to school, but he learned to write poetry, probably through reading the Korean-language Bible and volumes of modern Korean poems. He made his literary debut in 1939 with three original nature poems published in Moonjang-Ji, a prestigious journal of literature. However, between 1941 and 1945, the Japanese occupiers prohibited the use of the Korean language except in writings that promoted the Japanese war cause. So Pak did not publish, but he wrote, and his work, when not hidden under the chicken coop, was shown to fellow writers, probably others involved in the resistance movement with Pak. Before and after liberation, Pak held various jobs at a tax office, bank, publishing house, and magazine. In 1946, Pak, with Pak Mogweol and Cho Chihun, published The Green Deer Anthology, a collection that greatly influenced modern Korean poetry. After liberation, leftists who eventually supported the communist takeover of North Korea dominated the literary scene, but Pak joined the nationalist writers supporting democracy. In 1949, Pak published Sun, his own collection of poetry, and by the early 1950s, he had established such a good reputation as a poet that he was invited to teach at Yo˘nsei, Ewha, and other universities in Seoul. However, after the student uprisings in 1960 and the military takeover of the government in 1961, Pak lost his teaching position for a time and entered a dark, bitter period in his life. Nonetheless, he wrote more poetry than ever before, taking a stand against the military dictatorship and promoting the application of a strong historical and cultural consciousness to contemporary reality. Among his many books of poetry were also three books of essays. Pak retired from Yo˘nsei University in 1971, but continued to teach for another fifteen years at a couple of artistic and academic institutions. He won the Freedom Prize for Literature in 1956, the Seoul City Cultural Award in 1963, the Korea Academic Award of Art in 1976, and the fifteenth Sole Pine Tree Award in 1993, among other awards. He refused induction into the National Academy of Arts while Korea was still under dictatorial rule, but accepted it in

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1996. His work has been taught to school children for years in the standard curriculum of Korean literature. Pak died on September 16, 1998, at the age of eighty-two.

POEM SUMMARY The title and recurring phrase, River of August, refers to the element of nature that Pak chose to represent Korea: a river flowing out to sea. It is called the River of August because it was in August 1945 that Korea was liberated from Japanese occupation. Throughout the poem, Pak uses personification, a type of analogy that gives human attributes to a non-human subject; personification makes it possible for Pak to imbue the river the emotions of the people of Korea. The point of view in the poem is that of a narrator observing the actions of the river and speaking of the river in third person. The tone is emotional, which is conveyed in the words used to describe the action and memories of the river: writhes, agony, sighs, tears, wrath, and betrayals. But the negative remembrance shifts midway to a more positive remembrance of a Korea that had developed a beautiful culture. The tone becomes hopeful with words such as golden, brilliant, achievement, victory, stately, lofty, and boundless. The narrator believes that the glory that once was Korea can be recaptured and transformed by a nation that can march into the future with its own identity and purpose. Meter and rhythm cannot be discussed with accuracy when dealing with a translation. A talented translator can perhaps capture the essence of the original rhythm, but sound devices such as alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia cannot be reproduced because of the word differences. For example, there are a lot of differences in meter and sound between adios and goodbye. The two words have the same meaning, but one starts with a vowel and has three syllables; the other starts with a consonant and has just two syllables, among other poetic differences. However, phrases such as ‘‘River of August,’’ line and stanza length, and punctuation can be retained in a translation. Also, whatever the words claps and sighs sound like in Korean, there is an assumption about the sound that goes with these actions, a sound the readers will hear in their minds. In this poem, the stanza and line

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lengths vary with line breaks coming according to the emphasis the poet wants to place on a thought. Of course, the meaning should remain the same. Bad translations can really make a mess of a poem, but a good translation allows people around the world to appreciate the art of the original poet.

Stanza 1 In the first line, the character, River of August, claps its hands and writhes. The initial reaction to ‘‘claps its hands’’ might be an interpretation that the river is clapping its hands in joy or in appreciation of a performance. However, the appearance of the word ‘‘writhes’’ immediately after causes the reader to wonder how the two actions can go together. A little thought brings an image of a person who claps in reaction to bad news and says ‘‘Oh, no!’’ followed by a wringing of the hands and the writhing that is explained in line 2 as an expression of agony. Writhe is set off as a one-word sentence so the reader will focus on the depth of the pain. The third line, however, says that the river subsides, that is, it calms down to meditate on the memories listed in the second stanza. Pak uses the repetition of the phrase ‘‘River of August’’ at the start of each line for rhythm and to securely establish the personification of the river and the importance of August 1945 in the history of Korea.

Stanza 2 In this two-line stanza, the river remembers all the sadness and violence of Japanese occupation and World War II: the sighs of despair, the tears of grief, and the blood and death of warfare. The word ‘‘yesterday’’ is not the usual vague reference to times past, but involves more immediacy because the war has just ended. Pak separates ‘‘death of yesterday’’ perhaps to emphasize death, but perhaps also to make the point that the dying is done, and the war is over.

Stanza 3 As a nature poet, Pak often included animals in his verse. In particular, he used sinister animals for situations in which the weaker creature stands aside while the stronger ones fight over the choicest meats. Korea was the weaker neighbor and thus helpless victim of the stronger Japan. The river remembers the split tongue of the snake because in Asian lore, the snake symbolizes cunning and deceit. Native Americans

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refer to lying as speaking with a forked tongue, and apparently Pak makes the same comparison since a split tongue can say two different things and thus deceive. The wolf is a predatory animal that would have blood on its teeth after devouring its prey. The treatment of the Koreans by the Japanese from 1904 to 1945 was such that they certainly felt deceived and preyed upon. Fortunately, the snake and wolf died in the war because of the combined wrath and prayers of their enemies who betrayed the Japanese just as they had been betrayed. This time, Pak put only the words ‘‘of yesterday’’ on the final line of the stanza, perhaps to emphasize that finally all the horror is behind the Koreans.

Stanza 4 At this point, the mood of the river changes as it shifts from memories of war and exploitation to those of another time when the Koreans had high aspirations. The word ‘‘sublimation’’ means to divert one’s instincts from the primitive to something socially and culturally more evolved. Therefore, the river is remembering how Korea grew from ancient times into a sophisticated society where poetry was cherished and the people reached for the stars (their aspirations). In the past Koreans strived for greatness, and as for other people, this lofty goal was not achieved. Nonetheless, the effort reveals the optimism of the Korean people. In Asian literature, the stars and moon are more common images than the sun, but Pak uses both in this stanza by citing the group of stars composing the Milky Way, and the star that serves as the Earth’s Sun within the Milky Way.

Stanza 5 The indefinite pronoun ‘‘It’’ that opens this stanza stands for the river. The first two lines mean that the river of Korea must move from yesterday into the here and now of today with a commitment to looking forward. The word ‘‘tomorrow’’ is set off by itself on the second line to stress the importance of moving on and planning for the future. The message of the third line is that the victory against Japan has to be shared among all Koreans. There will be no return to the monarchy and class system of the past. After nearly twenty years of working for a democracy, Pak remained hopeful. His personal belief was that a person who believes in miracles and strives to fulfill noble desires lives a meaningful and honorable life, even if the miracle never comes.

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Stanza 6 This last stanza suggests an army’s march to the sea on a noble quest. After the initial repetition of the full name ‘‘River of August,’’ Korea is called just ‘‘River’’ in stanzas two and four. In this sixth stanza, the shortened name ‘‘River’’ is called and then the full name. It is like a roll call: John, pause, John Smith! The name is called and then reiterated formally to make sure there is no mistake about who is being pointed out. Korea, yes our Korea, can continue forward. The river will bravely flow without hesitation and with dignity. The word ‘‘stately’’ is set on a line by itself to emphasize that the mission of Korea to seek a bright future will be accomplished with honor and the highest principles, as the next line says. The river claps its hands again, but this time with exultation. The repetition of the phrase in a different context is a way for Pak to indicate the transition that Korea can make from the terrible past to a better life: Once we clapped our hands in dismay, now we clap our hands with joy. Pak often used the signal flag as an image in his poetry. In his poem ‘‘River of Loneliness,’’ which has the occupation as its topic, he portrays a signal flag that had recently flapped high above the plain but has been forced down. In its place, the enemy flag is fluttering, supported by the same but now betraying wind. In ‘‘River of August,’’ the reverse is the case. The enemy has died and the River is flying its own standard again as it moves out to the wide world of the ocean where the possibilities and opportunities are endless. Pak thus ends the poem with a call to the Korean people to stand up, follow their country’s standard, and regain their pride.

THEMES Although Pak usually drew his themes from nature, in ‘‘River of August,’’ he uses nature only for his imagery. His themes are multiple and intertwined. The labels put on these themes are variations of the same message, but each presents a different perspective on the how and why of moving Korea forward to a better life.

Historical and Cultural Consciousness Right after liberation, Pak and many other poets did not write about their recent experience. They were too eager to move on, and perhaps it was

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also too painful to write about the horrors of the occupation and the war. Eighteen years later, however, after the Korean War and continued political corruption and repression in South Korea, Pak began to write about this part of Korea’s past as a way to remind Koreans of their cultural identity and urge the application of their former values to the current scene. In other words, Pak was asking Koreans to remember who they were and that they once stood for a better world than the one they had in 1963. Koreans had carved out a separate nation from Japan and China through the centuries and fought hard during the occupation from 1910 to 1945 to maintain that separate identity. ‘‘River of August’’ was a way to ask Koreans to think about their unique heritage, believe again in a better Korea, and make it happen.

Remembrance as Motivation Through ‘‘River of August’’ Pak is causing his Korean readers to remember the great emotional impact of the occupation and then remember the lofty goals they had upon liberation. He is calling upon them to remember the exultation they felt when they regained their freedom and the accompanying spirit of hope they all had for a free Korea in which they would fly their victory standard in commitment to a progressive future. In this poem Pak is saying, in effect, since all Koreans suffered the same plight during occupation that ought to give them a sense of unity in building a better Korea rather than the fragmentation that the society was experiencing in 1963. That is, Koreans should rekindle the noble and moral passion they used to fight the Japanese to create a national rededication to reform. ‘‘River of August’’ suggests that Koreans call upon the power of this great river of commitment to carry away the bad and carry the nation toward new days of glory.

Fidelity to the Vision This theme is connected to the themes of historical and cultural consciousness and remembrance as motivation. Pak has asked Koreans to remember who they were and what happened to them that almost destroyed their culture, then urged Koreans to use that remembrance as motivation for reform efforts. Once the vision of a glorious Korea was regenerated, though, a fidelity to that vision was critical or Korea would go through the same cycle of losing sight of the vision and ending

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The Korean people were not permitted to use their own language for official or literary purposes during the Japanese occupation. In the United States, both Native Americans and Hispanics have been forbidden to speak their own languages at school. In teams, research this prohibition to discover when, where, and why the suppression of native language occurred in the United States. If you have Native American or Hispanic friends or family, interview someone with knowledge of this language discrimination. Report your findings to the rest of the class and then discuss the motivations and consequences of such language prohibitions. If you are bilingual or studying another language, try translating a simple poem from one language to another. If you do not know a second language, partner with someone who does and assist that person with the translation. What difficulties do you encounter? Is the translation still poetic, or does it lose its meter and rhythm? Are there some words that do not translate well? Share your experience with other students and the teacher. As a class, discuss whether you think it is possible to gain a true appreciation and understanding of a translated poem or if the poet’s skill and message are lost in the process. August 15, 1945, marked liberation for Korea from Japan because that is the day that the Japanese emperor announced his country’s surrendered to the Allied forces. Other dates in August were monumental as well. On August 6, the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, and on August 9 the Americans dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, while the

up with the kinds of troubles they had in 1963. Pak believed that this could happen, that Korea could once again reach for the stars and achieve its dreams if only it would follow

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Soviets invaded the Japanese colony of Manchuria. On August 28, the occupation of Japan by Allied forces began with General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander. Divide the class into groups that will research and give an audio/visual report of the consequences of the actions on these dates in August 1945.

Korean poetry is traditionally about nature, and Pak used nature a lot for his themes and images. Individually or in pairs, prepare a pictorial description of Korea showing the beauty of its countryside. Pictures from the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics would also be acceptable. The pictures can be presented on a computer or on a poster. Photos from travel brochures or magazines will cover only South Korea since North Korea is a closed country; however, news magazines will have some pictures from North Korea if contrast is desired. Pak joined the nationalists after World War II, but communist sympathies led to the split between North and South Korean and the Korean War (1950–1953) in which many Americans and United Nations forces lost their lives. For a one or two-day project, break the class into quick fact-gathering groups, one group for each decade of Korean history since 1950, then come together to create an overall outline of this history. For discussion, consider the following questions: What differences do you see between the two countries, politically, economically, and socially through the years? Why does the Demilitarized Zone still exist? What is and has been the relationship of North Korea with the rest of the world?

the flow of the river, remembering the past, but moving forward as a unified nation under one standard of hope and commitment all the way out to the ocean of the future.

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A winding river in a beautiful landscape (Image copyright Jaroslaw Grudzinski, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

Transcendence One way to express the overall theme of ‘‘River of August’’ is to use the word transcendence. The river has passed through a time of agony and a stage of remembrance of both the bad events and the idealism of the distant past and is now moving onward, motivated by a determination never again to allow such degradation, inspired by cultural pride, and committed to a legacy and a future of ideals. Transcendence is moving from one state of existence to another, and the course of the river has definitely changed through the years.

STYLE Occasional Poem ‘‘River of August’’ is an occasional poem, that is, one written upon the occasion of an event. It was not typical of Pak to write occasional poems until the early 1960s when he wrote a number of them. ‘‘River of August’’ is not about an occasion in 1963 when it was written,

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but rather it goes back to the occasion of the end of World War II and the liberation of Korea from Japanese rule. Most of Pak’s work has a Korean specificity to it, along with a sense of the cosmic and a message pertinent to current times. This style is obvious in ‘‘River of August’’ since the poem deals specifically with Korea, its history, and its idealism as encouragement to Koreans in 1963 to find again their lofty goals as a nation. In his early work, Pak used allegory to mask his patriotic zeal and ideals. In ‘‘River of August,’’ though, he uses the personified river to give the force of river waters, the inevitability of the journey to the ocean, to his message of patriotism and idealism. It was typical of Pak to use nature imagery to represent hope for a new life, and rivers are a recurring symbol in his work. Blood and betrayal are frequent topics. Other stylistic qualities common to Pak are a positive energy, repetition, a forceful rhythm, and long prose-like lines interspersed with shorter lines for impact. All of these practices can be found in ‘‘River of August.’’

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COMPARE & CONTRAST

1945: The Japanese surrender to the Allied forces liberates Korea from Japan but leaves the country divided with the Russians controlling Korea north of the 38th parallel, and the Americans occupying the South.

others draw on Western themes and techniques, thus expanding their subject matter and styles. Generally, though, Korean poets want to make their poetry reflective of a people who have survived crisis.

1963: Korea is ten years past the Korean War that permanently separated North and South Korea along the 38th parallel. A new civilian government, the Third Republic, is elected in South Korea after three years of political instability and a military coup.

1963: Traumatized by the Korean War and the political violence from 1960 to 1963, writers and poets have experienced emotional chaos for ten years. Writers have not had the creative time or energy to fully record their war experiences or try to inspire a new direction. Pak experiences his darkest days, too, but manages to remember the dreams Koreans had upon liberation in ‘‘River of August.’’ In the late 1960s, Korean writers regain innovation and momentum.

Today: Over five decades later, the U.S. military still guards the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Communist North Korea is much in the news as it builds its nuclear capabilities and makes threats of missile strikes against neighboring countries. In South Korea, the Fifth Republic has lasted since 1980 and has further evolved into a fully democratic country. 1945: Liberation results in a proliferation of all types of poetry in Korea. Some poems focus on the recent war, others try to reestablish traditional Korean values, and still

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Korean Poetry Korean poetry has a rich history that goes back to the fourth century B . C . Since the Korean alphabet was not invented until the fifteenth century, Koreans phonetically copied Chinese characters for their own writing. Like the literature of other cultures, Korean poetry has gone through many different stages across the centuries, including presenting poetry in the form of a song at festivals in ancient times. During Pak’s lifetime, several different movements in poetry occurred. In the early twentieth century, imagism and modernism were introduced through translations of writers such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. In the late 1930s,

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Today: Korean literature enjoys the wide range of expression characteristic of any democratic country. Since the 1980s, translations of Korean works are received with appreciation in other parts of the world, and journals on Korean literature can be found in English-speaking countries.

there was a proliferation of poetry and literary magazines. Finding modernism lifeless, some poets tried to energize their works by manipulating language and looking into themselves for the essence of life. In 1939, the debut of the three poets who would become the Green Deer Group (Pak Mogweol, Cho Chihun, and Pak) brought back the traditions of lyric poetry and the pursuit of the meaning of life in nature. After 1945, political turmoil affected literature production, as writers in the North and South chose factions, either the nationalists or the communists. After the Korean War, patriotic works were popular in the South, and then two movements emerged. The traditionalists followed long-established rhythms and emphasized folk sentiment and sensibility. The experimentalists

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introduced new methods with language and form. In particular, a modernist group called the Later Years gained critical recognition for integrating satire about social conditions in their poetry. Poetic trends were also affected by the 1960 student riots that toppled the government. Sentimental escapism was rejected for poetry that would be a force in the political discussion. During the 1970s, a similar trend focused on the experiences of the oppressed masses and promoted resistance to industrial exploitation. However, lyrical poetry dominated from the 1970s into the early 2000s. The National Literature Movement was created in the 1980s to give poets a unified voice on the issues of a divided country. Besides this influential organization, new poets emerged who tackled issues concerning the laboring class and women. Koreans read a great deal of poetry, not only what is published but also what is written by writers whose works are not published. During the 1970s, two Korean poets sold more than one million copies of their books. In the early 2000s, South Korean publishers market more than 200 poetry books each year, selling on average up to 2,000 copies each. That is higher than any but the most well-known European or American poets can usually expect.

Inhabitant of a South Korean village, c. 1948 (Carl Mydans / Time & Life Pictures)

The Green Deer Group Besides Pak, two other poets, Pak Mogweol (1917–1978) and Cho Chihun (1920–1968), made their debut on the poetry scene in 1939. The three had much in common. While they wrote as modernists, they continued in the Korean tradition of nature poetry and refused to take up the decadent topics, spiritual apathy, and trite foreign phrases that Pak said had crept into the poems of those trying to copy modernism. Also, all three worked in banking institutions, and all three refused to publish after the Japanese ban on the use of the Korean language in literature in 1941. They did not stop writing, however, so in 1946 they were able to publish The Green Deer Anthology, a collection of forty-five poems, fifteen by each of the three poets in his own distinctive voice. The publication of this anthology had a major influence on Korean poetry. The anthology stressed the importance of seeing poetry written in Korean again; it was a symbol of the new freedom from Japanese oppression. It also bridged the gap between the periods before and after liberation. This anthology is often viewed as the basis of a national Korean rebirth in poetry.

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CRITICAL OVERVIEW Pak’s fame as a poet was established with the publication of The Green Deer Anthology. He and his two compatriots not only rescued Korean poetry from the fashions of the time, but they reestablished the merit of nature poetry and applied to it a call for a better Korea. As Jaihiun Kim says about Pak in Modern Korean Poetry, ‘‘He looks to nature for the salvation of corrupted humanity.’’ Peter Lee, a professor of Korean and comparative literature at University of California at Los Angeles and author of numerous books on Korean literature, has written about Pak several times. In the introduction to his translations of Pak’s poems in his book A History of Korean Literature, Lee states that ‘‘By using such nature imagery as mountain, river, ocean, star, sun and sky, he summons hope for a new life.’’ Only the mountain from this list is missing from ‘‘River of August,’’ in which Pak used the imagery of a

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river flowing to the ocean in order to instill hope in Koreans by asking them to remember their ideals that were as high as the stars in the sky. In the introduction to another book, Modern Korean Literature, Peter Lee states: ‘‘Pak Tujin is capable of a wide range of moods, and his language and style impart a distinctive tone to his Christian and nationalistic sentiments. . . . Pak’s poems are imbued with the strong historical and cultural awareness of one who has honestly confronted the contradictions of his time.’’ This observation certainly applies to ‘‘River of August’’ since one theme of the poem is historical and cultural awareness. Pak felt Koreans needed this awareness in the difficult times they were experiencing when he wrote the poem. In Korean Literature Today, in an unsigned 1996 article, Pak is called ‘‘one of the best known contemporary Korean poets, widely appreciated by both the reading public and the critics.’’ This popularity is attributed to the fact that ‘‘His work reflects both a fertile imagination and much of the history and aspirations of the people of Korea during his lifetime.’’ ‘‘River of August’’ is a prime example of the application of Pak’s imagination to history and aspirations.

CRITICISM Lois Kerschen Kerschen is an educator and freelance writer. In this essay, she explains the historical context behind ‘‘River of August.’’ As a peninsula attached to the mainland of China, Korea has, of course, been influenced by its massive neighbor for centuries. Koreans used the Chinese alphabet until a Korean one was invented in the fifteenth century, but even after that, official documents continued to be written in Chinese for a long time. Nonetheless, with the figment of isolation that a peninsula provides, Korea was able to develop its own language and culture. Korean people have clung fiercely to traditions and customs that developed over centuries and produced a unique identity among the Korean people. Generally speaking, Asian countries mostly maintained an isolationist attitude toward the West until the nineteenth century. Then, new innovations in transportation and communication forced Asia to open more to trade and international

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KOREAN POETRY IN PAK’S HOME MAY HAVE BEEN HIS SALVATION BECAUSE IT TOLD HIM OF A BETTER WORLD IN NATURE, WHICH HE SOUGHT IN FREQUENT TREKS TO THE MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS.’’

relations. Meantime, China and Japan had a long history of wars. Famously, the empire established by Genghis Khan (1162–1227) began to crumble after his grandson Kublai Khan (1215–1294) suffered a terrible defeat by Japan. There was another war that China lost in 1894 and 1895, which resulted in decreased Chinese influence in Korea and increased interest by Japan in controlling Korea. Then Japan defeated Russia in a war (1904–1905). U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the peace treaty that ended this war. Unfortunately, in the process, Japan convinced the United States and the very powerful British Empire that it had legitimate interests in Korea and got those powers to agree to the Protectorate Treaty of 1905 that allowed Japan to penetrate the Korean government. In 1907, Japan forced Korea’s king to abdicate in favor of his son. Protests against this action were suppressed violently. The Korean army was reduced to token size, but when even that small group fought back, they were disbanded entirely. From this point until liberation in 1945, the ‘‘sighs, tears, blood and death’’ that Pak wrote about in ‘‘River of August’’ became a way of life for the Korean people. The Sino-Japanese War (1984–1995) had caused Koreans to worry about their status as an independent country. With the political atmosphere so unstable, independence organizations were established to promote the preservation of Korea. As the worst fears of Koreans became reality, a guerilla movement developed, too. These so-called Righteous Armies were joined by military men after the army was disbanded and with this added expertise were, for a time, a serious threat. After heightened rebellion in 1908, though, the vastly outnumbered Koreans were crushed by the Japanese army, and thousands died. In 1910, Japan forced out the new king, closed newspapers and the independence

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Song of the Universe: Earth Poems and Prose from Around the World (2008), by Anne Rowthorn, draws upon writings about nature from different cultures and eras to inspire respect and care for the earth and its creatures. When River of Life, River of Hope: Selected Poems of Pak Tu-Jin was published by Eastbridge in 2005, it was the first sizeable collection of Pak’s work in English. The book includes love poems, lyric verses, and poems of social protest. Peter Lee’s Silence of Love: Twentieth Century Korean Poetry, published by the University of Hawaii Press in 1981, is a critically acclaimed anthology of modern Korean poetry with good translations and representational work from every stage of each author’s career. The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry, edited by Peter Lee and published by Columbia University Press in 2002, is a firsttime comprehensive collection of classical Korean poetry of every length, period, and topic, including material from the oral lyrical tradition, expertly translated into English.

organizations, and arrested dissidents. Thus subjugated, Korea was officially a colony of Japan. Occupation meant that all goods and services were intended to benefit Japan. Even though the Japanese built new railway and communication systems, they were intended to facilitate military maneuvers against China. Korea became just a workhouse for Japan. Fifty percent of all rice, the main food staple, went to Japan. The Korean people became poorer as Japan took over their economy. It was into these conditions that Pak was born in 1916. It is not surprising then that his parents were too poor to provide him with formal schooling or that Pak lived a primitive, rural life until his teens. The availability of Korean poetry in Pak’s home may have been his salvation because it told him of a better world in nature,

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The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry, edited by David McCann and published by Columbia University Press in 2004, covers various movements and poetry of many types, including avant-garde, opposition, folk, Buddhist, and Christian. Of particular value is the informative note about each poet.

Frank Stewart’s The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry (2004) is the first book of its kind to explore the difficult process of translating Asian poetry while attempting to maintain the sound and spirit of the original. Multiple contributors discuss translations into English from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Khmer, and Sanskrit.

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (2005) is a young adult graphic novel about the experiences of French cartoonist Guy Delisle while he lived in North Korea for two months in 2001. This book records his observations of drab life in a totalitarian society, but inserts humor along with many drawings.

which he sought in frequent treks to the mountains and rivers. The Korean countryside inevitably made its way into his poetry, and the influence of the rivers is obvious given the number of his poems about rivers or with river in the title such as ‘‘River of August’’ and ‘‘River of Solitude’’ and the fact that the first English language collection of Pak’s poems was named River of Life, River of Hope. Korean exiles in Shanghai, China, signed a Declaration of Independence on March 1, 1919. When word reached the homeland, the Korean people took to the streets in celebration. The Japanese army responded violently, killing 7,000, injuring 15,000, and arresting over 40,000 Koreans. They also destroyed houses, schools, and churches, one at least with the congregation

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still inside while it burned. Since Japan had been an ally in World War I, western nations kept silent about the atrocities. The exiles, though, set up a provisional government with Syngman Rhee (1875–1965) as its leader. This government became dormant in 1925, but for a while the Japanese relaxed constraints and even allowed literary works and heavily censored newspapers to print in Korean. While some Koreans were allowed to advance in government and the professions, segregation was still enforced throughout the society. However, in 1931, when Japan annexed Manchuria, oppression increased again. As Japan prepared for further expansion across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, conditions worsened for Koreans; they were virtually slaves. Many hungry Koreans fled, if at all possible, which only caused the Japanese to tighten restrictions even more. The Japanese further humiliated the Koreans by banning the use of the Korean language, forcing Koreans to use Japanese names, and not only banning the practice of Buddhism and Christianity, but also requiring attendance at Japanese Shinto shrines. The Japanese thus attempted to wipe out Korean culture. In 1937, Japan invaded China. Twenty million Chinese died as all the coastal areas fell under Japanese control. Needing more men in Japanese military service, Korean laborers were exported to Japan and worked under horrendous conditions. The suffering of the Korean people intensified after Japan joined the Axis powers and attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The demands of the Japanese war machine devoured the people of Korea, and as Japan began to lose the war, Korea was stripped of every resource. Perhaps the most degrading experience of all was the use of Korean women to service the sexual demands of the Japanese army. Called Comfort Women, these Korean women were exported to army camps and forced into prostitution. The shame was so intense that the stories of these women were not told until decades later. Pak was witness to many of these events. It was with first-hand accuracy that he described Korea as writhing in agony in ‘‘River of August.’’ The Koreans had suffered mightily. As he describes in the third stanza of this poem, they had been the prey of the snake and the wolf who, in answer to the prayers of the Korean people, had finally ‘‘died in the wrath’’ of those whom they had tried to conquer. It is no wonder that blood

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was often mentioned in Pak’s poetry after what he had been through. Pak also often wrote about betrayal, as in the third line of the third stanza of ‘‘River of August.’’ The Japanese had betrayed all their promises to the Koreans. They had allowed publication in the native language for a time then prohibited its use, causing Pak and other writers not to publish under this ban. They remained loyal to their language and culture. Pak also worked with the resistance. But others were not so loyal. As in all occupied countries, there were those who collaborated with the enemy and betrayed their own people, like the Nazi collaborators, so brutally punished by their neighbors after liberation or the Jewish prisoners who betrayed fellow Jews in a desperate attempt to curry favor and stay alive another day. In another of his poems, ‘‘The Alpine Plant,’’ Pak refers to a dagger. As Yi Sang-so˘p describes it in an article for Korea Journal, the dagger is ‘‘hidden on a person’s body, usually [close to] the breast, to be used secretly, suddenly, decisively on the enemy. It is [a] weapon charged with secret intention.’’ Even though defeat came with the Japanese occupation, like the dagger carrier, the poet bided ‘‘his time, with the firm belief in the future when’’ the dagger would ‘‘be put to use to bring in a new world.’’ Also in this poem, Pak ‘‘reminisces about the past when the righteous zeal soared like a fierce bird and covered the country like a tide.’’ This is the same past that the ‘‘River of August’’ recalls, not as a fierce soaring bird but as a distant idea from the brilliant stars that will be carried like a standard by the river on its journey to the ocean. The concept of a proud and noble people is the same whether the motivation is righteous zeal or a galaxy-inspired metaphor. Upon liberation, Pak and the people of Korea felt that they had finally been able to put the dagger to use, and they intended to have a new world filled with the ‘‘lofty purpose’’ described in the ‘‘River of August.’’ Perhaps that is why Pak did not write historical poems at first. He wanted to move on to the new and glorious future that Korea would surely have. Sadly, even though Syngman Rhee established a supposedly democratic government in 1948, the country was soon ravaged by civil war that left Korea divided in two. Government corruption forced Rhee out after student riots in 1960, but then there was a military coup. A new republic was formed in 1963, but by that time Pak was despondent. In writing ‘‘River of

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by all poets from ancient times.’’ Pak applied the moral vision he gleaned from nature to the unrest in Korea when writing ‘‘River of August.’’ In nature he saw not only beauty, but truth, goodness, and God’s love. In his essays, Pak expressed the conviction that imagination is more powerful than history because imagination does not care what has already happened. Imagination is concerned with what may happen and, therefore, can serve as inspiration for action. Pak felt compelled to bring history into ‘‘River of August’’ because he thought a reminder would be motivational. The poetic manner in which he writes this reminder pulls the reader into the patriotic vitality and fervor of the rest of the poem. The South Koreans, a people who love poetry, eventually created peace and prosperity for themselves. Surely poems such as ‘‘River of August’’ have something to do with their success. Source: Lois Kerschen, Critical Essay on ‘‘River of August,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

Melodie Monahan The Milky Way (Image copyright Photodynamic, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

August’’ that year, it is as if Pak were saying, ‘‘Stop! This is not the way it was supposed to be. We had such good plans. We had hopes and dreams. Where did all that go? Can we get it back?’’ Of course, this man who had endured so much and risked his life for his country answered in the affirmative. Writing the second half of ‘‘River of August’’ was his way of saying that he believed that if the Korean people looked into their hearts, remembered where they had been and what they once stood for, they could rekindle their national spirit, reestablish their values, and rise to glory as a people. Japanese oppression, World War II, the Korean War, the power struggles in South Korea in the early 1960s, ‘‘all of these historical events left deep traces in Pak’s poetry,’’ writes Yi Sang-so˘p. Pak’s poems are not records of history, Yi Sang-so˘p adds, but the ‘‘sublimation of his varied experiences. . . . His poetry bears excellent witness to the belief of the supremacy of poetry over history, an article of faith held

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Monahan has a Ph.D. in English and operates an editing service, The Inkwell Works. In the following essay, she discusses William Wordsworth’s ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ and Pak’s ‘‘River of August’’ in order to show how poets use natural images to stimulate their readers’ memories and to encourage their readers to pursue a beneficial course of action. Many poets use nature as the frame of reference in their poetry. The techniques poets use vary to serve their purposes, and so do the meanings they invest in nature. Both William Wordsworth and Pak Tu-Jin used natural images in order to explain their sense of what really matters in human experience. Both Wordsworth’s ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ and Pak Tu-Jin’s ‘‘River of August’’ illustrate how poets use natural elements in their poetry to carry meaning. Leaving an urban setting in order to visit a natural setting is a common human experience, something many readers understand and many have experienced. The poets draw on this common experience in order to convey their poem’s message. In 1798, while the turbulence of the French Revolution continued to trouble people across the English Channel in England, William Wordsworth wrote a poem about two visits he made to the River Wye, which wends its way along the English-Wales border past the ruins of Tintern Abbey. In the late eighteenth-century and

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throughout the nineteenth century, walking excursions into this area were popular holiday activities; people visited the Gothic ruins, longsince left to crumble and covered with ivy, and made their way along the river edge through picturesque rolling and mostly unpopulated wooded countryside. Wordsworth visited the area in 1793 and again 1798. Returning to London, he thought about these beautiful scenes, idealizing nature itself and the life of common people who live in cottages and work on small farms. Faced with London’s polluted air and water and hounded by its filthy, congested streets, Wordsworth was comforted to think about that beautiful area along the Wye and prompted to write what it meant to him. The full title of his poem is ‘‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798,’’ commonly referred to as ‘‘Lines above Tintern Abbey’’ or more simply ‘‘Tintern Abbey.’’ ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ is virtually a cornerstone of romantic poetry, both in itself as a poem and in what it says about the value romantic poets found in nature. For Wordsworth and other romantic poets of his time and earlier, nature expressed a divine life force or deity. Being in nature brought people in touch with their innate moral sense, their true inner being. This awareness of essence or truth was degraded or eclipsed in city life. Nature was pure; the city was corrupt. So to return to nature was, in a sense, to cleanse oneself of environmental contamination, social materialism, moral decay, and psychological confusion and disillusionment. For the romantics, nature expressed a revitalizing energy available to every person directly. For them, going into nature was a better way of worship than attending church. So it makes sense that these walking tours along the Wye were so meaningful to Wordsworth that he felt compelled to write a poem about them, about how his appreciation of the area was more profound on the second visit, and how once back in London comforting memories of the visit recurred to him. In fact, it is memory of nature that Wordsworth stresses in his poem. He notes that between the two visits he often thought about the river scenes and surrounding views of orchards and farms, deliberately meditating on these ‘‘In hours of weariness.’’ Dwelling on the mental

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images increased his pulse rate and redirected his thinking in a new and beneficial direction. In other words, he explains how remembered images of nature can allow a person to access the spiritual, healing power of nature. Focusing on the ‘‘beauteous forms’’ during meditation or reverie caused his mind to shift from the city din and loneliness to forgotten ‘‘acts / Of kindness and of love,’’ and the pleasures those acts brought. Sustaining the meditation longer, Wordsworth describes, brought on a feeling of suspension. In this transfixed state quite like sleep but not sleep, he asserts, ‘‘with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things.’’ The transformative role of nature in people’s lives, the way it can heal the urbanite, the way it can bring the disillusioned and lonely person back to communion with deity, is at the center of Wordsworth’s poem. ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ serves as a call to people to reconnect with nature, to return to their individual and personal connection to spiritual essence, and to consciously renew their appreciation of the divine in nature and in human acts of kindness, despite the hardships they confront in their workaday urban lives. In a very different way, in 1963, Pak Tu-Jin sought to arouse the love Koreans have for their beautiful countryside and rivers and through it to stimulate their latent sense of indigenous selfhood and national identity. In a way not completely unlike Wordsworth’s purpose, Pak intended to mobilize the spirit of his people, to energize them in their difficult ongoing work of reestablishing their nationhood. His ‘‘River of August’’ does not describe a particular river or setting, but it uses his readers’ memory of such natural scenes to help them access the energy that flows through nature and can empower humans in their righteous purposes. Pak’s symbolic river can be equated with the enthusiasm and hope Koreans felt after their 1945 liberation from the Japanese. Pak relies on his readers to see the parallel between a forceful river that flows inevitably toward the ocean and the excited energy Koreans felt at the time of their liberation for the work of reestablishing their autonomous nation. Pak hopes his poem can energize weary Koreans, who nearly twenty years after liberation are discouraged and losing commitment. Pak must have hoped that his poem would give its readers renewed hope and vitality.

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For these two poets with their separate purposes, nature provided a constellation of images readers can recognize and see anew, in light of the messages conveyed in the poems that use them. The natural images carry the poet’s message, connecting with what readers already know, have experienced, and now remember. The poetry is designed to enlighten readers and to give them a purpose and direction. In each case, the poet believes that what his art does is transformative; the effect is one of new understanding and more certain conviction that choosing a certain course of action can change people’s lives. Source: Melodie Monahan, Critical Essay on ‘‘River of August,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

Yi Sang-So˘p In the following essay, Sang-So˘p gives an overview of the poetry of Pak Tu-jin and relates different poetic themes in the poet’s works to different time periods in his life. Pak Tu-jin, one of the most respected poets of Korea, has been writing poetry for almost half a century. When he began to publish his poetry in the late 1930’s, Korea was experiencing the cruelest sort of oppression under the Japanese militarist government. The national liberation in 1945 was followed by the tragic division of the nation, which resulted in the outbreak of the war in 1950. The post-bellum inefficiency and corruption of the government typical of poor new nations brought about the student uprising in 1960. The military takeover of the government in 1961 initiated a highly centralized political structure at the expense of some democratic ideals. All these historical events have left deep traces in Pak’s poetry. But history is not reflected in poetry as in a plain mirror. It is deflected, and the degree of the deflection is hardly measurable. Some deflections are of such a nature that they may be better called sublimations. Pak Tu-jin’s poetry embodies the sublimation of his varied experiences. He displays a unique power in finding appropriate ‘‘objective correlatives’’ to his experiences. His poetry bears excellent witness to the belief of the supremacy of poetry over history, an article of faith held by all poets from ancient times. ‘‘The Sun,’’ an early poem written during the darkest days of Japanese oppression, is one of the best-known poems by Pak Tu-jin.

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THE FOREIGNERS HAD REASONS FOR PERSECUTING HIM AND MOST KOREANS, BUT HE WAS NOW EXPELLED FROM HIS LOVED TEACHING POSITION FOR THE MOST ABSURD REASON. IT WAS PURE VIOLENCE.’’

Sun, come forth! Sun, come forth! With your face washed clear, handsome sun, come forth! Over the hills, over the hills, consuming the darkness, over the hills, all the night through, consuming the darkness; with glowing childlike face, handsome sun, come forth! No more moonlight nights, no more moonlight nights, I hate moonlight nights in tear-like valleys, I hate moonlight nights alone in the empty yard. Sun, handsome sun! If you only come, if only you come, I, I will exult in the green hills. I rejoice in the green mountains with their green wings flapping. In the presence of the green hills I am content to be alone. After the deer, after the deer toward the sunny spots, toward the sunny spots, following the deer, meeting the deer and playing with the deer. After the striped tiger, after the striped tiger, meeting the tiger and playing with the tiger. Sun, handsome sun, come forth! If I meet you face to face, not just in my dream, we shall rejoice together in that fresh day of innocent beauty when flowers and birds and beasts sit down together in one place, are all called to come and sit down together.

A Western reader of this poem may not find anything very striking in the use of the sun as the subject. To him, the sun is one of the most familiar natural symbols connected with a lot of important aspects of human life. But in Oriental literature, the sun as a symbol has not been so frequently used as in the West, at least not to the extent that the stars and the moon have been used. But in this poem Pak seems quite deliberate in presenting the sun as the central image, exalting it over the moon, which is shining on an empty yard in the valley—a perfect subject for traditional Oriental poetry. ‘‘With your face washed clear, handsome sun’’ shocks the Korean reader further. The

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face washed clear is that of a child. Usually a Korean mother washes her young children’s faces and hands in the morning. It is almost a ritual. Pak is obviously thinking of such a child’s face. The adjective go-un, translated as ‘‘handsome,’’ is usually about young women, children and flowers and not about grown-up men. In Pak’s vision the sun is the handsome face of a child washed clean in the morning by his loving mother. Such a vision of the sun is entirely new to Korean readers, and it will be quite refreshing also to Westerners. John Donne’s irreverent ‘‘Busy old fool, thou unruly sun’’ is shocking and remains only such, but Pak’s child-like sun remains refreshing. But Pak’s sun is not only handsome and child-looking, it is also an enfant terrible who has god-like powers. It is the child-like sun who has consumed the darkness over innumerable hills all through the night and is glowing like fresh coal fire. At first glance, the child’s clean washed face contradicts the darkness-consuming glowing face, but Pak envisions the unity of the contraries: something infinitely innocent and at the same time all powerful, like the miracle of the Christ-child or the Little Lamb. Darkness is the enemy of light. Light drives away darkness. But Pak’s light has to be more than simple light: it has to be innocent and handsome as well as powerful. ‘‘The green mountains with their green wings flapping.’’ The green mountains are compared to so many gigantic green birds. Or, the green mountains are full of wing-flapping birds. Both senses operate in the metaphor, adding greatly to the mythical atmosphere of the poem. The world where the sun is a handsome Korean child’s face, not Apollo’s or Hyperion’s, naturally becomes a fairy-tale Eden. The poet becomes a child in this Eden where he can play with the deer and the tiger. In Korean folk-tales deer and tigers are familiar characters, but a child even in its pristine innocence rarely meets and plays with a tiger. Obviously Pak’s treatment of the theme is a retelling of Isaiah’s vision in a Korean setting: The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and calf and the young lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice den. (Isaiah xi, 6–8)

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Isaiah’s prophetic vision is of a world where all creatures are living in innocent harmony, with emphasis on the infancy of the creatures. It is not a simple day-dreaming or wishful thinking; it is a proclamation about a historical future that should come. In the same spirit Pak says, ‘‘If I meet you face to face, not just in my dreaming, we shall rejoice together in that fresh day of innocent beauty.’’ He is not simply dreaming, but eagerly looks forward to the indefinite historical future when all creatures ‘‘shall not hurt nor destroy in all [God’s] holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover sea.’’ (Isaiah, xi, 9). As a Korean of that time, he was certainly longing for the day of national liberation from the foreign rule, but such longing was shared by all Koreans. As a true poet he had also the prophetic vision of the ultimate liberation of man in the Christian sense. In this he was following Isaiah who had the ultimate vision of man’s redemption while longing for the salvation of his own people. Pak Tu-jin was prohibited from publishing poems in the Korean language soon after he had discovered a world of poetry new in conception and style. He is known to have participated in underground resistance activities, but when finally liberation came he wrote few poems worth remembering for their vivid preservation of the great emotional empact of the occasion. He was not a recorder of historical facts. Liberation entailed the tragic division of the nation and consequent disillusionment. But our prophetic poet seems to have found it meaningless to write occasional verse on every social happening of those days. For that matter, few other poets wrote memorable poetry about those eventful days. Pak Tu-jin was meanwhile refining his diction and enriching the world of his images. During the Korean War, he took refuge in a southern city, but he was virtually silent about the national disaster. Only a few lyrics for patriotic songs written at the request of the government survive in song books. (He has written many occasional poems commissioned by social organizations, few of which are collected in his volumes of poetry.) Instead, he kept his characteristic dignity as a visionary poet. ‘‘The Stone Monument’’ was written during his refuge days.

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—Let just one green bird fly forth from you, Stone monument. Let just one long cry come forth out of you. You, sleeping for a thousand, two thousand, three thousand years, let all your lichens sprout and bloom as flowers. And when these flowers flow like frost melting, the stars shall descend from beyond the high heavens. Stone monument, oh, stone. . . . What do you breathe? If you gathered it all into one great breath, could you not grow wings? Could you not stretch forth a long neck like the crane and soar beyond the clouds? Rainstorms, swirling snows, the searing heat of the sun, and the madly leaping seasons drive nails into you, drive spikes. Moonlight. . . . When the stars melt down making it bright as a mirror, I shall come to you again. I wish you could put out your hand and just once clasp mine. I wander away leaving you alone on the plain.

Although this poem is almost as often anthologized as the foregoing one, the two seem so different in conception and style that many readers find it difficult to recognize them as the works of the same poet. While ‘‘The Sun’’ has the atmosphere of a fairy-tale with the childlike sun and the animals, ‘‘The Stone Monument’’ is an adult affair against the background of inclement weather and night. A lonely stone monument in the open field with the inscription almost eroded away and covered with black lichens is a familiar object in Korea. It may look like waiting for someone with infinite patience bearing a forgotten message. The poet has been wandering in the field when he confronts the stone monument fixed in the ground. Its centuries-long silence and immobility drive the poet to burst into an impatient ejaculation: ‘‘Let just one green bird fly forth from you.’’ He is not simply curious about its history or wishes it would move a little, yawn, or groan as in a fairy-tale, but wants it to fly instantly and make a bird’s cry. He wants an instant transformation, a decisive, once-for-all remaking of the object condemned to fixity and silence all through the eventful history. The ‘‘green bird’’ reminds us of ‘‘the green mountains flapping their wings’’ in the foregoing poem. A mountain is a big stone—a sort of monument by God as many poets like to say. The green that covers the mountains looks like green feather to the poet. The man-made

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monument with lichen covering its surface resembles a mountain. But the lichens are black and show little sign of life. But the God-made monument is green and alive with birds’ flapping wings. Pak’s poetry abounds in the imagery of flowers, especially of many blooming together in the same place. If the dead-looking lichens on the stone come alive with flowers overflowing it like melting dew, there would be a corresponding change in the universe: bright stars, the fixed ‘‘flowers’’ of the high heavens, would also flow down. There would be an apocalyptic change in the world. This is another expression of the poet’s ardent wish for a radical remaking of the world. Meanwhile, rainstorms, swirling snows, and the searing beat of the sun erode the surface of the stone which seems to be patiently waiting as if just for the sake of waiting. The poet feels both impatience and admiration for it. There is ground enough to interpret the symbolism of the stone monument as the long dormant national spirit of the Korean people which needs sudden, decisive awakening. This is the usual nationalistic reading of the poem. In the last part of the poem, the poet leaves the monument making a promise that he will come back on a miraculous night when the moon is shining or a shooting star is lighting the sky like a momentary mirror. He whimsically wishes that the stone would then shake hands with him like a human. Such a miracle does not happen in this life. But, Pak Tu-jin would say, the persistence of waiting for such a miracle and the ardent wish for it are meaningful and admirable as a mode of existence. ‘‘The Fragrant Mountains,’’ also an early poem, contains even more striking images of the miracle. In the latter part of the poem, Pak says: Mountains, mountains, mountains! your silence of millions of years seems to be wearisome enough. Mountains, may I hope for the blazing columns of fire forcing themselves out from your soaring peaks and lowly ridges? May I continue to believe that the day when foxes and wolves, forgetting the smell of blood, run joyfully together with deer and rabbits in search of the tender shoots of the bush clover and the arrowroot?

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The ancient mountains have been silent long enough; they seem now to be ready to burst out in fire and become gigantic incense-burners to God. This apocalyptic change will bring in a world of perfect peace among all created beings. In the anarchy and violence that followed the April 19 Uprising, Pak Tu-jin suffered greater injustice and humiliation personally than during the Japanese rule. The foreigners had reasons for persecuting him and most Koreans, but he was now expelled from his loved teaching position for the most absurd reason. It was pure violence. He protested, pleaded, cursed, mocked, condemned in his verse, the only weapon left to him. In this darkest period of his life, Pak Tu-jin wrote more poems than he had ever done before. But many of them are ‘‘occasional’’ verse with the usual shortcomings pertaining to such, though they bear vivid witness to his personal feelings. ‘‘The River of Loneliness’’ is fairly representative of the poems of this period. The following are selected passages from it. On the river flows the blood from the light. The blazing flower of fire loneliness used to set afloat is now night. The trade between beasts toward the end of tomorrow is never ending. Peace and freedom are lying on the chopping block, unable to move, below the blue knife. The cat’s eyes are burning which will bear witness to this night long afterwards. And the raven keeps the record of blood which will be croaked out of his throat. As soon as the signal flag was lowered on the plain, even the clouds and winds proved betrayers. On the shore of the river of loneliness, where the dove fell while repeating the name of its mate, an old, blind bronze horse neighs trembling toward the faraway sunset.

Light, blood, river, and other natural symbols are extensively used by Pak Tu-jin in his poetry, but they are nowhere else given such personal poignancy and urgency as in these lines. The blood flows from the light; that is, the light is the source of the blood. Blood is inevitable in revolutionary struggles. However, since it is shed in a righteous cause, it takes its origin in the ‘‘light.’’ Mundane history demands that the transparent, cold, weightless ‘‘light’’ be the source or cause of the red, warm, sticky

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‘‘blood.’’ Pak Tu-jin is acutely aware of the paradox. Unlike the utter loneliness and helplessness of the poet, the practical world is busy with the ‘‘trade’’ that will surely lead to the catastrophic end of all. The main articles of the ‘‘trade’’ are peace and freedom, which are ‘‘lying on the chopping block’’ like a fish helplessly waiting for the sharp, blue knife to come down into it. This striking metaphor refers to an old saying about the helpless victim for the bigger, choicer part of which the strong ones contend with one another. In such a situation the lonely poet’s mission becomes that of the witness, watching with the eyes of the cat and recording with the foreboding voice of the raven. The lamb, the deer, etc. are set aside and in their stead such sinister animals are chosen as the poet’s self-image. The signal flag that lately flapped high above the plain has been forced down and in its place, perhaps, the enemy flag may be fluttering, supported by the same but betraying wind. The old blind bronze horse in the last part is very impressive image of the lonely poet. The old, blind poet is of course the archetype of the great poet. Homer is said to have been old and blind when he ‘‘saw’’ not only the whole Mediterranean world but also the world of the gods. Milton was really old and blind when he so clearly gazed into ‘‘the fixed deeps of light.’’ In Korea, certain blind persons are regarded as having prophetic powers. But the archetypal, old, blind poet is fated to be lonely, if only because of his unlikeness to ordinary men in his physical disability. The blue-green rust of the bronze is a symbol of long history in oriental literature. The bronze horse may be considered to be a relique of the bronze age when recorded or reported history started. Thus the old blind bronze horse becomes the compelling image of the archetypal lonely poet as the persistent witness of man’s history. However, the lonely poet sees now only the sunset which will bring in the utter darkness. He can no longer envision a supernal world as Homer and Milton did. ‘‘The River of Loneliness’’ is Pak Tu-jin’s personal testimony to the hard times he went through, but it obtains a certain degree of universal appeal by embodying just indignation against manifest injustice. However, many of

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his poems of the same period fail to achieve full universality because of excessive personal ‘‘warmth’’ toward some political subjects. It is said that a poem should be more cool than warm; that it should not be the ‘‘lava of imagination,’’ let alone of indignation. Much of Pak’s poetry written in those days seems to have been singed by excessive warmth. To many of his contemporaries who shared the same hardship, his poetry is likely to serve as sharp reminder like intimate diaries or memoirs. Pak Tu-jin himself wrote in the Preface to the volume of poetry published in that period: My strong-willed stance and struggle against such reactionary behaviors, exacerbated by my personal sufferings, have been like those of a fierce animal licking its bleeding wounds in the sun or like those of a small bird struggling through turbulent snow storms. They have left undried traces on the pages.

He lays special emphasis on the ‘‘undried’’ traces of his struggle and suffering still smelling of sweat and blood left on the pages of his poetry. We all know that the pages of poetry should be dry; otherwise, the letters will be blurred and the pages soiled. He says he had quite an inner struggle as to whether to choose ‘‘The River of Loneliness’’ or ‘‘The Human Jungle’’ as the title of the next volume (1963). Finally he decided on the latter, because it represented the universal aspects of his experience although the former appealed to him with its strong tendency. In the Preface to The White Wing (1967), the final volume of this period, Pak Tu-jin speaks about the ‘‘true essence of poetry, the self-enlightenment toward the true ‘tao’ of poetry.’’ One gets the impression that Pak has passed his crisis and attained heightened spiritual calm. A crisis in the life of a poet may give him a valuable experience but it can cause severe dysfunction to his art. In 1973 Pak Tu-jin is able to say that for him ‘‘the overall situation is now not so urgent. Writing poetry need not be bound to a realistic purpose.’’ The following poem shows his new phase. The Alpine Plant It lives on the sheer riven cliff, This dagger in my breast, an orchid upward growing. It trembles in the wind enveloped by the dense fog and rain. In the cold mirror-like moonlight,

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The fierce bird nurses his wounded wing. The flag once covered the slope like a dazzling tide. The tumult has fallen to silence now as a dumb flower. It lives high on this side of the abyss of the silence. Once again the dawn tempest will burst, Revolution overrunning the earth east south west north. And the dagger will cut the chain, the net, and the night, And there will be the final whirl of flowers of the newly created light. You, orchid, live on a cliff where the fog trembles. The alpine plant here referred to is the almost mythical oriental orchid which is said to grow in deep mountains and on high cliffs away from people. It is the symbol of the noble-spirited person. The orchid growing on the inaccessible cliff is likened to the dagger hidden in the poet’s breast. A man’s noble spirit is often compared to the sharp edge of a knife. Quite naturally the dagger and the orchid are brought together in this poem, though they are almost in direct opposition to each other in nature. The ‘‘dagger’’ is an inadequate translation of the original word which does not simply mean a sharp-pointed weapon but a dagger hidden on a person’s body, usually in the breast, to be used secretly, suddenly, decisively on the enemy. It is weapon charged with secret intention. The poet reminisces about the past when the righteous zeal soared like a fierce bird and covered the country like a tide. But they are all muted now. The poet underwent the bitter experience of defeat, but he has attained the state of the ‘‘orchid-dagger,’’ abiding his time, with the firm belief in the future when the ‘‘orchid-dagger’’ will be put to use to bring in a new world. In the 1970’s Pak Tu-jin started several series of sequential poems. The first of them is The Acts of the Apostles (1973), a series of religious poems expressing his deep Christian faith. The following is Number 8 in the series. Love, how thy eyes disturb my mind! Love, how thy words enkindle my soul! Left alone is the wilderness, exhausted, Drowsing in the wilderness, on this side of death, The sun and the moon blanching my body, My soul astray between distant stars,

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Love, I should wake up, Thy warmth touching my body this moment, I should raise my spine like the dawn-wakened sea, Like the fledgeling eagle, should flutter my wings, Like the surprised tiger, should crouch my whole body, Like the surprised python, should raise up my head. Love, how thy eyes disturb my mind! Love, how thy words enkindle my soul! Religious enlightenment is a theme frequently treated by mature poets. However, it is liable to be expressed in abstract or pedantic terms. But Pak Tu-jin bypasses such liability by characteristically resorting to the natural symbolism of the sun, the moon, the tiger, etc. He retains the Isaiah-like vision of his early days, though chastened through the years of suffering. Pak Tu-jin’s culminating achievement as poet in recent years was the discovery of a wholly new world of poetic images and themes. As ardent lover of nature, he climbs mountains and strolls along rivers whenever he finds time to spare. In the early 1970’s he started collecting stones of strange shapes on river-sides. His visionary power was fired in a way he had never experienced before when he looked at the suggestive shapes and colors of the stones, which were eroded, chiselled, and smoothed ever so slowly by the flowing water for thousands, perhaps millions, of years. The result is The Biographies of the Water Stones, a series of sequential poems collected in two volumes (1973;1976). The ‘‘biographies’’ are still being written, and Pak Tu-jin is still strolling along rivers in search of stones with ‘‘biography.’’ His small garden and all the rooms of his house are packed with the stones, each of which can inspire him with a poem of wonderful images and themes. In his home they take the place traditionally given to ceramic pieces, old paintings, scrolls of calligraphy, rare books and other human artefacts cherished and treasured by the scholar or the artist. The stone has always been one of Pak Tujin’s central images, as we have seen in ‘‘The Stone Monument.’’ The English critic Coleridge said that imagination is the power of mind by which one sees human and natural figures in the strange shapes formed on the frozen window panes. Practically every person who sees such frozen shapes can exercise such imagination,

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but very rare are those who can ‘‘see’’ in the stones such symbolic images as ‘‘Waves at the Genesis,’’ ‘‘The Reunion of the Dragons,’’ ‘‘The Scar,’’ ‘‘The Cliff with Reasons,’’ etc. These are the products of a unique visionary power, strangely reminding us of modern expressionist and abstract art; for example, the works of Max Ernst, who ‘‘saw’’ such strange figures in the texture of the old wooden floor, worn bare by many decades of continuous scrubbing, as ‘‘battle ending in a kiss,’’ ‘‘rock, sea, and rain,’’ ‘‘earth tremors,’’ ‘‘sphinx in the stable,’’ etc. However, in contrast to expressionists Pak Tujin does not indulge in radical discontinuity of logic or in ‘‘systematic disruption of meaning.’’ His images are arranged in well-ordered compositions. ‘‘The Scar’’ is a fair example: Your blue scar was torn deep by water after water, Your first shame of pain still not healed, You bury your face in your ten fingers from the sun, You turn around and hide your eyes from the moon, Long after the loss of your youthful eyes You still shed tears touching your blue scar. The poet is looking at a black stone with a blue groove on it. It may look like a river, a ravine, and many other things to other people. But to the poet, it is a ‘‘scar’’ of shame in the body of the innocentlooking stone. Obviously it is a symbol of Original Sin by which man is shamed and humbled, but which at the same time puts into man the longing for the prelapsarian state. Such longing and shame make man lovable and truly human. ‘‘A deep sorrow humanized my soul,’’ writes a poet. Although the stones are very particular objects, Pak Tu-jin seldom becomes whimsically personal or incommunicably idiosyncratic. On rare occasions, however, he seems to be trying to make out that the stones have been slowly forming themselves into meaningful shapes expressly for him to discover at the destined moment and place. This is of course an instance of ‘‘pathetic fallacy,’’ in which he does not seriously indulge. On the whole, he looks for the universal meaning of the image he ‘‘sees’’ in a stone. Or to put it in another way, the image provides him with an appropriate ‘‘objective correlative’’ to the meaning he has in his inner self. Readers, who can never imagine what the poet is referring to, can share the shock, the sudden joy, of discovering the image and its charged meaning.

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Finding poetic inspiration in the stones is, to say the least, unusual. However it is natural that Pak Tu-jin should find the stones symbolic that have been eroded of their corruptible ingredients and smoothed of their sharp edges by the ever-flowing clean water. Their symbolic meaning is all too evident: the slow shaping of haphazard matter into a meaningful form, the shaping of words into the poem, the painstaking formation of the human animal into the spiritual man, the agonizing process of maturity of Pak Tu-jin’s poetic self. In an important sense, all the stones with ‘‘biography’’ are so many self-portraits of Pak Tu-jin himself. Their ‘‘biographies’’ are parts of his own biography. They reflect, or deflect, his inner self, the stones becoming alive with his meanings. ‘‘Let a green bird fly forth from you!’’ cries he to a immobile stone like a magician pronouncing his mighty spell, and, lo, a green bird in the shape of a poem takes flight. The stone becomes a bird, immobility becoming flight, matter becoming poetry. The ancient ritual of the magic known as poetry is reenacted by the master magus. Source: Yi Sang-So˘p, ‘‘A Reading of Seven Poems by Pak Tu-jin,’’ in Korea Journal, Vol. 21, No. 11, November 1981, pp. 39–46.

SOURCES Jaihiun Kim, Modern Korean Poetry, Jain, 1995, p. 122. Korean Literature Today, Vol. 1, No. 3, Winter 1996, n.p. Lee, Peter H., ed., A History of Korean Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 421. ———, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Modern Korean Literature: An Anthology, compiled and edited by Peter H. Lee, University of Hawaii Press, 1990, p. xxi. Pak Tu-Jin, ‘‘River of August,’’ in Korea Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2, February 1, 1965, p. 35. Wordsworth, William, ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2, 7th ed., edited by M. H. Abrams, Norton, 2000, pp. 235, 236. Yi Sang-so˘p (also known as Sangsup Lee), ‘‘A Reading of Seven Poems by Pak Tu-jin,’’ in Korea Journal, Vol. 21, No. 11, November 1981, pp. 39, 46.

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FURTHER READING Caprio, Mark, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945, University of Washington Press, 2009. Although the Japanese had policies of assimilation for the Koreans during the occupation, their programs were not enacted. Instead, segregation existed in schools and housing. Koreans lived as second-class citizens with few opportunities for advancement until Japanese men left for military service. This book discusses that situation and Korean views about colonial existence. Cumings, Bruce, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, Norton, 2005. Providing a background on ancient times and the influences of China and Japan, this history covers the effects of the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945, the growth of democracy in the South, and the isolation of the North. In addition, Cumings looks at the life for Korean Americans. Kim-Gibson, Dai Sil, Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women, Mid-Prairie Books, 1999. One of the worst humiliations of Japanese control was the forced prostitution of Korean women to Japanese soldiers during World War II. This book records oral history interviews and provides some background information. The documentary based on this material was broadcast on PBS. O’Neill, William L., World War II: A Student Companion, Oxford University Press, 1999. An easy-to-read collection of concise biographical and topical articles are arranged here alphabetically and cross-referenced. This book also contains a bibliography, illustrations, and maps. Yoñgho Ch’oe, Peter H. Lee, and W. Theodore de Bary, eds., Sources of Korean Tradition, Vol. 2: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, Columbia University Press, 2000. This collection of primary sources such as government documents, letters, and personal essays speak to the social, intellectual, and religious traditions that made Korea the civilization it is. The book starts with the mid-Chosin dynasty and ends with the 1998 presidential inaugural address. Yu, Ch’i-jin and Man-Sik Ch’ae, Korean Drama Under Japanese Occupation, translated and introduction by Jinhee Kim, Homa & Sekey Books, 2004. While Pak and other poets refused to publish during the war, these two prominent Korean playwrights dared to publicly voice anti-Japanese sentiments during the occupation in three plays that are presented in translation in this volume. Zong, In-Sob, Guide to Korean Literature, Hollym International, 1983. This introduction to the breadth of an ancient culture and its literature includes folk tales, drama, music, and dance.

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Seven Ages of Man William Shakespeare’s ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ is a speech from his comedy As You Like It. The lines may have been written as early 1599, but the play did not appear in print until the First Folio was published in 1623. (A folio is a book that measures about fifteen inches tall, which consists of folded sheets of paper nested together in six quires and hand-sewn.) The play As You Like It shows the influences of earlier pastoral poetry, but its plot also suggests the court intrigue and economic disorder of the late Elizabethan Age. Both of these influences are evident in the excerpted part, called ‘‘Seven Ages of Man.’’ These twenty-seven lines are a monologue from act 2, scene 7, lines 138 to 165. As You Like It is written in blank verse, that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 1623

The famous monologue ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ describes the several roles that men play during their lives. Regardless of social class, all people age, and as they do so they enact many of the same roles, but except for the infant this speech describes those that only apply to men. In the monologue, each role is described in terms of speech: the infant mews, the schoolboy whines, the lover sings, the soldier swears, the justice speaks, the old man’s voice wavers, and finally as he nears death, his voice is silenced. As You Like It is included in all complete editions of Shakespeare, such as The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (2005). As You Like It has also been published separately, for example, by

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Judith, were also baptized. Hamnet died at age eleven, but both Susanna and Judith lived to be adults. There are no records of Shakespeare’s life between the birth of his twins in 1585 and his first stage successes in London in 1592, but he likely went to London sometime around 1587 or 1588. Shakespeare worked as an actor and as a playwright and made money as a shareholder in an acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, from which he received a share of the gate receipts. Shakespeare depended on patronage for his survival as he became established, and this financial arrangement was true for most actors and playwrights. Eventually, Shakespeare became one of the owners of the Globe Theatre, which was built in 1599.

William Shakespeare (The Library of Congress)

Norton, Oxford, and Arden, all of which include extensive commentary and annotations.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY William Shakespeare was born in Stratfordupon-Avon, England, the third child and first son born to John Shakespeare, a leather worker and merchant, and Mary Arden, the daughter of a prosperous farmer. One of eight children, Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564. April 23 is the traditional date observed for both his birth and death. No known school records survive, but it is likely that Shakespeare attended the local grammar school, King’s New School, which was free. This grammar school emphasized a liberal arts education, including Latin. Shakespeare’s education probably ended after grammar school. In November 1582, an eighteen-year-old Shakespeare married twentysix-year old Anne Hathaway. Their daughter Susanna was baptized six months later. On February 2, 1585, fraternal twins, Hamnet and

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The 1623 Folio contains most of Shakespeare’s plays, but they were not published in chronological order, and the Folio does not include the dates of their original composition. Instead, dates are assigned to each work based on examination of the quarto editions, published during Shakespeare’s lifetime, or using references from contemporary letters or diaries. (Folio and quarto are terms that describe the size of books. A quarto, which is formed by sheets folded twice then cut along one fold and sewn along the remaining fold, is half the size of a folio.) The first play written by Shakespeare is thought to be Two Gentlemen of Verona, first published in the 1623 Folio, but probably composed in 1590 and 1591. The Taming of the Shrew was also first published in the 1623 Folio, but it may have been written in 1592 or earlier. Shakespeare wrote several history plays, including The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, which was first printed in 1597 but probably first performed in 1592 and 1593. Shakespeare also composed long narrative poems, including Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). Shakespeare is thought to have written or collaborated on thirty-nine plays. These include several more comedies, including The Comedy of Errors, which although not published until 1623, was first performed in 1594; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, probably written between 1594 and 1596; and Much Ado About Nothing, which was probably written in 1598. Shakespeare’s first tragedy was Romeo and Juliet, first published in 1597, followed by The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, which was not published until 1623 but was probably composed in either 1598 or 1599. As

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You Like It, which was probably written in 1599, is the last of Shakespeare’s light romantic comedies. The year 1600 is often cited as the marker for a new maturity and complexity in Shakespeare’s plays, beginning with the printing of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark in 1600. Twelfth Night, or What You Will, in 1601, is the first of the darker comedies. Several of the great tragedies followed, including The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (1602–1603), The Tragedy of King Lear, (1604–1605,) The Tragedy of Macbeth (1606), and The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra (1607–1608). In 1609, Shakespeare became an investor in the Blackfriars Theatre, where many of his plays had been staged. After 1610, Shakespeare returned to Stratford and semi-retirement. But he continued to write plays, including The Tempest (1611), which was largely composed in Stratford. Throughout his career as a playwright, Shakespeare was also composing poetry, including several hundred sonnets. Although he began creating sonnets early in his writing career, Shakespeare continued revising his sonnets during the 1590s and through the early 1600s, finally publishing the entire sequence in 1609. Shakespeare died April 23, 1616, and is buried at Stratford-upon-Avon.

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. Then the whining schoolboy with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then, a soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,

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With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank, and his big, manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange, eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

POEM SUMMARY Opening Statement: Lines 1–4 In the first several lines of ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ the speaker asserts that all men and women are players on a stage. Shakespeare compares metaphorically the world to a stage, on which all people play many roles throughout their lives. (The phrase, All the world’s a stage, is the English translation of the Globe Theatre’s Latin motto: Totus mundus agit histrionem.) The speaker’s point is that all men and women assume different roles as they live out their lives, with each person playing the role required for any given age. All men and women enter the stage—the world—the same way, by being born, and all exit the same way, by dying. Thus, all men and women have the same experience of aging. Regardless of social standing, employment, economic condition, every person is born and dies. The speaker ends this opening statement at line 4 by noting that each man will play seven roles during his life.

Infant: Lines 4–5

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The first stage of seven occurs immediately after birth. Shakespeare gives the infant a small part, only part of line 4 and line 5. The infant cries and vomits. During the sixteenth and seventeenth century, mortality rates among babies and young children were high. The crying and vomiting in infancy was to be celebrated, because it proved the child was still alive. The baby’s nurse is probably a wet nurse, hired to breastfeed the child and care for him, given that most women of social rank did not breastfeed or care for their infants. This first stage of life is the briefest.

Schoolboy: Lines 5–8 The schoolboy whines as he leaves for school each morning. He carries his books and papers in his satchel. His face is scrubbed clean by his mother, who prepares him for the day. The schoolboy is compared to a snail that creeps amongst the vines, because he goes as slowly as

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school. It is easy to understand why a schoolboy might not hurry off to school in the morning, knowing a day of memorization work awaited him. The schoolboy attends school begrudgingly, and the comparison to a snail gives a cue about how he dallies along the way.

Lover: Lines 8–10

As You Like It was filmed in 1936 and starred Sir Lawrence Olivier (Orlando) and Elizabeth Bergner (Rosalind). The director was Paul Czinner. As You Like It was filmed for television in 1963. The production starred Patrick Allen (Orlando) and Vanessa Redgrave (Rosalind) and was directed by Michael Elliott and Ronald Eyre. As You Like It: An Introduction was filmed in 1969 and starred Brian Spink (Orlando) and Jennie Goossens (Rosalind). This film gives an overview of the play, which is presented in an abbreviated form. As You Like It was filmed for Canadian television in 1983 and starred Andrew Gillies (Orlando) and Roberta Maxwell (Rosalind). The director was John Hirsch.

The lover sighs so much that he is compared to a furnace, which repeatedly expels hot air. The lover is like an adolescent boy; he is at an age when being lovesick rules his emotions. He is the infatuated would-be poet who writes bad love poems about his beloved’s eyebrows. Shakespeare makes fun here of the Petrarchan poets who wrote sonnets dedicated to a cold indifferent lover. A familiar method, called the Blazon of Beauty, was to begin by praising the lover’s beauty, starting with her hair and moving down her facial features and ending with the whiteness of her bosom. This lover writes poetry to his beloved’s eyebrows but is unable to complete the full portrait, since he possesses no real talent. (Shakespeare creates his own parody of the Petrarchan blazon in Midsummer’s Night Dream, act 5, scene 1, lines 316–28 and in Sonnet 130.)

As You Like It was filmed in 1992 and starred Bernard Tieman (Orlando) and Emma Croft (Rosalind). Directed by Christine Edzard, this British production is in modern dress.

Soldier: Lines 10–14

As You Like It was filmed in 2006 and starred David Oyelowo (Orlando) and Bryce Dallas Howard (Rosalind). Set in feudal Japan, this production was directed by Kenneth Branagh. William Mulready painted The Seven Stages of Man in 1838. The painting is displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England. It shows a street scene and a group of people, who in sum represent the seven stages. A steel-plate engraving of this painting was used to illustrate the Charles Knight two-volume edition The Works of Shakespeare, published in the 1870s. Both images can be located online.

The fourth stage of a man’s life is that of a soldier. If he is not apprenticed to a trade, does not choose to enter the church, or is not due to inherit wealth, a young man might choose to be a soldier. The soldier swears, using oaths that reflect his experiences, the foreign places he has seen, and the languages he has learned. His long bristling mustache is compared to leopard whiskers. Animals use whiskers for touch and to learn about their environment and to sense movement near their heads. In comparing the soldier’s whiskers to those of a leopard, the speaker suggests that the soldier’s mustache serves a purpose beyond decoration: It helps him hunt his enemy and helps him detect danger. The soldier is also quick to defend his honor. In fact, he is so quick to quarrel over his honor that he puts his life at risk, ‘‘even in the cannon’s mouth.’’ The soldier seeks the shortlived ‘‘bubble reputation.’’ Even if it means placing himself before a cannon, the soldier will defend his honor.

Justice: Lines 14–18 possible toward his destination. During the Elizabethan period, schoolboys would have had to memorize lengthy Latin speeches for

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The soldier who survives combat will have earned enough money to train for a profession when he leaves the military. The next age is that

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of the justice, who makes a good living, as his ‘‘round belly’’ filled with capon attests. A capon (castrated chicken) is a tender delicacy, used often to bribe local magistrates, so the suggestion is the justice is not always honest in his dealings. The justice’s appearance, however, implies that he acts the part, with his formal beard and serious expression. He knows the law, or at least he has memorized it, and is often heard to spout many important sayings, although they might be trite. The justice plays his part by spouting platitudes.

Pantaloon: Lines 18–24 The sixth age gets the most description, nearly six lines. The Pantaloon is a foolish old man. He is named after a stock character in commedia dell’arte, a form of Italian comedy. In this comedy, the pantaloon is old but still athletic. He is miserly, busily hoarding his coins and fearful that someone will try to rob him. He is easily fooled. The description fits characterizations in Italian comedy. However, here, he is older: He wears slippers, because he travels outside his house infrequently. The pantaloon stays home and guards his savings. His lean look fits with the pouch at his side, in which he carries his money. He watches every coin, not spending extra on food, which accounts for his thin build. His eyesight is failing now and he wears glasses. The pantaloon has saved the stockings of his youth and still wears them, another sign of his pennypinching, but now his old stockings are too wide for his shrunken calves, which have lost muscle tone. Once he had a strong masculine voice, but now it has child-like weakness. His money does not spare him from the ravages of time.

In the final age, man approaches death. He is like an infant again. He is senile now and requires care. He has lost his teeth and his eyesight. He can no longer taste food. The old man has lost everything he once had. He has reverted to infancy, with no control over his bodily functions and without speech.

THEMES Aging The picture of aging that Shakespeare creates in ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ is one that many people

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fear. As man ages, his physical appearance changes. The fat and muscle that create mass in his calves begin to thin, and his stockings hang on his legs. He wears glasses, and his voice wavers. As a justice, he is round and well-fed, but when he is older, he is an object of derision. In the final stage of life, he can only wish for death to release him from ever increasing deficits and infirmity.

Anti-pastoralism Pastoral refers to art that contains rural elements, such as shepherds, flocks of sheep, and countryside scenes. Pastoral elements were often used in poetry and drama to mask social, religious, or political criticism. As You Like It is a pastoral comedy, in which the two female leads, Rosalind and Celia, flee the urban court for the safety of the forest. Using the pastoral elements in an unusual way, Shakespeare has almost every character write poetry, except the two shepherds, who might have been expected to write poetry. Instead of spending their time on poetry, the shepherds actually tend to their sheep. In the ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ speech, the speaker ignores an important pastoral convention: Time never advances. In the pastoral, the beauty and serenity of nature are static and eclipse the realities of temporal progression. In the idealized pastoral world, time stops at a moment of youthful perfection, and love lasts forever. Thus, the typical pastoral romantic comedy idealizes the human condition. ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ subverts this convention by describing the fact that people age in a decidedly unromantic and relentless way.

Egalitarianism

Old Man: Lines 24–27

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Nature in the real material world is egalitarian in function. In nature, all animate beings are born and all die. All vital newborns begin in exactly the same way, crying and spitting up. As each person ages, that person is subject to the physical changes aging causes. Signs of aging afflict people over time and universally. If the aging man lives long enough, he becomes as helpless as an infant. This ‘‘second childishness’’ leaves the old man infirm and at the mercy of a caretaker. Although not everyone reaches the great age Shakespeare depicts as the final stage, the ending he describes is universal among those who do. ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ presents the basic human condition to which all people are subject. It is an egalitarian view of the human lifespan.

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Analyze a reproduction of William Mulready’s eighteenth-century painting, ‘‘The Seven Ages of Man.’’ Mulready’s work can be found online and is included in some art books. Study the painting carefully and then write an essay in which you compare Mulready’s painting to Shakespeare’s ‘‘Seven Ages of Man.’’ Explore the differences and similarities between the painting and the poem. ‘‘The Seven Ages of Woman,’’ by Agnes Strickland, is a response to Shakespeare’s ‘‘Seven Ages of Man.’’ Find a copy of Strickland’s poem and write an essay in which you compare her poem to Shakespeare’s. Discuss content, poetic style, and the choice by Strickland to use rhyme in her poem. Research the Globe Theatre, where As You Like It would have been performed. Create a PowerPoint presentation that includes diagrams of the theater, including the stage area and seating for the audience. Be sure to include information about costuming and staging of plays. The period during which Shakespeare wrote his plays is called the Golden Age of Elizabethan drama. Early in his career, Shakespeare’s most notable contemporary was Christopher Marlowe. Later in Shakespeare’s career, dramatists such as Ben Jonson and John

Time The passage of time is fundamental to mortal existence. The speaker in ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ notes the continuum of time, as it is marked and divided into periods of the human lifespan. Shakespeare chose time as his subject in many of his poems, for example, Sonnet 5, which describes how the passage of time affects everything. This sonnet describes how summer will change to winter and the leaves of summer’s trees will be gone. Although eventually summer’s flowers will die, the memory of their beauty and

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Webster were writing plays. Choose one of these three Shakespearean contemporaries and research his life and work and create a poster presentation to share with your classmates. Patronage was an important means of support for poets of Shakespeare’s age. Research patronage and write a paper on it, explaining how patronage worked and discussing both advantages and disadvantages to this method of supporting the arts. Read either ‘‘Childhood’’ or ‘‘How to Be Old,’’ both of which are included in the anthology Who Do You Think You Are? Poems about People (1990), edited by David Woolger. Compare the poem you chose to read with Shakespeare’s poem and write a short paper in which you describe your responses to these two poems. Imagine that you will live for ninety years. Write your own poem in which you describe each age of your life. Link description and action to each age, so that you are not only describing how you will look but how you will act and what you will be doing. Write a short paper to accompany your poem in which you discuss how you determined the different ages you chose and how you decided on the roles you anticipate playing.

their sweet smell endures. However, in ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ memory does not salvage something from what time steals. In ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ mortality is time-bound and absolute.

STYLE Blank Verse Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. It allows freedom from the artificiality and

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Monologue A monologue is a speech spoken by only one person and delivered to someone who is both present and listening. In ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ the speaker is Jaques, a character in As You Like It. This speaker is angry and disappointed, and his attitude tinges his monologue with cynicism.

Simile

Illustration of the Seven Ages of Man (Ó Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy)

contrivance of rigid rhyme schemes. Moreover, it sounds like natural speech. Blank verse allows the dramatist the freedom to create different speaking styles for characters. Although other poets experimented with blank verse, Christopher Marlowe was the first Elizabethan poet to master the form. Shakespeare quickly adopted it, as did other Elizabethan and Jacobean poets, including John Milton, who used blank verse in his narrative epics, such as Paradise Lost. Blank verse is effectively used in ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ to convey the speaker’s natural speech patterns.

Extended Metaphor A metaphor is an analogy that describes one object in terms of another and ascribes to one object the qualities of the second object. The metaphor may be simple, meaning it contains a single comparison, or complex, meaning it incorporates many parallels. ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ presents an extended metaphor. The initial correspondence is between the world and a stage in a theater. Coupled with this first pair is the idea that people living their lives are akin to players on stage acting out their roles. The sounds people make during their lives, and how over time those sounds change, are equated with the voices used by actors as they deliver their lines. The different periods of life are equated with the different acts in a play. The curtain goes up at birth, the first act, and it falls with death, the final act. The suggestion of this extended metaphor is that life itself is a performance, and each person is destined to play his part.

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A simile is a figure of speech in which two dissimilar subjects are compared, using the words like or as. The comparison is expressed directly. For example, in ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ at line 9, the lover’s sigh is compared to a furnace. Although a lover and furnace are very different in many ways, they have in common their output of hot air. That a person can expel as much hot air as a furnace is an example of hyperbole, meaning gross exaggeration; hyperbole is used for effect or emphasis.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Life in Shakespeare’s London By the end of the sixteenth century, about 200,000 people lived in London, making it the largest city in Europe. About half of the population lived within the walls of the city, with the remainder living in the suburbs. The city itself stretched only about a mile in length along the north side of the Thames River. London was surrounded by open countryside and within the city there were gardens and trees, too, but within the city walls, many streets were narrow, polluted with animal and human waste, and disease-ridden. Given that there was no sewer system, inhabitants relied upon ditches alongside the streets and alleys to carry refuge and human waste to the Thames, where it was dumped. The lack of sanitation led to the spread of disease. There were no city lights, and criminals loitered in the streets. Houses of prostitution and the theaters, including Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, were located outside the city walls, along the south side of the Thames. In London at this time the life expectancy at birth was only thirty years. That does not mean that most people only lived to be thirty years old; there were many people who lived to an advanced age. However, infant mortality rates were high in Shakespeare’s time, and half of all children born in poverty died before age fifteen.

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1590s: Christopher Marlowe, a dramatist and contemporary of Shakespeare, is killed in a bar fight on May 30, 1593. He is the same age as Shakespeare and has already written several important plays, including The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Today: Marlowe’s plays continue to be staged, and while he is considered an important Elizabethan poet, his plays are performed less frequently and do not have the same appeal with general audiences as Shakespeare’s plays. 1590s: The first flush toilet is invented in 1596 by poet Sir John Harington but is not popular. People continue to prefer to use the chamber pot. However, Harington does install one of the new water closets for Queen Elizabeth’s use. Today: The availability of flush toilets is taken for granted, since they are common in most western European and North American homes, but in many countries people still use outhouses.

1590s: England’s new Poor Law of 1601 finds jobs for the unemployed, provides apprenticeships for children to train for employment, and assists the elderly who are unable to work. The program is supported by new taxes. Today: The Department of Work and Pensions in Great Britain administers pensions and assists the unemployed in finding jobs. However, in spite of government efforts, child poverty continues to be a significant problem. 1590s: Shakespeare is only one of several notable poets during this period. Poets who are contemporaries of Shakespeare include Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), and John Donne (1572–1631). Today: More than four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, his plays and poetry are a central part of studies in British literature. Shakespeare’s plays and poetry are considered relevant to modern times and superior to many contemporary plays.

There were no hospitals, and most people were born and died in their homes. There were no antibiotics to fight infections, and no prescription medicine to alleviate pain, except for alcohol. Beer sales suggest that every man, woman, and child likely consumed forty gallons of beer a year. Alcohol not only eased physical pain but the pain of a difficult life.

plague. In 1603, the number of London dead from plague was 36,000. Moreover, poor crops in the mid-1590s led to periods of starvation, adding to the difficulties that Londoners faced. Although it appears that the old man described in ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ has reached a very old age, many Londoners failed to do so.

Plague and famine took their toll as well. Even the simplest of diseases could prove debilitating, and plague was not the simplest of diseases. Repeated epidemics of bubonic plague occurred in London. The wealthy could flee to more sparsely populated rural areas and thus have a chance of escaping infection. But the poor had no means to leave the city and would not have been permitted to leave in any case. In 1593, more than 15,000 Londoners died of the

Elizabethan Disorder The period from 1576 to 1642 is considered in modern times as the golden age of English drama, although it was probably not golden for those who lived through it. For more than one hundred years, farmers had been displaced by enclosure acts that fenced off agricultural land for private use as pastures. This created severe unemployment in rural areas with accompanying high inflation. Rural unemployment drove many

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people to London, making it the largest city in Europe. Widespread urban disorder developed with a capitalistic economy that replaced the feudal agrarian social order. Political intrigue and spying were commonplace and are often enacted in Shakespeare’s plays. Crop failures, the threat of war abroad, and harsh religious strife had shaken English society by the time Elizabeth I assumed the throne in 1558. Although crop failures and war continued, the reign of Elizabeth I brought relative stability and an end to religious persecutions. However, the queen’s failure to name a successor created discontent and the threat of civil war, even before her death in 1603. Initially, the reign of her successor James I was greeted with enthusiasm, but religious, class, and political divisions intensified. In spite of this turmoil, or perhaps because of it, the most important dramas in western civilization were produced during this period. Dramatists grappled with new ideas about science and philosophy, religion and politics. In addition, there was also a new emphasis on individual thought, action, and responsibility.

Numerology The significance of the number seven used in the ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ is determined by astrology and the seven planets. Seven was considered an especially meaningful number during Shakespeare’s time. There are seven virtues (faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, prudence, and temperance) and seven vices (pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth). There are also seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). The seven planets are the seven planets as named by the ancients. These include heavenly bodies not included in a modern list of planets in the solar system and do not include Earth. The ancient planets are: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon, and the Sun. When this astrology is applied to ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ the infant is associated with the Moon, and the student with Mercury, which rules students. The lover is Venus, the goddess of love, and as might be expected, the soldier is Mars, the god of war. However, the Sun, which should be in the fourth position since it signals the solar age when man is at his zenith, has been displaced by Mars. The justice is Jupiter, whereas the old man is Saturn, considered the symbol of impending senility. As the old man becomes a child again, he is again represented by the Moon.

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CRITICAL OVERVIEW Each year hundreds—perhaps thousands—of performances of Shakespeare’s plays occur. In England, the Royal Shakespeare Company stages many plays each summer in London and in Stratford-upon-Avon. The rebuilt Globe Theatre in London is the site for a season of Shakespearean plays. Many cities in Great Britain hold their own Shakespeare festivals, as well. There are Shakespeare festivals each summer in almost every state in the United States, including such well known ones as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and the Shenandoah Shakespeare Festival in Virginia. Shakespeare in the Park festivals are common in New York City and San Francisco, as well as in other cities. Canada also holds several Shakespeare festivals, including The Bard on the Beach Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. In fact, an exhaustive search would likely reveal that there are Shakespeare festivals every summer in many, and perhaps most, of the major cities in the western world. Presented in various languages, Shakespeare’s plays have wide appeal. His plays reveal timeless truths about the human psyche and the human condition, with plots that are as relevant in the twenty-first century as they were in the sixteenth century. In 2009, there were two different productions of As You Like It in Stratford-upon-Avon and in London. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s staging at Stratford-upon-Avon was described in reviews as a very dark rendering of the comedy that even includes the beheading and skinning of a dead rabbit on stage, much to the audience’s horror. No longer pastoral, this production emphasized the political realities of Shakespeare’s world. In his review of As You Like It for the Guardian, Michael Billington mentioned that Michael Boyd’s production ‘‘reflects the work’s sombre historical context’’ of 1599, with its facts of land enclosures, court intrigue, and rural homelessness. Billington also noted the strengths of the actors and that the play forgoes the usual lightheartedness of Shakespearean comedy. In his review of this same production for the Telegraph, Charles Spencer pointed out the dark elements of this production, with even the forest transformed into ‘‘a cold and wintry place,’’ entirely lacking in the balmy green comfort of a pastoral comedy. As Billington did in his review, Spencer also commented on the strength of the performances and

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‘‘a vision of the play that powerfully captures the dramatic movement from pain and fear to reconciliation and love.’’ But these two critics disagreed on the famous speech: Whereas Billington thought that Jaques’s rendering of ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ characterizes each of the seven ages so well ‘‘that he literally pipes and whistles as a wheezing old man,’’ Spencer thought that the same actor ‘‘milks the Seven Ages of Man speech a little too strenuously.’’ During the same season, the Globe Theatre in London also staged As You Like It. Spencer also reviewed this production, which he found ‘‘funnier and sunnier,’’ than the production at Stratford-upon-Avon and ‘‘almost continuously enchanting.’’ Spencer also traced ‘‘a constant feeling of wit, mischief and strong sexual attraction’’ in this production. Although Spencer did not mention the ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ specifically, he did claim that ‘‘almost every role comes to life in a production that combines great gales of audience laughter with magical moments of emotional depth,’’ during which the audience ‘‘seems to be holding its breath.’’ In a review for the Observer, Kate Kellaway admitted she ‘‘has never before seen a production belong as naturally to the Globe’s space’’ as this production of As You Like It. This is a production, Kellaway stated, with ‘‘perfect comic punctuation,’’ but it is Jaques, who ‘‘steals the show’’ and who brings a ‘‘languid wit, intelligence, and damaged complexity to the role.’’ Although Kellaway did not specifically mention the ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ speech in her review, clearly she found that the actor who delivered the speech, did so exceedingly well. These two productions of As You Like It took place 410 years after Shakespeare wrote the speech and the play, and yet audiences continued to enjoy both just as much as they likely did when they were produced in Shakespeare’s time.

CRITICISM Sheri Metzger Karmiol Karmiol teaches literature and drama at The University of New Mexico, where she is a lecturer in the University Honors Program. In this essay, she discusses what ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ reveals about the speaker, Jaques, in Shakespeare’s comedy, As You Like It.


The Merry Wives of Windsor (1592) makes fun of the romantic musings of an old man, who thinks he is still young enough to chase women. Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well (1602–1606) is a comedy that explores the foolishness of youth and the plight of the aging, who hope that the young will prove capable of taking on the obligations of adulthood. Shakespeare uses The Tragedy of King Lear (1607–1608) to explore the conflicting interests of parents and adult children and to expose the foolish decisions of two aging men. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the third Arden edition (1997), contains modern translations of each sonnet to help students better understand Shakespeare’s poetry. The Complete Poems and Translations, the 2007 Penguin edition, is a good place to begin a study of Christopher Marlowe’s poetry, which also shows the influence of the pastoral.

Elizabethan Poetry: An Anthology (2005), edited by Bob Blaisell, is an inexpensive collection of some of the most popular poetry of Shakespeare’s age.

Wayne Booth edited the collection of prose and poetry The Art of Growing Older: Writers on Living and Aging (1996). These selections, which include authors from various literary periods, suggest that old age is not quite as dismal as Shakespeare’s ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ suggests.

David Woolger edited the anthology Who Do You Think You Are? Poems About People (1990), which includes poetry by more than eighty poets from the eighth to the twentieth century. Woolger includes many writers from various cultures and covers a variety of topics, including youth and age, getting along with people, dealing with emotions, and social problems.

‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ is not a stand-alone poem. It is a speech from As You Like It, one of

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‘SEVEN AGES OF MAN’ OFFERS NOTHING NEW AND ORIGINAL TO THE AUDIENCE, BUT IT DOES REVEAL THE SADNESS THAT IS JAQUES’S LIFE.’’

Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. The speaker is Jaques, a lord attending the banished Duke of Burgundy, referred to in the play as Duke Senior. Duke Senior is Rosalind’s father and the rightful heir to the dukedom. One of several men living out their banishment in the Arden Forest, Jaques is melancholic, sarcastic, and occasionally bitter. He is also a person who believes that man’s journey from birth to death is completely without meaning. Men are born and eventually they die. Life, then, is without significance. As a character in a romantic comedy, Jaques would seem out of place in a play so filled with romance that it ends with four weddings. Understanding Jaques’s position in the play, his worldview, and his relationships with other characters is important to understanding the underlying messages of ‘‘Seven Ages of Man.’’ Understanding Jaques’s role and function in As You Like It allows readers to understand ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ more fully. Jaques is solely a Shakespearean invention. There is no corresponding character in Thomas Lodge’s 1590 prose pastoral romance, Rosalynde, Shakespeare’s source for As You Like It. In Jaques, Shakespeare has devised a solely contemplative character. Jaques thinks but does not act; he is content to stand on the sidelines, talking about other people. He entertains himself in his banishment by making barbs directed at the characters he encounters. Jaques is a jaded, melancholy philosopher, one who spouts moral precepts, just as the justice does in rendering decisions. Like the justice he satirizes in ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ with his ‘‘wise saws,’’ Jaques spouts trite platitudes and empty negative comments. In his sarcastic exchange with Orlando in act 3, scene 2, Orlando accuses Jaques of talking in cliche´s. Jaques’s so-called knowledge does not come from experience. The pithy sayings that Jaques uses are taken from ‘‘right painted cloth,’’ cheap

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tapestries used as decoration. In other words, there is nothing original or penetrating about what Jaques has to say. He is spouting the familiar sayings of the day, not unlike the framed truisms displayed in some modern homes. Jaques is a phony philosopher, whose posturing is not taken seriously by other characters in the play. In her book Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber states that Jaques’s melancholy is an affectation. Garber labels Jaques ‘‘a faddist, a self-conscious self-dramatizer,’’ who is mimicked by the fool Touchstone, and who, in turn, mimics himself. Just before Jaques utters the ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ he explains that he has met Touchstone in the forest. Jaques describes meeting Touchstone, who pretends to be as pretentious as Jaques. Jaques is amused at Touchstone’s mimicry. He laughingly tells Duke Senior: When I did hear The motley fool thus moral on the time My lungs began to crow like chanticleer, That fools should be so deep-contemplative. Jaques admires Touchstone for being similarly pompous and grandiose. In a sense Jaques is admiring himself. At the conclusion of this speech, he expresses a wish to be a ‘‘worthy fool.’’ Jesters or fools were employed in royal courts for comic entertainment, and often their witty remarks provided insight about political matters. These hired buffoons were generally very intelligent, and they were respected by people at court. At the end of the play, when the characters pair up and return to the world, Jaques chooses not to join them. His choice to enter a monastery seems to suggest he does have the makings of a fool. In fact, he is not even suited to live among ordinary people in the urban world. Although Jaques thinks himself a philosopher, he is not a deep thinker. The seven ages of man was an old tradition before Shakespeare appropriated it for As You Like It. Seven was historically a special number, assigned to the planets and to the number of vices and virtues, and the number of liberal arts. The idea that the real world is like a stage was also not original with Shakespeare. Garber states that the metaphor was a cliche´ by the time he used it and that the interest in the speech comes not from its content but from the person who delivers it. Garber observes that ‘‘when Shakespeare put these words in the mouth of one of the most affected poseurs he was making a deliberate theatrical

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decision.’’ In giving the speech to Jaques, Shakespeare makes a tired cliche´ ‘‘dramatically effective.’’ His audience pays attention to old ideas because the speaker is obviously ill-suited to deliver the words. This tactic makes both the words and the speaker more compelling.

him, she responds realistically: ‘‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’’ Thus, she undercuts his romantic posturing. All men will die, as Jaques makes clear in his speech, but they do not die from unrequited love.

It is appropriate that the speaker in ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ is a man, since the speech is about the male experience. In his book, The Seven Ages of Human Experience, David Bevington points out that ‘‘Shakespeare’s conception of human experience is that of the male,’’ which is to be expected. While male and female infants might cry and puke, only boys went to school in Shakespeare’s time and only men court women. The occupations listed are the occupations of men— soldier and justice, and as he ages, it is a manly voice that is diminished. Shakespeare’s view is the male view, and since women in Shakespeare’s world were limited to marriage and childbirth, any description of their ages, would have been decidedly brief. Thus it is a real irony that the most memorable and strongest character in As You Like It is a woman, whose actions counter Bevington’s ideas about Shakespeare’s male view. It is Rosalind who does the courting, not the male lover.

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom suggests that Jaques’s primary role is to serve as a counter to the far wittier Rosalind, who is the real star of the play. As Bloom points out, not all infants cry incessantly or puke constantly. In fact, it turns out that Jaques is a poor critic of his world. In act 4, Jaques returns to the ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ with his own commentary on his words. When challenged by Rosalind, he tells her:

The contrast between Jaques’s pessimism and Rosalind’s optimism is worth noting, since the contrast is so significant. When asked by Rosalind if he is a melancholy fellow, Jaques responds that he loves melancholy ‘‘better than laughing.’’ In contrast, strong, articulate Rosalind knows what she wants and makes sure that she gets it. She plays the pursuing lover and woos Orlando, despite the fact that he is an absolutely terrible poet, proven by these lines from a poem Orlando composes for Rosalind: Thus Rosalind of many parts By heavenly synod was devised Of many faces, eyes, and hearts To have the touches dearest prized. Heaven would that she these gifts should have And I to live and die her slave. Although he does not specifically mention her eyebrows, Orlando could be a model for the sighing lover with the ‘‘woeful ballad’’ of Jaques’s speech. Rosalind labels this poem a ‘‘tedious homily of love’’ that ‘‘wearied’’ the listeners. The poetaster Orlando is an unworthy match for the much more articulate Rosalind. When he says he will die if she will not marry

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I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation, nor the musician’s, which is fantastical, nor the courtier’s, which is proud, nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious, nor the lawyer’s, which is politic, nor the lady’s, which is nice, nor the lover’s, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

Jaques lists seven groups, thus recalling his earlier ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ speech. Rosalind responds to this speech by acknowledging that Jaques’s experiences may have allowed him to see much but that he has gained nothing from his experience. Rosalind further chides Jaques that all his experience has only made him sad and left him with little appreciation for all that he has seen and done. Indeed, Jaques’s melancholy affects him so severely that Rosalind fears that he would ‘‘almost chide God’’ for making him the man he is. Jaques has neither the melancholy of the student nor that of the soldier nor the melancholy of the justice nor that the lover nor the melancholy of any other being. He neglects to mention the infant by name who is incapable of melancholy or the aged, whom he perhaps believes to be past envy. But Jaques’s life is filled with unhappiness, which he cherishes and nurtures. His willingness to embrace his unhappiness casts his speech into a whole new light. ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ is spoken by a man, whose view of the world is colored by his own bitterness. Though appearing true, his words cannot be fully trusted. Finally, it is important to know that Jaques’s speech is satirized when Touchstone in act 5

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discusses a certain courtier’s beard, which he claims is the cause for a quarrel seven times removed. The seven instances are the ‘‘Retort Courteous,’’ the ‘‘Quip Modest,’’ the ‘‘Reply Churlish,’’ the ‘‘Reproof Valiant,’’ the ‘‘Countercheck Quarrelsome,’’ the ‘‘Lie Circumstantial,’’ and finally the ‘‘Lie Direct.’’ Entertained by this story, Jaques does not realize its application to his own speech. Touchstone provides seven responses, but Jaques fails to see the connection. Garber notes that Jaques ‘‘is not instructed’’ by Touchstone’s speech. He does not see his own failings, largely because he is so focused on the failings of others. Nor does Jaques see that even the fool Touchstone does not respect him. In the final lines of ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ Jaques says that at the end of life man is ‘‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’’ But he is wrong. As Jaques finishes this speech, Orlando enters, carrying Adam, an elderly servant. In contrast to Jaques’s speech, Adam is not without everything. He may not have his teeth or his hearing, but he is respected and venerated as a wise elder and cared for lovingly in his old age. All that Jaques says in ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ is refuted by either the characters in the play or by his own melancholic musings. As Rosalind makes clear, Jaques has learned nothing. His many experiences have not left him any the wiser. Jaques asserts stock phrases and commonplace platitudes. ‘‘Seven Ages of Man’’ offers nothing new and original to the audience, but it does reveal the sadness that is Jaques’s life. Source: Sheri Metzger Karmiol, Critical Essay on ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers In the following essay, Kambaskovic-Sawers examines several of Shakespeare’s sonnets and discusses the use of voice and the possibility of an overarching story arc throughout the whole of all the sonnets. The nature of a sonnet sequence as a poetic art form is essentially twofold: it contains selfsufficient, prosodically complex poems, each seeking to develop an idea to its conclusion; but it also typically functions as a sequence, an integrated work in which poems have been ordered, and characters fashioned, to make sense when the work is read from beginning to end. It seems hardly necessary to point this out; yet, while the sonnets of the Petrarchan discourse receive what appears to be continuous

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SHAKESPEARE’S FOCUS ON THE IMPACT OF REAL RELATIONSHIPS, SUPERIMPOSED ON THE PETRARCHAN POETICS OF UNSATISFIED DESIRE, REPRESENTS A GENUINE DEVELOPMENT IN THE HISTORY OF FIRST-PERSON SPEECH IN THE SONNET SEQUENCE GENRE.’’

critical attention, acknowledgment of their ‘‘sequentiality’’ is rare and at best tacit. There is a need to turn critical attention to mechanisms that sonneteers employ to foster a perception of cohesion, as well as to acknowledge that such preoccupations betray the presence of novelistic thinking. The sonnet sequence genre constructs a double sense of immediacy: drawing on the lyricism of its constituent sonnets, it also often generates a perception of a personal narrative when the sequence is read from beginning to end. Sonneteers use many speaker figures or voices in the sonnets that constitute a sequence; one of the more striking examples is certainly Petrarch’s giving of the first-person-plural voice to ‘‘little animals’’ in his Sonnet 8. Yet varied uses of voice in individual sonnets detract little, if at all, from the impression created in the mind of the reader that they are reading a love story told in the first person. The disjointed nature of the sonnet sequence ‘‘voice’’ is an important part of its effect. Thus, talking about the birth of the sonnet sequence vogue, Jacques Barzun writes: ‘‘[Petrarch] fashioned into a shapely quasi narrative work, a kind of allusive autobiography . . . Sonnet sequences like Petrarch’s or Shakespeare’s make possible a narrative-by-episode; the poet need not versify any connective matter as he must in an epic. Rather, he anticipates by five or six hundred years the technique of film and television’’; and Roland Greene considers the history of Petrarchism from the fourteenth to the twentieth century representative of the staged development of the sequences ‘‘fictional’’ mode. As such, it is a rare literary genre to offer first-person fictions to the medieval and early modern reader, and for a long time the only

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one to deal with erotic subject matter in the first person. The link between medieval first-person genres and Dante and Petrarch, originators of the genre, is clear: St. Augustine’s Soliloquia and Confessions, and Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae are considered to be standard sources for Dante’s work as well as Petrarch’s Secretum. The public letter, another one of Petrarch’s favorite genres, also relies on the first-person voice and self-fictionalization, a unique, creative process of authored selfhood based on literary and cultural subtext, as well as the essentially documentary processes such as self-betrayal, self-representation, self-fashioning, and autoethnography. Petrarch’s decision to remove the first-person prose surrounding the poems in Dante’s La Vita Nuova, the resulting complexity of his II Canzoniere, and the subsequent popularity of the Petrarchan (proseless) sonnet sequence model may all have had implications for the development of first-person narration. The context within which individual sonnets in a sequence are considered is a question of importance where sequences initially circulated in manuscript form (yet carefully numbered by their authors), such as Petrarch’s II Canzoniere and Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, are concerned. It is equally important for linear and circular sequences; seemingly disjointed or frequently revised sequences, such as Michael Drayton’s Idea; as well as those sequences, such as Shakespeare’s Sonnets, that have the best of both worlds: printed to be read in a linear manner yet, as James Schiffer has suggested, potentially brilliantly constructed to make the collection seem as if it originally had an exclusive primary audience. Whether read more or less linearly, the voices of the sonnet sequence speakers are constructed by their authors, and it is methods used to construct them in a way that generates reader interest, sympathy, and involvement that deserve closer attention. Perhaps, however, a caveat is in order. I have structured my analysis outside the current scholarly debate on whether all English sonnet sequences follow a tripartite, ‘‘Delian’’ structure that unites a sequence of sonnets, Anacreontics, and a longer narrative poem—usually a complaint, or in Edmund Spenser’s case, Epithalamion—into an integral work in which each section plays a carefully orchestrated role. I have made Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence itself

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my primary concern for two main reasons: first, ambiguous characterization and its role in reader involvement can be traced back to Petrarch, a poet who worked two hundred years before the ‘‘Delian structure’’; and second, narrativity of the complaints and the Epithalamion is not a category that warrants contesting. Despite occasional mentions in critical literature of tension as an important mainstay of a sonnet sequence, little attempt has been made to examine the role that ambiguous characterization plays in building this tension. Spenser studies provide a good example. As early as 1956, J. W. Lever noted the characterization shifts in Amoretti, but dismissed them as ‘‘structural inconsistencies.’’ Similarly, Kenneth Larsen acknowledged the ‘‘unease’’ present in some of the sonnets, but ascribed this to insufficient poetic skill. Carol Kaske noted the ambiguity of Spenser’s speaker’s character, but explained it in terms of character development, of ‘‘emotional progression from sexual conflict to Christian-humanist resolution of Epithalamion.’’ While Donna Gibbs saw irony (an invitation to the reader to sub-read) as the structural principle of Amoretti, she denied a division between the historic author and his firstperson speaker, and thus the primacy of selffictionalization over autobiography. Roger Kuin acknowledged the role of characterization in promoting the narrativity of the sequence, but viewed the dynamic between the two main characters, ‘‘the unstable space (gap) between them,’’ as the main narrative motor. He also suggested the presence of two plots in Amoretti, one based on the fidelity/ cruelty topos, and the other on a ‘‘love conformable to . . . the bold equation of eros and agape,’’ yet ambiguous characterization, which clearly forms the basis for both of these ‘‘plots,’’ remains unexplored. Lisa Klein saw the clash of ‘‘irreconcilable ethics—love as domination versus love as freely chosen submission’’—as the ‘‘main conflict in Spenser’s poetic tribute,’’ but sought to examine this conflict for the insight it might provide into the author’s philosophical standpoint rather than its potential for reader involvement. Perhaps unlike any other aspect of the discussion on Shakespeare’s sequence, there appears to be little critical disagreement that the character of Shakespeare’s speaker is indeed ambiguous. He has been described in terms of his ‘‘anomaly’’ and ‘‘unpredictability,’’ his ‘‘claims undercut by slippery language’’ and defiance of ‘‘sequential logic,’’ as well as a ‘‘poetics of narcissism’’ that

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emerges from ‘‘relationships between consecutive sonnets that are bewilderingly unstable.’’ Yet the link between the speaker’s contradictions and sonnet sequence integrity has not, to my knowledge, been explicitly made. Because I wish to suggest character ambiguity as the aspect bridging the space between lyric and fictional aspects of a sonnet sequence, in this essay I will look at how an ambiguous character has been built out of remodeled myth, interactions of disparagement and praise, and sophisticated voice-gendering. Then, seeking to show how character ambiguity relates to reader involvement and a sense of sonnet sequence integrity, I will propose that ambiguous characterization in a sonnet sequence triggers an intellectual and emotional response I would call splintered identification, whereby the reader simultaneously sympathizes with some of the speaker’s aspects while resenting others. This process generates tension, but what may be called catharsis is never reached, so the reader’s mind is recruited to connect individual lyrical units into an integral work. Instantiated by Petrarch, the mechanism draws on the tendency of a reader’s narrative consciousness to make up logical connections where they appear to be missing, and is ideally suited to an environment with no conventional narrative, informed by the complexity, polarity, and viscosity of the first-person voice. As I have argued elsewhere, ambiguous speakers appear and perform their integrating functions in Petrarch’s as well as all the major sonnet sequences of the Elizabethan period. However, the difference between Shakespeare’s and other great Elizabethan sonnet sequences lies in the degree and complexity of his main characters ambiguity, as well as in the skill with which this complexity is managed. Shakespeare’s contradictory speaker stands as one of the most important elements of the artistic impact and lasting vitality of the sequence. His never-resolved ambiguities provide thematic links between the two parts of the work, inducing the reader to question the speaker’s motives. This silent questioning acts as a fictional motor, fostering the perception of the sequence as an integral work with the (disjointed and contradictory) speaker at its center. The constant shifting of Shakespeare’s speaker’s voice could thus be seen to betray what Mikhail Bakhtin called ‘‘creative disorder and the plurality of voices’’ or ‘‘narrative polyphony,’’ a sign of a novelistic principle at work within a genre.

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The question of Shakespeare’s authorization of the order of the Sonnets is implicit in any discussion that treats his sequence as a whole. As is well known, Shakespeare’s authorization of the sequence is questioned by many, on various grounds; more often than not, questioning authorization implies questioning the ability of the sequence to function as a work of fiction. Yet many of these doubts are presented in contradictory terms, probably due to the unease that excessive biography making of the Sonnets has inspired. For instance, according to Heather Dubrow, ‘‘Critics impose a narrative and dramatic framework on a sequence that resists those modes,’’ but she subsequently proposes a variant reading that offers an alternative fiction. Paul Ramsay denies the Sonnets authorization and integrity, to reaffirm them shortly afterward: ‘‘Had Shakespeare invented a story to build poems on, it would have been more . . . realized . . . What else are we to think? . . . That Shakespeare wrote some 500 sonnets creating a full story, and that only these 154 remain, sonnets 1–126 somehow having preserved chronological order?’’ (What he seems to be saying is that a story is present but unfinished, and that chronological development can be perceived in sonnets 1–126.) Helen Vendler argues, on one hand, that a lyric poem is judged memorable if the reader’s ‘‘self’’ can seamlessly inhabit the poem’s ‘‘I’’ (a definition of the lyric that in itself seems dangerously close to identification—a fictional, rather than lyrical, reader response usually linked to characterization), yet she also predicates the success of the sequence on Shakespeare’s ability to sustain ‘‘feelings in form over 154 sonnets,’’ which would imply a sense of integrity as crucial to the effect of the sequence. On the other hand, recent scholarship demonstrates a growing confidence in the idea of authorization. In the 2003 Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Katherine DuncanJones puts forward a seemingly incontrovertible case in favor of authorization, and the traditional, bipartite structure of the sequence is also, more or less apologetically, supported or implied by many Shakespearean critics and editors since Edmond Malone. Evidence demonstrating that Shakespeare’s sonnets were not in fact written in the order in which they appear in Thomas Thorpe’s 1609 edition also supports the idea of order-related authorial intent, as does the internal evidence of deliberation, notorious for defying attempts at reordering. Most important,

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exciting as it is to imagine a discovery of Shakespeare’s autograph different from Thorpe’s 1609 text, such a discovery would not change the cultural influence that Shakespeare’s sequence exerted over the past 450 years or diminish its value as a field of study. On balance, in this article 1 will consider the order of the poems in Shakespeare’s Sonnets to be based on Thorpe’s 1609 text and indicative of authorial intent. Even the briefest and most general of attempts to summarize Shakespeare’s Sonnets reveals more characters than a reader of sonnet sequences is accustomed to, deployed with elements of plot and suspense. Despite the paucity of gendered pronouns, the first part of the sequence gives the impression of being concerned primarily with the young man, and the text allows for a possibility of a homoerotic reading. The second, shorter story maps the speaker’s attempts to comprehend the continued and profound emotional impact of a consummated relationship with a female protagonist. The two ‘‘stories’’ also have complications: jeopardy to loyalty, the rival poet, the periodic absences and suggested dalliances, and, last but not least, the speaker’s devastating suspicion of an affair between his two beloveds. Both ‘‘stories’’ remain unresolved, and the sequence ends at the highest point of the reader’s intellectual and emotional involvement, leaving a lasting impression of the speaker’s emotional turmoil. It also leaves a sense that an integral work has been read. Rather than showing neglect for the depth of Shakespeare’s themes or the volumes of criticism attesting to them, this rudely brief synopsis underpins my conviction that not unlike his plays, Shakespeare’s sequence works to enhance the intellectual impact of its themes by underwriting them with the emotional engagement of the audience. Granted, a summary of a poem sequence is nothing but a snapshot of an individual receptive consciousness at work. However, it is precisely our ability to summarize—as well as the points of similarity that inevitably arise between individual retellings of Shakespeare’s Sonnets—that suggests that the connective ability of our minds has been successfully recruited to piece a story out of 154 distinct, self-contained lyrical poems, most of which employ classic second-person address or explore complex material not directly related to the ‘‘plots.’’ This is a remarkable feat—and one, I would like to suggest, achieved by the presence in the Sonnets of original decisions that are essentially novelistic.

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Shakespeare’s sequence has two plots, combined into an overarching third story: a voice that fosters a sense of intimacy with the reader and foils its richly polyvalent subtexts; and the absence in the sequence of a professed erotic rhetorical goal, which results in a focus on the speaker’s emotional outcomes beyond the pursuit of consummation. All of these aspects of Shakespeare’s sequence involve ambiguous characterization of the speaker, and none of them are to be found at the same level of development in other contemporaneous sequences. Although his final result circuitously reclaims a fundamentally Petrarchan purpose (to tell a story of the journey of the speaker’s writing self as he is abased and ennobled by a multifaceted experience of love), Shakespeare arrives at this purpose by non-Petrarchan means. Reading the Sonnets, the reader recognizes the speaker’s frustration, which is crucial to the genre; yet its objective of sexual gratification, which the sonnet sequence reader has come to expect, is missing. Both of Shakespeare’s ‘‘stories’’ contain non-Petrarchan elements, connected by formal means (characters recur in both ‘‘stories,’’ the second foreshadowed in the first) as well as thematically (by themes employed in both stories). Remodeling of myth, ambiguous gendering of the speaker’s voice, as well as the interaction of disparagement and praise are all such elements; they have been used to highlight the aimlessness of the sequence and dramatize the speaker’s inner fluctuations between authority and weakness, enhancing the appeal of the character. Shakespeare’s speaker applies to a man what by now have become commonplaces of Petrarchan misogynist insult. Purporting to praise the addressee’s beauty, he implies in the man an inability to love (10.4), an obsession with deceitful appearances (53.5–8), vacuity, lack of constancy (53.13–14), and insufficient intelligence or vanity (84.9–14). Embedded in a sonnet of praise, disparaging couplets are revealed only once the alternating rhymes have been removed: Look in thy glass, and there appears a face ... Dulling my lines, doing me disgrace. ... And more, much more, than in my verse can sit Your own glass shows you when you look in it. (103.7–14) Ostensibly expressing idolatrous sentiment akin to the Trinitarian rhetorical formulas of the

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Athanasian Creed, the speaker could also be accusing the young addressee of promiscuity: Fair, kind and true have often lived alone, Which three, till now, never kept seat in one (105.13–14) At this point Shakespeare had already used ‘‘seat’’ to suggest female sexuality in the Sonnets (‘‘Ay me, but yet thou mightst my seat forbear’’ [41.9]), and Samuel Daniel used it in similar way in Delia (‘‘There my soules tyrant ioyes her, in the sack / Of her owne seate, whereof I made her guide’’ [39.5–8]). The feminine focus of the metaphor also allows for the possibility that the accusation to the young man quietly employs an element of misogyny. The speaker has similar motives in appropriating the Ovidian figure of Philomela, semantically inseparable from the ideas of rape and speaking out by alternative means after a violent silencing: As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing, And stops her pipe in growth of riper days ... Therefore, like her, I sometime hold my tongue, Because I would not dull you with my song. (102.8–14) Here, ‘‘Philomel’’ has been employed to project tension between inspiration and loathing, and by ‘‘sloping her pipe’’ the speaker is revealed as his own violator. First, the seemingly misaligned pronouns in my previous sentence will already have called attention to the gender ambiguity of Shakespeare’s image. The ambiguity does not seem to arise solely from the uncertainty that surrounds the use of pronouns in the quarto, where the text reads ‘‘stops his pipe’’ (120.9) (‘‘her pipe’’ is an emendation favored by Katherine DuncanJones, based on the clash with Q ‘‘Therefore, like her’’ [120.13] and a proposal that the Q ‘‘his’’ is a misreading of the manuscript ‘‘hir,’’ whereas C. Knox Pooler, Stephen Booth, and Gwynne Blakemore Evans all retain ‘‘stops his pipe’’) but primarily from Shakespeare’s decision to use a female figure for his speaker. Gwynne Blakemore Evans unwittingly acknowledges this even as he proposes a factual error on Shakespeare’s part (‘‘The error may well be Shakespeare’s,’’ he writes, ‘‘who . . . is thinking of himself as Philomel’’). And second, the speaker’s self-imposed silence is supremely ambiguous. In one possible reading the speaker is submissive and ‘‘holds his tongue,’’ because he does not

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wish to ‘‘dull,’’ or bore, the addressee; in another, he assumes ironic authority and suggests that his tongue could render the addressee dull. Lest the latter meaning of the verb ‘‘dull’’ escape the reader, it is reemployed in the very next sonnet, which purports to praise the addressee’s glorified indescribability: a face That overgoes my blunt invention quite, Dulling my lines, and doing me disgrace. (103.6–8) Even when it claims Petrarchan sobramar, ‘‘love which surpasses speech’’ (102.3–4), the speaker’s silence could imply contempt. By the same token, calling the youth a ‘‘pattern’’ for all human flowers (98) acquires a deeply ironic meaning when we consider Shakespeare’s variations on the Petrarchan comparison of the beloved with flowers. These variations involve, among other things, using the lily (94.14)—a flower that elicits a dual response in the contemporary imagination as a symbol of purity, but also toxicity linked to malodorous putrefaction and disease, as well as terms of criminality, unease, and threat: The forward violet thus did I chide: ... the purple pride ... in my love’s veins thou hast too grossly dyed. The roses fearfully on thorns did stand, One blushing shame, another white despair; A third, nor red, nor white, had stol’n of both, ... But for his theft, in pride of all his growth, A vengeful canker ate him up to death. (99) Indeed, insult to the young man, concealed beneath the rhetoric of respect, often draws on the subversion of social norms. Having presented his young addressee with a notebook (77), the speaker scornfully rejects his reciprocal gift of tables (a hand-bound notebook) and reports having given it to someone else (122). Although written in a way that stages submission, such rejection breathes disrespect as it contravenes Elizabethan decorum of patronage, founded on the reciprocal Senecan theory of gift giving. Signaling offense and, particularly, giving away the addressee’s gift are rude and potentially dangerous gestures. By making them the speaker rejects socially sanctioned reciprocity out of hand. The device quietly but

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effectively implies that the speaker’s need for equality has reached a desperate stage. The speaker’s rudeness repels, his despair attracts; splintered identification leaves the reader’s reactions divided. Some of the speaker’s most powerful expressions of disparagement depend on the reader’s recognition of subtext. Sonnet 20 offers a prime example of this. The poem begins by describing the addressee as both male and female. This is presented as perfection, yet this sonnet has a long history of eliciting unease in its readers. A cultural duality surrounds androgynous myths: the laudatory ‘‘layer’’ works by association with the ‘‘positive’’ androgynous figures, such as Androgynos, a Platonic being of near-divine perfection, power, and hubris; Hermaphroditus, a symbol of unity in marriage; Phoebus Kitharoidos or Apollo Citaredo (Apollo with the Lyre), a personification of complete poetic consciousness; Venus bijormis, a figure of generative self-sufficiency; and many other mythical figures symbolizing greatness, with ambiguous gender as a subsidiary characteristic. The ‘‘disparaging’’ layer, on the other hand, draws on the ‘‘negative’’ associations that androgynous figures evoke: Ovid’s contempt for Hermaphroditus (Met, IV379) finds many echoes in early modern iconography and some contemporary writers represent androgyny as a monstrosity to be scrupulously concealed. These dualities aside, however, Shakespeare’s concealed insult should be sought in the way Nature is shown to have created the addressee: she suddenly becomes so taken with her creation that she cannot resist turning her into a man. The sonnet presents this process as a compliment to the speaker’s beauty: And for a woman wert thou first created, Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting (20.9–10). Yet a compliment this can never be. By representing a man hastily created from a woman, Shakespeare is consciously mocking three crucial subtextual frameworks: God’s creation of Man in the book of Genesis; the myth of Nature’s creation of (the male) Man, a process that was seen to symbolize the panegyric precisely because of the associated painstaking effort, care, and forethought it involved; and the widely circulated Aristotelian and Galenic commonplaces of the defectiveness female-yielding gestation, clearly known to Shakespeare:

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[S]ince nature always intends and plans to make things most perfect, she would constantly bring forth men if she could; and that when a woman is born, it is a defect and mistake of nature, . . . as is . . . one who is born blind, or lame, or with some other defect . . . A woman can be said to be a creature produced by chance and accident. (Castiglione, The Courtier, III. II) Macbeth: Bring forth men-children only! For thy undaunted mettle should compose Nothing but males. (Macbeth, 1.7.73–75) It is clear that instead of praise, Sonnet 20 actually offers a two-pronged insult: not only has the addressee been created at whim and without forethought, but also by repairing a woman, a ‘‘defect of nature’’ and a product of a natural ‘‘accident.’’ As has been shown, the sonnets to the young man conceal disparagement under the guise of praise. Sonnets to the dark lady mirror this approach: they conceal praise under the guise of disparagement. The lady’s appearance is the first example of this. The sonnets to the dark lady begin with an apology that ‘‘in the old age black was not counted fair’’ (127.1), which suggests that the lady’s looks, as well as the speaker’s taste in women, diverge from the Petrarchan norm. Nevertheless, the first descriptions of the lady seem carefully orchestrated to suggest beauty; the lady’s hair or skin will not have been mentioned for another three sonnets, and black eyes have no claim to historic novelty—they are the norm. The sum of contemporary precepts of female beauty, Federico Luigini da Udine’s Libro della bella donna, printed in Venice in the 1540s, defines ideally beautiful eyes as ‘‘black, like mature olives, pitch, velvet or coal, for such are the eyes that belong to Laura, Angelica, Alcina and the beloveds of Propertius, Horace and Boccaccio,’’ and, as Shakespeare no doubt knew, to Sidney’s Stella. Golden locks and florid cheeks may have been fashionable, but it was not entirely anomalous to think a dark woman beautiful, as the reputation of Mary Queen of Scots attests. The speaker is, in fact, circuitously claiming some legitimacy for his taste. Yet the speaker does not seem attracted to the lady because of her physical, intellectual, or moral excellence. On the contrary, much care has been taken to represent this attraction as self-generated, with no basis in ‘‘reality.’’ Shakespeare’s speaker’s schizophrenic division occurs, remarkably, outside the classically Petrarchan standoff between the body (pro) and mind (contra); his self appears

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conflicted between intellectual and sensual reluctance pitched against an inexplicable emotional craving: Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited To any sensual feast with thee alone; But my five wits, nor my five senses, can Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee (141.7–10) Nor is the speaker’s frustration caused by the lady’s unavailability, for she is clearly available. Sonnet 129, the third sonnet of the dark lady group, acknowledges consummation as soon as plausible. What, then, is the reason for the speaker’s frustration? What is Shakespeare’s purpose in remodeling the Petrarchan convention of stymied desire? The sequence represents two accounts of emotional subjugation lodged in aware (as opposed to frustrated) thralldom. Shakespeare’s focus on the impact of real relationships, superimposed on the Petrarchan poetics of unsatisfied desire, represents a genuine development in the history of firstperson speech in the sonnet sequence genre. By moving his focus away from a time when a relationship is imagined and into the forum of real relationships, Shakespeare demonstrates that longing does not represent the end of a sonnet sequence, and that consummation does not represent the end of narrative. In fact, he demonstrates that the sonnet sequence genre in its original form is no longer sufficient unto itself. The strongest bid the Sonnets make to independence from Petrarchism is also one of their important contributions to literary history. It rests on the unlikely distinction of not having a rhetorical goal. Unlike the other Petrarchan speakers, Shakespeare