Poetry for Students, Volume 35: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Poetry 9781414441832, 1414441835, 9781414449562, 1414449569

Table of contents :
Advisors......Page 3
Table of Contents......Page 6
Just a Few Lines on a Page......Page 10
Introduction......Page 12
Literary Chronology......Page 16
Acknowledgments......Page 18
Contributors......Page 20
Acquainted with the Night......Page 21
Blackberry Eating......Page 42
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage......Page 65
The Dead......Page 88
I’m Nobody! Who are you?......Page 101
In Music......Page 123
Miniver Cheevy......Page 145
Odysseus to Telemachus......Page 165
Of Modern Poetry......Page 188
River of August......Page 211
Seven Ages of Man......Page 231
Song......Page 255
Sonnet LXXXIX......Page 278
Uncoiling......Page 296
Winter......Page 315
Words Are the Diminution of All Things......Page 335
Glossary of Literary Terms......Page 359
Cumulative Author/Title Index......Page 381
Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index......Page 393
Subject/Theme Index......Page 401
Cumulative Index of First Lines......Page 407
Cumulative Index of Last Lines......Page 415

Citation preview

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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xvii

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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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. . 1 . 1 . 3 . 3 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 7 . 8 . 20 . 21

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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45 46 46 47 48 50 50 53 53 66 66

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

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

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THE DEAD (by Susan Mitchell) .

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

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

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

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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).

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

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

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

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123 123

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125 125 126 127 129 130 131 132 133 143 144

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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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168 169 169 170 172 172 173 175 190 190

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191 192 192 194 196 197 198 199 210 210

. . . . . . Author Biography . . . . . . .

211 212

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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258 259 259 260 261 264 265 267 268 274 274

SONG (by John Donne).

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

SONNET LXXXIX (by Pablo Neruda) .

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

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UNCOILING (by Pat Mora) .

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

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213 213 215 216 217 219 220 233 233 .

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276 276 277 277 278 280 281 282

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

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

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282 294 294 .

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

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

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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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361

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

373

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381

SUBJECT/THEME INDEX

CUMULATIVE INDEX OF FIRST LINES . CUMULATIVE INDEX OF LAST LINES

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387

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395

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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 sixty- minute 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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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 









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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.

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 











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.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 







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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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 







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.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

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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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 





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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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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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

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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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 





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 on´ce 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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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 





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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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 

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.

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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.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

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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Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

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.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 

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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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

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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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 









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-Franc¸ois 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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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 









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.’’

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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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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 





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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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 







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. Yo˜ngho 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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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 







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.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 









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’s speaker does not seek to overcome a status quo; instead, the author’s focus is firmly on the speaker’s emotional outcomes. Frustration has moved away from external sources and become firmly rooted in the speaker’s consciousness. Shakespeare’s placement of his speaker’s infatuation with the dark lady at a time in the ‘‘story’’ that follows consummation, as well as the un-Petrarchan loathing with which he describes the event, render the subsequent pleas for the attention of the lady—the one already won and loathed—all the more striking. In fact, begging for the same lady’s exclusive attention, Shakespeare divides the reader’s loyalties by superimposing the ‘‘feminine’’ rhetoric of entreaty (‘‘dear heart,’’ ‘‘forbear’’) on the patriarchal ideal of chaste female eyes directed only at their lord (139.4–5). To a

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contemporary reader, the contrast projects an image of embattled masculinity, a character whose emotional needs pull in the opposite direction from social expectations. The technique can involve considerable ethical ambiguity, as when the speaker’s frustration finally erupts in a curious merging of the ‘‘feminine’’ rhetoric of entreaty with the ‘‘masculine’’ rhetoric of threat: Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press (140.1) For if I should despair, I should grow mad (140.9) Similar fluctuations in the gendering of the voice are observable in the section to the young man. When the speaker feels that the young man’s absences are sapping his strength, he reclaims his authority in a ‘‘masculine’’ voice that hints at inconsequential infidelities of his own: Yet seemed it winter still, and, you away, As with your shadow I with these did play (98.13–14) The speaker uses this ‘‘masculine’’ voice to say he is uninspired and bored, or to threaten that the addressee’s role in his life could be temporary: do not kill The spirit of love with perpetual dullness (56.7–8) From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! (97.2) The speaker also uses his ‘‘masculine’’ voice to imagine that the addressee is listening to his words from the perspective of ‘‘feminine,’’ receptive docility: This is my home of love: if I have ranged, Like him that travels I return again (109.5–6) For nothing this wide universe I call, Save thou, my rose (109.13–14) And worse essays proved thee my best of love (110.7–8) Mine appetite I never more will grind On newer proof (110.10–11) Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best, Even to thy pure and most most loving breast. (110.13–14) The last example uses the rhetorical figure of place, where a word is repeated to show that the opposite is meant: the speaker’s praise, once again, implies disparagement—even tacit violence.

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The ‘‘masculine’’ voice is also used to describe the addressee in Petrarchan terms that are traditionally associated with female sexual or procreative appeal. Thus the addressee’s ‘‘beauty’s rose’’ must be opened and distilled, his ‘‘fresh ornament’’ preserved, time’s action to ‘‘dig deep trenches’’ in the addressee’s ‘‘beauty’s field’’ prevented—either by persuading the speaker to procreate or by immortalizing him in poetry. Each image appears to have been especially selected for its ability to elide the sexual and the autopoetic, as well as to imply in the addressee an enabling, ‘‘feminine’’ function for the speaker’s ‘‘masculine’’ authority and creativity. By contrast, the speaker also constructs a ‘‘female’’ voice, predicated on characteristics that are traditionally associated with women, such as submission or proneness to wiles in the context of seduction. The speaker uses his ‘‘female’’ voice when he employs the language of injured ownership to describe his feelings (‘‘take,’’ ‘‘robb’ry’’ ‘‘mine/thine,’’ ‘‘usest,’’ ‘‘bear’’ ‘‘hast/had,’’ ‘‘steal’’), when he ‘‘forgives’’ the addressee’s transgressions in a way that accuses him, or when he stages submission in order to determine the outcome of the dynamic: do forgive thy robb’ry, gentle thief, Although thou steal thee all my poverty ... Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows, Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes. (40) It is also in his ‘‘feminine’’ voice that Shakespeare’s speaker claims ignorance where it is obvious that he is skilled, and the one in which he protests his emotional and sexual magnanimity: But thou art all my art, and dost advance As high as learning, my rude ignorance. (78.13–14) Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure. (20.14) Here, the speaker promises to the young man that he can tolerate his infidelities if he can refrain from being deliberately cruel toward him. The theme is echoed in the dark lady sonnets (140.14) and is exceptionally effective in portraying thralldom. Another similarly effective technique is that used in Sonnet 144, which shows the speaker at once angered by the beloveds’ suspected infidelity and voyeuristically attracted to it: Suspect I may, but not directly tell; ... I guess one angel in another’s hell. (144.10–12)

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Other interactions of disparagement and praise also offer thematic links between the two parts of the sequence. In both instances, love is represented as an addiction or an incurable disease (118.14, 147.1–2), and both of the beloveds possess the devil-like ability to make sin and corruption irresistibly attractive (95.1, 9; 150.6–8). Yet another such link, crucially, serves to signal that the speaker has seen through the deceit of both: And to the painted banquet bids my heart (47.6) Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill (147.2) Ambiguous characterization underpins the thematic links that turn the speaker into the focus of the sequence and enhance the perception of the sonnet sequence as an integral work of fiction. The speaker’s ambiguous autopoetics add to the reader’s fascination. Where the English Petrarchan convention dictates gentle disparagement of other poets to position oneself as original, Shakespeare’s speaker achieves the same purpose by employing the opposite strategy. On one hand, he pretends to disparage his own style in a way that reads suspiciously like bragging: Why write I still all one, ever the same, ... That every word doth almost tell my name (76.5–7) On the other, by this stage the speaker has already voiced insecurity in terms more genuine and profound than Petrarchan staged modesty: For I am shamed by that which I bring forth And so should you, to love things nothing worth. (72.13–14) Similarly, Shakespeare’s speaker promises to immortalize yet also explicitly claims the selfreflexive value of his praise (39.2). The speaker’s subtle schizophrenic divisions attest to the author’s characterization skill. The fluctuations of the speaker’s tone from ‘‘masculine’’ to ‘‘feminine,’’ his tenor from authority to self-abasement, his claims of grandeur undercut by dread, the intensity of his attempts to destabilize his beloveds with no apparent purpose; the intensity of his efforts is, in fact, inversely proportionate to hope. By replacing consummation, the traditional sonnet sequence goal, with the addressee’s and the lady’s attention, loyalty, and thralldom—all elusive, emotional categories,

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SHAKESPEARE’S FINAL STAGE IS A PARADOX: A STATE OF LIVING DEATH, HARDER TO CAPTURE THAN DEATH ITSELF, ‘SANS TEETH, SANS EYES, SANS TASTE, SANS EVERYTHING.’ ’’

not easily ‘‘pursued’’—Shakespeare simultaneously harkens back to the Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas of wooing of the soul by rhetorical means, and heralds modern first-person writing and its quest to portray the multiplicity of personal reality. Self-contradicting characterization elicits splintered identification in the reader; this response generates interest and reader involvement, causing ‘‘narrative’’ responses (‘‘What happens next? I wonder what will happen to him? Will he be all right?’’) rather than only lyrical ones (‘‘How true—it could be me saying this’’). Shakespeare’s divided character promotes reader involvement and fosters perception of his sequence as an integral work. Source: Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers, ‘‘Three Themes in One, Which Wondrous Scope Affords: Ambiguous Speaker and Storytelling in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets,’’’ in Criticism, Vol. 49, No. 3, Summer 2007, pp. 285–305.

Richard Barbieri In the following essay, Barbieri discusses Shakespeare’s seven ages of man and refers to examples from other literary works to illustrate the ages. Jaques’ ‘‘seven ages’’ speech from Shakespeare’s As You Like It is one of the dozen texts assigned for memorization by teachers who want their students to graduate with at least a little of the Bard in their souls. Never mind that it is immediately contradicted by the appearance of hearty old Adam, who bears no resemblance to any of these gloomy ages and stages, this passage has entered the literary tradition as the paradigm of our three score and ten. How well do modem men, both authors and characters, match this satirical survey of male ambition and folly? An initial problem is that, as E.M. Forster noted, though birth and death are equally momentous, the latter attracts far more attention from writers than the former. Our birth is

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indeed, as Wordsworth put it, ‘‘a sleep and a forgetting,’’ now termed by psychologists as ‘‘infantile amnesia.’’ Nevertheless, more than a few writers have attempted to capture the mewling infant, from the opening words of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man to Gunter Grass’s nightmare vision of Nazism through the eyes of the permanently juvenile Oskar in The Tin Drum. But no author has ever traveled farther back in ontogeny than John Barth in ‘‘Night-Sea Journey’’ (in his short story collection, Lost in the Fun-house). Barth’s narrator, a Schopenhauerian spermatozoon equipped with foreknowledge of all that preceded, and all that will follow his cohort’s brief argosy, urges his successors to ‘‘foreswear night-sea journeys! Make no more!’’ Once we have traversed the way up and the way down, and stepped into the river of childhood, there is no end of schoolboy tales, most of them falling into two forms: the family deformed and deforming or the classroom cruel and constraining. An original account of childhood, however, appears in J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar, one of the most successful recent male memoirs. Moehringer, whose father fled his Long Island family to live as an itinerant disc jockey, finds himself growing up in the company of women—‘‘my mother, grandmother, aunt, and five female cousins.’’ Where would such an only child find ‘‘mentors, heroes, role models’’? Since, as he tells us, ‘‘My hometown was famous for two things—lacrosse and liquor,’’ the choices were few, and lacrosse never figures in the book after this line. Neither does the schoolroom. Instead, taken under the wing of his bookmaking uncle, J. R. begins joining the bar habitue´s at the beach for drying-out afternoons long before he can legally enter the tender bar. Moehringer tells us how, over the course of 20 years, ‘‘the bar saved me. It restored my faith when I was a boy, tended me as a teenager, and when I was a young man the bar embraced me . . . until one night the bar turned me away, and in that final abandonment the bar saved my life.’’ Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore presents the lover in a novel form: adolescent, precocious Kafka Tamura, seeking his mother and fleeing his father, takes refuge in, of all places, a library, where he finds Miss Saeki, the librarian, who also has hidden from the world, in her case because of the death of a fiance´e many years ago. Meeting the two other Kafkas in the story, a painting and a song by the librarian

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inspired by the painting, Kaflka Tamura falls in love with Miss Saeki both as woman and as his possible lost mother, embracing one half of the oedipal prophecy. Yet his story is not truly Kafkaesque, despite the presence of numerous other inexplicable characters and situations, from talking cats to giant-slug-spawning stones. The combination of human warmth and fantastic situations—a trademark of all of Murakami’s writing—may cause us someday to term such novels Murakamian.

but Stephen Carter’s The Emperor of Ocean Park, gives us a scholarly lawyer’s views on race, politics, and privilege under the guise of a mystery story. The death of a conservative black judge who almost made it to the rank of justice, and his son’s quest for the reasons behind both his literal death and the demise of his judicial career, make for a summer reader’s mix of melodrama and social reflection—reminiscent of a LeCarre or a Graham Greene entertainment, if either had written of the American scene.

Many books span more than one age, and my next two books encompass both the soldier seeking, as Jaques puts it, reputation in the cannon’s mouth and the lean and slippered pantaloon. At first, the two books appear markedly similar: a shrunk-shanked old man recalls World War I while awaiting the approach of death. But Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War is a young man’s book about soldiers and an old man, while Peter Pouncey’s Rules for Old Men Waiting is an old man’s book about an old man and soldiers. Helprin’s has the ambition of youth, in both size (860 pages) and scope—as his Italian protagonist participates in a sweeping range of actions: against the Austrians in northern Italy and Italian deserters in Sicily, in the Alps and on shipboard, and as a prisoner of his own side and of the enemy. In contrast, Pouncey’s is spare in both ways: a thin book of 200 pages that covers a few days in one trench in Belgium.

Shakespeare’s final stage is a paradox: a state of living death, harder to capture than death itself, ‘‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’’ There are innumerable masterpieces, after all, which center on the moment of death, from Hermann Broch and Thomas Mann to Leo Tolstoy and Ambrose Bierce. But to convey the state of total loss, of being without either lower or higher powers, is rarely attempted.

Indeed, the more closely these novels are read, the more each seems like an unconscious mirror image of the other. Helprin’s Alessandro Giuliani is ‘‘tall and unbent, and his buoyant white hair floated about his head like the white water in the curl of a wave,’’ while Pouncey’s Robert MacIver is ‘‘large-framed and failing fast.’’ Giuliani, a professor of aesthetics who lost the love of his life decades ago, takes a last marathon walk across the Italian countryside and tells a young man the expansive story of his own war years. MacIver, a professor of history, isolates himself in his summer house after the death of his wife, and, like Socrates awaiting the hemlock, turns his hand to creative writing after a lifetime of nonfiction, developing in a short story a small cast of characters who face the moral questions of war as fully as do Giuliani’s myriads. Between the wars and the piping treble comes the justice. Judges and lawyers are, of course, a mainstay of Grishamite fiction and its subspecies,

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An exception, of course, as he was to so many conventions, is Samuel Beckett. In his trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, he approached the condition of death from a philosophy as much grimmer than Jaques’ as Jaques’ is than Falstaff’s. Each of these short novels brings its narrator closer to his desired end, until in The Unnamable Beckett raises Hamlet’s existential question to a new power: what if the last moment of consciousness is unending but unendurable? Apparently Beckett himself passed his last months in a nursing home in a state much like those of his characters, or like the real people who fill David Shenk’s The Forgetting: Alzheimer’s, Portrait of an Epidemic. Shenk’s work combines the latest technical information about Alzheimer’s causes and treatment with historical views of aging and decline, as well as moving encounters with living victims. He is alert to the scope of the disease, noting that, ‘‘In the nearly 50 years since Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin introduced their vaccines against polio, somewhere between one and two million lives have been saved. Curing A’s disease sometime in the first decade of the 21st century would save as many as 100 million lives worldwide in the same length of time.’’ But he is also conscious of the fact that the illness happens to one person at a time, although ‘‘the unique curse of Alzheimer’s is that it ravages several victims for every brain it infects . . . roughly half of all Alzheimer’s caregivers struggle with clinical depression.’’

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Although he never mentions Jaques or Shakespeare, Shenk validates their insight into this condition as ‘‘second childhood and mere oblivion.’’ Brain research has shown ‘‘precise inverse relationships between stages of Alzheimer’s disease and phases of child development . . . , the strange notion of reverse childhood turns out to be the best map we have to understand the terrain of Alzheimer’s.’’ He also validates the lives of many who struggle until the end to maintain dignity in the face of this despair-inducing disease, and who remind us, in the optimistic words of Cervantes, who incidentally died on the same day as Shakespeare, that ‘‘Until death, all is life.’’ Source: Richard Barbieri, ‘‘The Seven Ages of Man,’’ in Independent School, Vol. 66, No. 2, Winter 2007, pp. 122–4.

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Shakespeare, William, As You Like It, in The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Norton, 1997, pp. 1625–81. ———, ‘‘Seven Ages of Man,’’ in As You Like It, in The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Norton, 1997, pp. 1647–48. ———, ‘‘Sonnet 5,’’ in The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Norton, 1997, p. 1925. Spencer, Charles, Review of As You Like It, in the Telegraph, April 29, 2009. ———, Review of As You Like It, in the Telegraph, June 9, 2009. Tracer, James, The People’s Chronology, Henry Holt, 1992, pp. 207–13. ‘‘Welfare Reform,’’ http://www.dwp.gov.uk/policy/welfarereform/ (accessed August 3, 2009).

FURTHER READING SOURCES Bevington, David, ‘‘Life in Shakespeare’s England,’’ in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed., Longman, 1967, pp. xii–xvi. ———, Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 3–5, 235. Billington, Michael, Review of As You Like It, in the Guardian, April 29, 2009. Blair, Alexandra, ‘‘Britain’s Children Are Unhappiest in the Western World,’’ April 14, 2007, http://www.shadow 1980.com/content/view/169/42/ (accessed September 13, 2009). Bloom, Harold, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Riverhead, 1998, pp. 212–17. Bradford, Alan Taylor, ‘‘Jaques’ Distortion of the SevenAges Paradigm,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 2, Spring 1976, pp. 171–76. ‘‘Classification of the Planets,’’ http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/ astr161/lect/classification/classification.html (accessed September 13, 2009). Garber, Marjorie, Shakespeare After All, Anchor Books, 2004, pp. 446–53. Greenblatt, Stephen, ‘‘Shakespeare’s World: Life and Death,’’ in The Norton Shakespeare, Norton, 1997, p. 2. ‘‘Harington’s John,’’ Episode 846, Engines of Our Ingenuity, National Public Radio. KUHF, 1993. Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 11th ed., Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008, pp. 68–69, 340–41, 353, 514. Kellaway, Kate, Review of As You Like It, in the Observer, June 14, 2009.

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Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, Oxford University Press, 1999. Cressy depicts what it was like to live in England during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Of particular interest is the discussion of social and culture change during Shakespeare’s life and the effect that change had on his work. Greenblatt, Stephen, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Norton, 2005. In this biography of Shakespeare, Greenblatt draws from historical documents and the poet’s writings to create a picture of the man and his work within the Elizabethan historical context. Kastan, David Scott, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare, Blackwell, 1999. Kastan has assembled twenty-eight scholarly essays about Shakespeare’s world and his work. Each essay examines one aspect of the playwright’s world. The essays focus on such subjects as politics, religion, playwriting, censorship, printing, and the economics of theater life. Picard, Liza, Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London, St. Martin’s Press, 2003. Historian Liza Picard describes London life when Shakespeare walked the city’s streets. Buildings and gardens, the shops and palaces, the theaters and streets are all described. Picard also includes details about domestic life, about the city’s water supply, and about diseases common to Londoners. Pritchard, R. E., ed., Shakespeare’s England: Life in Elizabethan & Jacobean Times, Sutton, 1999. Pritchard presents a large selection of primary documents, written during Shakespeare’s time. These firsthand reports provide a glimpse of what it was like to live in England at this time. Pritchard includes excerpts from letters, diaries,

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pamphlets, plays, and poetry, all revealing something about the times in which these writers lived. Secara, Maggie, A Compendium of Common Knowledge, 1558–1603: Elizabethan Commonplaces for Writers, Actors & Re-enactors, Popinjay Press, 2008. Secara provides information about the details of life during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Secara includes facts about food, occupations, religion, games, education, and manners. Shapiro, James, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, Harper Perennial, 2006.

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Shapiro relies upon the public events of 1599 to analyze four of Shakespeare’s political plays written in 1599, including As You Like It. Wells, Stanley, Shakespeare for All Time, Oxford University Press, 2003. This is an illustrated and easy-to-read narrative of Shakespeare’s life and his legacy. Wells provides a thoroughly researched biography of Shakespeare’s life, as well as many interesting details about the plays and their reception in the 400 years since Shakespeare wrote them.

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Song John Donne was an English poet and Protestant clergyman who wrote in the late-Elizabethan Age and the Jacobean Age. He is the leading figure in a group of seventeenth-century poets known as the metaphysical poets. His ‘‘Song,’’ the first line of which is ‘‘Go, and catch a falling star,’’ is one of Donne’s many love poems. He wrote it to a tune he knew, not one he composed himself. The poem was also set to music in the seventeenth century and has since been set by a number of modern composers, including William Flanagan, Bernard George Stevens, and Lee Hoiby.

JOHN DONNE 1633

The poem was first published in Poems, by J. D. with Elegies on the Author’s Death in 1633. This was the first collected edition of Donne’s verse. The exact date the poem was written is unknown, since only a few of Donne’s poems were published in his lifetime. However, it is usually thought that he wrote all his love poems before he was thirty years old. One scholar, Theodore Redpath, believes that the love poems that express a cynical point of view, which would include ‘‘Song,’’ were written before Donne met Ann More in 1598, when he was twenty-six. Donne married More in 1601. If Redpath’s theory is correct, this poem was written in the late-Elizabethan period, contemporary with the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare. Unlike some of Donne’s love poems, ‘‘Song’’ is not difficult to understand. In three stanzas, the cynical speaker claims that it is not possible

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In 1592, Donne was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in London to study law, and after receiving an inheritance from his father’s estate, he lived quite affluently during the mid-1590s. In 1596, serving under the Earl of Essex, he joined the English naval expedition that attacked and captured Cadiz, Spain. A year later, Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Edgerton, and in 1601, he secretly married Ann More, whom he had met in 1598. Ann was the daughter of Sir Thomas’s brother-in-law, and the family did not approve of the marriage. Donne was dismissed from his job and imprisoned. Soon he was released from prison, and with the legality of his marriage ratified, Donne and his wife lived with her cousin, Sir Francis Wooley, in Pyrford, Surrey, where their first child was born in 1603. The couple would produce twelve children, including two that were stillborn. This included the last child, born in 1617, only five days before Ann’s death.

John Donne (Ó Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library / Alamy)

to find a chaste woman anywhere in the world. The poet’s use of a range of unusual images, his witty and argumentative approach to his theme, and his sudden turns of thought, stamp the poem as by Donne.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY John Donne was born sometime between January and June 1572, in London. He was the third of six children. His father, John Donne, was a successful merchant, and his mother, Elizabeth, was from a prominent Roman Catholic family. In the Protestant England of Elizabeth I, Catholics were a persecuted minority. In 1576, when Donne was three or four, his father died; his mother quickly married a prosperous widower. In 1584, Donne matriculated from Hart Hall, Oxford, and may later in the decade have attended Cambridge University. He began writing poetry while still in his teens, and over the years his verse circulated in manuscript form. The poem titled ‘‘Song,’’ beginning ‘‘Go, and catch a falling star,’’ was likely written when he was a young man, perhaps in his twenties. To this period also belong most of his other love poems.

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In Pyrford, Donne practiced as a lawyer but his income was small. Within a few years he and his family moved to Mitcham, about twelve miles from the center of London, and later he also took lodgings in the Strand, London. During 1608 and 1609, Donne sought more lucrative positions, such as a secretaryship in Ireland, but he was unsuccessful. He continued to write, and in 1610, he published Pseudo-Martyr, a prose work about the controversy over Roman Catholicism and allegiance to the Protestant King James 1. This won for Donne the favor of the king. The following year one of the small number of Donne’s poems published in his lifetime appeared. This was An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary. A year later, Of the Progress of the Soul: The Second Anniversary was published. In 1612, Donne traveled in Europe with his patron, Sir Robert Drury, and in 1614, he became a Member of Parliament for Taunton. Donne had converted to Protestantism during the 1590s, and in 1615, he was ordained a priest of the Church of England. He was appointed a royal chaplain, and in 1616, for the first time he preached at the court of James 1. He became known for the brilliance of his sermons, and in 1621, he was appointed Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Following a serious illness, he wrote Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and published them in 1624. Donne died on March 31, 1631, after a long illness. His poems were published posthumously, in 1633, and were reprinted several times over the next twenty years.

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POEM TEXT Go, and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me, where all past years are, Or who cleft the Devil’s foot, Teach me to hear mermaids singing, Or to keep off envy’s stinging, And find What wind Serves to advance an honest mind.

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If thou be’est born to strange sights, Things invisible to see, Ride ten thousand days and nights, Till age snow white hairs on thee, Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me All strange wonders that befell thee, And swear No where Lives a woman true, and fair.

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If thou find’st one, let me know, Such a pilgrimage were sweet, Yet do not, I would not go, Though at next door we might meet, Though she were true, when you met her, And last, till you write your letter, Yet she Will be False, ere I come, to two, or three.

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English singer and guitarist John Renbourn set ‘‘Song’’ to music. It is included on his CD John Renbourn, first released in 1965, reissued in 2001 and available from Amazon.com. ‘‘Song’’ is included in Anthony Quayle’s CD Elizabethan Sonnets and Lyrics, released by Saland in 2008. Quayle’s reading of ‘‘Song’’ is also available as an MP3 download from Amazon.com. Poems by John Donne, a CD released by CreateSpace in 2008, features Christopher Hassall reading thirteen of Donne’s most famous poems (not including ‘‘Song.’’) Richard Burton Reads the Poetry of John Donne, released by Saland Publishing in 2009, is available in MP3 or CD format. It features famous British actor Richard Burton reading twenty poems by Donne, including ‘‘Song.’’

POEM SUMMARY Stanza 1 The first stanza of ‘‘Song,’’ directly addresses the reader, asking him (a male reader is assumed on the part of this seventeenth-century poet) to perform impossible tasks and answer impossible questions. The first task is to ‘‘catch a falling star.’’ There are such things as falling stars, and they are usually called meteors. These are small objects that enter the Earth’s atmosphere at great speeds and then burn up. This process creates light, and so the term ‘‘falling star’’ or ‘‘shooting star’’ has been used to describe them. A falling star may be observed, but who could actually catch one? Obviously, the task is impossible. Line 2 instructs the reader to perform an equally impossible but very different task, ‘‘Get with child a mandrake root.’’ Mandrake refers to any plant of the genus Mandragora. The root of the mandrake is shaped like a fork and is said to resemble the lower part of the human male body. According to folklore, when the root is pulled from the ground it is castrated and shrieks in

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pain. Donne’s instruction is obviously impossible, since how could anyone get a mandrake root pregnant, especially one that has been castrated by being pulled from the ground? Line 3 also presents a baffling task for anyone: ‘‘Tell me where all past years are.’’ Who could possibly do that? The past is past; it is vanished, due to the passage of what people call time. People may feel the effects of the past, but where those days have gone is not possible for anyone to know. Something that was, is no more. That is all anyone knows, so this line presents the third impossible task in this poem. The fourth impossible task is presented in line 4, in which the reader is instructed to tell the poet ‘‘who cleft the Devil’s foot.’’ To cleave something is to split it apart. In Christian mythology, the devil, also known as Lucifer, is presented as having a cleft (or cloven) foot. In other words, the devil’s foot is divided into two, unlike a human foot that has five toes. Particularly in medieval

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Christian iconography, the devil is portrayed as having a tail and horns as well as a cleft foot. Line 5 presents the poet’s next challenge: ‘‘Teach me to hear the mermaids singing.’’ The mermaids are the three sirens in Greek mythology. The sirens are women with wings and bird feet. They live on an island near the Italian coast and lure sailors with their irresistible singing. The sailors are so entranced by the singing of the sirens that they forget where they are going and where they come from. Bewitched, they end up on the island with the sirens and just while their time away until they die. The only man ever to resist the call of the sirens was Odysseus, in Homer’s epic Odyssey. Since the sirens exist only in mythology, who can really hear them or show anyone else what they sound like? In line 6, the poet moves from religious and classical mythology to human psychology. He asks for someone to teach him how not to be envious. Envy is one of the traditional Seven Deadly Sins. The poet is saying, in effect, that envy is a universal emotion. Everyone feels it at some point. No teaching in the world can instruct a person how to avoid envy or the distress that it creates for the person who feels it. The final impossibility in this stanza is contained in lines 5 to 7, which also reveal what the poet is driving at in presenting all these impossible tasks. He wants to find someone who is honest, but suggests that such a quality is hard to find: is there a certain wind that someone could show him, that produces honesty in a person? Obviously not, so this is the seventh impossible task that the poet has listed in this nine-line stanza.

mentioned the quest for an ‘‘honest mind’’ in the last line of the first stanza he was referring not to humans in general but to women. ‘‘True’’ here means honest (that is, chaste and virtuous) and faithful. The final impossibility is to find a woman who is both honest and beautiful (‘‘fair’’).

Stanza 3 In the first line of the stanza, the poet appears to hedge his bets just a little. In the previous stanza he was confident that a woman both ‘‘true, and fair’’ could not be found, no matter how long the search. But now he tells his imaginary traveler that if he, the traveler, should manage to find such a woman, he should inform the poet about her. In line 2 the speaker adds that a journey that produced such an unusual find would have been enjoyable (‘‘sweet’’). In line 3, however, he changes his mind rapidly. ‘‘Yet do not,’’ he says, meaning that he does not want, after all, to hear from the traveler should that man in fact have found a beautiful and honest woman. He adds by way of explanation, in the same line (3), that he would not go to see her, even if she lived next door (line 4), and in the remainder of the stanza he explains why. Even if, the poet says, the woman had the desired qualities when the traveler met her, she would not retain them for long. She might remain beautiful and honest while the man wrote a letter informing the poet that he had found her, but before the poet managed to get there to meet her, she would, he is certain, prove ‘‘false’’ (that is, dishonest, deceitful, or unchaste) not just once but twice or even three times. In other words, the woman will not be what she at first appeared to be.

Stanza 2 In stanza 2, the poet continues his theme of attempting the impossible. He suggests that if the reader is the adventurous type, and enjoys ‘‘strange sights’’ and likes to see ‘‘Things invisible to see’’ (which is an example of the literary device called a paradox, a statement that appears to be selfcontradictory), he should go on a journey. He should ride for almost a lifetime—ten thousand days is about twenty-seven years—until he is old and his hair is white. Then he should return and report to the poet about all the unusual things that happened to him on his travels. After that, the traveler would be expected, according to the poet, to assure him that nowhere on his travels did he meet, and nowhere lives, a woman who is ‘‘true, and fair.’’ The poet thus reveals that when he

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THEMES Inconstancy of Woman The speaker complains about the universal inconstancy of women. No one can find a woman who will be faithful, he says. In taking this approach, the speaker is drawing on a common theme in love poetry. For centuries, male poets have picked up their pens to grumble about how their women (to whom, of course, they are ready to be completely devoted) do not live up to their expectations and their ideals. There is nothing new in this, although the speaker in ‘‘Song’’ is determined to take the argument to a new extreme. Who is this speaker? There is no way of knowing whether there is any autobiographical content in the

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 







Write a poem that could be set to music about some quality that men (or women if you are a male) possess that creates problems or frustrations for the opposite sex. Write with a light, playful tone. Songs are meant to be sung, and over the years ‘‘Song’’ has been set to music a number of times. If you are musically inclined, create a melody for the song and sing it to your classmates. See if you can find someone who can accompany you on a musical instrument. Does this song easily lend itself to a musical setting? Read Donne’s poem, ‘‘Sweetest love, I do not go,’’ and make a class presentation in which you compare and contrast it to ‘‘Song.’’ How do these poems differ in theme, style, and language? What do they have in common? Consult The Teen Survival Guide to Dating and Relating (Free Spirit Publishing, 2005), by Annie Fox. It is based on emails Fox received from teens seeking help in their relationships. Read the sections on how to make a relationship work, and how to handle a relationship that is not working out. Then imagine that you are either the speaker in ‘‘Sweetest love, I do not go,’’ or a girl who has at some point dated the speaker or been approached by him. Write a letter that explains your situation, what you perceive the problem to be, and asks for advice. Be creative. Then put yourself in the role of counselor and answer the letter.

poem, but it is highly likely that Donne wrote it when he was a young man with women on his mind. The speaker is likely a young man, too, and women are his subject. He thinks he knows a lot about them, as his sweeping generalization about their nature shows. But such sweeping statements are often made by people who know far less about their subjects than they might do, and yet they want to impress others with their knowledge.

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The speaker might be thought of, perhaps, as a young man who has had some disappointments in love, some rude awakenings, just when he thought a young lady was his and his alone. Now, he is frustrated and gives vent to his feelings, perhaps to a sympathetic friend. In addition to being cynical, he shows himself to be lively, clever, inventive, imaginative, and ingenious. He is prone to extremes and exaggerations. Is he frustrated, perhaps, by the determination of a recent sweetheart to show a will of her own, rather than submitting to his? Did she seem to think she had the right to speak to and even make friends with other young men? How dare she do such a thing, the speaker probably thinks, when she has me? Why would she even think about it? Such is the pride and complacency of the young beau who thinks that he, if not God’s gift to women, is certainly doing them a favor by singling them out for his amorous attentions. In regaling his friend (or reader) with his verbal extravagance, the speaker roams over all fields of human activity and thought. His images are drawn from cosmology (the falling star), botany (the mandrake root), theology (the cleft foot of the devil), mythology (the mermaids), and psychology (envy). Then he envisions a years-long journey of exploration across the globe to seek out new wonders. Nothing holds his imagination back. One can imagine the silent friend listening patiently and perhaps with amusement as the speaker paces up and down the room, waving his arms around as he lists all these fantastic, impossible tasks, all designed to show that not a single woman on earth can be faithful and true. And even if there were such a woman, he says in stanza 3, eager to show that his argument and point of view still hold even if a chaste woman might be found (and even if she just happens to live next door to him), she will prove herself unchaste by the time he gets there. This is a young man who, at least for the moment, is determined to be right rather than wise, and his rhetorical skill produces a rather comic effect. He seems in earnest, and he is, but perhaps he is playful too, slyly winking at readers if they can catch it. Everyone has to let off steam sometimes, and one can imagine him smiling with enjoyment of his own verbal fireworks rather than with malice for all women—after all, there seems to be, if readers take the hint offered in stanza 3, line 4, a no doubt attractive young lady living next door, and he is probably dying to meet her.

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‘‘They Swam Before the Ships and Sang Lovely Songs,’’ illustration by Louis John Rhead (Blue Lantern Studio / Corbis)

Misogyny The tone of the speaker might be seen as playful as he expounds on the inconstancy of women, but it is possible to take a darker view of the speaker’s attitude. In his complaints about the lack of moral fitness on the part of women, he reveals himself to be a misogynist. A misogynist is someone who hates women. The clue is contained in the fact that the speaker ascribes promiscuity, sexual looseness, to all women, not just one or two whom he might happen to know, but to all of them. This suggests not an opinion formed rationally on the basis of knowledge or information but a prejudice blindly held. This is to take a more serious view of the poem than perhaps it merits, but lying just behind the speaker’s attitude it is perhaps not difficult to see the double standard that sometimes operates in those who demand standards of others that they are not prepared to observe for themselves. After all, if the speaker claims to know that all women are unfaithful, he must have had a lot of women himself to make such a statement—and what does that say about his own fidelity? It is not difficult to imagine a song or poem that gives the opposite point of view in this eternal battle of the sexes. Actually, one does

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not have to imagine it since it has already been done, and around Donne’s time, too, by William Shakespeare, in Act 2 scene 3 of Much Ado About Nothing, when the character Balthasar sings a song that starts like this: Sigh no more ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever, One foot in sea and one on shore, To one thing constant never. As lovers have known through the ages, when it comes to making negative generalizations about the opposite sex, two can play at that game.

STYLE Trochaic Tetrameter The poem is written in trochaic feet. A trochaic foot consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. The trochee is the opposite of the more common iamb, which is an unstressed or lightly stressed syllable followed by a more heavily stressed syllable. Each line of the poem consists of four feet, which means the meter is trochaic

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tetrameter. In most lines, however, the final unstressed syllable is omitted. Lines 5 and 6 in stanzas 1 and 3, and line 6 in stanza 2, contain the full four feet. The exception to the tetrameter is in lines 8 and 9 of each stanza, which have only one foot. These lines are trochaic monometer. These short lines help to create the mocking tone of the speaker as he confidently asserts the faithlessness of all women. The fact that the poem is in trochaic feet is a useful reminder of how it should be read. For example, in the first line of stanza 3, the first foot, ‘‘If thou,’’ the emphasis is on the first syllable, which reinforces the cynicism of the speaker, since it suggests the unlikelihood of finding a woman with the desired qualities. The same applies to line 5 of stanza 3, which is trochaic throughout: ‘‘THOUGH she WERE true WHEN you MET her’’ (emphasis capitalized). The rhyme scheme of the poem may be described as a b a b c c d d d. This means that in each stanza, line 1 rhymes with line 3; line 2 rhymes with line 4; line 5 rhymes with line 6; and line 7 rhymes with lines 8 and 9. To the modern ear, ‘‘root’’ and ‘‘foot’’ (stanza 1, lines 2 and 4) may sound like an imperfect rhyme, but sometimes over the centuries the pronunciation of words changes. In Donne’s time, the early seventeenth century, it may well be that these two words rhymed perfectly.

Quest and Journey Motifs In this poem about the futile search for a woman who has the qualities the male speaker desires, the poet employs the motifs of quest and journey but he uses them in ironic or mock fashion. These are impossible quests and impossible journeys. The quest is presented in terms of exploration, as if the speaker is challenging his reader to go out and discover new things in the world, such as the singing of mermaids, or go on a quest to perform seemingly magical feats employing natural phenomena that have previously not been possible (and are not likely ever to be possible). The journey motif appears in stanza 2 with the image of the traveler riding his horse and exploring, presumably, the distant corners of the world. But the journey is not in pursuit or discovery of some mythic beast or kingdom but something much more mundane but also (according to the cynical speaker) elusive: the constancy, beauty, and purity of woman. The quest or journey may metaphorically be an

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outward one, but what the speaker and his invited traveler are really in quest of is an inner, moral quality that cannot be seen with the eye.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Elizabethan Age Although Donne is usually classified as a poet of the early seventeenth century, and most of his poems were not published until 1633, he probably wrote most of his love poems in the 1590s, the heyday of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age. In fact, Donne was born only eight years after William Shakespeare, so it was the Elizabethan period that shaped his early life and thought. Queen Elizabeth I reigned in England from 1558 to 1603. She inherited a relatively weak kingdom threatened by powerful enemies in Europe, as well as trouble in Scotland and Ireland, but she was one of England’s ablest rulers, and she left the country strong and united. The Elizabethan Age was a time of great development and expansion for England. The nation became a major European power and laid the basis for its future maritime empire. Adventurous English sailors explored Asia and North America, and Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe from 1577 to 1580. The leading power in Europe at the time was Spain, which was a Roman Catholic country. Spain tried to invade England to overthrow Elizabeth I, who had reestablished Protestantism as the religion of the realm. But the Spanish Armada sent out by Spain’s Philip II in 1588 failed because of a storm, and never again was Elizabeth’s kingdom so threatened. As a result, in the 1590s, England enjoyed increasing stability and prosperity. In literature and music, the Elizabethan Age is often considered the Golden Age of England. Drama in particular flourished, not only the plays of Shakespeare but also the work of Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Dekker, and the early work of John Webster, Thomas Heywood, and Thomas Middleton. The plays were performed at large theaters in London. London was by far the biggest city in England, with a population in 1605 of nearly 225,000. It is known that John Donne frequently attended the theater in the 1590s, and he must have seen works by many of these dramatists, probably including many plays that are now lost. Elizabethan poetry flourished in the work of Sir Philip Sidney; Edmund Spenser; Sir Thomas

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 



Elizabethan Age: Mandrake has various associations. Some think it is used as a poison by witches. It is also seen as an aid to fertility for women and also as a narcotic that promotes sleep. Shakespeare mentions it in the latter context in Antony and Cleopatra and Othello. Today: Mandrake is used in small doses by herbalists for various medical purposes. These include as a stimulant for the liver and as a purgative for the removal of waste products. Elizabethan Age: In the privileged classes, marriage is determined more by factors such as wealth and social position than affection or love. Suitable partners are often identified by the families of the young people concerned, although the future couple does have to agree to the match. In London, the average age at which people marry for the first time is

Wyatt; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; Sir Walter Raleigh, and others. Music was also a part of this cultural renaissance. Some of the leading composers of the day, whose music is still performed in the early 2000s, include William Byrd, John Dowland, and John Taverner.

Metaphysical Poetry Metaphysical poetry is a term applied to a type of poetry written mostly in the Jacobean Age, in the early seventeenth century, although poets also wrote metaphysical verse in the Elizabethan Age. The Jacobean Age refers to the reign of James I (1603–1625). Leading metaphysical poets were Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan. Metaphysical verse has great intellectual dexterity. It is characterized by word play often involving paradoxes and puns, quick turns of thought, and witty and unusual similes and metaphors known as conceits. A metaphysical conceit

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twenty-eight for men and between twenty and twenty-one for women. Today: In 2003, the average age of people marrying for the first time in England is thirty-one for men and twenty-nine for women. People tend to make their own decisions about marriage, and love is considered a more important factor than wealth or social position. 

Elizabethan Age: In a superstitious age, falling stars and other astronomical phenomena such as eclipses are often seen as portents from heaven, signs of impending death or disaster. Today: Astronomical events are understood entirely in scientific terms. They are not considered to have any effect, whether good or bad, on human life.

is a sometimes outlandish comparison between two very dissimilar things, made similar only through the intellectual ingenuity of the poet. The metaphysical poets exploited all areas of common or everyday life and esoteric or scholarly knowledge in order to create these striking conceits. For example, in ‘‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,’’ Donne wants to show that the soul of his speaker and that of his lady love can never be parted, and the poet constructs an elaborate conceit that compares the souls of lovers to the two feet of a draughtman’s compass; each moves only in coordination with the other.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Donne’s poetry was influential and widely read after his death and until the end of the seventeenth century, but after that his work fell into neglect. In the early nineteenth century, during the Romantic period, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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of the rejected lover-turned-amatory Jacques, is obviously intended merely to entertain, the Holy Sonnets . . . are . . . intended to instruct as well as entertain.’’

Mandrake root, 14th-century engraving (Ó INTERFOTO / Alamy)

and Thomas de Quincey tried to restore interest in Donne’s work, and Victorian poet Robert Browning was an admirer of the poet. But other than that, the revival of appreciation for Donne had to wait until the early twentieth century, with the advent of the movement known as modernism. Modernists saw in Donne a spirit close to their own who could offer them a model for their own poetry. He was championed by T. S. Eliot in the 1920s, and his work quickly came to enjoy a popularity and critical appreciation it had not enjoyed since the generation after his death. Since then Donne’s poetry has been the subject of numerous critical interpretations. As one of his slighter works, the poem, ‘‘Song’’ has not received as much attention as many of his other poems. For example, Roger B. Rollin, in ‘‘‘Fantastique Ague’: The Holy Sonnets and Religious Melancholy,’’ contrasted this poem with the seriousness of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, which were written later, when Donne had become a clergyman. Rollin wrote: ‘‘Whereas a trifle like ‘Goe, and catche a falling starre’ . . . with its comic portrait

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However, critics have certainly not ignored the poem. Frank Warnke, in John Donne, saw it as exemplifying one of three categories into which Donne’s love poems fall. Using a term that Donne himself employed disparagingly about his own poems in his letters to friends, Warnke called this category ‘‘lightly cynical ‘evaporations’,’’ and grouped it with poems such as ‘‘Woman’s Constancy’’ and ‘‘The Indifferent.’’ His comment about the structure of many of these cynical poems might be applied to ‘‘Song’’: ‘‘A series of propositions, each more outrageously ingenious than the one before it, seems to be leading in one logical direction, only to be overthrown by an opposed—and unexpected—proposition yet more outrageously ingenious.’’ John Carey, in John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, noted that infidelity of women is a common theme in Donne’s poetry but suggested that ‘‘Song’’ ‘‘catches briefly at hope’’ in its use of the word ‘‘pilgrimage,’’ which is normally used of a religious journey, to describe the search for the ideal woman: ‘‘There’s no mistaking the poetic effect of the word ‘Pilgrimage,’’’ Carey wrote. ‘‘It floods the line with relief, like a sob of joy.’’ Carey further commented that ‘‘when Donne allows himself to imagine a state beyond betrayal, he chooses a word which relates to sanctity, not sex.’’ In a lively interpretation of the poem, Judah Stampfer, in John Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture, placed it in the category of Donne’s ‘‘promiscuity’’ poems, which include ‘‘Loves Usury’’ and ‘‘Confined Love.’’ Stampfer described the first two stanzas as ‘‘a zestful expansion of human experience in the dew of youth, touching the quicksilver unknown,’’ and he also commented on the youthfulness of the speaker, who is ‘‘so inexperienced he consults friends about the world, so young he hangs in an atmosphere of boyish magic, a green and lyrical schoolboy, baldly asserting universal promiscuity, so worldly wise.’’

CRITICISM Bryan Aubrey Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English. In this essay, he discusses ‘‘Song’’ in terms of Donne’s life in the 1590s as well as misogynist views expressed in other Elizabethan literature.

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 

Donne’s nineteen Holy Sonnets, which he began to write in about 1609, well after he had put his womanizing days behind him, present a marked contrast to the love poems. They reveal Donne’s strong need to feel that he would be saved after death by his faith in God, and also his doubts about whether he would indeed by forgiven for his past sins.



The Crescent Moon Book of Elizabethan Love Poetry (2008), edited by Carol Appleby, is an anthology of Elizabethan love poetry. It includes a selection from the works of Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Thomas Campion, Sir Walter Raleigh, Samuel Daniel, William Shakespeare, and others. It also includes bibliography and notes.



The Metaphysical Poets (1960), edited by Helen Gardner in the Penguin Classics series, is a selection of poems by all the major metaphysical poets, such as Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan, as well as many of the lesser known ones. Gardner’s introduction, which explains the main characteristics of metaphysical poetry, is excellent.

In the 1590s, when John Donne was full of the energies of youth, he was known in London social circles as something of a ladies’ man—or, to put it less delicately, a womanizer. When he married in 1601, his wife’s family objected to the match in part because of Donne’s reputation as a libertine. Donne himself mentioned in a letter the gossip that soured his future in-laws toward him, saying that it ‘‘was laid to me of having deceived some gentlewoman before’’ (quoted in John Carey’s John Donne: Life, Mind and Art). No more details have ever surfaced about this alleged incident involving a ‘‘gentlewoman.’’ There is, however, another description of the young Donne as a man-about-town that was

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Wit (1999) is a play by Margaret Edson that won the Pulitzer Prize. The main character is an old John Donne scholar who is dying of cancer. The character is actually based on Helen Gardner (1908–1986), the distinguished English literary critic who was known for her work on Donne and the other metaphysical poets. The playwright skillfully conveys what it is like to suffer from terminal cancer, and in doing so she also weaves into the play many references to Donne and his work. The 100 Best Love Poems of the Spanish Language (2009), edited by Rigas Kappatos and Perdo Lastra, is a collection of poems written in Spanish spanning several centuries. Seventy-seven poets are represented, from fifteen countries. Four of the poets are Nobel Prize winners. The text shows the poems in Spanish as well as in English translations. In Teen Love: On Relationships, A Book for Teenagers (1999), Kimberly Kirberger reproduces letters she has received from teenagers regarding a range of typical teenage problems about relationships. Kirberger provides answers the letters with respectful, insightful advice that young people will enjoy.

left by Sir Richard Baker, who knew him in the 1590s when Donne was studying law at Lincoln’s Inn. According to Baker (quoted by Carey), the young poet was a ‘‘a great visiter of Ladies, a great frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited Verses.‘‘ The word ‘‘conceited’’ in this context means verse that employs conceits (a conceit is a literary device), not that the writer held a high opinion of himself. More relevant to the present point is that behind that careful euphemism, ‘‘visiter of ladies,’’ lies Donne the lover, a man who, on the evidence of his poetry—if, as seems probable, those poems are based on personal experience rather than being mere literary exercises—took great pleasure in the delights of

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THUS IN THE SPACE OF ONE NINE-LINE STANZA, THE SPEAKER HAS VEERED FROM ONE EXTREME TO THE OTHER: FROM WOMAN-ASGODDESS TO WOMAN-AS-WHORE. THIS HINTS AT A WAY OF THINKING, OF HOW MEN RESPOND TO WOMEN, THAT IS FOUND MANY TIMES IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE, AND ELSEWHERE.’’

love. This was the young Donne who wrote passionate, highly erotic poems, such as ‘‘To his Mistress Going to Bed,’’, and intense romantic poems about the all-encompassing world of the lovers, such as ‘‘The Good Morrow’’ and ‘‘The Sun Rising.’’ The John Donne of this period can be seen in the portrait painted by an anonymous artist around 1595 that frequently appears on the covers of editions of Donne’s work. The portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, and a reproduction of it can be found online at the gallery’s Web site, www.npg.org.uk. This could well have been the time, give or take a few years, when Donne wrote one of his most cynical poems about love and women, ‘‘Song.’’ In the painting, Donne’s attire, with the large hat and the lace around the collar, suggests a certain raffish glamour, or at least the young Donne’s idea of what such glamour might look like, and the expression on the face might suggest that of the melancholy lover (as Carey puts it). Is there a brooding quality in that face, a sullen silence that might suddenly, one supposes, give way to a contemptuous tirade against women? Donne was certainly not the first poet or literary character to note the sad but irrefutable fact of the inconstancy of women. In Edmund Spenser’s romance, The Faerie Queene, published in its complete form in 1596, a knight known as the Squire of Dames (a title that refers to his promiscuous nature) confides that he once conquered three hundred women in less than a year, which, the curious will note, is not far off one woman per day. However, at the request of the lady Columbel, whom he loves and serves, he searches all over the country for a chaste woman who will resist him no matter

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how hard he tries to seduce her. In three years, the Squire of Dames finds three such women—a paltry total, one might think, for such a lengthy search. Moreover, on closer examination, the Squire’s modest haul becomes even less impressive. One of the three women is a courtesan who spurns his advances because he cannot pay enough; the second is a nun who turns him down because he refuses to swear to keep the seduction secret. That leaves just one woman who is the genuine article. She turns out to be a humble country girl, who—ghost of Donne’s cynical speaker in ‘‘Song,’’ take note—was not only chaste but also beautiful. Nearly two hundred years later, Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote the libretto for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera Cosi fan tutte (1790) and made Spenser’s Squire of Dames look a little too optimistic. The title of the opera means ‘‘they are all like that.’’ They? Women, of course. In the plot, two young men, egged on by a cynical older man, decide to test the loyalty of their respective fiance´es, confident the ladies will pass the test. The men pretend they have been sent off to war, but they soon return in disguise. It does not take long for the oh-so-loyal ladies to switch their romantic allegiances to the newcomers. But what else could have been expected? After all, cosi fan tutte, just as Donne’s speaker asserts in ‘‘Song.’’ His complaint is not just against some women, or a particular woman, or even most women, but all women. However, that speaker, so confident in the rightness of his absolute views, may not realize that in stanza 2 he lets slip something that reveals a great deal about the psychology of men, at least in Donne’s time, when it comes to thinking about women. The key passage comes in stanza 3: ‘‘If thou find’st one, let me know, / Such a pilgrimage were sweet.’’ A pilgrimage is a religious journey, usually to a sacred site, for the purpose of worship. In other words, Donne’s speaker is saying that if such a pure woman can be found, he will go on a pilgrimage to meet her (this of course is before he changes his mind in the next line). He appears to regard such a woman as a kind of goddess, a holy figure to be worshiped. But then look what happens when his cynical side immediately reasserts itself, and he says that before he could reach such a woman, she would prove false, not once, not twice, but as many as three times. In other words, to put it bluntly, she will turn out to be no better than a whore. Thus in the space of one nine-line stanza, the speaker has veered from one extreme to the

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other: from woman-as-goddess to woman-aswhore. This hints at a way of thinking, of how men respond to women, that is found many times in Renaissance literature, and elsewhere. A woman may be held up as a divine ideal, an image of spotless purity, by men who like to adore distant objects. The presentation of Elizabeth I as the Virgin Queen is an example. But a real woman, in all her power and complexity, is a different matter. One false step and she becomes, well, nothing better than a tramp. This psychological pattern suggests the anger and rage that can take possession of the male who has his fantasy ideal disturbed by the presence of real flesh and blood—by a woman who is a complex human being, just as he is. One does not have to look further than the works of Donne’s contemporary, William Shakespeare, for examples. In Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra is both goddess and harlot. She is decked out as the Egyptian goddess Isis, but when she appears to betray Antony, he condemns her venomously as a ‘‘tripleturn’d whore,’’ which was what the Romans were saying about her all along. The same applies to Desdemona, in Othello, according to which character is describing her. Othello idealizes his beautiful wife, but look what happens when Iago convinces him of her infidelity. Desdemona suffers the fatal consequences of this split in the male psyche that results in deadly rage when women do not act as men think they ought to. This may perhaps be taking Donne’s little song, ‘‘Song’’ too seriously, but the psychology described above is clearly present in it. Men who fear or condemn women for their volatility, their changeability (as happens in both those plays by Shakespeare) are in fact as subject to irrational and dangerous change as the women they complain about—as any woman who has been the victim of male violence knows very well. Whether he means his cynicism seriously or is just adopting a pose, there is no doubt that Donne, in his persona as the speaker of these love poems, can sometimes sound a very embittered fellow indeed. ‘‘Song’’ is only one example. ‘‘Woman’s Constancy’’ is even more savage. It begins, with heavy irony, ‘‘Now thou hast loved me one whole day, / Tomorrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say?’’ In the remainder of the poem, the speaker anticipates the excuses he thinks the departing lady will offer to justify her hasty ending of their relationship. He includes a typical ingenious twist, saying that perhaps she will argue that since her nature is to

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be false, by being false to him she is being true to herself. Finally, calling the lady a ‘‘vain lunatic’’— nothing gives such satisfaction, when lovers are about to split, as the carefully honed insult—the speaker says that he could argue with her if he chose, and demolish all her excuses and justifications, but he is not going to do so. Why should he? By tomorrow, he may want to end their relationship, too. The poem is petulant, clever, amusing, and psychologically accurate about the way people may behave when their love, once so bright and eager, is rejected. Donne’s voice, reaching across the centuries, still sounds so very modern. Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on ‘‘Song,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

R. V. Young In the following excerpt, Young discusses John Donne’s wit and use of irony. Taken together, John Donne’s Songs and Sonets, along with many of the erotic elegies, constitute a varied, even sporadic meditation on the experience and significance of love. Despite the apparent contradictions in the collection— the outbursts of bawdiness, arrogance, and cynicism among the reiterated, if often problematic, assertions of love’s transcendence of what is base and banal—these poems finally evoke a unified vision of what Monsignor Martin C. D’Arcy calls ‘‘the mind and heart of love.’’ In fact, it is precisely the candid acknowledgment of the contradictions in human attitudes that enables the complex irony of Donne’s witty eloquence to dramatize the approach to that ‘‘decisive moment’’ when a man genuinely recognizes the common human identity of the desired other, and ‘‘‘love’ now takes on its proper meaning’’ (244). As D’Arcy also says, ‘‘It is always, we must remember, a full human person who is loving, and in that love there are sure to be many different strands’’ (69). Love is an arresting exemplar of the paradoxical structure of reality as it is perceived by men and women; and poetry, understood broadly as a creative literary fiction (a ‘‘golden world,’’ if you will), is our most compelling means of manifesting that perception for the contemplation of ‘‘a full human person.’’ Few poets have achieved more in this line than John Donne. Amid the current atmosphere of ideological intimidation, which looms . . . over . . . Donne scholarship, these must seem quixotic assertions. This is, after all, the same John Donne who has been accused of apostasy (Carey 15–36), phallocentrism

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MOST OF US ARE CAPABLE OF STALE, REASSURING COMPLIMENTS LIKE ‘I THINK THE WORLD OF YOU.’ DONNE WORKS OUT THE DETAILS OF THE CLICHE´ AND CREATES A SUPERBLY PREPOSTEROUS CONCEIT.’’

(Mueller 148), servile submissiveness to an absurdly repellent embodiment of patriarchal royal absolutism (Goldberg 111–12), and even bulimia (Fish 223). The most ambitious twelve-step program may seem hardly sufficient to restore to a man of such vicious compulsions his former status as the most persuasive love poet in English literature. These gloomy assessments of Donne and his work arise, however, from a misconception both of love and of poetry. Both of these vital human activities have been ‘‘defined down’’ in this therapeutic age: judged as something less than the sum of their parts. The vital abundance and mysterious subtlety of love have been subjected to a diminished appraisal in a fashion analogous to the ‘‘demystification’’ of the inventive copia and wit of Donne’s poetry. The recovery can be managed only by the constructive work of literary criticism and scholarship—a kind of joint operation seeking to rescue meaning from a wind-swept sea of floating signifiers. The interpretation of Donne’s love poetry offered here depends upon a vision of human love as an experience fraught with tension. D’Arcy refers to ‘‘the twofold character of love, in which respect it is compared to the struggle of opposites in nature’’ (222). At the heart of this ‘‘struggle’’ is the tension between Eros and Agape´—in the simplest terms, possessive and self-sacrificing love, desire and charity. The great value of D’Arcy’s work lies in his insistence that simply to favor agape over eros will not suffice: perfect agape is possible only for God whose fund of benevolence is infinite and inexhaustible. A man or a woman cannot give absolutely because we are finite creatures: a measure of self-assertive egotism, of possessive eros, is (literally) essential for us in order to retain an identity to be sacrificed or surrendered. Herein the paradox of the human situation: our most transcendent aspirations are as limitless and insatiable as our most sulphurous

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desires, while our capacity for each alternative is strictly limited. What is more, our divergent longings often seem not merely simultaneous, but even indistinguishable. The swoon of ecstatic selfimmolation is whirled about in the slaver of predatory anticipation. The resolution of this dilemma by means of supernatural grace is matter for another essay. My topic here is just the enigma of earthly, profane love, which embodies so much of what is both admirable and delightful, reprehensible and mortifying, in human nature and conduct. This tension at the center of human life finds its analogue in the tension that is central to poetry, a tension that attains its exemplary literary form in irony. ‘‘Irony’’ in this context means a poetic figure or a rhetorical device; but it refers as well to a particular vision of reality that is marked by an acute awareness of the fallibility of human knowledge, the uncertainty of human enterprise, the contingency of human existence itself. Such considerations are far more pertinent to this discussion than worries about whether irony is excessively ‘‘elitist’’ (Hutcheon 94) or inappropriate—not to say incorrect—in certain political contexts. The concern here is less with irony as a ‘‘political issue’’ (Hutcheon 2) than with Cleanth Brooks’ concept of ‘‘irony as a principle of structure.’’ Brooks’ 1949 essay describes irony as ‘‘a dynamic structure—a pattern of thrust and counterthrust’’; and after listing apparently contradictory implications in a poem by Randall Jarrell, Brooks argues that what results is not incoherence, but a complex of ironic tension: None of these meanings cancels out the others. All are relevant, and each meaning contributes to the total meaning. Indeed, there is not a facet of significance which does not receive illumination from the figure. (740)

The concept of irony as a structure of semantic tension, however, offers an obvious parallel to Monsignor D’Arcy’s conception of love as a tension of eros and agape. Together the two concepts provide a means of interpreting Donne’s love poetry as the ironic embodiment of a vision of love as a version of concordia discors. The same violent yoking that Dr. Johnson finds in the metaphysical style Brooks attributes to irony: Irony, then, in this further sense, is not only an acknowledgment of the pressures of context. Invulnerability to irony is the stability of a context in which the internal pressures balance and mutually support each other. The stability is like that of the arch: the very forces which are

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calculated to drag the stones to the ground actually provide the principle of support—a principle in which thrust and counterthrust become the means of stability. (732–33)

Poetic irony is thus the perfect counterpart to D’Arcy’s notion of love as ‘‘the struggle of opposites in nature.’’ Where Brooks’ formulation perhaps falls short is in neglecting to show how the stability of the poem—of any work of art—is the ultimate ironic turn of the screw. In his closing chapter, D’Arcy observes that love only reaches its culminating resolution—its ‘‘stability’’—in the eternal perfection of the love of God (363–73). Following T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards, Brooks maintains that sentimentality is avoided by that poetry ‘‘which does not leave out what is apparently hostile to its dominant tone, and which, because it is able to fuse the irrelevant and the discordant, has come to terms with itself and is invulnerable to irony’’ (732). In the realm in which irony is the only antidote to irony—a world of what is ‘‘hostile,’’ ‘‘irrelevant,’’ ‘‘discordant’’—we have no lasting city, and no lasting love. Thus the stability of the love poem forged out of the clash of ironic tensions is the ultimate ironic comment on the realm of human experience that the poem evokes. Not only Donne’s notorious ‘‘metaphysical’’ conceits, but indeed the entire fabric of particular poems corresponds to Brooks’ ‘‘conceit’’ of irony: a typical Donne love poem is a surprising fusion and distillation of hostility, irrelevance, and discord. A privileged recipient of a manuscript of Donne’s elegy ‘‘The Bracelet’’ in the 1590s would have been struck first of all by the poem’s topicality. The Acts of the Privy Council contains this item for 20 August 1591: Robert Henlack has petitioned the Council for redress against certain men who robbed him. He complains that while he was absent in the night a confederacy of certain evil disposed persons broke open his chamber door in the house of Isabel Piggott in Thames Street and took away goods and money to the value of £400. Further, one Nathaniel Baxter hath since then robbed him of £12 more, pretending that by casting a figure he would help him to his goods and money again. (Harrison 50)

The probable reader of ‘‘The Bracelet,’’ a Londoner, perhaps an Inns of Court man like Donne himself, might well recall this incident, or one like it, when he read in Donne’s poem of ‘‘many angled figures, in the booke / Of some great Conjurer’’ (lines 34–35); and the memory would be reinforced by the desperate persona’s

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effort to satisfy his mistress by any device short of melting down his ‘‘twelve righteous Angels’’ (line 9) to replace her lost chain: Or let mee creepe to some dread Conjurer, Which with phantastique scheames fils full much paper; Which hath divided heaven in tenements, And with whores, theeves, and murderers stuff his rents So full, that though hee passe them all in sinne, He leaves himself no roome to enter in. (59–64)

Allusions such as these, along with the colloquial texture of the language of Donne’s strong lines, would anchor the elegy firmly in the world of popular gossip and scandal of the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign. The generic designation elegy, however, which apparently was attached to this poem and more than a dozen others in the early manuscripts, would have signalled to an educated Elizabethan reader that the poet was engaged in the learned humanist activity of imitating the classics as well as remarking the kind of sensational ‘‘news’’ that was the preoccupation of broadside ballads. Any reasonably well-read contemporary of Donne would recognize the reference to the love poetry, especially the elegiacs, of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. Beyond the mere use of the term, Donne succeeds in evoking the atmosphere of the Roman elegy more successfully than any other Renaissance poet known to me. Donne is less an imitator of particular phrases, stylistic devices, themes, or episodes of this or that poem by his ancient predecessors than a triumphant rival, who has recreated in toto the Roman genre and transposed it into his own late Elizabethan milieu. ‘‘The Bracelet,’’ for example, captures the mingling of passionate desire, bitter cynicism, and wry irony that mark the classical erotic elegy without drawing on any specific classical poem. Indeed, its chief incident, the lover forced to search the town for a lost bracelet given him by his mistress, may parody, as Grierson and Gardner point out, Soliman and Perseda, a ‘‘foolishly romantic play’’ probably by Thomas Kyd (Gardner 112, 116). What emerges from this congeries—references to the ‘‘news’’ or gossip of the day, a form modelled on classical antiquity, allusions to contemporaneous popular literature—is a love poem in which ‘‘Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use / To say, which have no Mistresse but their Muse’’ (‘‘Love’s Growth’’ 11–12). The ‘‘impurity’’ derives, in large part, from the improbable me´lange: it is a lover who speaks the poem, but his love is shaped by the poet’s response to a generic clash. The

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Roman erotic elegy is, as Paul Veyne says, ‘‘one of the most sophisticated art forms in the entire history of literature’’ (1), and in Donne it collides with the crude Petrarchanism of so much of the poetry and drama of the Elizabethan age. This is a lover who, as he addresses the beloved, is acutely aware of the world of business and boredom, of perfidy and peril, of avarice and ambition, of vileness and violence—all that from which love is so often sought as an escape. The scene of Donne’s elegy is thus littered with elements that are ‘‘hostile,’’ ‘‘discordant,’’ and ‘‘irrelevant’’ to the conventional sense of love: it is irony that brings these antagonistic forces together in a single poetic structure. For despite the disparate elements jostling about among its lines, ‘‘The Bracelet’’ attains not only unity but even dramatic cogency. Whether it amuses or appalls, attracts or repels, the voice of this poem is alive and consistent with human experience, because its exasperated speaker is so credibly torn between two familiar human motivations: lust and greed. The first of these impulses is sufficiently strong that we infer that he will, however reluctantly, submit to the demand of his imperious mistress: But thou art resolute; thy will be done; Yet with such anguish, as her only son The mother in the hungry grave doth lay, Unto the fire these martyrs I betray. The harsh flirtation with blasphemy evoked by the echo of the Our Father (‘‘Thy will be done’’), by the hyperbolic term ‘‘Martyrs,’’ and by the hinted reference to the Blessed Virgin at the burial of Christ undercuts the familiar idealism of the Petrarchan deifying of the beloved by a mockingly excessive solemnity. This lover laments the loss of his money more than a mother the death of her child, more than Mary the death of Jesus; and yet the mistress is divine—her ‘‘will’’ must ‘‘be done.’’ The angry tone of this reluctant erotic worshipper reveals that his devotion can hardly be spiritual, especially since he has already observed that his very act of appeasement will serve only to diminish her favor: But shall my harmless angels perish? Shall I lose my guard, my ease, my food, my all? Much hope which they would nourish will be dead. Much of my able youth, and lustihead Will vanish; if thou love, let them alone, For thou wilt love me less when they are gone;

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The final irony of course is, that despite his compulsive yet reluctant yielding to a less than ideal mistress, the speaker of the poem still cannot relinquish his attachment to his ‘‘angels.’’ The woman disappears from the last twentyfour lines in the persona’s obsessive brooding over the ‘‘wretched finder’’ (91) of the bracelet: But, I forgive; repent thee, honest man! Gold is restorative; restore it then: But if from it thou be’st loth to depart, Because ’tis cordial, would ’twere at thy heart. This feverish, fickle preoccupation with the hypothetical possessor of the bracelet is an ironic mirror image of his odi et amo relationship with his rather dubious mistress. This is a bitterly cynical vision of love as possessive passion: the parallel between the irresistible desire for the erotic favor of a woman, whose chief attributes seem to be greed and arrogance, and the lover’s own grasping avarice is a finely distilled solvent for the amorous idealism prevalent in a literary culture dominated by love-sonnet sequences. The final comic irony arises from the absurdity of the speaker’s own situation: he is, after all, no better off than the deluded Petrarchist whom he implicitly scorns. Like the saturnine speaker of ‘‘Loves Alchymie,’’ he has seen through the sham of love, knows that women are hardly human much less divine; but for all his blase´ sophistication he is still as frustrated, every bit as much a slave to passion as Astrophil. Here again, without imitating a particular classical poem, Donne has succeeded in capturing the flavor of the Roman erotic elegy. ‘‘I myself,’’ writes Paul Veyne, believe that Propertius, or rather the Ego he brings on stage, does not so much suffer from the pangs of jealousy as regard the chains of passion as something dreadful. Indeed, the ancient Roman considered the effects of passion a form of tragic fate, a form of slavery, a special form of unhappiness. (2)

This reflection gives the alternate titles of Donne’s poem that refer to the bracelet as a ‘‘chaine’’ rather more resonance: the persona is surely bound to his mistress by the ‘‘lost chain.’’ Here among the love poems of John Donne we find a very acrid view of love, but we find very little about John Donne himself. In a qualified way I wish to endorse the perception of Judith Scherer Herz that ‘‘in his poems . . . Donne is rarely there, indeed in some poems never there,’’ and I

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agree that Donne is ‘‘the master of complex, unsettling, prickly poems, poems that simply will not resolve,’’ (3, 5). . . . Such attributes, however, do not define his character. He is writing poems, and a poet is precisely that man or woman ‘‘who will say anything if the poem seems to need it’’— ‘‘for the Poet, he nothing affirmes, and therefore neuer lyeth’’ (Sidney 184). As John Shawcross points out, ‘‘The false specter of Romantic effusion has blighted poetic criticism for a long time—as if the poet cannot write without parallel experience, as if all that is said is fully and firmly believed as he or she writes’’ (57). I would go even further than Shawcross in defending the essay by Wimsatt and Beardsley, ‘‘The Intentional Fallacy,’’ because it accepts absolutely one of the poet’s intentions, the intention to write a poem. This brings us back to the issue of inconsistency between and within poems. The persona of ‘‘The Bracelet’’ is surely inconsistent, a monument of tergiversation: he regards his mistress’ will as divine, but her person as less ‘‘angelic’’ than his money, he speculates about someone recovering the gold chain who is now a ‘‘wretched finder,’’ now ‘‘an honest man,’’ and finally the object of what we may call a heartfelt curse. The discourse represented by the poem is inconsistent because its speaker is inconsistent. Of course Donne himself was also inconsistent, but then so are you and I, and so are most men and women in every era . . . There is, then, inconsistency within and among Donne’s poems because they deal with the reality of human existence, which is a tissue of inconsistencies; but the poems as such are not inconsistent. The philosopher, as Sidney reminds us, deals in abstractions only tangentially connected to human life; the historian is in danger of drowning in the chaotic flood of experience: ‘‘the Historian, wanting the precept, is so tyed, not to what shoulde bee but to what is, to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things, that hys example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a lesse fruitfull doctrine.’’ It is only ‘‘the peerelesse Poet’’ who ‘‘coupleth the generall notion with the particuler example’’ (164). This ‘‘coupling,’’ or layering of inconsistencies into whatever the pattern of the poem requires, is irony—‘‘irony as a principle of structure.’’ It is the fundamental irony of poetry that it produces consistent formal structures out of the turbid swirl of inconsistency that constitutes human experience, that it reveals meaning—the ‘‘precept’’—in what may seem meaningless.

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The distinction between poetic intention and the personal life of the poet becomes more complex in those works of Donne where we find what seems an indisputable indication of ‘‘parallel experience’’ providing the origin of the incidents or situation of a poem. If the tone is even more elusive than that of ‘‘The Bracelet’’ and falls into Gardner’s category of ‘‘poems of mutual love’’ (liii), then critical preoccupation with the autobiographical features of the poem becomes almost irresistible. There is no better example than ‘‘The Sunne Rising.’’ The persona who brashly proclaims his satisfaction at having thrown away the opportunity for preferment in the royal court for the sake of love bears a suspicious resemblance to the historical John Donne, who, we may surmise, had plenty of time to wile away in bed with his teenage bride, since he had no place in the busy world of education, politics, and trade. The seventh line, ‘‘Goe tell Courthuntsmen, that the King will ride,’’ cries out to be associated with the court gossip of the years shortly after Donne’s elopement, as retailed by that ubiquitous busybody, John Chamberlain, in a letter to Ralph Winwood: The Kinge went to Roiston two dayes after Twelfetide, where and thereabout he hath continued ever since, and findes such felicitie in that hunting life, that he hath written to the counsaile, that yt is the onely meanes to maintain his health, (which being the health and welfare of us all) he desires them to undertake the charge and burden of affaires, and foresee that he be not interrupted nor troubled with too much busines. (I: 201)

This looks like fairly solid evidence that the poem was written sometime after the accession of James Stuart as James I of England, when his new subjects had become acquainted with his habits; however, there was some notice in England of James’ addiction to hunting when he was still just King of Scotland. It was bruited about London at least as early as 1591 that, despite the threat of rebellious Earls to James’ safety, he would not ‘‘be restrained from the fields or in his pastime, for any respect’’ (Harrison 13). The detail of a hunting king could have been picked up from political gossip during the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign in England as well as during the first decade of James’ reign. The poem powerfully evokes certain details of what we know of Donne’s life during the latter time, but we cannot be sure when it was written, and, finally, it does not matter. We must also take into account, again, the element of literary imitation. It is a commonplace

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to notice that the opening lines of ‘‘The Sunne Rising’’ echo even as they transform the corresponding lines of Ovid, Amores I. xiii: . . . [Already the blonde who drives the day in her frosty carriage is coming over the ocean from her aged husband. What’s your hurry, Aurora? Wait!—And so may a bird appease Memnon’s shade each year with solemn slaughter!]

But if Donne is, in part, seeking to outdo the wit of Ovid with his own more extravagant conceits, it also seems that he may be parodying ‘‘A Hymn to Aurora’’ of a more recent Latin poet, Marcantonio Flaminio (1498–1550). The opening of his Hymnus in Aurora offers a picture of the dawn goddess that contrasts sharply with Ovid’s: . . . [Behold Aurora coming from the farthest East brings round again her dewy four-horse team and brightly bears the shining light within her rosy bosom.]

Besides the fact that Flaminio portrays the Dawn’s conveyance as ‘‘dewy’’ (roscidas) rather than ‘‘frosty’’ (pruinoso), this is an altogether more engaging portrait of the goddess as the embodiment of refulgence, and it seems to be a direct reply to Ovid. The moral edification of the closing sapphics may have especially caught Donne’s attention: . . . [Without you mortals would lie buried in eternal night, and without you things would have no colors and life would not be enriched with learned arts. You expel heavy sleep from sluggish eyes—sleep is the image of death— calling from the roof-tops you send each one joyful to his duties. The swift traveler leaps from the covers, the strong bullocks return to the yoke, the happy shepherd hastens quickly to the woods with his hurried flock. But weeping the lover forsakes the bed of his darling girl and speaks harsh words to you, torn away from the desired embrace of his yielding mistress. Let him love the lairs of deceitful night, let me always rejoice in the good light: permit me, great goddess, to receive the shining light through the long years!]

The weeping lover who speaks harsh words to Aurora would seem to be Flaminio’s version of the irreverent persona of Ovid’s Amores. This lover of dark dens and loose women is reproved by contrast to the man who rejoices in the light and hastens eagerly to his duties. Donne reverts to the tone of the Amores, painting a very different scene from Flaminio’s sturdy bullocks, eager traveler, and happy shepherd who go off to work whistling like the seven dwarfs: Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,

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Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride Call countrey ants to harvest offices . . . (5–8) ‘‘The Sunne Rising’’ undoubtedly celebrates mutually fulfilling love, but the celebration takes place in a context that recalls the limits even of such a love. Donne would have expected his readers to be aware of other claims on human time and attention amidst this exaltation of erotic bliss and sleeping-in. Perhaps neither the poet nor his audience knew this particular poem by Flaminio, but they surely knew poems or prose exhortations like it. There is obvious humor in Donne’s mockery of this kind of earnest solemnity; however, even Ovid must have occasionally had to be somewhere on time. Donne calls attention to the equivocal status of the claims made in the poem by their very extravagance. Ovid is never so brash with Aurora as Donne is with the ‘‘Sunne,’’ which he calls ‘‘Busie old foole’’ and ‘‘Sawcy pedantique wretch.’’ The very excessiveness of his emulation of Ovid and parody of Flaminio discloses the tension between the notion of love’s sufficiency and the civic and economic demands of the world: If her eyes have not blinded thine, Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee, Whether both the’India’s of spice and Myne Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee. Aske for those Kings whom thou saw’st yesterday, And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay. (15–20) There are times when we have all believed this, or at least wished to do so; and it is a truth of human experience that love is finally more important than money or power. What makes this poem so much more than a conventional assertion of the transcendent power of human love is the structural irony: its subtle incorporation of the contrasting reality that love— certainly the sort that is enacted in the lovers’ four-poster bed—is a fragile enterprise indeed without the economic and social where-with-all to sustain it. Cleanth Brooks did not perhaps sufficiently allow for the way the irony is deepened not only by such intertextual resonance as is afforded by Ovid and Flaminio, but also by our knowledge of the historical situation of John Donne: the irony of his radical defiance of accepted social norms is surely rendered more

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piquant by the disastrous results of his elopement with Anne More. Donne the man could stay in bed every morning because he had no office. But Brooks is finally right: the irony is discernible in the structure of ‘‘The Sunne Rising’’ . . . As evidence I offer the last stanza, which highlights the conflicting norms of conventional society precisely by rejecting them so outrageously. Are the lovers lingering in their bed alienated from the ‘‘busie’’ world to which the ‘‘unruly Sunne’’ awakens them? It is no matter because they not only transcend that world; they epitomize it: She is all States, and all Princes, I, Nothing else is. Princes do but play us; compar’d to this, All honor’s mimique; All wealth alchimie . . . (21–24) The ‘‘real world’’ thus fades before the sublime bliss of the shared bed. The high-spirited absurdity of these assertions seems so selfevident that there hardly seems any point in refuting Jonathan Goldberg’s assertion that here ‘‘the speaker makes the absolutist declaration toward which the entire poem tends . . . The absorption of the lovers in each other, their replication of the power of the world, constitutes an appropriation of and reversal of the language of state secrets’’ (111). Likewise, in a generally sympathetic essay, Camille Wells Slights seems to be straining . . . when she defends ‘‘The Sunne Rising’’ from the charge that it ‘‘reinscribes the culture’s gender hierarchy’’ by arguing that ‘‘as third- and first-person singular pronouns give way to first-person plural, the topic becomes not the lovers but their relationship’’ (78). Carey gets closer to the mark in noticing the tension in the conceits, but he seems altogether oblivious to the tone: ‘‘Donne’s vaunting language is, like all vaunting language, an expression of insecurity, and this makes the poem more human. The pretension to kingship that he voices amounts to an acknowledgement of personal insufficiency’’ (109). The speaker of the poem, however, knows this as well as Professor Carey: the ‘‘vaunting language’’ sounds like an effort to deflect by means of laughter an anxious question about, say, where the rent money is coming from this month. The woman whose lover or husband has just proclaimed his universal sovereignty over the empire of the bedroom probably has

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more concrete worries than being colonized by the hegemony of absolutist patriarchal ideology. At the same time, there would have been some compensations even to genteel poverty in the company of such a roguish wit. Most of us are capable of stale, reassuring compliments like ‘‘I think the world of you.’’ Donne works out the details of the cliche´ and creates a superbly preposterous conceit in which the cosmos becomes thalamocentric: Thou sunne art halfe as happy’ as wee, In that the world’s contracted thus. Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee To warme the world, that’s done in warming us. Shine here to us, and thou art every where; This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare. (25–30) Ovid chides Aurora for her haste to leave her aged husband: . . . [If only Tithonus were allowed to tell a tale of you; nothing more scandalous would be told in heaven. While you shrink from him, since he is a long age older, early in the day you leap to the chariot odious to the old man.]

Donne’s sly sympathy for the aging sun is a comically inventive variation on the Ovidian theme, and it hints at the reality of human aging, which undermines the speaker’s jaunty erotic optimism. This is a man ruefully amused at the human limitations he so brazenly denies. Donne evidently was able to laugh at himself, . . . The vision of love in ‘‘The Sunne Rising’’ is decidedly more affirmative than what we find in ‘‘The Bracelet.’’ Anthony Low has argued persuasively that the former poem marks an important step in ‘‘the reinvention of love’’ at the threshold of modern times whereby lovers, wedded or otherwise, create their own private world over against the claims of the larger community: ‘‘Surprisingly, the two lovers in Donne’s private room enact one of the central rituals of carnival. They assume the personae of the dominant authority figures of their diurnal society and mockingly invert the social order’’ (54). The reference to carnival catches the tone of ‘‘The Sunne Rising’’ very well, and it distinguishes Donne’s more equivocal notion of the private world of love from the exacting idealism and solemnity of Milton’s divorce tracts and his intense portrait of marital love in Paradise Lost. Donne’s pervasive

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wit precludes even a shadow of sentimentality: he retains an inescapable awareness of the proclivity of erotic desire for self-absorption and special pleading. ‘‘The Dream’’ provides a striking example. This poem weaves conceits that challenge the most idealistic Petrarchan manner. The beloved mistress is no mere donna angelicata; in her intuition of the speaker’s mind she is more than an angel with implicitly divine knowledge: As lightning, or a Tapers light, Thine eyes, and not thy noise wak’d mee; Yet I thought thee (For thou lovest truth) an Angell, at first sight, But when I saw thou sawest my heart, And knew’st my thoughts, beyond an Angels art, When thou knew’st what I dreamt, when thou knew’st when Excesse of joy would wake me, and cam’st then, I doe confesse, it could not chuse but bee Prophane, to thinke thee any thing but thee. (11–20) This stanza is both rather grandiose in its language and yet at the same time an example of strictly verbal irony: to say that it is ‘‘prophane’’ to think a woman less than herself, when less means angelic, is in fact profane because the assertion implies that a mortal creature is divine. Both the comedy and the complexity increase in the following stanza when the lady’s divinity is put in doubt because of her reluctance to ‘‘act the rest’’ of the speaker’s ‘‘dreame’’: Comming and staying show’d thee, thee, But rising makes me doubt, that now, Thou art not thou. That love is weake, where feare’s as strong as hee; ’Tis not all spirit, pure and brave, If mixture it of Feare, Shame, Honor, have; Perchance as torches which must ready bee, Men light and put out, so thou deal’st with mee, Thou cam’st to kindle, goest to come; Then I

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Will dreame that hope againe, but else would die. (21–30) There is a great deal here of sheer metaphysical mockery of the pretensions of erotic idealism: the slangy puns on ‘‘Comming’’ and ‘‘die’’; the outrageously phallic torch, lit only to be put by in readiness, that suggests the woman to be tease; and, above all, the pseudo-Scholastic speculation about how a woman is not who she is and love ‘‘not all spirit, pure, and brave’’ except when it is realized in the flesh. It is a seducer’s paradox that argues for the identification of purity and spirituality with physical consummation. Yet there is a gentleness, even a tenderness, in ‘‘The Dreame’’ that elevates it above a mere cynical irony. The difference is apparent in the contrast with the bitterness of another famous poem about a woman coming into a man’s bedroom: ‘‘They fle from me that sometyme did me seke / With naked fote stalking in my chambre’’ (Wyatt 1–3). Readers who know Donne’s history will be drawn to set the scene of the poem in York House, and picture the charming intruder in the persona’s chamber as a very young Anne More, both daring and diffident, drawn irresistibly to, and yet somewhat afraid of, the witty, sophisticated courtier with the dubious reputation, rather unaccountably employed by her step-uncle. The poem’s delicate blend of wry humor and breathless ardor bespeaks both the love and lust of a man who thought his mistress a goddess, but liked his goddess to be flesh and blood—a carnal substitute, perhaps, for the deity incarnate in the sacrament of the Altar that the actual, historical John Donne must have been relinquishing about the time he met Anne More. However, . . . we must remember that erotic dreams would have represented a familiar poetic topic for Donne and his contemporaries. ‘‘Dreams are not unusual in the Roman love elegy,’’ Clifford Endres observes as he comments on the strikingly original imitation of the motif by Joannes Secundus (1511–1536), who was in turn imitated by other sixteenth-century poets, both Neo-Latin and vernacular (126). As in ‘‘The Dreame,’’ the speaker of Secundus’ Somnium is concerned about the tension between his desires to possess his beloved sexually and the restraints imposed by social and familial disapproval: . . . [Now no markets, no warehouses, no packed theatres, no temples are privy to our pleasures. The mother is away who imposes law on fingers and mouths, and constrains us

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to speak few words in a low murmur, to reap no lingering kisses on parched lips (which any lover would regard as barbarous) to hide our burning torches, to weave the name of friend, and to feign many things which ingenious Love learns.]

Secundus not only anticipates Donne’s torch, he also describes a beloved mistress as a source of light: ‘‘I hold thee, my Light, my Light, I hold thee’’ (24: ‘‘Te teneo, mea Lux, Lux mea, te teneo’’). But in fact the two previous elegies (viii and ix) have described Julia’s wedding to another man, and her appearance in the speaker’s bed turns out to be only a dream: . . . [Julia, I am holding you: let the Gods above hold on to their Olympus. What am I saying? Do I truly, Julia, hold you? Do I sleep? Or do I wake? Is this real or is this a dream? Whether dream or reality let’s enjoy it, let’s do it! If this is a dream, may it last a long time, and let no daylight, I pray, awaken me.]

Like the lover of Secundus’ Somnium, the speaker of ‘‘A most rare, and excellent Dreame, learnedly set downe by a woorthy Gentleman,’’ which appeared in The Phoenix Next in 1593, is consoled only by a dream, and unlike the resourceful persona of the Neo-Latin poem, he cannot even manage to stay asleep. The pace of the poem is leisurely: it runs to 60 stanzas of rime royal and includes a learned disquisition on the origin and nature of dreams worthy of Chaunticleer. After the distraught, unrequited lover finally lapses into sleep out of sheer exhaustion, ‘‘Slumber’’ brings him, ‘‘To mitigate the anguish of my thought,’’ the vision of ‘‘a Ladie faire (33)’’ who, at the end of a twelve-stanza blazon, turns out to be ‘‘the portrait of the Saint, / Which deepe ingraued in my hart I beare, / The Mistres of my hope, my feare, my plaint’’ (36). The lady’s explanation for her appearance in the gentleman’s bedchamber is disarmingly innocent: With vnperceiued motion drawing ny, Vnto the bed of my distresse and feare, She with hir hand doth put the curtaine by, And sits her downe vpon the one side there: My wasted spirits quite amazed were, To see the sudden morning of those eies, Within the darke thus inexpected rise. Being abrode (quoth she) I lately hard, That you were falne into a sudden feuer, And solitarie in your chamber bard, From companie you did your selfe disseffeuer,

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To charitie it appertaineth euer, In duties to our neighbors for to sticke, And visit the afflicted and the sicke. (36) The first of these two stanzas bears an obvious similarity to the situation at the beginning of Donne’s ‘‘The Dreame,’’ including again an emphasis upon the woman as bearer of light into the darkness. The lady in The Phoenix Nest, however, is devoid of that equivocal blend of daring and diffidence that characterizes her counterpart in Donne’s poem. It takes several stanzas for her to realize that her lover expects her to cure his ‘‘feuer’’ without recourse to her garden herbs or ‘‘closet of conserues.’’ When she finally understands what he is asking, they argue for several pages the standard love vs. honor theme, with the lady defending rational selfcontrol against blind passion: ‘‘The argument is dull, and nothing quicke, / Bicause that I am fake, you should be sicke’’ (39). The lover’s only effective counter-argument is a death-like faint, which leads the lady to relent and recall him to life ‘‘with a kisse.’’ Unfortunately his joy is so great that the dream is broken and he awakens to ‘‘The vanitie and falsehood of these ioyes’’ (42–43). Perusing a volume like The Phoenix Nest is a forceful reminder of the power and originality of Donne’s love poetry. ‘‘The Dreame’’ treats exactly the same dilemma as ‘‘A most rare, and excellent Dreame, learnedly set downe by a woorthy Gentelman’’: namely, the internal clash in a man between love and lust, between the longing to cherish with honor and to possess with casual pleasure, between the image of a woman as angelic, saintly, or divine and the predatory perception of a woman as a quarry. The poem printed in The Phoenix Nest, in keeping with the length of its title, spends 420 lines rehearsing a series of predictable, though loosely strung-together commonplaces. In just thirty lines Donne’s poem evokes a world. The young woman who slips into her lover’s room, listens to his blandishments, with their mixture of wry wit and anxious pleading, and then, suddenly panicked, draws back—she comes vividly to life in the words of Donne’s poetic persona. There is no need for her to speak; we should probably imagine her hushing his expostulations with her finger at her lips, fascinated and fearful at the same time. She is so real that she generates a tremendous urge to find her in history, to re-create her biography. But what, in fact, makes her real is precisely the comparison of the poem in which she takes shape with the dreary litter of Phoenix Nests in their

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thousands despoiling the literary landscape. It is Donne’s capacity to interact creatively with literary tradition that makes his poetry so much more than conventional literature. . . . But a good poet does not have to react against bad poems. Perhaps the most resonant context for Donne’s ‘‘The Dreame’’ comes at the end of the very first canto of The Faerie Queene. Could any reader of poetry in the 1590s pick up Donne’s account of a man awaking to fined the woman of his dreams there at his bedside and not think of the Redcrosse Knight awaking to a demonic apparition of his beloved? There is a striking inverted parallel insofar as Spenser’s hero is beguiled into mistaking an evil spirit— that is, a fallen angel—for the real Una, who allegorically represents the Truth; while Donne’s persona at first mistakes the real woman for a mere ‘‘Angell.’’ Donne’s poem differs most notably from the first two bits of poetic context that we have considered insofar as ‘‘The Dreame’’ is not just a dream—the lady actually shows up in the bedroom. The difference with the scene created by Spenser is still more significant: Una bears a grave symbolic burden as the representation of the transcendental truth and the idea of the true Church. When the Redcrosse Knight finally chases the counterfeit out of his room— much unlike Donne’s persona, who urges the lady to stay—it is as if the Truth itself has failed: Long after lay he musing at her mood, Much griev’d to thinke that gentle dame so light, For whose defence he was to shed his blood. (The Faerie Queene I.i.55) It is no surprise when, several cantos later, in the company of that very different woman, the false ‘‘Fidessa,’’ his iron resolve fails ‘‘Poured out in looseness on the grassy grownd, / Both carelesse of his health and of his fame’’ (I. vii. 7). ‘‘The Dreame’’ thus flashes a derisive smile at Spenser’s aggressively Protestant, rigorously NeoPlatonic idea of Truth. It also gives point to what is clearly the superior reading of line seven: ‘‘Thou art so truth, that thoughts of thee suffice, / To make dreames truths; and fables histories’’ (7–8). If the lady in Donne’s poem who enters the bedroom is contrasted with Spenser’s Una, then Gardner’s reading ‘‘so true’’ instead of ‘‘so truth’’ must be rejected; and the relevance of Grierson’s citation of St. Thomas, which she dismisses, becomes clear (Gardner 209). Donne is proposing that truth is a flesh and blood woman, not a

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Platonic abstraction. The being of God, St. Thomas writes, is not only consistent with his understanding, but it even is his act of understanding; and his act of understanding is the measure and cause of every other being, and of every other understanding; and he is himself his own being and understanding. Hence it follows that not only is he truth in himself, but that he is the first and highest truth itself.

In other words, God is truth itself because He is absolutely and completely Himself in a way impossible to any creature. The ironic exception is, of course, the lady who enters the bedroom in ‘‘The Dreame’’: she is ‘‘so truth’’ that she too is divine—but only so long as she stays: Comming and staying show’d thee, thee, But rising makes me doubt, that now, Thou art not thou. (21–23) The woman in his bed, in his arms, is truth itself: palpable, concrete, existential reality. Gardner finds ‘‘‘so truth’ a very forced expression and the repetition of ‘truth . . . truth’ unpleasing to the ear’’ (209), but if the woman in ‘‘The Dreame’’ is set against Una as a differing version of truth, then Donne has provided an Aristotelian/Thomist vision to counter Spenser’s Neo-Platonism. To be sure, ‘‘The Dreame,’’ as well as many other poems among The Songs and Sonets, offers a very irreverent version of Thomism or more generally of Catholic doctrine and practice. It behooves us to recall, again, that in the course of writing these poems Donne was moving away from the faith of his youth. Most especially, he was relinquishing the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar—the ultimate manifestation of God’s truth in the Catholic liturgy. If the poet’s reckless marriage to Anne More was the decisive event in his spiritual journey, then he can be said to have surrendered the Body of Christ for the body of a woman, the flesh and blood present on the altar for the ‘‘divine’’ presence of the woman in the bed. ‘‘What Donne proposes in his most idealized love lyrics,’’ writes Anthony Low, ‘‘is a union between lovers that is essentially communal, sacred, and religious in a certain sense, but neither Christian nor social’’ (63). While Spenser tries to reconcile human sexual love with a militantly Protestant, Platonically spiritual version of truth, Donne attempts to forge a dramatic account of the truth of Eros that is ironically modelled on Catholicism at its most

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incarnational and sacramental. This convergence of conflicting elements—religious and political strife, philosophical and literary competition, the clash of Petrarchan idealism and cynical libertinism—results in the equivocal tension and the pervasive irony that mark the love poetry of John Donne.

ples, Research, 2AS1. http://www.2as1.net/marriage_ research_3.html (accessed November 12, 2009).

An historical individual named John Donne with all his individual quirks and personal experiences; literary conventions derived from ancient elegy, from Medieval Scholasticism, from courtly love lyric, from Renaissance Petrarchanism, and from many other sources; ideas about love of religious, philosophical, and social origin—all these elements converge in the love poetry of John Donne along with many more too numerous to list. What holds them together and forges them into a unity is wit. . . . The literary result is irony: the perception of the incongruous and contradictory suspended together in a verbal matrix. Gracia´n goes on to define the conceit (concepto) as ‘‘an act of the understanding that expresses the correspondence that is found among objects’’—found or invented by ‘‘the artifice of ingenuity’’ (242; artificio del ingenio). Literature is thus fundamentally ironic insofar as it acknowledges the incongruousness of human existence. Donne’s love poetry is ‘‘a well wrought urne’’ precisely in recognizing its own heroic insufficiency against the temporal and material forces always threatening to overwhelm it. The wit and irony of Donne’s poetry are very much akin to what a modern poet, Wallace Stevens, calls ‘‘nobility’’:

Donne, John, ‘‘Song,’’ in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, edited by A. J. Smith, Penguin, 1971, pp. 77–78.

It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence from without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives. (36) Source: R. V. Young, ‘‘Love, Poetry, and John Donne in the Love Poetry of John Donne,’’ in Renascence, Vol. 52, No. 4, Summer 2000, pp. 251–73.

SOURCES ‘‘Astronomy and Telescopes Glossary.’’ http://www.goastronomy.com/glossary/astronomy-glossary-f.htm (accessed November 12, 2009). ‘‘Average Age at Marriage, by Sex and Previous Marital Status, England and Wales, 2003,’’ in Marriage & Cou-

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Carey, John, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, Oxford University Press, 1981, pp. 38, 72. Cook, Ann Jennalie, Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society, Princeton University Press, 1981.

———, ‘‘Woman’s Constancy,’’ in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, edited by A. J. Smith, Penguin, 1971, p. 92. ‘‘Mandrake,’’ in The Natural Path. http://www.theherbprof. com/hrbMandrake.htm (accessed November 12, 2009). Redpath, Theodore, ed. The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne, 2nd ed., St. Martin’s Press, Penguin, 1983, p. xx. Rollin, Roger B., ‘‘‘Fantastique Ague’: The Holy Sonnets and Religious Melancholy,’’ in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, University of Missouri Press, 1986, p. 131. Shakespeare, William, Much Ado About Nothing, edited by R. A. Foakes, Penguin, 1981, Act 2, scene 3, lines 60–63, p. 64. ———, Antony and Cleopatra, edited by M. R. Ridley, Methuen, 1981, Act 4, scene 12, line 13, p. 166. Stampfer, Judah, John Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture, Funk & Wagnells, 1970, pp. 66, 67. Warnke, Frank, John Donne, Twayne English Authors Series, No. 444, Twayne, 1987, pp. 31, 36.

FURTHER READING Guibbory, Achsah, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, Cambridge University Press, 2006. This collection of essays is to date the most comprehensive guide on all aspects of Donne’s work. Nelson, Nicolas H., The Pleasure of Poetry: Reading and Enjoying Poetry from Donne to Burns, Greenwood, 2006. This is a clearly written, accessible guide to English poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nelson explains themes, devices, styles, language, imagery, and other literary elements as he discusses poets, including Donne, Ben Jonson, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, William Cowper, Robert Burns, Oliver Goldsmith, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden and others. Nelson discusses Donne’s ‘‘Song’’ as well. Picard, Liza, Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2005. Drawing on diaries and contemporary documents, Picard aims to give a picture of what life was like in London for the average person during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558–1603), which

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covers the first thirty years of John Donne’s life. She covers such topics as buildings, furniture, courtyards, and gardens. She also describes the people themselves—what illnesses they had, what they wore, what they ate and drank, their education, amusements, and family life. The book contains thirty-two pages of color photographs and maps.

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Stubbs, John, John Donne, The Reformed Soul: A Biography, Norton, 2007. This biography of Donne was well received by reviewers for its clarity, insight, and skill in interpreting the poetry. Stubbs explores the paradoxes and contradictions in the life of the great poet who was a rake and an adventurer before he became a revered Protestant cleric.

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Sonnet LXXXIX PABLO NERUDA 1959

By the time Pablo Neruda wrote One Hundred Love Sonnets for Matilde Urrutia in 1959, he was already a giant figure on the world stage of politics and the arts. In his political career, he had met Nehru, Castro, Che Guevara, Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung. In the world of art, he knew Octavio Paz, Picasso, Garcı´ a Lorca, Diego Rivera, and Gabriel Garcı´ a Ma´rquez. He had lived through the Spanish Civil War, World War I and World War II, and had been exiled from his country as a communist. Though fifty-five, he could still write passionate poems to the woman who would stand beside him for the last years of his life, up until his dramatic death during Chile’s military coup in 1973. Thousands turned out in the streets for his funeral to mourn their beloved poet, despite the ban by the dictator who destroyed Neruda’s lifetime of hope and work for the people of Chile. Neruda was that unusual phenomenon, a popular and literary writer at the same time. The Chilean man in the street or in the mines could recite Neruda’s poems, and at the same time, the poets of the world took note of his constant innovations in verse. He wrote over thirty books of poetry, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and served his country as diplomat, senator, and presidential candidate. He was the South American Walt Whitman in his magnetic personality and poetic ability to unify his continent’s history in Canto general (1950). Some critics separate Neruda’s poetry into categories such as political or romantic, but One Hundred Love Sonnets contains

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Pablo Neruda (Sam Falk / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

the same concern for nature, humanity, and love as all of his work. He called poetry the bread of the masses and himself a poet of love. ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX’’ in the One Hundred Love Sonnets gives the poet’s wife instructions for when he dies. The sonnets are available in a University of Texas Press edition translated by Stephen Tapscott (1986).

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, Pablo Neruda’s birth name, was born on July 12, 1904, in Parral, a town south of Santiago, Chile. His father worked on the railway, and his mother was a teacher who died as soon as he was born. He was raised by a stepmother with his half brother and sister in Temuco, where he began publishing poetry, prose, and journalistic articles as a teenager. At the age of twenty, he adopted the name of Pablo Neruda after Jan Neruda (1834–1891), a favorite Czech poet. He went to Santiago to the University of Chile to become a French teacher but wrote poetry instead. In 1923, Crepusculario was published, and the next year, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). The latter was both famous and controversial because of its eroticism, but it made his reputation as a daring and talented poet. In 1927, Neruda accepted a post as Chilean consul first in Burma, then Ceylon, Java, and Singapore. Lonely and repulsed by the climate of the Far East, he wrote poems of existential despair, which would become Residence on Earth, published in two volumes in 1935. Out of his first

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marriage in 1930 to Maria Antonieta Hagenaar was born Neruda’s only child, Malva. With his second wife, painter Delia del Carril, he went to Spain as consul in 1934 and was changed by witnessing the Spanish Civil War. Spain in My Heart (1937) is a tribute to the war-torn country and his friends who were killed there. In 1945, Neruda was elected as Chilean senator, and he joined the Communist Party. He won Chile’s National Prize for Literature the same year. The Heights of Macchu Picchu was published in 1945 (some claim it as his masterpiece), The Third Residence in 1947, and Canto general in 1950, a tribute to the working masses and the history of South America. In 1948, Neruda had to go into hiding in Chile when Communists were outlawed. He remained in exile for many years. In 1950, he won the Peace Prize in Warsaw, and in 1953, the Stalin Peace Prize in Moscow. Neruda carried on a clandestine relationship with singer, Matilde Urrutia, who would become his third wife, the love of his life, to whom he wrote The Captain’s Verses (1952) and One Hundred Love Sonnets (1959). In the 1950s, Neruda published three books of Odes, poems celebrating simple everyday objects and pleasures. At his home in Isla Negra in Chile during the 1960s, Neruda wrote his Memoirs, published in 1974. In 1970, Neruda was diagnosed with cancer. That same year he helped Salvador Allende’s socialist government get elected and went to France as ambassador. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 and died of heart failure on September 23, 1973, days after his friend, Allende, was assassinated or committed suicide, and the dictator, Pinochet, began a reign of terror. Eight posthumous books of poetry were published in 1973. Neruda has been called one of the great poets of the twentieth century.

POEM TEXT When I die, I want your hands on my eyes: I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once more: I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny. I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep. I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea’s aroma that we loved together, to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.

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I want what I love to continue to live, and you whom I love and sang above everything else to continue to flourish, full-flowered:

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so that you can reach everything my love directs you to, so that my shadow can travel along in your hair, so that everything can learn the reason for my song.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS 

Poetry Suite from ‘The Postman,’ Miramax/ Hollywood Records, 1996, audio CD, features celebrities such as Sting, Julia Roberts, Ralph Fiennes, Ethan Hawkes, Andy Garcia, Madonna, Glenn Close, and Samuel L. Jackson reading Neruda poems in English, including a couple of the love sonnets.



Pablo Neruda reads his ‘‘Arte Poetica’’ on The Caedmon Poetry Collection: A Century of Poets Reading Their Work, Volume 3, 2000.



Pablo Neruda: Love, Protest, and Exile is a fifty-minute film in Spanish, VHS and DVD, by the Films Media Group, 2004. It covers Neruda’s literary output and political activities, using archival photographs, film footage, and scholarly commentary. The Brazilian singer, Luciana Souza, translates and sings Neruda poems on Neruda in her original compositions, accompanied by her percussion and piano, with piano parts by Edward Simon, Sunny Side label, 2004, on audio CD, or MP3 download. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sings Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs in Spanish, a cycle of five Neruda love sonnets with Robert Levine and the Boston Symphony, Trumpet Swan label, 2006, audio CD or MP3 download.

POEM SUMMARY Line 1 Pablo Neruda’s ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX’’ is in ‘‘Night,’’ the last section of the One Hundred Love Sonnets, a sonnet series in four parts, which the poet dedicated to Matilde Urrutia. The sonnets in the section called ‘‘Morning’’ are full of the early joy of love; in ‘‘Afternoon,’’ they are full of domestic life; ‘‘Evening’’ concerns the challenges of love; and ‘‘Night’’ includes several death poems, foretelling the couple’s final separation. In‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX,’’the speaker addresses his lover, saying that when he dies, he wants her to place her hands on his eyes. He prepares her for his death by giving instructions on what to do. Rituals of caring for the deceased person’s body include closing the eyes, washing the body, and dressing and laying it out for viewing. All through the love poems, Neruda has described private rituals he shared with Matilde, describing her hands in many sonnets as a live-giving force. Here the speaker asks only for his lover to put her hands on his eyes. He wants that to be his last touch of earthly life. Since she is sometimes seen as an earth goddess in the poems, the request also suggests the earth’s last touch as it covers him in a grave.

Line 2 The speaker declares that her hands contain light and wheat. In many of the sonnets, the lover is compared to specific natural elements, the light of the moon or sun and to wheat and bread. Bread is the simple sustainer of life. Their love is like the baking of bread. He is asking her to put her hands full of life on his eyes. They will be his last nourishment. The bread is a communion image, though Neruda secularizes the meaning. The speaker requests no priest to attend him when he dies but his lover, and no communion but her hands.

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Line 3 By putting her hands on his eyes, she will put freshness in him once more. The sonnets identify the lover as the speaker’s very life. If she leaves the room, the light goes out. Wherever she walks, she brings life—to the house, to the garden, to nature, and to him.

Line 4 The softness of her hands changed his destiny, and he wants to feel that once more, even though at that future moment he will be dead. The lover changed the speaker’s destiny with her touch and that is why he wants her hands on his corpse.

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Perhaps she can give him a sense of life one last time. This ends the first quatrain presenting the scene of the moment of his death.

Line 5 The second quatrain instructs the lover about what to do with her life once he is gone. She must go on and live while he waits for her. He is asleep and she will be awake; she must carry on for both of them.

Line 6 He still wants her ears to hear the wind. He imagines the life in her by putting attention on her sensory experience. It implies that it is the sensory experiences of earth he will miss. She must sense them for herself and for him.

Line 7 He wants her to smell the sea because they loved to do that together. Elsewhere in the sonnet series, the couple’s love is compared to the sea, wild and uncontained. In references to the sea, the poet may be drawing upon images from his life in Isla Negra, where his home had good views of the ocean.

Line 8 The lover should continue to walk on the sand they walked on together. This line ends the second quatrain. Though the poem is about death, the speaker does not refer heaven or an afterlife somewhere else. He does not explain where he will wait for his lover. The emphasis is on the physical senses and the present moment, on the lover’s continuing life, since she will use her own sense of smell, touch, hearing, and sight for him as well. She is the part of him that will survive, since they are one. He will be as if asleep, but she must continue to feel life because it is a way to continue their love.

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Line 11 He wants his beloved to continue, not in sorrow, but to bloom in fullness. This flower image is appropriate since she makes the garden live by touching the soil and plants with her hands.

Line 12 She has to bloom in order to grasp everything his love has pointed to for her, to gather the gift of it. The lover has been like an earth goddess in the poems, full of life. She has to continue this role and example.

Line 13 If she does this for him, his shadow can be there with her in her hair. The speaker reduces his presence after death to a mere shadow around her full life, but he imagines that will be enough for him. This is the afterlife he imagines, nothing supernatural. He will remain as a trace in her hair, again a sensuous image. He has celebrated her hair in many sonnets, and he now imagines his essence after death entwined in her hair.

Line 14 If she does as he asks and is full of life after his death, then everyone will understand his song about her. The speaker implies that the poems have celebrated life, not death. The poet characterizes the lover as one who as she carries on alone is a living testimony to the couple’s love. Neruda was a spiritual man who loved his wife, his people, and the earth. He was not, however, a religious man. So instead of picturing a religious version of the afterlife in heaven, he names the things on earth that will last: the love has shared with his wife, their love of nature, and his poetry. In Sonnet LXXXX, the speaker says that he leaves only his lover behind, and only her love is strong enough to defeat death. In Sonnet XCII, he says that their love is immortal, like a river that keeps flowing, but with other lips and in other lands. They love, therefore, not only for themselves, but as a legacy for all times.

The speaker explains that it is his wish that what he loves should continue to live, so therefore she must live.

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Line 10 She has been the one he loved and wrote about the most. Earlier in the sonnet series, the speaker has given his lover credit for rekindling his poetic gift in the last years of his life, and many of the poems he wrote were love poems for her.

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Love One Hundred Love Sonnets celebrates the relationship between Pablo Neruda and Matilde Urrutia. Matilde was Neruda’s third wife and his greatest love for the last twenty-five years of

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 





For a young adult assignment, students could watch the film Il Postino (The Postman, Miramax, 1994), which includes Pablo Neruda as a character discussing poetry with an Italian postman. Neruda helps the postman understand how to make a metaphor and write poetry. Write a poem of your own using metaphors or similes to create an experience for readers. For instance, the postman tells Neruda that when he hears his poem about the sea, it makes him feel like a boat floating on the poet’s words. Use your poems to start a class discussion on figures of speech, such as metaphor and simile, including what these are and how they work in literature. Compare one of Neruda’s love sonnets to a love sonnet written by Francesco Petrarch or William Shakespeare. How does Neruda make the sonnet form his own in style and content? What aspects of love does Neruda emphasize that Petrarch or Shakespeare do not? Write a short paper on the sonnet with examples from Neruda and the other poet to explain your points. One class member who speaks Spanish can read some of Neruda’s sonnets in the origi-

his life. He wrote the sonnets for her as well as The Captain’s Verses and Barcarola. Eight years his junior, Matilde was a singer and actress, completely unacquainted with poetry and politics, his two vocations. He turned to her as a refuge and a way to reconnect with his past. They were both from southern Chile, and she was close to the earth and nature. She enjoyed cooking, gardening, singing and playing the guitar, and making a home for him. Neruda paints a picture of their earthly paradise in their home at Isla Negra on the Chilean coast in these poems. For years, the two met secretly as lovers because Neruda was still married. These sonnets, however, chronicle not only their physical passion for each other, but the couple’s domestic

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nal while the class views an English translation. As a class, discuss the sound of the Spanish as compared to English and what is lost in translation. Have the Spanish speaker explain the feeling or cultural nuances that are not present in English. 

One Hundred Love Sonnets is written from the man’s point of view. Imagine a woman’s response to one of these sonnets and write an answering sonnet. Read it to the class explaining how a dialogue between a man and woman love might be different from getting only one point of view.



Research the geography and climate of Chile, especially around Isla Negra, where Neruda lived while writing the sonnets. How do the sonnets convey the seasons of the place and make that part of the love story? Present slides to the class and pair them with certain sonnets from One Hundred Love Sonnets.



Compare and contrast love poems or love songs from different cultures. Present them to the class and discuss how love is both the same and different, depending on the culture and time.

happiness after they settled down at Isla Negra. The poems celebrate the romantic intimacy of a man and a woman in a mature and solid relationship, but besides being personal, they have universal appeal. The sonnets portray the seasons of life and love that the lovers pass through together. Morning abounds in images of innocence and joy. The woman is compared to everything the man loves— wood, water, earth, fruit, flowers, and light. She is the rock on which he founds his life. Everything is fresh and new. Love saves him and gives him strength. Afternoon is the fullness of love; the woman is his queen, and their home a refuge. Evening brings the sorrow of public spite and envy, but it cannot disturb the balance of their

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Lovers walking on the beach (Image copyright iofoto, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

love. Sonnet LXXXIX comes in the ‘‘Night’’ section and addresses their eventual separation through death. The speaker makes it clear, however, that it is his body that will die but not the love between them. Though love has its seasons, it is not subject to death. As the poems unfold, the love between the man and woman expands to embrace nature and the suffering people of the world. In his earlier book of love poems to Matilde, The Captain’s Verses, Neruda began to braid together the themes of love and politics. There, the speaker addresses his lover as his comrade in the fight against the world’s injustice. In the sonnets, he again asserts that his life stands for the love and care of all humanity, and their personal love will be the lasting testimony to that.

Death The ‘‘Night’’ section brings up the inevitable moment of separation through death. The lovers must tie their hearts together to defeat darkness, the speaker says, in Sonnet LXXIX. Several of the sonnets assume he will die before she does, and he tells her how to be the survivor. Sonnet LXXXIX

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depicts the speaker’s death as a sort of sleep and his beloved as his vicarious life. While he sleeps, she must use her senses and live intensely for both of them. Though the theme is death, the imagery and tone are passionately alive, showing her how she must be when he leaves her. All the sonnets are focused on the physicality of the joys of love—her body as the body of nature, for instance. The lovers enjoy and fit into the cycles of nature, even this one of death and separation. He continues to celebrate and tell her how to keep living for their love. He does not want death to cause sadness, but he also refuses to deny the difficulty of separation of death by offering spiritual consolation. It is only their love that sustains them in this physical separation, as in their life together. In Sonnet XCV, he declares that no one has loved as they did, and they must consume their life with passion like a full fruit that falls to the earth. The light of such a love endures.

Continuity of Life In the death sonnets, especially LXXX, LXXXIX, XC, XCII, XCIII, XCIV, in which the poet imagines either the beloved’s death or the speaker’s

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own, the focus is not on decay, absence, or sorrow. It is on the continuity of life. They will go back to the earth, but their love, his poetry, and humanity that they both have loved so dearly, will all survive. The celebrated parts of life must continue, even if through other hands and lips. Even in death, the poet wants to pass on the legacy of hope. In ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX,’’ he says if he dies first, he will wait for his wife; she is the surviving testament to his poetry. In the ‘‘Night’’ section of the sonnets, the speaker focuses on death and also remembers the people he will leave behind. He asks for bread for the workers he loves and happiness for his beloved. He warns her if she mourns, he will die a second time. She must continue to uphold their love after he dies for the sake of others. He compares their love to a beacon fire on the mountain or a river that will continue to flow, to which others will add. In Sonnet XCII, he tells her that they must be grateful they found one another and that the meadow of infinity they shared for a while, must now be given back, even though the love is not ended. One way he establishes the continuity of life is to compare death to night. During the night the lovers sleep together, and they are resurrected as someone new the next day. They have passed through the shadows of time together. In the death sonnets, the speaker can take this one more step to assure her that similarly, there will be continuity of life after death, perhaps not personal continuity, but of a more general kind. It may not be their hands and faces, but they have added to the reservoir of love for the benefit of all who come after. Another way he creates continuity is through the paradox of presence in absence. He always feels her when she is absent, and it will be like that in death; she must inhabit his absence like a house (Sonnet XCIV).

STYLE Sonnet The sonnet, or little song, became popular in the later Middle Ages as it was used by Italian lyric poets such as Guido Cavalcanti and Dante Alighieri. Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) immortalized the form in his Canzoniere to his beloved Laura (perhaps Laura de Noves, 1308–1348). Poets in every European country in the Renaissance used the sonnet for love poetry and for discussions of

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other topics, too. The Italian sonnet is fourteen lines, divided into an octave and a sestet, in which a topic is introduced in the first eight lines and then takes a turn in direction in the last six. The English variation on this is a sonnet of three quatrains and a concluding couplet. Neruda uses the Italian sonnet with a basic division of eight and six, but he does not follow the established rhyme scheme. The lines are short free verse in this loose, modern adaptation of the sonnet form. Neruda divides the octave into quatrains, and the sestet is divided into tercets (three-line stanzas). In the octave, he introduces some thought or imagery or scene, and in the sestet he reflects on the meaning of it. In ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX,’’ the first eight lines are instructions to the beloved about what to do when he dies. The last six explain why he wants her to do what he has asked. As is traditional with love sonnets, the poet addresses the poems to his ideal lady. Neruda glorifies Matilde, not as Petrarch glorified Laura as a type of the Madonna, but as an earth mother who takes care of the garden, all living things, and the poet himself.

Chilean Literature Spanish poet Alfonso Ercilla y Zu´n˜iga had written an epic about Chile in 1888 called La Araucana, romanticizing the country and its native people. This was a model for Neruda’s later Canto general (1950), which attempts to define his country’s origin and character. Chilean literature began to blossom on the world stage, however, in the 1920s with Neruda as part of a founding group of poets in Santiago, who broke from the old romantic models to champion modernism. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) made Neruda famous, with its daring lack of meter, surrealist imagery, and frank sexual content. Vincente Huidobro was another of this circle of avant-garde writers, urging poets to forget tradition and invent their own reality in verse. Two of Chile’s poets have won the Nobel Prize: Gabriela Mistral (1945) and Pablo Neruda (1971). Contemporary Chilean novelists are also read internationally, such as Isabel Allende, whose House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, and Eva Luna have been bestsellers. Luis Sepu´lveda’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, and Jose´ Donoso’s novel Curfew, Antonio Ska´rmeta’s novel Burning Patience (about Neruda) are other well-known works of Chilean literature.

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Spanish American Literature Spanish American poetry flourished in the twentieth century with such authors as Nobel laureates Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) and Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) from Chile, Nobel laureate Octavio Paz from Mexico (1914–1998), Nobel laureate Juan Ramo´n Jime´nez, an Andalusian transplanted to Puerto Rico (1881–1958), Argentinean poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Nicola´s Guille´n from Cuba (1902–1989) and Peruvian, Ce´sar Vallejo, (1892–1938). These poets experimented with surrealism (illogical or subconscious images) and other avant-garde styles setting the trends for Spanish American poetry in the early 2000s. Fiction writers have been equally celebrated with Uruguayan writer Felisberto Herna´ndez (1902–1964), the father of magic realism in fiction (a realistic style with magical or illogical elements) influencing other writers such as Gabriel Garcı´ a Ma´rquez, Julio Corta´zar, and the writers of the Latin American Boom (Boom Latinoamericano). The Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s initiated when Latin American novelists began getting published in Europe. The Boom is associated with Julio Corta´zar of Argentina, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and Gabriel Garcı´ a Ma´rquez of Colombia. The Cuban Revolution influenced these authors who were part of Pablo Neruda’s circle. Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcı´ a Ma´rquez (born in 1927) from Columbia wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Julio Corta´zar (1914–1984) from Argentina is known for the film adaptation of his short story, ‘‘Blowup’’ and for novels such as Hopscotch. Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes (born in 1928) wrote The Death of Artemio Cruz, and Mario Vargas Llosa (born in 1936) wrote The Time of the Hero. Once little known in the United States because of language, culture, and political barriers, these poets and novelists are mainstream worldwide in both translation and in Spanish. They are part of the political and artistic circle Neruda knew and influenced. He mentions his meetings and collaborations with them in his Memoirs.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Spanish Civil War (1836–1839) On the eve of World War II, the Spanish Civil War erupted and drew in supporters for both sides as a sort of prelude to the full world conflict

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brewing in Europe. Pablo Neruda was serving as a Chilean diplomat in Madrid, accompanied by his second wife, Delia del Carril. His many government and artist friends were socialists or communists, sympathetic to the Republican cause. The ruling Republican government of liberals was shaky and had outraged the conservative Spanish by its attacks on the Catholic Church. The Nationalist rebels, including the monarchists, Spanish nationalists, the fascist Falange, Catholics, the army, landowners, and most conservatives, staged a bloody coup. They wanted centralization of state power. The Republicans included socialists, liberals, communists, anarchists, urban workers, peasants, and much of the educated middle class. Atrocities were committed on both sides, with major destruction of cities and the countryside. Russia and Mexico supported the Republic. Fascist Italy and Germany supported the Nationalists and General Francisco Franco, who eventually won the war and became dictator. Volunteers from other countries joined the International Brigades to help the Republicans. Ernest Hemingway was a member of the Brigades and a war correspondent, writing his famous version of the conflict in the novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Neruda was permanently scarred by what he witnessed. When his friend and fellow avant-garde poet, Federico Garcı´ a Lorca, was assassinated in 1936 by Nationalists, Neruda left the country shaken and determined to join the Communist cause. His poetry became politicized, and his concern for the general welfare of the workers and lower classes never left him. Even the love poetry he wrote changed from its earlier self-centered macho point of view to a more universal view.

Communism and Exile Neruda returned to Chile with a new political conscience. He went on a diplomatic mission to relocate Spanish exiles to Chile and became a political organizer founding Spanish American Aid and the International Writers’ Conference with other writers such as Ce´sar Vallejo. He read everywhere he went from Spain in My Heart, his chronicle of the Spanish war. His poetry took on an epic and historical tone. His wife Delia del Carril was a painter and already a Communist. Neruda joined the party in 1945 and was elected as a Communist senator in Chile the same year. After the Spanish War, poetry and politics were the same for Neruda. He became a Communist, he says in the Memoirs, because Communists were the

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1959: The indigenous people of the Araucanian culture, the Mapuche, are impoverished and living on reservations or in the mountains of Chile as the European settlers occupy their fertile ancestral farmland. Neruda champions their cause in his poetry and politics. Today: Indigenous people participate in Chile’s government, and their demand for fundamental changes in the national constitution to recognize a multi-ethnic society is being implemented.



1959: Castro’s revolution in Cuba brings the cold war to South America with the USSR and the United States interfering in Chile’s politics. While Chileans try to decide whether to go for a market economy or socialism to

only organized moral force he saw in the Spanish resistance. Poetry became for Neruda a political act, an act of peace. In 1948, President Gonza´lez Videla of Chile ordered Neruda’s arrest for his leftist criticism. Communism was outlawed in Chile. Neruda had another formative experience when the common people of Chile risked their lives to hide him and his wife from authorities and helped him escape the country. His Canto general (1950) is a tribute to the working people and to Communism, calling for solidarity and change. Neruda spent some years in exile, having to travel from country to country, to avoid being arrested. He was offered asylum in Capri, Italy, and spent time there with his soon to be third wife, Matilde Urrutia. The love poems he wrote her (The Captain’s Verses, 1952) include a militant theme of the lover as political comrade. One Hundred Love Sonnets (1959), though focused on Matilde, still espouses a desire for bread for the common man (‘‘Sonnet LXXX’’).

The Cold War and the Cuban Revolution The Communist government of Fidel Castro, introduced with the Cuban Revolution of 1959,

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address Chile’s inequities, the KGB and CIA initiate covert operations.



Today: After the repressive military regime of Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s and 1980s, in which thousands of Chileans are killed, Chile returns to a democracy and a market economy with its first woman president, Michelle Bachelet, of the Socialist Party. 1959: Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral is one of the few known female authors in a maledominated literary scene. Today: Female authors write international bestselling poetry, fiction, and memoirs, including Isabel Allende, Marı´ a Luisa Bombal, Brenda Hughes, and Matilde Urrutia, Neruda’s wife.

changed the political dynamics of the American hemisphere. The U.S. government began interfering in South American politics to prevent the spread of Communism in its cold war with the Soviet Union. Latin America was a scene of political violence in the 1960s and 1970s, as military regimes with their human rights violations were backed by U.S. support in the attempt to block more Communist takeovers. The climate gave rise to a new generation of radical writers (Latin American Boom). South American leftist and liberal artists, such as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcı´ a Ma´rquez, and Julio Corta´zar, saw Pablo Neruda as a seasoned radical writer, politician, and moral leader. These writers joined him in becoming public spokespersons through their poetry and novel readings, to make the South American countries more aware of their solidarity against foreign interference. Neruda had gone to the Soviet Union in 1953 to accept the Stalin Peace Prize, and he visited Cuba and met with Che Guevara and Castro. He wrote odes to Stalin and Castro, and though later he was sorry he supported Stalin, he never recanted his commitment to communism. It was commonly acknowledged that Neruda’s Nobel Prize was

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Wheat and bread (Image copyright Mike Flippo, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

postponed for at least a decade based on his Communist politics.

to the streets to express love for the man who had championed their cause.

The Fall of Allende in Chile In 1970, Neruda ran for president of Chile on the Communist ticket but yielded to his friend, Salvador Allende and his socialist coalition who were democratically elected. Neruda was at the height of his popularity, drawing huge crowds for his readings. In 1971, he finally got the Nobel Prize for Literature and returned triumphant, a hero to his people. On another notorious September 11 (1973), Allende was overthrown and assassinated or committed suicide, replaced by General Augusto Pinochet, backed in part by the Nixon administration. Pinochet tortured and killed thousands. The shock of the coup and news of the torture-death of artists who were Neruda’s friends were enough to bring on Neruda’s death by heart failure a couple of weeks later. He lived to see repeated what he saw happen in Spain and had spent his whole life trying to prevent in his own country. The last pages of his Memoirs were written three days after the coup denouncing the overthrow. Neruda’s public funeral was forbidden, but the people spontaneously took

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CRITICAL OVERVIEW In his own country, Pablo Neruda was a popular though controversial poet after the publication of his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). He was influential in literary circles and well known to an international public while he traveled around the world as a Chilean diplomat. Historically, his poetry was classified in three periods: the modernist period of the 1920s; the surrealist style of the 1930s, and the politically motivated verse after 1936. One Hundred Love Sonnets (1959) falls in the last period. In English, Neruda’s reputation depends on translations, and they were few and imperfect in the United States until the 1950s and 1960s. Jonathan Cohen in his article, ‘‘The Early History of Neruda in English (1925–1937),’’ in Romance Notes for 1982, summarized the early American views on Neruda. The beauty of the poet’s language was

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noted by translators and anthologizers, but these people were sometimes put off by the frank sexual themes. Neruda was compared to the French symbolist poets. Cohen concluded that Neruda was not properly appreciated in the United States until the better translations and liberal atmosphere of the 1960s made his poetry more available. In ‘‘Neruda in English: Establishing his Residence in U.S. Poetry,’’ in the Multicultural Review (2004), Jonathan Cohen discussed Neruda’s reputation in the United States as being spread mainly by poets and translators after 1960. In translating Neruda, American poets are renewed; Cohen wrote: ‘‘Neruda became a model for poets looking for new directions.’’ They love his daring topics, political involvement, his leaping images. Neruda was not widely reviewed in the United States until after his Nobel Prize in 1971. In ‘‘Nobel Prize at Isla Negra’’ in the New Republic (1971), John Felstiner asked, ‘‘Why has Neruda been an obscure name in the United States, yet the bestknown poet of the rest of the world?’’ He concluded it was for the same reason that the Nobel Prize came to Neruda ‘‘ridiculously late.’’ It was because of his communism. Yet Felstiner decided that the real revolution in Neruda’s poetry is how the poet engages the reader with the essential nature of life. In his last twenty years, wrote Felstiner, Neruda purged his political anger with ‘‘fervent sonnets to his wife Matilde Urrutia, and hundreds of odes on simple, concrete things.’’

with the film Il Postino (The Postman); the follow up CD, Poetry Suite from the Postman; and the play, Neruda 2000. His poems and message were commodified and depoliticized, ironically making money for corporations, while Neruda thought of his poems as his gift to the people. During his life, Neruda was controversial because of his Communism, his sexual frankness, utopian visions, and his shift from a sophisticated literary style to a simplistic glorification of daily life. In the early 2000s, however, Neruda was accepted as the most important and influential Latin American poet of the twentieth century.

CRITICISM Susan K. Andersen Andersen is a writer and teacher with a Ph.D. in English literature. In this essay, she considers Pablo Neruda’s One Hundred Love Sonnets in light of both personal and universal love.

In ‘‘The Poetry of Neruda,’’ a review in the New York Times in 1974, Michael Wood noted that Neruda’s life and poetry paralleled the life of his country, but even though illiterate Chileans could sing or recite his poems, he must be judged by what he left on the page. Wood argued that Neruda’s greatest poems, which he identified as ‘‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu’’ and Residence on Earth, were written by the time the poet was forty-five years old. The last twenty years of Neruda’s life were an anti-climax (this would include the One Hundred Love Sonnets, which he did not discuss).

Critics frequently cite among Pablo Neruda’s masterpieces Residence on Earth (1935) and The Heights of Macchu Picchu (1945). Except for the early fame of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), the love poems are less frequently seen to be among his best works, especially since feminist readings have criticized Neruda’s macho stance towards women. Yet it is the love poetry that vaulted Neruda to posthumous fame after the release of the film Il Postino in 1994, which glorifies Neruda as a poet of love. In Earth Tones: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, Manuel Dura´n and Margery Safir claim that Neruda’s love poetry is not just an incidental category of his body of poems; ‘‘His love poetry is a thread running through his different works, his successive styles and periods, unifying his whole poetic world.’’ One must consider the Neruda love poetry in a larger context, then. For Neruda, poetry itself is a love affair— with women, words, the land, the people, and life. One Hundred Love Sonnets (1959) demonstrates this larger context of love.

Some thirty years later, Teresa Longo complained of Neruda’s American popularity in ‘‘Introduction: Poetry Like Wonder Bread’’ in Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry (2002). She argued that Neruda had been ‘‘romanticized’’ by Americans who wanted to consume his ‘‘vision of communion, community, hope and wonder.’’ She pointed out that in the 1990s Neruda became a media favorite as the compassionate poet of love,

Christopher Perriam in ‘‘Metaphorical Machismo: Neruda’s Love Poetry,’’ in Forum for Modern Language Studies, concedes the feminist claims that Neruda makes women passive objects in the early love poems, but finds that Matilde Urrutia altered that style. One Hundred Love Sonnets names Matilde specifically and makes her a partner in the love story they write together. He confers creative powers on her in

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 





The House of the Spirits (1982), by Isabel Allende, and translated by Magda Bogin for a Bantam paperback edition in 1986, includes scenes of the violent political atmosphere of the Pinochet coup in 1973. It tells the story of three generations of the Trueba family of Chile in the style of magical realism that blends realism and myth. The book was made into a 1993 film with Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. Miriam Bat-Ami’s Two Suns in the Sky (Puffin, 2001) is a young adult love story that presents the Jewish experience of World War II. Neruda saw love and politics as inseparable, and this story involves two fifteen-year-olds, Christine Cook, a Catholic American, and Adam Bornstein, a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Yugoslavia, who fall in love at a refugee shelter in New York. In The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende’s Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide (Norton, 2005), Jonathan Haslam, professor of the history of international relations at University of Cambridge, explains the U.S. involvement in Chile that helped bring

celebrating her hands in many sonnets. Finally, in the ‘‘Night’’ sonnets that anticipate death (including ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX’’), the speaker asks his beloved to use her hands to comfort him and to carry on their legacy. In his article, ‘‘Loving Neruda’’ in Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry, Bruce Dean Willis discusses the American pop culture response to Neruda’s love poetry following the film Il Postino (1994). The public did not seem to find Neruda too macho or his women too passive. ‘‘Sonnet XVII’’ from One Hundred Love Sonnets, for instance, was read in the movie Patch Adams (1998) and generated enthusiastic Internet comments and reviews on Neruda’s love poems. Willis asks why Americans like Neruda’s brand of love

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down Allende’s socialist government. The thesis is that Allende’s government was already crumbling from within; the book brings to light new facts and documents. 

I Explain a Few Things: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda (2007), edited by Ilan Stavans, is a bilingual edition with facing Spanish text. Stavans has picked and translated famous poems from each of Neruda’s great collections from the 1920s to his death in 1973. It is a good overview of his vast work.



The New Penguin Book of Love Poetry (2003), edited and with an introduction by Jon Stallworthy, includes famous poets in English and some love poems from around the world.



Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (1996) was translated and edited by Stephen Tapscott, a literature professor at MIT. The anthology highlights seventy-five poets, including Neruda, Dario, Reyes, Vallejo, Borges, and Paz with original language versions and translations set side by side.

and decides that readers ‘‘fall in love with Neruda’s love because he has anchored it to nature, a Nature that evokes, for many, a Golden Age before urban sprawl.’’ One Hundred Love Sonnets is first of all about the poet’s personal love for Matilde. Marjorie Agosin in Pablo Neruda quotes Ben Belitt who characterizes the sonnets as ‘‘a husband’s book of hours, grievances, privacies, troubled meditations.’’ Agosin adds that ‘‘Optimism and vitality are the central characteristics’’ of the sonnets. They are divided into four seasons of love: ‘‘Morning,’’ ‘‘Afternoon,’’ ‘‘Evening,’’ and ‘‘Night.’’ The morning poems record the couple’s youthful joy together in the paradise of their home at Isla Negra on the ocean. The poet’s

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predicts their love will outlive death. In fact, the constant threat of death in the background makes their present joy more poignant. LOVE HAS EXPANDED FROM BEING ABOUT PABLO AND MATILDE TO MAN AND WOMAN LIVING IN HARMONY WITH THE RHYTHMS OF EARTH.’’

love for Matilde is connected to his love of the earth, this particular coast of Chile where both he and Matilde spent their childhoods. He recovers memory and innocence here with her. They are alone with nature and their love, far from the strife of cities. These poems abound in images of Matilde as clay, wood, wheat, bread, fruit, and water. Their love is passionate and sensuous. Matilde Urrutia’s memoirs, My Life with Pablo Neruda, written after the poet’s death, confirm this idyllic view of their early years together. Though often fleeing with him from his political peril or from scandal when he was still married to Delia del Carril, Matilde recounts how they were drawn irresistibly together. They were always laughing and amusing themselves with delightful pastimes such as swimming in the ocean; gathering wildflowers; enjoying food and music; or going over his poems, which she typed. There are photographs of them at home and in Europe, with their dog, with Matilde singing and playing the guitar, and at an outdoor cafe´ in France. Although it is a completely domestic picture, she says that to them, ‘‘Our love felt big, very big.’’ They were careless, like adolescents in love: ‘‘We lived in our own world, far removed from reality.’’ With Matilde, Neruda could be simple and earthy and live in the present moment. All of which illustrates his view of how life should be for everyone. One Hundred Love Sonnets creates a modern Eden, and Neruda mythologized in it the life at Isla Negra, though it is an Eden with seasons and sorrows as well. Even in the ‘‘Morning’’ section, there are forebodings of death. The lovers will fall together like rocks into the grave, he wrote, and the earth will continue to live. Perhaps one appealing aspect of the love is that Neruda does not always idealize Matilde. Sometimes he finds her ugly, or he is not in love with her, but he embraces that too. He accepts her completely, even the dark in her. In the morning fullness, he

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The context of love expands in the ‘‘Afternoon’’ section with the theme of coming home and Matilde as an earth goddess presiding over the home. The activity of her hands moves all over the day, creating order and life as she touches the flowers and even the syllables of his poems that ring like bells. Her hands are there beside him in the dark like a bird with closed wings. In ‘‘Sonnet XXXVI,’’ he says the soil opens for her hands when she plants flowers. Having identified her as the life force of the earth, he wants her life-giving hands on his eyes in ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX’’ when he dies. Death, however, is a momentary thought in the ‘‘Afternoon.’’ The man and woman reign over their love and home like a king and queen. Love has expanded from being about Pablo and Matilde to Man and Woman living in harmony with the rhythms of earth. Even problems cannot disturb their honeyed days that he calls a sort of natural eternal life (Sonnet XLVIII). The tone changes in the ‘‘Evening’’ sonnets; the lovers cannot completely hide from the world. Sorrow is rising and falling like a tide in the human family, and it seeps into their paradise as well. His poems, however, will exhaust the envy and spite. The word ‘‘love’’ in his poems can bring the spring, he declares. In ‘‘Sonnet LVII,’’ he confronts the critics of his poetry who say that his lyric gift is gone, that he can only connect to the people through political poetry. His love sonnets to Matilde show this is false; he has been reborn as both a man and an artist through her love. Images of dark, of winter, and a wasteland recur in this section, but Matilde is his refuge and daily bread. Love has to bear grief as well as joy, and it has expanded now to include the world and its troubles. Their love is strong enough to survive this, and his poems can overcome hate with love. The ‘‘Evening’’ sonnets end with ‘‘Sonnet LXXVIII’’ that explains what Neruda stands for. He turns his exclusive gaze from Matilde momentarily as if to address readers and include them in the love sonnets. He is a simple man who loves his fellow men. He says, ‘‘I love you,’’ in a way that suggests both Matilde and all people. He has stood for the truth and fought against what was wrong. With death he will go into oblivion, but in the name of love, he wants to build a bonfire on the mountain. This declaration was developed further in Neruda’s Nobel acceptance speech in which he

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compared his poetry to the daily bread that can nourish the human community. His love poetry is for everyone. In his Memoirs, Neruda writes, ‘‘Poetry is an act of peace.’’ ‘‘Night’’ brings premonitions of death. ‘‘Sonnet LXXIX’’ declares that lovers can defeat darkness by tying their hearts together as they sleep. In LXXX, the speaker tells the beloved to play a barcarole on her guitar to build a shelter for them, but he would share the song with everyone; he wants bread for all workers. There is joy in the night, especially since he can share darkness with the one he loves. This section brings images of the vaster expanse of the night sky; he feels the flow of time and realizes they are a drop in the river. He feels solidarity with all humans at night. Most of the ‘‘Night’’ sonnets are concerned with death and time. ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX’’ is a vision of his own death as the speaker asks his beloved to be his companion in his last hour and then go on living so that she can testify to the truth of their love and his tributes to her in song. This poem is especially moving in light of Matilde’s memoirs in which she describes Neruda’s death and funeral amidst the crumbling of Allende’s socialist Chile and the terror of the Pinochet dictatorship that followed. She also writes of the period after his death when she had to carry on his legacy. In danger herself, she smuggled a copy of his memoirs out of the country and helped edit them for publication. These ‘‘Night’’ sonnets in which the speaker anticipates separation through death are poignant when compared to the historical accounts. Matilde herself refers in her memoirs to ‘‘Sonnet XCIV’’ as giving her strength to go on alone, to travel and to speak out for Chile’s oppression, because Neruda asked her to be strong. Her memoirs also provide the answering female voice the critics find missing in the sonnets. Fernando Alegria’s remarked in ‘‘Neruda: Reminiscences and Critical Reflections’’ on his friend Neruda, right after his death are. Alegria proposed that Neruda conquers death through his love poems and gives as an example the poems Neruda published a few months before his death in the August issue of Crisis Magazine (1973), still praising Matilde. In ‘‘Pablo Neruda, Interpreter of Our Century,’’ Guissepe Bellini sees a ‘‘suggestive pantheism’’ in the One Hundred Love Sonnets, ‘‘providing redemption from the fear of absence and death.’’ (Pantheism is a kind of paganism that identifies

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whatever is eternal with the forces of nature.) Instead of speaking of heaven, Neruda envisions the lovers joining the river of time and the material world. Once more the poet’s love expands; he renounces personal life and identifies with the ongoing life of the earth. He declares that the love the lovers shared will go on after death, because love itself has no beginning or end. He uses images of large cycles of time, of planets, rivers, and stars, predicting there will come a purer time on earth. In his Memoirs, Neruda wrote, ‘‘My poetry rejected nothing it could carry along in its course; it accepted passion, unraveled mystery, and worked its way into the hearts of the people.’’ Neruda acknowledged Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a model for much of his later poetry. Like Whitman, Neruda is in love with nature, life, and the common people. Neruda, however, realized the popularity that Whitman only wished for. Neruda’s poetry was recited and loved by the people because it affirmed the oppressed. One Hundred Love Sonnets chronicles a personal love, which Neruda prepares as bread that can be shared by all. Though not blind to violence and suffering, he wanted to leave a legacy of hope, as he wrote in the Memoirs: ‘‘And I go on believing in the possibility of love. I am convinced that there will be mutual understanding among human beings.’’ Source: Susan K. Andersen, Critical Essay on ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

Odette Magnet In the following essay translated by Kathy Ogle, Magnet and Ogle give information about the personal background that inspired Neruda’s sonnets. He was Pablo Neruda’s friend for four decades and a fellow Communist Party member. Chilean Volodia Teitelboim (2002 National Award for Journalism), author of Neruda, speaks about his friend Pablo Neruda and the women in his life. On the centennial celebration of Neruda’s birth, this interview with Teitelboim gives us a small window into Neruda’s most intimate world, allowing us to explore through the eyes of a friend, the soul of the poet and the man. Their friendship was a long and close one. Today, the writer says with a certain sadness, ‘‘His death interrupted our dialogue, our ongoing conversation. He was sick and death awaited him, but that was one thing we never talked about.’’ According to Teitelboim, Neruda always had a special way with women. Women are ‘‘our better

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half,’’ he says, ‘‘but never predictable just because it’s the other half.’’ He adds with irony that ‘‘one of Neruda’s regrets was not to have been able to love all two billion women who existed in his time, though he tried to do it through his poetry.’’ Neruda spent most of his life with two particularly significant women: the Argentine painter Delia del Carril and the Chilean singer Matilde Urrutia. Delia was so constantly active that she had been nicknamed la hormiga, or the ant. Later, the poet would give her another name, ‘‘the neighbor.’’ What we know is that she burst into Neruda’s life and precipitated the end of his marriage with Maria Antonieta Agenaar Vogelzanz of Holland. Delia and Pablo began to live together, and in 1943 they were married in Mexico. (The marriage was not recognized by Chilean law.) In his book, Teitelboim says of her: ‘‘Deep down, she felt like she had to protect him. Many years after they separated she continued to say that Pablo was a child . . . She had to educate the adult child. Their conversation was primarily political. She opened his eyes.’’ Matilde Urrutia and the poet had a brief romance in 1946. They met at an outdoor concert in the Forest Park of Santiago. Mutual friends introduced them. Teitelboim says: ‘‘Neruda planned to have a fling with this singer who had such impetuous laughter. And he had one. It didn’t last long, though. He had too much work to do. The woman with laughter like birdsong drifted away.’’ Three years later they met again in Mexico. There she had founded a school of music, and Neruda had become bedridden with thrombophlebitis. His friends came to see him and, of course, many women did as well. One of them was Matilde, and though he didn’t recognize her at first, she took care of him, gave him his medicines, and fluffed his pillows. Their secret affair began in this state. Always a lover of pseudonyms, Neruda christened her ‘‘Rosario.’’ Their relationship was established more openly in 1949 and it lasted twenty-four years, until Neruda’s death in September of 1973. Delia and Matilde—Teitelboim concludes— ‘‘were different kinds of muses, each one for a period of twenty years. They are a central part of Neruda’s intimate history. Delia was an exquisite queen of literary salons and painting workshops; Matilde was the queen of the kitchen, which her predecessor never visited. But in or outside of the house, some woman always stirred up his hormones. I couldn’t say who he loved

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most. I think he loved them all intensely, one after another. Let each reader come up with his or her own response to this. But the poet said not only ‘I will live,’ but also ‘I will go on loving.’ And he will—as long as there is still one man who appropriates his verses to whisper them in the ear of his beloved.’’ Some women did turn him down, especially in his adolescence and early youth. Neruda himself said that the other guys always got the blondes. In Neruda, Teitelboim maintains that the poet was loyal to his women, but not faithful. The distinction is not a small one. He explains: ‘‘His loyalty was unfailing, but he refrained from promising faithfulness, knowing as he said in ‘Farewell,’ one his first poems of love and disaffection that ‘love can be eternal, it can be fleeting.’ So he allowed himself the right to that freedom. He liked women who were mature, like ripe fruit.’’ Neruda made the best of every liaison, says the author, and he ‘‘was enriched humanly and literarily by each one of his women friends, even in the brief encounters. Some of the women found a place in his poems and, so, in history. Both psychiatrists and non-psychiatrists who observed his life concluded that he sought in them the mother he had lost at birth. Neruda loved intensely. Was he also loved in the same way? Volodia, his friend, doesn’t hesitate to say that ‘‘he was intense about everything; in life, in poetry, and in action. Being famous does give a sense of erotic power, real or unreal. Neruda was the number one poet of love. But like all mortals, he did some things right and he made some mistakes. Painful experiences he pushed inside. He didn’t publicize them.’’ Neruda’s relationship with Delia fell into crisis because he had fallen in love with ‘‘Rosario.’’ Teitelboim recalls, ‘‘I heard him say that he didn’t want to divorce Delia. He proposed that they stay married formally, but ‘that proud Basque woman’—that was the expression he used—told him she would never accept such an insulting agreement. The man always sought out vibrant and combative sexual experience, and he fed a large part of his biography that way. There is no lack of poems whose romantic history would be interesting to unveil some day.’’ Source: Odette Magnet, ‘‘Neruda: For the Love of Women,’’ in Americas, Vol. 56, No. 4, July–August 2004, p. 64.

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L. Howard Quackenbush In the following review, Quackenbush praises the skill of Neruda’s translator, Stephen Tapscott. Stephen J. Tapscott’s translation of Neruda’s Cien Sonetos de amor includes a short introduction of intent and method in which Tapscott subscribes to ‘‘the principle that the fewer overt interpolations by the translator of a beautiful poem the better’’ (ix), and we must applaud his desire not to overtranslate Neruda which, I might add, he seldom does. Those who are acquainted with the most popular translations of Neruda’s poetry will be reminded of works which have violated that rule, even though professional literary translators should be aware of George Steiner’s postulate in favor of ‘‘treasoning upward’’ (‘‘A Necessary Treason: The Poet and the Translator;’’ a discourse at the Poetry Center, New York YM-YWHA, March 31, 1969). We might add, however, that this cardinal sin can easily be inverted by undertranslating or mistranslating the verses of a beautiful poem, particularly when that poem was produced by one of Latin America’s most revered and beloved poets. Tapscott’s work is a handsomely produced, hard-bound tome, containing a few helpful notes on Neruda’s personal life, Chilean geography and customs, an index of English/Spanish first lines (Neruda gave each of his 100 sonnets merely a number), as well as the 100 sonnets in both languages. In his ‘‘awesome task’’—to use the vernacular—of translating Cien sonetos de amor, Tapscot attempts to capture in English Neruda’s ‘‘use of voice, in sound and syntax, as the force that binds lines and stanzas into integrated whole . . . [constituting] what an English version of these poems risks losing; . . . ’’ (vii). It is unfortunate that more scholars and editors do not realize that literary, and particularly poetic, translation is not a labor for the neophyte. Few comprehend the dexterity of expression in both languages requisite to being counted among the great practitioners of this craft. Success comes as no accident, and in most cases it takes years of preparation and practice. One marvels at the talented display of a Gregory Rabassa in translating One Hundred Years of Solitude or Macho Camacho’s Beat. In poetic translation the restrictions placed on the hand of the translator and the demands of his level of expertise are compounded. Not only are words, idioms, and cultural innuendo to be

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transposed to make recognizable sense and to approximate the original text, but also the emotion, the rhythm and cadence, the alliteration and euphony of the verse, and the voice of the ‘‘I’’ in some mysterious way are to be captured and brought into translatable focus. One of the greatest threats in poetic translation is that, through its metamorphosis from one language to the other, the poetry will be alchemized into prose, and we must add that Tapscott is one translator who does maintain a poetic touch. Tapscott at times is very good, even brilliant: ‘‘tengo hambre de tu boca, de tu voz, de tu pelo/ y por las calles voy sin nutrirme, callado’’ > ‘‘I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. / Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets’’ (XI 26–7). When he stays close to Neruda’s original, as in sonnets XVII and XCVIII, his translations are of a very high quality, but three problems tend to plague even the most experienced translators. The first is the difficulty they experience in maintaining consistency in the level of register or diction. The choice of terms is of tremendous consequence. For instance, when Neruda wishes to be lyrical in his courtship display (100 Love Sonnets, after all, was written to his beloved Matilde Urrutia with whom he was living at the time of composition and who was to become his third wife), the translator should be careful not to destroy the illusion with antipoetic impurities of tone or euphony. The ear attuned to the melodic tones of Spanish may he shaken violently by the strains of English syllables and terms. The following examples may serve to illustrate this idea: it may clash with the sensibilities of the reader for ‘‘agua desbocada’’ to become ‘‘galloping water’’; and should ‘‘tus cabellos’’ be reproduced poetically as ‘‘your hairs’’?; ‘‘sombra’’ becomes ‘‘shadowy dark,’’ when it could have been merely ‘‘shadows’’; ‘‘desdichas’’ become ‘‘rough times’’; ‘‘acecha’’ turns into ‘‘sabotaged,’’ and ‘‘inu´til’’ into ‘‘stupid.’’ The second pitfall is that through translation the verse or terminology may become vague, appear dispossessed of meaning, or lose its relationship to its referent. A good example of the latter appears in sonnet XXII when ‘‘luna de junio’’ becomes ‘‘summer’s moon.’’ We should remember, of course, that ‘‘junio’’ is winter in Chile. A more subtle problem occurs if ‘‘avispa’’ (XIX) is translated ‘‘bee’’ instead of ‘‘wasp’’ or ‘‘hornet.’’ A subsequent reference to its ‘‘cintura,’’ alluding to the hourglass shape of the wasp and its parallels with the female human form, is lost in translation, because a bee does not have that shape. What is the poetic result when ‘‘los cerezos’’ become

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‘‘cherries’’ instead of ‘‘cherry trees’’? How does a ‘‘bodega’’ become a ‘‘geyser’’ and can ‘‘lodo y luz machacados’’ turn into ‘‘mud and light in maquerade’’? ‘‘Amor’’ is simply translated ‘‘love’’ in its numerous appearances, but why not vary it once in a while: ‘‘my love,’’ ‘‘lover,’’ ‘‘dearest,’’ ‘‘sweetheart’’? Granted, the translator must have some liberty to create a unity of imagery, but when totally different perspectives or meanings are produced by using the terms selected, perhaps the translator should work a little harder at that imagery. The last item to be mentioned in this review is one of the most difficult aspects of literary translation, and it concerns sustaining the tone of a work and not producing gaps in its linguistic intensity or lapsing into simple translation traps. The translator needs to know the subject, the poet’s work and personality, his motivation and perspectives, and the translator should try not to betray the poet’s principles. At times in the work under consideration, the nostalgic melancholy of Neruda’s droning voice, the cumulative intensity of his repetitions, and his stacking of phrase upon phrase disappears in translation. This problem might be termed ‘‘syntactical undertranslation’’ and several functions appear to be involved. In too many instances, the thought sequences are divided into short sentences instead of following the poet’s use of commas and conjunctions in a cumulative series. The surge of vitality and the emotional flow seems stifled by these changes. Could it be that Neruda’s verse, particularly these tender but human expressions of love and pain for his ‘‘amada amante,’’ represent such sacred ground that any attempt to reproduce them in a foreign or strange tongue would precipitate a holy war of words? Perhaps all we can hope for is an approximation. Undoubtedly, Stephen Tapscott’s efforts will not go unrewarded. His work is worthy of continued study, and he has accomplished his goal of ‘‘making some of the pleasure of Neruda’s work available to Englishspeaking North Americans’’ (viii). Source: L. Howard Quackenbush, ‘‘Review of 100 Love Sonnets (Cien sonetos de amor) by Pablo Neruda,’’ in Hispania, Vol. 70, No. 3, September 1987, pp. 513–15.

SOURCES Agosin, Marjorie, Pablo Neruda, translated by Lorraine Roses, Twayne’s World Author Series, No. 769, Twayne, 1986, pp. 30, 32.

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Alegria, Fernando, ‘‘Neruda: Reminiscences and Critical Reflections,’’ translated by Deborah S. Bundy, in Modern Poetry Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 1974, pp. 41–51. Bellini, Guiseppi, ‘‘Pablo Neruda: Interpreter of Our Century,’’ translated by Janice A. Jaffe, in Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry, edited by Teresa Longo, Routledge, 2002, p. 8. Cohen, Jonathan, ‘‘The Early History of Neruda in English (1925–1937),’’ in Romance Notes, Vol. 22, No. 3, Spring 1982, pp. 272–76. ———, ‘‘Neruda in English: Establishing his Residency in U.S. Poetry,’’ in Multicultural Review, Vol. 13, No. 4, Winter 2004, p. 27. Dura´n, Manuel, and Margery Safir, Earth Tones: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, Indiana University Press, 1981, p. 31. Felstiner, John, ‘‘Nobel Prize at Isla Negra,’’ in New Republic, December 25, 1971, p. 29. Longo, Teresa, ‘‘Introduction: Poetry Like Wonder Bread,’’ in Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry, edited by Teresa Longo, Routledge, 2002, p. xvii. Neruda, Pablo, Memoirs, translated by Hardie St. Martin, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, pp. 137, 170, 274. ———, One Hundred Love Sonnets, translated by Stephen Tapscott, University of Texas Press, 1986. ———, ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX,’’ in One Hundred Love Sonnets, translated by Stephen Tapscott, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 189. Perriam, Christopher, ‘‘Metaphorical Machismo: Neruda’s Love Poetry,’’ in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 24, January 1988, pp. 58–77. Urrutia, Matilde, My Life with Pablo Neruda, translated by Alexandria Giardino, Stanford University Press, 2004, pp. 156, 173. Willis, Bruce Dean, ‘‘Loving Neruda,’’ in Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry, edited by Teresa Longo, Routledge, 2002, p. 93. Wood, Michael, ‘‘The Poetry of Neruda,’’ in the New York Review of Books, Vol. 21, No. 15, October 3, 1974, pp. 8, 10, 12.

FURTHER READING Bloom, Harold, ed., Pablo Neruda: Modern Critical Views, Chelsea House, 1989. Nineteen essays on Neruda widely cited by other authors give a critical overview of Neruda’s major works by the best critics. Collier, Simon, and William F. Sater, A History of Chile, 1808–2002, 2nd ed., Cambridge Latin American Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2004. This history traces the country’s political, economic, and social evolution from an aristocracy to a democracy, including the periods of turmoil Neruda lived through.

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Feinstein, Adam, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life, Bloomsbury, 2004. This detailed and well researched centennial biography uses new sources and information to cover Neruda’s political, artistic, and personal life. Kettenmann, Andrea, Diego Rivera, 1886–1957: A Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art, Taschen Basic Art Paperback, Taschen, 2001. Diego Rivera was the Mexican artist who painted historical murals of Mexico and influenced Pablo Neruda’s theme and style in Canto

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general, illustrated by Rivera. Rivera’s utopian vision of the pre-Columbian heritage of Mexico appealed to Neruda’s idea of the common man for whom he wrote. Ska´rmeta, Antonio, Burning Patience, Graywolf, 1994. The original inspiration for the film, Il Postino, this novel is set in Chile in the 1970s, rather than Italy in the 1950s, and gives a better vision of Neruda’s relationship to the land and people than the film does. It ends with the coup that killed Allende and Neruda.

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Uncoiling PAT MORA 2001

Mexican-American author Pat Mora has published several books of poetry, including the 2001 collection Uncoiling, which includes the poem by that title. She has published a well-regarded memoir, House of Houses, which describes how she became an author while growing up in a bilingual area of Texas near the Mexican border where literacy was not valued. Mora’s fame comes from the many award-winning books she has written for children, which often describe the joys and difficulties of cultural blending. Mora is an activist for literacy and for gender equality, and her social concerns are often present, if understated, in her writings for both adults and for children. The poem ‘‘Uncoiling’’ presents its ideas on many layers. On the simplest level, it is a description of a tornado as it approaches, shakes a house, and then moves on. Mora describes the tornado with feminine adjectives and images, though, so the suggestion is that the violent natural force is like a woman. Unstated but clear is the admiration that the poet expresses for this force, as well as for the women who brave the storm: This is at heart a poem about the strength of women, though the poet does not need to force that point to make it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Patricia Mora was born in El Paso, Texas, on January 19, 1942. Her father, Rau´ Antonio Mora, was an optician, and her mother, Estela Delgado

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Mora, was a housekeeper. Pat Mora grew up in El Paso, attended Catholic schools, and she received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Texas Western College in 1963. That year she married William H. Burnside Jr., with whom she had three children; the couple divorced in 1981. She then attended the same college, earning her Master of Arts in English in 1967, the year that the school changed its name to University of Texas at El Paso. Mora taught English at El Paso Community College as a part-time instructor until 1978 and then for a few years at University of Texas at El Paso. After teaching there for two years, she became an assistant to the vice president of academic affairs, working in that capacity from 1981 to 1988. She hosted the radio program Voices: The MexicanAmerican in Perspective on the El Paso National Public Radio affiliate from 1983 to 1984. She was the director of the University of Texas museum and assistant to the president for one term (1988–1989). Then she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and began making her living as full-time a writer. Mora’s first book of poetry, Chants, was published in 1984, which is the year that she remarried, this time to archeologist Vernon Lee Scarborough. It was followed in 1986 by Borders, the book that brought her to national attention after she won the Southwest Book Award. Her subsequent publications led to a series of awards and honors, including a membership on the Ohio Arts Council panel in 1990; membership on the advisory committee for the Kellogg National Foundation Program from 1991 through 1994; the Garry Carruthers Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of New Mexico in 1999; and a fellowship in Umbria, Italy, in 2003. In 2000, she helped establish the Estela and Rau´ Mora Award, in honor of her parents, to promote family literacy. In addition to her poetry for adult readers, Mora has authored over two dozen children’s books since 1992, for which she has won numerous awards, including the Ohioana Award for Children’s Literature in 2000 and the Golden Kite Award in 2006. In 1996, Mora proposed that the annual Mexican tradition of El Dia de las ninas (Day of the Children) be expanded to include El Dia de las libras (Day of the Book); the combined Children’s Day/Book Day is now celebrated annually on April 30.

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POEM TEXT With thorns, she scratches on my window, tosses her hair dark with rain, snares lightning, cholla, hawks, butterfly swarms in the tangles. She sighs clouds, head thrown back, eyes closed, roars and rivers leap, boulders retreat like crabs into themselves. She spews gusts and thunder, spooks pale women who scurry to lock doors, windows when her tumbleweed skirt starts its spin. They sing lace lullabies so their children won’t hear her uncoiling through her lips, howling leaves off trees, flesh off bones, until she becomes sound, spins herself to sleep, sand stinging her ankles, whirring into her raw skin like stars.

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POEM SUMMARY Stanza 1 The poem begins with references to an unknown woman who seems to be scratching at the narrator’s window with thorns. The fact that she is scratching the window rather than knocking or even tapping on it suggests the person is too timid to ask for admission, even though it is raining. By the poem’s third line, it becomes clear that the speaker is not describing literally what she sees outside the window. She describes the other person as having a wide variety of odd things in her hair. Lightning might just be reflected in the shine of wet hair, but she also describes the hair as containing cholla (a kind of cactus) and hawks. The last two identify the poem’s setting as the desert. The last line of the first stanza helps soften the reader’s idea of the person being described. While she was associated with thorns at the start, by line 4 she is associated with butterflies that are caught within her web of influence.

Stanza 2 The woman outside metaphorically sighs clouds, suggesting some sort of meteorological event.

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Stanza 4

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS 





Mora reads her poetry on the audio cassette recording of the program Pat Mora, originally broadcast as part of the New Letters On the Air series, released in 1990. A 1996 profile of Pat Mora is available on the Scholastic videocassette Pat Mora: Author, produced by Terra Associates. Mora maintains an extensive home page that includes biographical information, her blog, and information about the literacy projects she has spearheaded.

It becomes clear in the ensuing lines that the subject is a tornado: It releases clouds, either in the sky or clouds of stirred-up dust; it makes a powerful sound like the roar of an oncoming tornado; and it has the power to knock rivers over their banks. Its power is so great, in fact, that it can spin boulders so that they appear to be running away and trying to hide. Readers can take these descriptions to be symbolic of the power of the woman being described, but it is clear that they all can used as descriptions of a tornado as well.

Stanza 3 In the middle of the poem, Mora describes the tornado in its full force, becoming dangerous. In lines 11 and 12, people are frightened of it: In particular, pale women run inside and secure the doors and windows. While this might seem to a prudent action to take against a tornado, it also plays on the description of a woman that begins the poem. The women are turning pale and running indoors to lock themselves away from the woman who threatens them. The final line of this stanza continues to describe the subject as both female and a tornado. The tornado spins tumbleweeds like a woman spins her skirt by moving quickly.

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The fourth stanza keeps the focus on the frightened pale women who are mentioned in stanza 3. The women try to comfort their children while the tornado unleashes its power outside. The lullabies are like lace, delicate and fragile, no match for the driving force and sound of the tornado. The women hope that their lullabies will obscure the roar of a tornado. Line 17 personifies the tornado again, indicating that the loud sound of rushing air is actually the wind coming through her lips. The wind, so powerful that it strips trees and even bones bare, is said to come from within this person as she uncoils, releasing wound-up tension. Instead of seeing the tornado as entirely wind, the imagery that Mora uses likens it to a great force that is inside of a person.

Stanza 5 The last stanza is the shortest one of the poem, covering the relatively quick return to calm that occurs after a tornado moves away. The tornado is spent, and, in the poem’s extended metaphor, the person who is the tornado is exhausted and falls asleep. The wind still blows the sand around after the woman is sleeping, causing sand to pelt her skin. The final line connects the blowing sand and the stars above. This view of the open sky reminds readers of the grand scale of a weather event of this suddenness and power. It also evokes the nighttime image of a woman peacefully falling asleep, and it helps to restore the feeling of calm, since the stars would only be visible after the tornado has past.

THEMES Nature The tornado Mora describes in this poem follows a predictable pattern. At first its sound is barely noticeable. Soon, dark clouds arise and the wind picks up, stirring rivers. Large stones are tossed about. At the height of the storm, gusts kick up and the wind roars. Then the excitement dies down and calm is restored. The sky is clear again. All of this activity occurs in nature in the absence of emotion. Extreme weather is often used to represent emotional upheaval, but nature itself does not have emotions. A tornado might resemble the rampage of an angry person, but its actions are actually just the combination of

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barometric pressure bringing together combinations of temperatures. Mora makes use of the tornado’s behavior to convey the power of Nature, personified as a woman.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 















Anger

Write a poem describing a snowy or a hot day, personifying the extreme weather as a person. Study the concept of the tornado in the mythology of the indigenous people who lived in the Southwest before Mexicans or Europeans arrived in the area. Make an illustration or drawing that tells a Native American story of the tornado. Mora mentions that hawks and butterflies are caught in the tornado. Study the ways that birds or winged insects react in turbulent winds. Create a 3-D model or a computer simulation that shows how its wings react to increased wind pressure. Compose a song in several movements, corresponding to the stanzas of this poem, that captures the approach, full force, and then the dissipation of a tornado. Perform the song for your classmates. Drawing from personal experience, write an essay or a short story about facing a terrifying situation and someone soothing a child with a song, a story, or some other kind of distraction. Most psychologists say that anger is bad for a person, but some say that expressing anger is healthy. Find two scholarly articles that you think take opposing views on this issue. Summarize them, and then write your opinion on the matter. Every time a severe tornado touches down, property can be destroyed. Do some research on tornadoes and the destruction they cause, and write a report about some particular incident when a tornado hit people’s houses and what the people had to do afterward to repair the damage. Research the causes of tornadoes and then write a report explaining the conditions that give rise to them and the environmental effects they have.

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Although the tornado cannot really be said to be driven by any emotion, the same cannot be said of a human being. Mora draws a connection between the weather and a person’s emotional state. Though the tornado is not angry, the woman it is meant to represent may well be. Most of the images in the poem indicate anger. Lightning, roaring, gusts, thunder, and howling, all imply a person who is raging. According to the poem’s title, she is uncoiling, or releasing, pent up power. Even the end of the poem, which has the woman falling asleep, seems like the rapid cooling off of a person after an emotional outburst. The only image that does not indicate anger is the butterflies mentioned in the first stanza. Butterflies are calm and delicate, which may reveal a placid side of this angry person, or they could show that peaceful creatures can be swallowed up in the tumult of a person driven by rage.

Female Strength The poem presents the tornado as female, but it does not give it any other specifically human traits. It can, therefore, be interpreted as representing women in general. The impression is positive, a kind of tribute to female power. The tornado-like woman in ‘‘Uncoiling’’ is described with respect, even though she is a frightening and destructive force. She is seen more positively than the smaller, weaker women mentioned in stanzas 3 and 4. These women are pale with the fear as they lock themselves in their houses, singing to distract their children from the storm. Their paleness also indicates they are not as vibrant, as full of life, as the dark-haired powerful woman represented by the tornado. The fragile women, singing lace lullabies, are not presented as negative characters, but the poem does not treat them with the same level of admiration it conveys for the woman who is the tornado. Feminism as a philosophy affirms female power and worth equal to male power and worth. The woman described in this poem is so strong and assertive that she is feared by other women.

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Lightning during a storm (Image copyright miamia, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

STYLE Personification Personification is a figure of speech in which human attributes are assigned to a non-human subject. The tornado is described in terms of a woman. The first instance of this is the use of the feminine pronoun. The poem also assigns distinctly human traits to the storm, such as stating that its sound is like sighing. Other human features are attributed to the tornado, including hair, a skirt, and lips. Like other figures of speech, personification is used to explain one subject in terms of another. In this case, Mora shows how a tornado is like a woman. As the poem describes the tornado’s progression, each stanza shows a different aspect of the woman’s personality. In stanza 1 she is quiet and brooding, in stanza two she sighs and then lets loose with a powerful blast that upsets everything around her. Stanza 3 shows her frightening the women near her, and in stanza 4 the word ‘‘uncoiling’’ suggests the tornado’s circular movement and at the same time the unleashing of

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pent-up emotion. In stanza 5, the woman is calm once her outburst has ended. These descriptions match levels or stages of expression, like a person but used here to describe a tornado. Mora forces readers to think about the ways in which one is like the other.

Shape Poem A true shape poem, also referred to as a carmen figuratum, is one in which the placement of the words on the page resemble the physical shape of the subject of the poem. The most commonly discussed poem in this style is George Herbert’s ‘‘Easter Wings,’’ which has two stanzas that each narrow then widen again, to create the image of wings on the page. Many readers may not see a tornado outlined on the page when they look at the way ‘‘Uncoiling’’ is printed. Still, they might notice how each line is indented from the one before it until the start of a new stanza, when the pattern repeats again. This layout suggests a rotating or twisting motion, something like the movement of a tornado spinning and leaning as it moves

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across land. Mora might have chosen to write the poem in a spiral instead of presenting it in the traditional form of lines and stanzas, but doing so might draw too much attention to the form at the expense of the message. A writer who designs a pattern out of her words runs the risk of causing readers to think more about how the words look on the page rather than what the words mean.

standard scale for measuring the intensity of a tornado is the Fujita Scale, with the following range of categories: an F0, called gale tornado, with wind speeds of 40 to 72 miles per hour to an F5 incredible tornado, with wind speeds between 216 and 318 miles per hour. The damage described in the poem indicates that this storm might rank as an F2, significant tornado, with wind speeds between 113 and 157 miles per hour.

Chicana Literature HISTORICAL CONTEXT Tornado Alley Pat Mora wrote often about the southwest United States, particularly Texas, where she was born and raised. This poem seems to take place in that part of the country. One indicator occurs in line 3, where Mora mentions a cholla, which is a kind of cactus indigenous to North American desert areas. At the end of the poem, she describes sand, which is common in the desert. Mora juxtaposes these desert images with indicators of a tornado. She mentions rain and lightning, which commonly precede a tornado, and she mentions the loud sound, which she describes as ‘‘howling.’’ People who have observed tornados frequently describe them as arriving with a roar that sounds like an approaching freight train. Tornados can occur anywhere in the United States, but they are most common in a line that runs up the middle of the country, which climatologists have dubbed Tornado Alley. This area extends from central Texas through Kansas and up into Illinois; ideal conditions for tornados tend to form in this area. Hot, humid air moves northward from the Gulf of Mexico. Warm, dry air moves east from the Mojave Desert, and cold, dry air comes down from the Northwest across the Rocky Mountains. When these air currents meet each other, a vacuum is formed. The warm air is inclined to rise, creating an updraft, which falls into a spinning pattern. The Earth’s gravitational pull affects the motion of the moving air; in the northern hemisphere, they almost always spin in a counterclockwise direction, and in the southern hemisphere the direction is clockwise. The situation described in ‘‘Uncoiling’’ seems to be that of a lower-level tornado. It is stronger than a tornado cyclone, which is a small tornado that only lasts about an hour and does little damage. A storm is not classified as a tornado until it reaches speeds of over forty miles an hour. The

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Though Mora has lived in the United States for her entire life, her writing is generally identified with her Chicana roots. Chicana and Chicano are the female and male words used to designate people whose ethnic backgrounds is a mix of Mexican and Anglo American. The word Chicano came to prominence during the civil rights movements of the 1960s, when it took on a strident, rebellious connotation. During the 1970s, it was the preferred term for describing people of MexicanAmerican descent, though in subsequent years there was a trend away from the militant attitude that the word came to imply, making its use less and less common. It is still used more often when one wants to emphasize the unity of the culture, while the term Mexican-American tends to emphasize the culture’s divided nature. Chicano culture has its roots in the 1848 annexation of large parts of Mexico at the end of the Mexican-American War. The people in the land that changed hands, including parts of Texas, Utah, Nevada, and areas of three other states, had been Mexicans, but they abruptly found themselves citizens of a new country when the borders were redrawn. In the years that followed, the Chicano culture spread from those people and to other people of Mexico who immigrated to the United States. Thus, by the latter part of the twentieth century, Chicano culture was apparent throughout the United States, even though it was most prominent in the Southwest. Twentieth-century Chicana literature was mostly written in Spanish and not translated into English. The post–World War II generation that came of age in the 1960s changed that. For one thing, the civil rights movement, which worked to end segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, emphasized cultural pride, a value picked up by other groups. The 1960s also gave rise to the feminist movement in the United States, which promoted the same sort of pride of identity. Female writers from Mexican-American backgrounds began to tell stories of their own, stories about prejudice

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Palm trees in a storm (Image copyright photo kiev, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

and stories about traditions passed down from generation to generation. Writers such as Pat Mora, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Ana Castillo, and Denise Chaa´vez drew the attention of mainstream American publishers. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, high schools and colleges expanded their curriculum, making it more multicultural, and in so doing making an effort to recognize cultures other than those of western European countries, which had previously dominated textbooks. Chicana literature went from being solely of interest to descendants of Mexico to being of interest to anyone who understood the richness of combined cultures.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Pat Mora may be better known in the early 2000s for her children’s books than for her poetry, but, if so, that is only because of her exceptional success in that field. Her first publications were in poetry, which she began submitting after having a few children’s books rejected. She had already won poetry awards from New America, a literary magazine published by the University of New Mexico, and the National Association of Chicano Studies before her first book was published. Her first poetry collection, Chants (1984), was followed by

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Communion in 1985, which brought Mora a national audience. In 1996, Patrick D. Murphy discussed these two books in detail in Melus, finding Mora’s work a driving force in the move toward multiculturalism. ‘‘She encourages a cultural conservation through the cultivation of the rich roots of her Chicana heritage,’’ he wrote. ‘‘She also reminds us that other voices are speaking out for the necessary preservation of cultural diversity. To all of these heretofore marginalized and suppressed voices we must also attend.’’ Mora’s 1993 book Borders won the Southwest Book Award. Mora was also awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1994 and a Tomas Rivera Mexican American Book Award in 1997. Over the years, her poetry output was considerably less than her other work, including dozens of children’s books, a memoir, and a collection of essays. Though most of her awards have been regional, her work has been praised by her fellow poets, who consider her an important voice.

CRITICISM David Kelly Kelly is a writer who teaches creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College in Illinois. In this essay, he considers whether the tornado is

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

THE TORNADO IS DEPICTED AS A WOMAN UNLEASHING HER POWER, UNLOADING HER ENERGY, PLAYING OUT HER FORCE. IN THIS HUMAN PROCESS, IT BECOMES SYMPATHETIC.’’



The poems in Mora’s first collection Chants (1984) concern identity and in particular her feeling of being viewed as a foreigner because of her Mexican background.



In Julie Williams’s Escaping Tornado Season: A Story in Poems, the protagonist tries to cope with the death of her father and life with her emotionally distant mother. This book for young adults was published by HarperTeen in 2004. The Mexican American poet Sandra Cisneros is considered a little more strident than Mora, particularly the poems in Cisneros’s collection Loose Woman: Poems. The title poem, ‘‘Loose Women,’’ comes close to the turbulent fury that Mora describes in ‘‘Uncoiling.’’ Cisneros’s collection was published in 1995 by Vintage.





An interview with Mora is included in Karen Rosa Ikas’s collection Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers. Mora discusses writing, culture, and teaching, along with other subjects. Ikas’s book was published by University of Nevada Press in 2002.



Lorna Dee Cervantes is credited with being one of the first Chicana poets to establish a national reputation in the early 1980s, when Mora was just beginning to write. The poetry in her second book, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger, which was published in 1991 by Arte Publico, is widely respected. The journey of a young Mexican mother who leaves her child behind to find a new life in Texas is described in the novel Golondrina, Why Did You Leave Me? by Ba´rbara Renaud Gonza´lez. This book, part of the University of Texas Press Chicana Matters series, was published in 2009. Pat Mora discusses her life and writing with the voices of her ancestors in her memoir, House of Houses (Camino del Sol), published by University of Arizona Press in 2008.





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meant to be a universal statement about all Chicana women. Pat Mora, a prolific writer particularly in the last decades of the twentieth century, is also a media personality. She is an ardent advocate for children’s literacy, having started the prestigious Estela and Rau´l Mora Award to promote reading awareness. In her poetry, Mora often is seen as standing for social issues, particularly feminism and Mexican-American identity. Mora identifies herself as Hispanic and feminist. In interviews, she has explained her disappointment when, as a beginning writer and teacher, she looked for books containing works by Mexican-American women, only to find that very few existed. Keeping in mind the fact that Mora consciously tries to fill a void, to include images of Hispanic women in her works, can help readers understand her poetry. Unfortunately, it can also throw a reader off track. As is often the case, applying generalizations to a specific can lead readers to see what they expect to find, whether it is actually there or not. For example, Mora’s poem ‘‘Uncoiling’’ describes nature at during a violent storm. The poem does convey inferences about the ways women are viewed and the ways they view themselves. It even contains a glancing reference to Mexican-American identity. It seems to, at least. Often, a poem will yield greater understanding for readers who have the tenacity to look for meaning under the surface, but in the case of ‘‘Uncoiling,’’ it would be very easy to go too far with a close reading, to miss the author’s intent. That, of course, requires an understanding of the author’s intent, and such a thing is never clear— no one can really say what a poem means, and frequently a poet will deny that she was conscious of a specific intent. There are clues within the poem, though, that can be used to define its focus and purpose.

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The poem centers on the description of a tornado touching down in a desert area, a place where cacti and sand are part of the landscape. The tension comes from juxtaposing the arid desert with the torrential rainstorm. Mora describes the lightning and how the cholla, hawks, and butterflies are all swept up together by the driving wind. The poem is more than just a description, however. It also personifies the tornado, mentioning its hair and eyes and lips, calling it ‘‘her.’’ These parts are clear enough. What is not explained, however, is who this tornado woman represents and how much she is supposed to tell readers about womankind in general. It would not make sense to say that the tornado is meant to be a comment on all women, even though it is tempting to read the poem that way. There is just too much complexity here for such a direct answer. To some extent, the tornado is an empowering image. Her power contrasts with stereotypes that show women as weak, and she has the freedom to express that power, even if it means causing destruction. Since the feminist movement in the 1960s, there has been a conscious effort to challenge preconceived beliefs about gender. People have asked why it is considered socially acceptable for a man to act out his anger show and express his pent-up frustrations, whereas the same behavior is considered unacceptable for women. In order to reset social expectations, some writers have made a point of showing women who exert their strength and make an impact. Of course, power cannot be fully exerted if one is going to fret about what the results might be, so saying that a powerful woman has some degree of irresponsibility—that she is as dangerous as a rampant tornado—is a compliment in this context, not an insult. But the tornado in ‘‘Uncoiling’’ might not be intended as positive. Its ferocity is balanced with a vulnerability that Mora presents in the final stanzas. As an impersonal force of nature, the tornado simply exhausts its energy, destroying whatever happens to be in its path. The human characteristics Mora ascribes to it elicit the reader’s empathy. In particular, the word ‘‘uncoiling’’ gives this woman a motive for her destructiveness. Mora does not say what might be coiled, wound up, within her, but she does not have to. Without specifics, readers can assume that her problems are the universal ones, and that works fine in the poem.

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The tornado is depicted as a woman unleashing her power, unloading her energy, playing out her force. In this human process, it becomes sympathetic in the final stanza. She falls asleep. This is not the way a fierce destroyer behaves. Real tornados lose their velocity eventually, and when they do, they cease to be. In the final stanza the sense is that the world has resumed its calm, now that the tornado has gone away. Presenting a sleeping woman at the end, drawing attention to the placid stars above, gives a sense that the storm’s force only exists for so long and then it no longer exists. The image of a sleeping woman at the end does not erase the poem’s negative implications completely. There is never a good occasion for a tornado; nobody is ever pleased to see one or hear one approach. Probably Mora does not intend ‘‘Uncoiling’’ to make a universal statement about women. It is one thing to say that women can be fierce, and that tornados can be gentle, but linking all women to such a rampant force does not make sense. It becomes clear that the tornado is not a comment about all women when other women appear in the poem’s third stanza. These women are frightened, hiding from the tornado and singing to their children with voices that are fragile as lace. They could not be more unlike the poem’s vibrant central character. It would be pointless to question which image is really meant to represent women. The answer is obvious; there are women who are wild and women who are weak, women who are destructive and women who are nurturing, loud women, quiet women, and so on. A more relevant question is whether one type of woman is more authentic. Any sign of bias could be read to imply that if it is not how women are, it is at least a sign of how the poet thinks they should be. The tornado is the image that dominates the poem, certainly, and some readers might assume from this that it stands as a statement about womanhood, but the unavoidable negative connotations associated with a tornado make that unlikely. By contrast, there is nothing particularly admirable about the other women, either. Contrasted with the tornado, they seem weak, but they are also caring for children. Contrasted to them, the tornado seems dangerous. The portraits are so evenly handled that neither can be assumed to be the true or best image of women. By not taking sides, the poem ends up saying that women are

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both forceful and reckless and prudent and nurturant. This balance between the two types of women correlates with suggestions about race. The dark-haired wild woman and the pale nurturing woman can be read as suggesting separate races or ethnicity. In this sense, the poem seems to show Mexicans as unbridled and Anglo Europeans as frightened. Such inferences are unfair to both sides. People would not like to be thought of as running amok, unable to contain their emotions, and similarly others do not want to be viewed as hiding in fear, either. Considering the question of ethnicity, though, there really is no firm evidence that Mora intends to use this poem to make any kind of statement. The swirling can resemble strands of hair, and in the midst of a storm they would be nothing other than dark; the paleness of the other women might not be there to contrast with the tornado’s darkness, but just to show the women’s fear. When a poet writes about social issues, as Pat Mora often does, there is a temptation to assume that all of her poetry is intended to make the same point. In ‘‘Uncoiling,’’ Mora describes a tornado as a woman, and so it would make sense to question whether she means a woman or all women. It is a question worth asking, but, on examination, it just does not make sense. Mora has imbued this tornado with too much complexity to make it representative of more than one individual. The poem is powerful enough as it is, without forcing it to carry some social message that it does not support. Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on ‘‘Uncoiling,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

I OFTEN WRITE ABOUT WHAT I LOVE, AND WHAT I LOVE—MEXICAN HERITAGE, SPANISH AND LANGUAGES, THE DESERT—IS VIEWED BY SOME AS INFERIOR. ONE OF MY MOTIVATIONS FOR WRITING THEN, IS TO AFFIRM AND CELEBRATE WHAT I CHERISH.’’

Umbria, Italy, 2003; and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, 1994. The numerous awards her books have received include: IRA’s Notable Books for a Global Society for Confetti: Poems for Children; ALA’s Notable Books for Doha Flor: A Tall Tale about a Giant Woman with a Great Big Heart; the Americas Award for Children and Young Adult Literature for A Library for Juana: The World of Sor Juana Ine´s, Pablo’s Tree, and Tome´s and the Library Lady; and the Toma´s Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award for A Library for Juana: The World of Sor Juana Ings, Pablo’s Tree, and Tome´s and the Library Lady. In this interview, Pat shares with us who she is as a reader and writer, the way her writing draws from her experiences growing up in the Southwest, her passion for family, her love of language, and her celebration of her Mexican heritage.

In the following interview, Pat Mora discusses who she is as a reader and a writer and the way her writing draws from her experiences.

Gail: In an interview with Connie Rockman, you note your mother influenced you as a reader— buying you books and taking you to the library. Tell us more about your reading and writing history and how that history characterizes you as a reader and writer today.

Pat Mora, featured speaker for the CLA Breakfast at the 2006 NCTE Convention in Nashville, is a writer of picture books, poetry, and nonfiction for an audience ranging from young children through adults. She has been honored for her writing and her advocacy, and her books have received numerous awards. Her many honors include: Honorary Doctorate of Letters, State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo, 2006; National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, 2006; Civitella Ranieri Fellow ship,

Pat: I remember the pleasure of reading which explains coining the word ‘‘book joy.’’ I remember reading on my bed on hot El Paso afternoons, reading in bed when I was home sick and my dear grandmother would bring me hot tomato soup, reading in bed at night before going to sleep. Sounds like I did a lot of reading in bed, doesn’t it? I’m the eldest of four and our maternal aunt and grandmother often lived with us. Maybe that’s part of the explanation for finding a quiet place to enjoy books.

T. Gail Pritchard and Patrick W. Pritchard

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I’ve written that I always liked rhyming poetry, the wonderful Robert Louis Stevenson poems, for example. Poetry remains a favorite genre both for reading and writing. Thanks to a Summer Reading Club, I think, I began reading biographies. I’ve written two, Toma´s and the Library Lady and A Library for Juana, and am currently working on a biography project using poetry. To be candid, my motivation is my desire to increase awareness of Latino heroines and heroes. You use the term ‘‘book joy.’’ What do you mean by that and what is an example of a book experience that gives you book joy? I so like the intensity packed into the threeletter word joy. By ‘‘book joy,’’ I mean the intense, private pleasure readers experience when they savor a book. Delicious text. Presently, for example, I’m savoring The Wild Braid. A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden by Stanley Kunitz. I love to garden and am so enjoying the insights of a fellow gardener and poet, who lived to be a hundred and was wise and talented. In an article you wrote . . . entitled ‘‘Why I Am a Writer,’’ you explain that you write because you are ‘‘curious’’ and because you read. Deborah Morad . . . quotes you as saying, ‘‘I also write because I am fascinated by the pleasure and power of words.’’ Tell us more about this recursive process of reading and writing. How do each influence you as a reader and, a writer? A fascinating question. I feel strongly about that interesting duality: the pleasure and power of words, of languages. It’s important to me that young readers and writers experience both, at a level appropriate to their stage of development. Language liberates. I read as a source of deep pleasure that readers know in the way tea drinkers know the pleasure of a cup of tea. Of course, I value reading as a route to knowledge and understanding including the knowledge I may need for my next writing project. In doing research for the current project on Latina heroes and heroines, for example, I not only learn facts but am awed by what others have endured and accomplished. This inspires me to persevere. Being a writer, then, does influence what I read and vice versa. The image that comes to mind is the symbol for infinity. In a profile written by Rosalind a Barrera . . . , you mention your imagination is fired up by reading the works of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the Spanish poet and novelist, Frederico Garcia-Lorca.

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How does reading authors like these push your own creativity and curiosity? I smiled at the question since this fall, the University of Arizona Press will publish my sixth adult poetry collection, . . . [which was] inspired by the odes of Pablo Neruda. I love the music and imaginative leaps by Neruda and Lorca. Writers we admire give us linguistic courage. Tell me more about [this collection]. What linguistic courage did you call upon to write this collection? A kind question. It was a considerable risk to write a collection modeled on the work of the reviewed Pablo Neruda. I include an ode to him because from my perspective, the collection is in homage to him. A book of praise songs is also a risk in a time when praise may seem frivolous compared to tragedy. Praise can sustain the human spirit, however. One of my hopes is that the collection will tempt readers of all ages to write their own odes to the things they love. . . . what will be your next project? . . . my new children’s book illustrated by Doug Cushman will be published in November. It’s a zoo romp that includes animals doing Latin dances and features twenty-six cognates such as hippopotamus/hipopo´tamo. Eight other children’s books are in press, including a set of four easy-read bilingual books. Rosalinda Barrera points out that particular themes consistently run through your books, including: ‘‘family and community, the Chicano experience, border relations, the desert, and bilingualism.’’ How has writing about these themes changed you as a person, a writer, and your view of these themes? Another question that makes me smile. Critics who comment on the themes in my adult work would add women to that list. Those themes are me, of course. A writer’s intents are complex and probably not fully apparent to the writer herself. One of my intents is affirmation. I often write about what I love, and what I love— Mexican heritage, Spanish and languages, the desert—is viewed by some as inferior. One of my motivations for writing then, is to affirm and celebrate what I cherish. I’m inviting readers to notice as a botanist invites us in. Your close relationship with the desert is reflected in many of your books, too. The beauty of the desert is mirrored in the beauty of the language you use to write about it. Describe this connection

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and how it has impacted you as a writer and as a wordsmith. I grew up and now live in the Chihuahua desert. When I visit schools, I tell children that if I’d grown up in Cincinnati, for example, where I’ve spent some time, I would probably have written about oaks and maples and cardinals. Landscapes, the wonder of the natural world, delight me wherever I travel, and thanks to my archaeologist-professor husband, I’ve had the opportunity to savor some amazing landscapes. I edited one adult poetry collection by the Aegean Sea and the new collection by a crater lake in Japan. The desert is my mother, though, as I say in a book title. Love of place is rich clay for ideas. In the Language Arts article, you reveal that you ‘‘would like to become a better writer.’’ What did you mean by that? I tell students that we all want to be better writers. That ‘‘all’’ may be a slight exaggeration, but when we face a blank page, most of us desire to express ourselves more compellingly. Reading intensifies that desire for me since I can experience the skill of the gifted. A reviewer for a manuscript I co-authored commented, ‘‘subjecting pre-and in-service teachers and primary students to books written in a foreign language (as well as introducing a foreign culture) seems rather ‘over the top,’ especially in the USA where language diversity is not promoted.’’ In Rosalinda Barrera’s interview, you state, ‘‘we have a repressive linguistic atmosphere, and a long and ugly history of devaluing other languages. However, you also go on to state, ‘‘I love languages, I love their inventiveness. They’re a record of human ingenuity. We need to be nurturing them, not suppressing them.’’ Tell us more about why you feel this way and how your books nurture languages. I question the statement that ‘‘we live in a country that does not support the study of languages.’’ Foreign language requirements have long been a part of our educational history. In part because of demographic shifts and power struggles, however, monolingual’s is touted as a virtue by some. One of the purposes of education is to expand our horizons and help us be responsible world citizens, isn’t it? More than we want to admit, language and cultural debates are about power, politics and class rather than about education.

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If we truly value each child as schools state in their mission statements, we value what children are which includes their home language and culture. I cringe at the thought of any child being embarrassed about the beautiful language he speaks with his family. I could write a book on this complex topic and have, a manuscript entitled, ‘‘Dear Teacher: Seven Practices for Creative Educators.’’ Let’s talk about this a little more. Given the unprecedented criticism teachers are enduring, national mandates created by politicians, and the unparalleled push for standardized testing, teachers are struggling to meet the needs of all their students. In Something About the Author, Volume 134, you describe how as a child, you wished your ‘‘Mexican American heritage were a part of my school day.’’ Please tell us about one ‘‘practice’’ you feel is most crucial in supporting students, nurturing their home language and culture, and creating the kind of school environment you wished for as a child. I’ve always liked the epistolary form whether in fiction or nonfiction. I wrote this manuscript as a series of paired letters to teachers. I write, for example, a letter about the first practice: value your creative self. Teachers are often so undervalued that I fear some begin to doubt their own creativity. The companion letter is, then, about valuing each student’s creative self. Don’t we all crave such affirmation? You have talked about the ‘‘self-doubt’’ many artists feel as they create. Many children feel this way about their own writing. What would you tell these children and their teachers about moving past the self-doubt and finding their voice? Again, that is the topic of the epistolary manuscript mentioned above. I have had a hard time finding a publisher for the manuscript. This has been very discouraging, of course. I began by wanting to affirm the creativity of teachers and librarians, all who work with children, and wanting to suggest ways to nurture the educator’s creativity as well as that of our children, all our children. Large publishers thought the audience for the book was too narrow. Educational publishers said that educators, in this time of testemphasis, want practical books. I believe in the power of the human spirit and believe that spirit needs nurturing.

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You were a high school English teacher at one time. What do you wish you knew then that you now know as a reader, writer, and lover of words? My first public school teaching assignment was teaching Spanish to every child in grades K-6 at a new school. I was an English major who had planned to teach high school, but I was bilingual. That first semester before I managed a transfer to a middle school to teach reading and spelling was a real challenge. The next two years, I finally taught at a high school. What I say in the unpublished manuscript is that I wished I’d been writing when I taught writing in high school, the community college, and the university. I love to cook and garden. It would be difficult to teach either well if I weren’t experimenting in the kitchen and garden myself Your questions have brought to the surface the sadness and frustration that every writer feels at not placing a manuscript. You and your family have been instrumental in creating a special event celebrating children and books during National Poetry Month—El Dia´ de los Nin˜os/El Dia´ de los Libros, as well as the Estela and Rau´l Mora Award. What should teachers and parents know about this special event and how can they join in on the celebration? It’s impossible to give a brief answer to a family literacy project that has absorbed so much of my time for ten years. Key points: what began as the desire to create an annual celebration has grown to the concept that El Dia´ de los Nin˜os/El Dia´ de los Libros, Children’s Day/Book Day, is a daily commitment to link ALL children to books, languages and cultures. Families are key educational partners in this work. We celebrate this daily commitment nationally on April 30th. This project is now housed at the Association for Library Service for Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association. The project has flourished thanks to the commitment of librarians, parents and teachers. I have plenty of information on my Web site www.patmora. com. I hope that teachers and parents who share the desire to foster book joy in their homes and schools will be leaders in bringing this commitment and celebration to their communities. You are the keynote speaker for the Children’s Literature Assembly’s Annual Breakfast at NCTE this coming November 19th in Nashville, TN. Your

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talk is entitled, ‘‘Early Morning Eye-Openers & Tall Tales.’’ Will you give us a ‘‘trailer’’? Yikes! 7:30 a.m. I’m more of a night person than a morning one and know that the alarm will ring mighty early on Sunday at NCTE. But, I’m delighted and honored to be speaking at the Assembly and grateful to Random House, publishers of Don˜a Flor: A Tall Tale About a Giant Woman with a Great Big Heart, available in English and Spanish, for sponsoring me. I so enjoy being with people who love children and books and look forward to sharing some secrets as we wake up together. Pat, I’m a night person, too—but, I’m going to make sure my alarm is set extra early. I am truly looking forward to your speech! Source: T. Gail Pritchard and Patrick W. Pritchard, ‘‘An Interview with Pat Mora: The Reader and Writer,’’ in Journal of Children’s Literature, Vol. 32, No. 2, Fall 2006, pp. 23–26.

Patrick D. Murphy In the following essay, Murphy discusses Pat Mora’s ideas on cultural conservation. Pat Mora writes in Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle that the United States ‘‘has both the opportunity and responsibility to demonstrate to this world of emerging representative governments that nurturing variety is central, not marginal to democracy’’ (19). The use of the word ‘‘nurturing’’ seems in no way fortuitous, because she recognizes natural and cultural diversity as integral threads of the lifeweb labeled Humanity, which is one thread of a much larger lifeweb labeled Earth. As a result, she calls for emphasizing cultural conservation with the same enthusiasm with which some movements labor for ‘‘historical preservation’’ and ‘‘natural conservation’’ (18). This recognition of the interrelationship of natural and cultural diversity and emphasis on the nurturing practice of cultural conservation are to be found throughout the poetry of Chants (1985), Borders (1986), and Communion (1991), as well as Nepantla (1993), of which she says: ‘‘The essays are about my encounters with my world’’ (Nepantla 9). Pat Mora is a Chicana who began writing around 1980 and has won awards for both her poetry and her children’s books. Born in 1942, she grew up, raised three children, and worked in El Paso before moving in 1989 to Cincinnati, Ohio. She has taught at the high school, community college, and university levels and served in various administrative capacities at the University of

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THE PEOPLE AND THE LAND INTERWEAVE IN MORA’S CONCEPTIONS OF CULTURAL CONSERVATION AND THE WORD-HEALING OF POETRY.’’

But Mora is well aware of the danger of token wilderness preserves and Potemkin-village mercados and warns against any idea of recovering the Mexican-American heritage as curio or artifact: ‘‘a true ethnic of conservation includes a commitment to a group’s decisions, its development and selfdirection’’ (Nepantla 30). Just as the ecology movement warns that biological diversity is crucial to biotic survival, Mora warns that cultural diversity is crucial to human survival, since it actually helps to maintain diversity in general: Pride in cultural identity, in the set of learned and shared language, symbols, and meanings, needs to be fostered not because of nostalgia or romanticism, but because it is essential to our survival. The oppressive homogenization of humanity in our era of international technological and economic interdependence endangers us all. (Nepantla 36)

Texas at El Paso from 1981 to 1989. Of those years, Mora remarks that ‘‘I was fortunate to work on issues of outreach to women and to the local Mexican American population . . . For those of us committed to extending the opportunities of the university to our community, it was a frustrating but exciting time to participate in that gradual transformation’’ (Nepantla 4). ‘‘Nepantla’’ is a Nahuatl word meaning ‘‘place in the middle,’’ and Mora makes it clear she not only recognizes herself as having come from such a physical place, the Tex-Mex borderlands, but also from such a psychic and cultural place as a MexicanAmerican. Mora seeks in her writing, as well as her life, to conserve the generative tension of the dynamic plurality that is borderland existence. ‘‘I am in the middle of my life, and well know,’’ she declares, ‘‘not only the pain but also the advantage of observing both sides, albeit with my biases, of moving through two, and, in fact, multiple spaces’’ (Nepantla 6).

Human diversity can be maintained only when cultural conservation is practiced by the marginalized and subordinated groups who defend and recover their heritages in order to generate their futures. Many of the essays in Nepantla focus precisely on the issue of cultural conservation, even as they embody such a practice. Mora rightly emphasizes the conservation of Chicano/a and Latino/a cultures, but does not stop there. She also addresses respect for, and awareness of, other cultures internationally and the differing degrees and kinds of effects that dominant U.S. culture has on subordinated cultures within the U.S. and worldwide.

One of the dangers of a segment of the natural conservation movement is the recovery or preservation of a small section of a larger bioregion. Tourists can then visit that parcel and experience nostalgia for the rest that was allowed to be destroyed. One can see the same danger evident in urban historical preservation, particularly in historically ethnic areas being crowded out by skyscrapers and highways. As Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero observe in the Introduction to Infinite Divisions, ‘‘since many freeways in large urban areas were built in the barrios, the freeways often run along Chicano residential areas. In addition, they may have also destroyed much of the older sections of the barrios, thus destroying traditions’’ (32). And in such urban renewals/removals, one often sees that the buildings preserved as representative of a particular cultural heritage are ones that are of interest to tourists and tourism promoters rather than inheritors of the culture.

Mora’s first book of poetry, Chants, demonstrates some of the ways by which the recovery of heritage dimension of cultural conservation may be realized. Part of such recovery requires the retelling of old tales and the untelling of old interpretations by others of one’s culture. For Southwestern Latinos, one such untelling involves embracing the Indian heritage of the mestizo/a, in opposition to the imposition of the ‘‘Spanish’’ heritage as the primary cultural determinant. Mora opens Chants with the poem ‘‘Bribe.’’ In it she retells the story of the ‘‘long ago’’ practices of ‘‘Indian women’’ to seek inspiration for their weaving arts from ‘‘the Land.’’ She then claims those traditional practices as part of her own heritage through ritual imitation: ‘‘Like the Indians / I ask the Land to smile on me, to croon / softly, to help me catch her music with words’’ (7). But it is not only an imitative relationship of artistic practices, weaving and writing, that she claims; she also claims a parallel relationship with the personified

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‘‘Land’’ through identifying both the women weavers’ practice and hers as efforts to represent the earth’s creativity through their artistry. She thus claims and images an inheritance and continuation of a human cultural relationship with the rest of the world in which respect, honor, and humility define human-non-human interaction. Another part of such recovery of heritage consists of reaffirming the situatedness of culture, the relationship of values, beliefs, practices, and character to place. As Mora notes, ‘‘Many Mexican American women from the Southwest are desert women’’ (Nepantla 53). This is not merely anecdotal, but a delineation of identity and source of pride, as well as a claim about historical residence (see Fast 30). Mora, for example, opens ‘‘Desert Women’’ in Borders with the lines, ‘‘Desert women know / about survival’’ (80). Survival must be understood not as a minimal condition of existence but as an achievement against odds and concerted efforts, not by ‘‘nature’’ but by other cultures. Survival is thus not some passive form of endurance, but an ongoing practice of resistance and self-education. ‘‘Mi Madre,’’ the third poem of Chants, celebrates ‘‘the desert’’ that is a ‘‘strong mother’’ (9), because the skills not only to survive but also to flourish there are part of what defines the culture Mora celebrates. And the use of Spanish here differentiates her own cultural identity of Mexican heritage from the pre-concert heritage of desert Native Americans. Her use of turquoise defines a commonality without conflating the difference between the native and immigrant cultures sharing and struggling over the same terrain through generations of inhabitation (Murphy 39). Several poems that follow ‘‘Mi Madre’’ elaborate the desert’s ‘‘strong mother’’ role. For example, ‘‘Lesson 1’’ and ‘‘Lesson 2’’ emphasize the desert’s power to reassure and emotionally heal the speaker. ‘‘Lesson 1’’ consists of three stanzas, with the first focusing on the desert’s return to balance after a thunderstorm and the second depicting the speaker’s seeking out of the desert when ‘‘shaken, powerless’’ with ‘‘sadness.’’ The third stanza imparts the lesson. The speaker, knowing she is the ‘‘Mi’ja’’ of the desert mother, feels free to express her emotions while not surrendering to disempowerment and learns to ‘‘cry away the storm, then listen, listen’’ (10). ‘‘Lesson 1’’ begins with rain pounding the land and the lesson of the poem derives from the desert’s rapid recovery from this down-pour. ‘‘Lesson 2,’’ on the next page, also begins with water, but this time it is rising from the river through the evaporative

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power of sunlight. Here the desert again speaks a lesson about overcoming sadness, but Mora has added an interesting dimension. In the first lesson, she emphasizes imitating the solidity of the land to weather sadness and the lifestorms causing the emotion. In the second lesson, she emphasizes imitating the fluidity of the water, rising about her river of troubles, strengthened, transformed, and active. Mora moves from the desert mother’s instruction to ‘‘listen’’ to her challenge to ‘‘dance,’’ recognizing that both solidity and fluidity are processes of a single dynamic system. A third part of recovery of heritage, particularly for the building of a future, is to critique the oppressive and exclusionary elements of one’s heritage: ‘‘to question and ponder what values and customs we wish to incorporate into our lives, to continue our individual and our collective evolution’’ (Nepantla 53). In Nepantla Mora critiques, for example, dominant Mexican culture’s suppression of indigenous peoples and languages (28–29, 40). In Chants, she critiques the sexual oppression of women enforced through the virgin / whore dichotomy by depicting the fear of two brides-to-be in ‘‘Discovered’’ and ‘‘Dreams.’’ In the first poem, the speaker fears that she will be denied a dignified wedding and be ostracized by the community if her loss of virginity is discovered, and also, perhaps, that ‘‘her lover’’ will see her as a ‘‘whore’’ (13), i.e., a sexually active being, rather than as a wife, a supposedly sexually passive being. This speaker remains firmly subjected to cultural oppression. In the second poem, the bride-to-be has the same fear on her wedding day of public censure, but relishes the sexual awakening she enjoyed the night before and speaks to her groom as someone who understands. Here the speaker breaks free ideologically of cultural restrictions and ‘‘Mexican superstitions’’ (15) and also asserts a relationship of equality with her lover, unlike the speaker of the first poem. Interestingly enough, this speaker seeks assistance from the flowers for her hair—a symbol of nonhuman, uncultured nature—to keep her secret through the wedding. Mora returns to this topic of gender oppression and sexual inequality in Borders with the poem ‘‘Diagnosis,’’ which treats a Chicana’s anguish over being informed that she needs a hysterectomy, because ‘‘She fears her man / will call her empty’’ (25). And she addresses it in Communion with ‘‘Perfume,’’ in which a man kills his wife in a jealous rage; and with ‘‘Emergency Room,’’ in which the woman

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declares that her jealous husband ‘‘clothed me in bruises’’ (45). As with ‘‘Discovered’’ and ‘‘Dream,’’ Mora has these two poems arranged so that the woman in the second poem is stronger, is a survivor who has learned something about her culture and her oppressed condition. She more forcefully repudiates the sexual oppression in her heritage, however, through diverse affirmative images of empowered women in Chants. The bruja of ‘‘Bruja: Witch’’ is depicted positively, as a seeker of freedom and a champion of other women, for exacting retribution for a male’s infidelity and double standard: ‘‘My work is done. A frightened husband / will run to the wife who paid me / three American dollars// . . . Beneath white / stars, I dance’’ (16–17; see Fast 31). The mother of ‘‘Plot’’ reveals a deep determination and lasting anger in planning to protect her daughter from the same degradation she experienced on her wedding night when her husband discovered she was not a virgin: ‘‘I’ll arm my daughter with a ring / . . . / . . . She must use the ring. / I don’t want to slit his throat’’ (20). ‘‘Curandera’’ emphasizes the healers strength drawn from her integration with the environment, a particular kind of cultural empowerment. And here this female tradition is explicitly linked to a dynamic relationship with the mysteries of the natural world that empower this woman: ‘‘The curandera / and house have aged together to the rhythm / of the desert’’ (26). And, in ‘‘Aztec Princess,’’ the young woman thwarts her mother’s traditional efforts to enforce her domestication by choosing the ‘‘rich earth’’ and ‘‘moonlight’’ over ‘‘the home for happiness’’ (28; see Rebolledo 122–23). Such empowered women appear throughout Borders and Communion as well. While Chants may focus more on recovering and affirming heritage, the early poems of Borders address the difficulty of maintaining and legitimating one’s heritage and communicating it across the borders existing in the U.S. The title poem, with its epigraph from feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan, emphasizes the gender border; but Mora also ties it to the divisions created by language. Communication is always a translation of ‘‘like but unlike’’ (10), in which the differences cannot be effaced in order to understand the other’s desires, needs, culture, heritage. When one culture claims universality and dominates the lands and the lives of another culture, translation breaks down (see Rosaldo Ch. 9). And Mora has several poems emphasizing such breakdowns, like ‘‘Unnatural Speech’’ and

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‘‘Bilingual Christmas’’. In ‘‘Echoes,’’ Mora recognizes that language alone is not the culprit; class divisions serve as well. The speaker of ‘‘Echoes’’ is a guest of a white woman with a Mexican maid; feeling kinship the speaker tries to bridge the chasm of class with Spanish, but it is insufficient. Then she hopes ‘‘to hear this earth / roar’’ in retribution for the maid’s oppression, but realizes the responsibility lies with her. ‘‘Perhaps,’’ she thinks, ‘‘my desert land waits / to hear me roar’’ (23–24). Only through voicing the common ground of their heritage, not just speaking a recognizable language, can the speaker overcome the class division that places her on the side of the oppressor against others of her own heritage. Perhaps because of her concern over class divisions, Mora places the eulogy ‘‘Toma´s Rivera’’ after the title poem in Borders. Rivera represents someone who rose from the fields to a position of prominence that carried class status, yet his hands remained always outstretched to others and remained always a reminder of his own history. Significantly, Mora emphasizes the initial difficulty Rivera had in developing his own literacy: Those hands clenched in the dark at vı´ boras, vı´ boras hissing we don’t want you, you people have lice as the school door slammed but Toma´s learned and his hands began to hold books gently, with affection . . . Beyond personal literacy, Rivera advanced Chicano cultural literacy: ‘‘He searched / for stories about his people and finally / gave their words sound, wrote the books / he didn’t have, we didn’t have’’ (13). He is therefore a model to emulate not only for his own achievements and his bridging of class divisions, but also for his efforts to encourage others with similar experiences to build a better life by revaluing their shared roots and place in the world rather than leaving them behind. Remaining connected with the people rooted in the land is what provides strength, as Mora testifies in ‘‘University Avenue.’’ These first generation Chicano university students, a population with whom Mora had extensive contact in her university years as student, teacher, and administrator, know that ‘‘Our people prepared us / with gifts from the land’’ (19). And while Mora addresses many subjects in Borders, her poems

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return again and again to the relationship of people and land, particularly toward the end of the volume. ‘‘Miss Doc at Eighty,’’ Mora speaks in the persona of an octogenarian who was an herbalist or curandera. Her morning ritual of working in the garden reminds her of, and continues to connect her with, the restorative, healing qualities of plant life: ‘‘ . . . sharp smell / of plants on my fingertips / where the facts once were / so my patients said’’ (48). Later, in ‘‘Secrets,’’ Mora elaborates on the importance for cultural conservation of healers such as Miss Doc. In the first two stanzas of ‘‘Secrets’’ she describes ‘‘Felipe, the Tarahumara, guiding / my great grandfather.’’ And in the third stanza Mora expresses her desire ‘‘for such a guide, a woman, / teaching me the art of bending / close to the land, / silent, listening, feeling the path’’ (86). In ‘‘Mi Tierra,’’ the speaker addresses the land directly, indicating that Mi Tierra in its generative essence is also Mi Madre. Through going barefoot the speaker can feel the earth move: ‘‘through me, but in / me, in me’’ (79). The speaker is part of an entity and part of a system, with the relationship depicted as participatory and processive. While ‘‘Mi Tierra’’ emphasizes an individual woman-earth relationship, ‘‘Desert Women’’ extends that relationship to a community. Here the women become like the desert, because they are a part of it, knowledgeable ‘‘about survival’’ in extremes, with ‘‘deep roots . . . to hide pain and loss by silence.’’ These lines remind the reader of Lesson 1 in Chants about learning the silent listening strength of the desert. The conclusion of ‘‘Desert Women,’’ however, reminds the readers of Lesson 2. In that poem the speaker accepted the desert’s challenge to ‘‘dance,’’ while in ‘‘Desert Women’’ she exclaims: ‘‘Don’t be deceived. When we bloom, we stun’’ (80). In ‘‘Success,’’ the final poem of Borders, the speaker, as both poet and cultural activist, wishes ‘‘To be of use / like hierbabuena’’ (88), healer from the desert. But Mora knows that through the writing of this poem, as with all of her others, she is already of use to those who share her heritage and to those who seek to understand and respect another’s heritage. Poetry serves as both a healing agent and a repository of the knowledge necessary to know how to ‘‘steep leaves patiently’’ (88). In Nepantla, Mora defines the sense of responsibility behind her writing: I write because I believe that Mexican Americans need to take their rightful place in U.S. literature. We need to be published and to be studied in schools and colleges so that the sto-

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ries and ideas of our people won’t quietly disappear. . . . [D]eep inside I always wish I wrote better, that I could bring more honor and attention to those like the abuelitas, grandmothers, I write about. (139)

Communion is filled with the stories of such people and ideas that must be preserved, and repeatedly these are tied to the land. ‘‘Gentle Communion’’ opens the first section, ‘‘Old Bones,’’ with a tribute to ‘‘Mamande,’’ who the speaker says ‘‘came with me from the desert’’ (11). As a symbol of resistance to assimilation, she remains, even though ‘‘long-dead,’’ a source of reassurance and comfort. This comfort is imaged as peeled grapes, and the pleasure of their taste depends upon the same patience required to steep leaves for tea. The desert that opens the poem is linked with a fruit, and Mamande is linked with both, indicating the nourishment to be derived from a ‘‘natured culture,’’ one generated and maintained in the place from which it arose. The heritage Mamande represents is one not so much built as grown and nurtured through generations, a heritage that survives and may flourish despite changes, difficulties, and the barriers of languages. Similarly, the three poems, ‘‘Divisadero Street, San Francisco,’’‘‘Desert Pilgrimage,’’ and ‘‘Don Jaime,’’ link the preservation of traditional knowledge embodied in the stories and lives of abuelas and abuelos with maintaining their rootedness in the land. The woman of ‘‘Divisadero Street’’ lives in the city but reminds the speaker that we are ‘‘Lost without dirt,’’ without connection to the soil that is the source of the wisdom and healing power handed down from one curandera to another. This woman seems very much a younger version of Miss Doc found in Borders. Mora notes that her gardening affects the people around her. As the flowers reflect the sunshine, ‘‘ . . . light dazzles / until we too shimmer’’ (17). In the final stanza Mora equates growing these urban flowers with cultivating the next generation. ‘‘Desert Pilgrimage’’ reinforces the generational importance of curanderas, as the first person narrator recounts all of the arts she practices that have been learned from a woman like the one on Divisadero Street. Such a woman’s voice remains with her, guiding her in the way that she would want to be guided, as expressed in ‘‘Secrets’’ in Borders. The power of herbal healing is also celebrated in ‘‘Don Jaime,’’ which immediately follows ‘‘Desert Pilgrimage.’’ Here, a male is depicted as curandero, perhaps like ‘‘Felipe, the Tarahumara.’’ Mora here does not nostalgically

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memorialize a lost art, but rather celebrates its continuation as ‘‘the lame healer and his grandson’’ gather ‘‘branches and bark, / with boto´n de oro’’ (21). Other poems in the volume also pay tribute to such individuals, with ‘‘Strong Women,’’ the penultimate poem, providing a generalized celebration and invocation for ongoing learning. This connection to the land that Mora believes must be maintained even in the cities, as indicated in ‘‘Divisadero Street,’’ can be understood in terms of a strategy for survival against assimilation and disenfranchisement and a basis for reestablishing and preserving community. As Rebolledo and Rivero note, ‘‘the city, shining land of opportunity, signals only struggle and often destruction for [Chicanas], their families, and their culture’’ (160). Having introduced curanderas in Chants, Mora returns to them in Communion, as in the poems previously mentioned, and clarifies their importance in Nepantla in her essay, ‘‘Poet as Curandera.’’ The traditional healer is a part of her heritage, providing Mora with a name that defines her own artistry as an act of healing through ‘‘witnessing’’ to her culture. In that first poem of Chants, ‘‘Bribe,’’ she identifies her writing with the land and with the most ancient elements of her heritage, embodying what she has come to understand by the time of writing ‘‘Poet as Curandera’’: ‘‘learned wisdom, ritual, solutions springing from the land. All are essential to curanderas, who listen to voices from the past and the present, who evolve from their culture’’ (126). The people and the land interweave in Mora’s conceptions of cultural conservation and the word-healing of poetry. In ‘‘The Border: A Glare of Truth,’’ Mora defines the origin of her being as poetcurandera: When I lived on the border, I had the privilege accorded to a small percentage of our citizens. I daily saw the native land of my grandparents. I grew up in the Chihuahua desert, as did they, only we grew up on different sides of the Rio Grande. That desert—its firmness resilience, and fierceness, its whispered chants and tempestuous dance, its wisdom and majesty—shaped us as geography always shapes it inhabitants. The desert persists in me, both inspiring and compelling me to sing about her and her people, their roots and blooms and thorns. (13) With that view of both sides of the river, Pat Mora opposes any national monoculture, because she knows, first of all, that place is not determined by national boundaries. A culture can and must

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cross political boundaries to remain true to its own place of existence. The Chihuahua desert and the lifestyles of the peoples who have lived there have mutually evolved over time. They were divided in an instant by a border, but their roots remain a tapestry woven beneath the surface, crisscrossing—even as the people continue to do so today—the Rio Grande. She opposes any national monoculture in the U.S. and elsewhere, second of all, because there exists an implicit ecological sensibility of multi-culturality (the existence of multiple cultures existing within geopolitical boundaries) within her concerns for the cultural conservation of Latina heritage. Even her decision to use ‘‘Latina’’ and ‘‘Latino’’ more frequently than other labels reflects her sense of this multi-culturality, because it seeks to unite ‘‘Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexican Americans, Central and South Americans,’’ whom she defines as interrelated, but certainly not identical (7). In labeling Mora’s sensibility an ecological multi-culturality, I conceptualize ‘‘ecological’’ here in two related ways. One, I see it in terms of ecosystem, as metonym and metaphor for a set of necessary human-land relationships. As Mora contends, ‘‘because humans are part of this natural world, we need to ensure that our unique expressions on this earth, whether art forms or languages, be a greater part of our national and international conservation effort’’ (25). Only if a person understands and accepts what a curandera does, will that person then appreciate the plants upon which she relies for her power. Two, I see it in terms of environment as a component of cultural heritage and continuity. As Rebolledo notes, for Hispanic writers . . . the southwestern landscape . . . meant a long tradition of families not only tied to the land but nourished by it. . . . Recent writers have looked to the rich and varied heritage of the past to find a regenerative and transforming sense of identity in the present and for the future. (96–97)

The very concept of la mestiza that Mora raises, referring in Nepantla to the work of Gloria Anzaldu´a, as a cultural melding occurring in a specific region that need not efface difference between peoples, but recognizes multiplicity within the individual, the community, and the communities of the region, also forms a component of an ecological multi-culturality. And when Mora refers to herself as a ‘‘Texican,’’ that too is a manifestation of this multi-culturality characteristic of borderlands and the dynamic tension that resonates across the desert. It also recognizes, however, that

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Texas is not California, and the experiences of cultural conflict and preservation remain varied. As Mora emphasizes, her desire is ‘‘to be one of the many voices and not the voice, for we know the grand variety in our community, and we want others to recognize this human wealth’’ (45). Mora’s voice is one of many speaking out against what she labels ‘‘the safety of uniformity,’’ the anti-ecological pursuit of a national monoculture by the practitioners of the dominant ideology who would diminish the world by diminishing its biological and cultural diversity. As Mora and others warn, these two are not unrelated: ‘‘the inheritors of culture [are] those who remain in contact with nature and tradition,’’ in all their diversity (Nepantla 121). She encourages a cultural conservation through the cultivation of the rich roots of her Chicana heritage. She also reminds us that other voices are speaking out for the necessary preservation of cultural diversity. To all of these heretofore marginalized and suppressed voices we must also attend. Source: Patrick D. Murphy, ‘‘Conserving Natural and Cultural Diversity: The Prose and Poetry of Pat Mora,’’ in MELUS, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring 1996, pp. 59–69.

SOURCES Bradford, Marlene. Scanning the Skies: A History of Tornado Forecasting, University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. Hardy, Ralph, et al. ‘‘Tornado Formations,’’ in The Weather Book, Little, Brown, 1982, pp. 112–13. Murphy, Patrick D., ‘‘Conserving Natural and Cultural Diversity: The Prose and Poetry of Pat Mora,’’ in Melus, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring 1996, pp. 59–70.

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Torres, Hector A. ‘‘Introduction: The Labor of Value in Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Literary Discourse,’’ in Conversations with Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Writers, University of New Mexico Press, 2007, pp. 1–32.

FURTHER READING Arteaga, Alfred, Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Arteaga examines what the combination of cultures means in American literature. DeLeon, Arnoldo, Mexican Americans in Texas: A Brief History, 3rd ed., Harlan Davidson, 2009. This scholarly study of Tejanos and their influence on American culture examines the cultural phenomena that are specific to the particular mix found in Mora’s home state. Dobie, J. Frank, Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest, Southern Methodist University Press, 1974. Published before the Chicano movement that included Mora changed the way people looked at the mixed cultures of the region, this book illustrates the old way of looking at Mexicans in the United States. Grazulus, Thomas, The Tornado: Nature’s Ultimate Windstorm, University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. This book explains the natural forces that create tornados. The description in the poem proves to be accurate. Nieto-Gomez, Anna, ‘‘Chicana Print Culture and Chicana Studies: A Testimony to the Development of Chicana Feminist Culture,’’ in Chicana Feminism: A Critical Reader, Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 90–96. Though Mora is not defined here as a feminist writer, this essay, as well as others in this collection, give readers a context for her work.

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Winter Nikki Giovanni’s poem ‘‘Winter’’ was published in 1978 and included in her eighth poetry collection, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. ‘‘Winter’’ is a twelve-line, three stanza, free verse poem, with no punctuation or rhyme scheme. For the most part, the poems in Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day are about isolation and loneliness. They were written after the civil rights movement of the 1960s and early 1970s appeared to have failed and efforts to secure autonomy and equal rights for African Americans seemed to be stalled. In ‘‘Winter,’’ however, Giovanni looks toward the future and turns her back on the past. The allegory of preparing for the winter cold is a reminder that African Americans should also be prepared for whatever might happen next in their struggle for equal rights. ‘‘Winter’’ also suggests the promise of a new beginning and a better world to emerge from the civil rights struggle. ‘‘Winter’’ is included in both The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni (1996) and The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni (2007).

NIKKI GIOVANNI 1978

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Born Yolanda Cornelia Giovanni on June 7, 1943, Nikki Giovanni grew up in Lincoln Heights, a predominately black suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, although she frequently visited Knoxville, Tennessee, the city of her birth and the home of her

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At the same time, Giovanni enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work but soon left the program. She received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and was able to move to New York City, where she continued writing poetry while enrolled at Columbia University’s School of Fine Arts; however, she dropped out of that MFA program during the first year. A second collection of poetry, Black Judgement, was also published in 1968. Giovanni began teaching, first at Queens College and later at Rutgers University, and then gave birth to her only child, Thomas Watson Giovanni, in 1970. Re: Creation, published in 1970, was the third and the last of Giovanni’s books to have a revolutionary tone that advocated militant change for the African American community. After Giovanni became a mother, the tone of her poetry changed, becoming less militant, and she also began writing poetry for children. The following year, Giovanni published her first collection of poems for children, Spin a Soft Black Song and a lengthy autobiographical essay, Gemini.. Also in 1971, Giovanni recorded a spoken album, Truth Is on Its Way, with the New York Community Choir. This bestselling album received the National Association of Television and Radio Announcers Award for Best Spoken Word Album.

Nikki Giovanni (Mike Simons / Getty Images)

grandparents. When she was fourteen, Giovanni moved back to Knoxville to live with her maternal grandparents. Giovanni enrolled at Fisk University after her junior year at Austin High School, under an early admission policy, but was expelled at the end of her first semester when she left campus to visit her grandparents at Thanksgiving. After a new dean of women replaced the one who had expelled her, Giovanni returned to Fisk. She graduated with honors in 1967, with a degree in history. After graduation, Giovanni moved back to Cincinnati. When her grandmother died only a month after graduation, Giovanni began to write poetry as a way to deal with her grief. Many of the poems she wrote during this period of mourning were published in her first collection of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968).

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In 1972, Giovanni published a collection of poems about family, titled My House. A second children’s poetry collection, Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People, was published in 1973. Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, the collection that includes the poem ‘‘Winter,’’ was published five years later in 1978. A children’s book of African American song lyrics, On My Journey Now: Looking at African-American History Through the Spirituals, was published in 2007. Giovanni published Acolytes in 2007 and Bicycles: Loves Poems in 2009. Giovanni has received a number of awards, including being honored as Woman of the Year by several magazines, including Ebony Magazine (1970), Mademoiselle Magazine (1971), and Ladies Home Journal (1972). She was also named to the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame (1985) and received the Governor’s Awards from both Tennessee (1996) and Virginia (1998). Giovanni was awarded the Langston Hughes Medal for Poetry (1996) and the Rosa L. Parks Woman of Courage Award (2002). Giovanni’s children’s book about Rosa Parks, Rosa (2005) was selected a Caldecott

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Honors Book. Since she began publishing in 1968, Giovanni has had more than two dozen books published, as well as many essays and individual poems. She is a prolific writer and also a teacher. Giovanni has been a professor at Virginia Tech University since 1987 and in 1999 was given the title, University Distinguished Professor, the highest award given to members of the university faculty. As of 2010, she resided in Virginia.

POEM TEXT

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS 



Frogs burrow the mud snails bury themselves and I air my quilts preparing for the cold Dogs grow more hair mothers make oatmeal and little boys and girls take Father John’s Medicine



An audio recording of Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978) by Giovanni was reissued by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 2009.



Only the Best of Nikki Giovanni (2009) is a five-DVD-Audio disc, in which the poet reads poetry from several of her collections. Although she does not read ‘‘Winter,’’ Giovanni reads sixty-eight of her poems on this audio DVD.

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Bears store fat chipmunks gather nuts and I collect books For the coming winter

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Giovanni’s spoken album, Truth Is on Its Way, which was recorded with the New York Community Choir in 1971, was reissued by Collectables in 1993. Giovanni reads her poetry for two hours on The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection (2002), issued by Caedmon.

POEM SUMMARY Stanza 1 The first stanza of ‘‘Winter’’ begins with a series of brief phrases about the preparations that are being made for the change of seasons. Winter is coming and animals and humans alike are preparing for the change of season. Frogs burrow just under the surface of the mud at the bottom of a lake to hibernate. Their heartbeats slow and their breathing becomes shallow, but they are able to absorb oxygen through their skin and from the water. Likewise, snails hibernate by burying themselves. They are able to excrete a slime that hardens and closes the opening to their shells, leaving only a small hole to allow air. Humans also prepare to burrow under layers of quilts. The speaker describes airing out quilts, which will be needed to ward off the cold nights. Quilts are usually stored away for the summer when not in use. Sunlight damages fabric and weakens the threads; thus it is customary to wrap quilts in old sheets and store them during warmer weather. As the days shorten, quilts are taken from storage and hung outside to air out. Airing quilts removes any insects that might have taken refuge during the summer within

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their folds. Airing also removes the stale smell of storage and infuses the quilts with the fresh smell of outdoors. All of these preparations signal that change is in the air. The seasons are about to change and preparation is key to surviving change.

Stanza 2 In stanza two, the preparations for winter continue in the house. Dogs prepare for winter by growing a thicker coat of hair. Dogs grow an undercoat that will add protection and warmth. This undercoat is a reminder that dogs did not always reside in people’s homes, sleeping cozily in warm beds. Instead of cold cereal or fresh fruit for breakfast, people now prefer warmer foods, especially oatmeal, which heats the inside and offers a soothing and comforting way to warm up on cold mornings. Further preparations for winter are evident in the dosing of small children with Father John’s Medicine. Father John’s was a cough medicine that became very popular in the latter half of the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Father John’s had become nationally known as a tonic

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

poetic style, choice of topics, tone, and content. 

Arnold Adoff writes many poems for children and young adults. In his poetry collection Slow Dance Heartbreak Blues, Adoff focuses on poetry about teenagers and their concerns. Read one of Adoff’s poems for teenagers and consider how effective his poetry is in exploring the problems of teenagers. You should also consider how Adoff’s poetry differs in tone and content from Giovanni’s poetry. Prepare an evaluation of the differences that you noted and present your findings on a poster to your classmates.



Langston Hughes is widely considered one of the most important African American poets of the twentieth century. Like Giovanni, Hughes was considered a revolutionary poet who wrote about inequality and oppression of African Americans. Research Hughes’s life and read at least six of his poems. Also read six poems from Giovanni’s collection Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. Write an essay in which you discuss Hughes’s poetry of the first half of the twentieth century and compare it to Giovanni’s poetry from the last half of that century. Discuss

My Black Me: A Beginning Book of Black Poetry (1994) contains fifty poems for young children by Lucille Clifton, Sam Cornish, Langston Hughes, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and several other poets. Choose two of the poems from this book to study. Be sure that you choose poems by two different authors. With at least one other student partner from your class, prepare a multimedia presentation of the poems that you have chosen. Your presentation should include an oral component, in which you either download an audio of the poets reading their poems, or if that is not available, you or your partner read the two poems aloud. You should also prepare several PowerPoint slides in which you present what you have learned about the poems that you chose and what you have learned about the kind of poetry these poets write. Your slides may include information about poetic styles, including meter, tone, stanza arrangement, and rhyme, and information on imagery, metaphors, similes, and parallelism.

to ward off winter colds. It is more commonly known as cod liver oil, mixed with sugar and other flavorings to make it more palatable. It

was common to dose children with variations of cod liver oil as preparation for winter’s approach, and Father John’s was a popular brand.







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Giovanni’s poem was composed near the end of the 1970s. Research the economic and social status of African Americans from the 1950s to 1970s. Prepare an oral report in which you discuss the economic and social changes that African Americans experienced during these decades. ‘‘Winter’’ is about preparing for change. Take the first line of Giovanni’s poem and use it as the first line of your own poem. Write a poem of at least twelve lines by continuing Giovanni’s first line to whatever conclusion fits your own experiences with change. Write a brief paragraph to attach to your poem, in which you evaluate what your poem reveals about the changes you are undergoing or expect to undergo. ‘‘Winter’’ has a rhythm or a sing-song quality that is best appreciated by being read aloud. Read ‘‘Winter’’ aloud and then read it silently to yourself. Then ask a friend to read the poem to you. Write a short reflection paper in which you explain the different qualities of the poem that you noticed in reading and hearing the poem in these different ways.

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Stanza 3 In the third stanza, the poet links back to stanza one with a reminder of another animal that also hibernates for the winter. Bears eat vast amounts of food to store fat, on which their bodies feed during winter when food is less available. Chipmunks store nuts to eat during winter months when food is scarce. Once again at the end of the stanza the speaker notes her own preparations. She stocks up on books to read during the winter while she is snug indoors. During spring it is enticing to be outside and stacked books go unread. Fall is a time of harvest and preparation. But during the winter books gathered earlier help to pass the time and make the long seclusion meaningful. The coming of winter is inevitable for all living creatures. The animals and the speaker plan for their retreat from harsh weather, from which they will emerge when spring returns.

THEMES Change An important theme of ‘‘Winter’’ is the preparation for change. In this poem the change is the coming cold weather, which requires animals and humans to prepare. Animals prepare for winter by storing food, as the chipmunks do when they gather nuts or the bears do when they eat extra food to store fat. Humans also prepare for change, as the poet notes. The change of seasons requires less work for humans. The speaker airs out the quilts that have been stored during the summer. She also gathers together the books that she envisions reading while homebound. Change is not restricted to weather, however, in the collection Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. Some focus on the 1970s, a decade in which African Americans have seen few of the changes that the civil rights movement sought to bring about. However, in ‘‘Winter’’ the poet sounds a more hopeful tone in the preparations for the change of season. Winter is as brief as any other season. After the short days and long nights, spring brings rebirth and new opportunities arise. The change that lies beneath the surface in ‘‘Winter’’ is a reflection of the poet’s hope for a change in society and the fulfillment of the promises of the past seasons.

Nature ‘‘Winter’’ offers important lessons about the exquisite planning of the natural world. Animals

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have evolved survival skills for inhospitable climates. For example, bears prepare for winter by eating vast amounts of food, which they store in fat. Bears can gain forty pounds in a week as they prepare for winter. During much of the year, bears eat fish, but as rivers freeze, fish are no longer available, and small animals begin to burrow into caves. If bears were unable to hibernate and store excess fat, they would starve during the winter. As they sleep through the winter, they might lose 15 to 20 percent of their weight, but if they have eaten enough food before winter’s arrival, they will survive. In contrast, frogs and snails do not store food; instead their bodies enter a state that is similar to death, in which they use little energy and can wait out the cold before reawakening. Even chipmunks have an intuitive sense that they must store food for the winter. Humans prepare for winter in different ways. Since food is not a problem for the speaker, she prepares winter bedding. Giovanni’s poem is a reminder to readers that nature finds ways to help animals survive until spring, when they can once again find food they need to nourish their bodies as they give birth to their young.

STYLE Free Verse Free verse is not restricted by previously established rules of structure, rhyme, or meter. In writing free verse, the poet does not need to shape the poem to a particular meter; she can create new rhythm and pattern to suit her purposes. There is no previously fixed pattern of rhyme or meter illustrated in ‘‘Winter.’’ Some lines are four syllables, some are five, and others are six. The lines have no rhyme scheme and there is no punctuation. However, free verse is never totally free of poetry styles and conventions. Giovanni does use a stanza pattern, and she does rely on some basic repetition of phrasing, but in general, ‘‘Winter’’ is free of conventional rules of meter or rhyme.

Parallelism Parallel structure is a grammatical arrangement of equivalent parts. Parallel parts are presented as equal in order to make a certain point or for illustration, and the grammar used underscores that equivalence. In Giovanni’s poem, frogs and snails are completely parallel in stanza one, equal

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Frost on a window (Image copyright stocknadia, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

in their preparation for burying themselves, and the speaker’s airing of quilts is presented as virtually parallel to what frogs and snails do. In the third stanza, bears and chipmunks are parallel, in that they prepare their food storage; bears by gaining weight, and chipmunks by stockpiling nuts. The activity of the speaker is practically parallel, in that she stockpiles books, which provide the sustenance she needs for the winter of increased hours inactive and indoors. In both the first and third stanzas, the animal activities are equated with the human activity. The first stanza is a literal equation: burrowing to stay warm. The third stanza is a metaphorical equation: the animals feed on stored calories; the human is sustained by literature. The second stanza does not

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use parallelism. By contrast, there is a series or progression here: dogs get thicker coats (outside); mothers cook oatmeal (inside); and children take castor oil (a cathartic or purgative). This center stanza marks a progression, whereas the first and third stanzas present equivalents.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT A Decade of Turbulence The late 1960s was a period marked by protest: protests against the Vietnam War, protests for equal rights for African Americans, and protests demanding equal treatment for women.

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1970s: In 1970, more than 25 million Americans live below the poverty line of $3,908 a year for a family of four. More than 10 million people live just above the poverty line. Nearly half of these people live in the southern part of the United States. Today: In 2004, the poverty level is $18,810. More than 37 million people in the United States live below that level. Of that number, more than 91 percent are members of minority groups: African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities.







1970s: In May 1970, an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University results in the deaths of four students after Ohio national guardsmen fire on demonstrators, who are protesting the escalation of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. Today: The United States is engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Public protests against the war become more frequent the longer the two wars last.



million and one billion frogs are harvested as food each year.

1970s: Although it is difficult to estimate how many frogs are eaten each year, in Italy alone, 47 million are eaten between 1968 and 1970. Today: So many frogs’ legs are eaten worldwide that frogs are in danger of becoming extinct. Exact numbers are difficult to determine, but it is estimated that between 180

However, the 1970s brought a change in the tenor of these protests, and the change was one of greater violence during the first years of the decade. This was first seen in anti-Vietnam War protests, when protestors turned to bombs to make their point. In one example of this change, three radical Vietnam War protestors accidentally blew themselves up while building a bomb in a house in Manhattan in March 1970. Then in August 1970, four students protesting government research at the University of Wisconsin blew up a campus building at the university

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1970s: Although farm laborers account for only 5 percent of the U.S. workforce, farmers produce enough food and fiber for 50 people, an increase from 31 people in 1963. Today: Agriculture accounts for about 20 percent of the workforce in the United States, with about one-third of acreage used to plant crops for export overseas. Farmers produce enough food and fiber for 155 people. 1970s: In 1973, the Supreme Court issues a decision on Roe v. Wade that establishes abortion as a fundamental right for all women. Today: Abortion rights continues to be a political and social issue that influences political elections and results in violence and even murder in and around abortion clinics.



1970s: Much of the opposition to the Vietnam War is led by religious leaders. Both Protestant ministers and Roman Catholic priests take an active role in opposing the war. Church leaders urge the U.S. government to combat poverty and racial discrimination. Today: Religious leaders are active partners with politicians in political discourse. Much of the discussion, however, is focused on religious extremists and terrorism and the treat they pose.

campus in Madison, killing a graduate student. In another incident, Brandeis University students protesting the war decided to rob a Boston bank, killing a policeman during the robbery. This use of explosives and guns and the resulting deaths made it clear that the demonstrations against the war had an increasingly violent turn. A decade that began with violence continued with more turbulence in the economy. In 1973, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) doubled the price of oil. OPEC’s move led to gasoline shortages and gas

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rationing, with outbursts of occasional violence, but that was not the only problem. Inflation was also high, as was unemployment. The economy was stagnant, and it appeared as if all the giddiness of the 1960s had died by the middle of the 1970s. President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, amid scandal and rumors of hush money, cover-up, and government corruption. The hopefulness of the 1960s protests for equal rights seemed to collapse under the violence of anti-busing protests in the mid 1970s. Hopes for desegregation of schools and greater access to equal education were never realized. In fact, the number of African American children attending segregated schools deceased by less than half a percentage point during the 1970s. It is no wonder that Giovanni was discouraged about the lack of change. However, as her poem ‘‘Winter’’ suggests, change is always in the air; thus the 1970s were not only a decade of violence. The 1970s were also a decade of disco music, tie-dyed clothing, and love-ins.

The Counterculture The 1970s were also characterized by rebellion against what was perceived to be the rigidity of the past. In the late 1960s, young people rejected traditional family values, including the pursuit of money and the racism that had divided classes. In their place, young people substituted communal living, alternative religions, and the power of love. During the 1970s, the hippy lifestyle that had begun in California at the end of the 1960s spread across the United States. Many young people adopted the label hippy, suggesting they were hip (or current) on the latest trends. Communes were established in rural areas as separate societies, in which people could live without the conventions usually assigned to married couples and without traditional jobs. As alternatives to conventional Judeo-Christian religious practices, young people explored Eastern religions and tried yoga and meditation as a way to find greater meaning in their lives. The poet Allen Ginsberg created the phrase ‘‘flower power’’ to define the love-focused hippy opposition to the Vietnam War. The rebellion of the 1960s focused on changing the world. That decade ended with protests against the war and against racism to be replaced in the 1970s by peace signs, flower power long hair on both men and women, and bellbottom pants.

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Environmental Concerns The 1970s was marked by a new attention to environmental damage and loss of habitat. The dangers of environmental pollution and the ecological effect of loss of habitat had been fundamental to the founding of the Sierra Club in the late nineteenth century and the establishment of the National Parks system, also during the nineteenth century. What changed was that modern technology allowed for destruction on a much larger scale and at a faster rate and greater awareness was drawn to that destruction. Travel into space provided a clear picture of the beauty of the Earth, which resulted in an increased awareness of the need to preserve the planet. Suddenly people began to discuss acid rain (rainfall that contains high levels of nitrogen and sulfur oxides) and other industrial byproducts. Acid rain destroys forests, rivers, and lakes and the animal populations that live in those habitats. However, acid rain was not the only concern. Many factories had been dumping mercury into rivers and lakes; developers were destroying the rain forests of the Amazon and of Southeast Asia, leading to concerns about animal species extinction; and chlorofluorocarbons were destroying the ozone layer of the atmosphere. The first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, led to political pressure to create government regulation of environmental pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency was created two months after the first Earth Day celebration. Greenpeace was formed in 1971 to oppose U.S. nuclear testing, and by 1972, the United Nations had become involved in environmental concerns when it held its first environmental conference. By the end of the decade, concerns about the environment were beginning to be part of the general vocabulary and Green Party politics had become a political force as well.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Giovanni emerged as a poet during the black arts movement that lasted for a decade from the mid1960s to the mid-1970s. Her early poetry often depicted the injustices and oppression endured by African Americans. As is the case with the early work of many poets, Giovanni’s early poetry was not reviewed by book critics. There are ways, however, to evaluate the impact that

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Snowdrop flower (Image copyright Anette Linnea Rasmussen, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

her work had on her readers. In 1968, Giovanni self-published her first two books of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgement. Her second book sold six thousand copies within the first six months, with Giovanni distributing the book in a limited area. In the 1973 essay ‘‘Fascinating Woman,’’ which focuses on Giovanni’s poetry, Lorraine Dusky noted that ‘‘publishing houses consider a poetry book to be doing well if it sells 2,500 copies in a year.’’ By self-publishing her books, Giovanni had only limited distribution contacts, and so her success in selling so many books, almost 60 percent more than were typically sold, was a remarkable achievement. Clearly, she had already found a supportive audience. In Racism 101, Giovanni wrote that she selfpublished her first books because she feared rejection; however, rejection did not prove to be a problem. By the time that she published My House in 1972, she was already a popular and bestselling author. In a 2002 article about

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Giovanni’s work, ‘‘Giovanni’s World,’’ Samiya Bashir wrote that Giovanni’s readings of her poetry ‘‘rivaled the popularity of Amiri Baraka,’’ the iconic poet and dramatist of the 1950s and 1960s. Giovanni’s My House collection, according to Bashir, ‘‘was a watershed with an unheard of 50,000 copies, an unprecedented printing for a black poet at the time [1972].’’ In 1973, Giovanni staged a New York Philharmonic Hall celebration of her thirtieth birthday. Presenting both readings and music, Giovanni entertained a sold-out audience with her poetry. Although there are no reviews of ‘‘Winter’’ or Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, it is possible to judge Giovanni’s legacy as a poet by looking at the reviews of Acolytes, published in 2007. Elizabeth Lund wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that Giovanni is both a cultural icon and a poet of the people but that her reputation as a household name can sometimes outshine her poems. However, Lund found much to like in this collection of poems. Many poems in

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Acolytes deal with ordinary things, which Lund found ‘‘refreshing,’’ and ‘‘a wonderful balance to some of the grittier topics she revisits’’ in this collection. Lund also suggested that Giovanni’s readers will not be disappointed in this collection, which provides a ‘‘good reason for fans to continue their journey with the poet.’’ When the New York Times asked several authors to write about the books they were currently reading, Haitian novelist and short story writer Edwidge Danticat wrote that she was reading Giovanni’s Acolytes. Danticat claimed that ‘‘the fire, eloquence and lyricism in these poems show why Giovanni was able to turn tears into cheers at an April 17 convocation following the Virginia Tech massacre’’ in April 2007. Danticat also referred to Giovanni as one of her favorite contemporary poets. Like Lund, Danticat also found much to admire in Giovanni’s poetry. The reviews of Acolytes, in which Giovanni was labeled an icon whose poetry should be celebrated, indicated that her poetic legacy will continue to be celebrated.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 





Nikki Giovanni’s Racism 101 (1985) is a collection of essays in which Giovanni writes about what it means to be an African American and how she feels about her experiences with race and racism.



Nikki Giovanni’s Grand Mothers: Poems, Reminiscences, and Short Stories About the Keepers of Our Traditions (1996) is designed for adolescents. Giovanni has collected a large number of stories by and about grandmothers, including stories from Asian and African writers and stories from the Civil War.



Giovanni’s personal website, http://nikkigiovanni.com/index.shtml, provides audio files of some of her poetry readings, as well as links to other websites with additional biographical information. Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003), by Alice Walker, is an collection of poems that celebrate nature and love and are written as a protest against war.

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 idea of preparedness and change in Giovanni’s poem, ‘‘Winter.’’ In ‘‘Winter,’’ the speaker’s actions mirror those of the animals preparing to survive the winter. The speaker gathers what she needs to make it through the coming season of solitude. There are quilts to air and books to gather. Her actions mimic those of the animals, who prepare to find a warm place to pass the cold months and who also gather the items necessary for survival. On the surface, Giovanni’s poem appears to be a simple children’s poem about animals preparing for winter, but the poem is neither simple, nor is it a children’s poem about animals surviving in nature. ‘‘Winter’’ is about change and about preparing for change. It is about the end of one season and the beginning of another. Winter’s approach, however, always brings a reminder that each season is temporary. After only a few months, winter inevitably thaws into spring. Thus, Giovanni’s poem is about more than the coming of winter. The poem offers hope for the

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Nikki Giovanni’s Black Judgement and Black Feeling, Black Talk, both published in 1968, are samples of her early revolutionary writing. Nikki Giovanni’s Gemini (1971) is a lengthy autobiographical essay about her first twentyfive years. The philosophical discussion centers on her childhood and her response to the civil rights movement and to racism.









The Circle of Thanks: Native American Poems and Songs of Thanksgiving (2003) is a collection of songs and poems by Native American poets who honor nature in their writing. John Hollander’s Poetry for Young People: Animal Poems (2004) is intended for ages six through nine, but the poems included, such as one by William Blake, are commonly taught in high school and college. Pamela Michael is the editor of River of Words: Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of Things (2008), a collection of poetry written by children and teens, who write about water and nature. The focus of the book is environmentalism.

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AT ITS CORE, ‘WINTER’ REPRESENTS THE PROMISE OF THE FUTURE AND THE OPPORTUNITIES THAT THE FUTURE MIGHT BRING, IF ONLY PEOPLE LOOK BEYOND THE PRESENT AND BELIEVE IN THE POSSIBILITY FOR CHANGE.’’

future and the expectation that the dark winter will eventually end in a time of rebirth and new opportunities. Giovanni believes in change and transformation. In the essay ‘‘An Answer to Some Questions on How I Write: In Three Parts’’ (1984), Giovanni explains that all material is recycled matter, born from other decaying things. She observes that ‘‘what the plants expel, we inhale; what decays into the ground gives forth fruits and vegetables; when the glaciers pass, the lakes are formed.’’ Nature and humankind are cyclical, constantly reinventing themselves and everything around them. Nature makes the new from the old. The chipmunks gather the fallen nuts each fall to eat through the winter, just as the bears gorge themselves before hibernating, so that they too can survive. In the spring, the bears might well eat the chipmunks, but their survival during the winter was not wasted, since they ensured the survival of another living thing, which might now mate and reproduce. The speaker will bundle up against the cold, but she knows that winter does not last. The key is to survive until spring and rebirth. The poet understands that to reach renewal, it is first necessary to survive the winter, when no progress appears to be made, and the earth appears to lay dormant. Giovanni also believes that life is about how much effort is put into living and into achieving what people desire most. She does not believe in quitting or in offering excuses for what has not been done. In this same essay, Giovanni claims that ‘‘life is only about the I-tried-to-do.’’ Life is not about the failures or the desires that were postponed—not for her, anyway. Life is about trying to do what does not always come easily. Giovanni does not mind failure, she claims, but she could not forgive herself if she did not try to

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do all that she wants to do. She recognizes that she has changed and that her work has changed during the past decade, but she also celebrates that change, since to do otherwise is to stagnate, which she finds intolerable. Giovanni writes that she seeks ‘‘change for the beauty of itself.’’ She knows that everything changes and that there is an attraction to change. Giovanni claims that human beings have a ‘‘great opportunity to grow up and perhaps beyond that.’’ She alludes indirectly to Robert Browning when she claims that ‘‘our grasp is not limited to our reach.’’ (Browning made the claim first in ‘‘Andrea Del Sarto,’’ when he insists that ‘‘a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.’’) Although people should always work to achieve more than what can be easily gained, Browning also thought that individuals should persist in working hard to achieve that which is just beyond their grasp. Giovanni finds fulfillment in the continued effort to grow and change, since according to her, the only choice ‘‘is growing up or decaying.’’ It is this belief in the importance of change and the opportunities that change brings that allows Giovanni to continue to hope for social change as well. Thus, ‘‘Winter’’ is not only about change on an individual level. The poem also holds the promise for a better world for all people. Giovanni maintains that ‘‘writers live always in the three time zones: past, present, and future.’’ She recalls the past in Browning but looks toward the future in ‘‘Winter’’ where she describes the preparation necessary for survival. For a brief decade it appeared that there was momentum in the quest for civil rights for African Americans, which might result in significant change. However, change was slow to come. In her introduction to Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, Paula Giddings writes that the poetry of the 1960s ‘‘recorded what we saw, more than what we felt. But the sixties mostly made us look within ourselves and we recognized the noblest of our spirit, the courage inherent in rebellion, the reawakening of pride buried deep in our unconscious memories.’’ Giovanni uses her poetry to respond to what she learned about herself in the 1960s. As a result, her poems in the 1970s explore an emotional response to that period. When the promise of the 1960s seems to have failed in the 1970s, ‘‘Winter’’ served as a reminder that patience and preparation are sometimes required to make way for change to occur.

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‘‘Winter’’ the speaker’s preparations hold the promise of change and hope. The airing of quilts provide a clue to the poet’s expectation that the promises of the 1960s have not been forgotten. Although airing quilts is a common act in preparing for the coming winter, the quilts themselves represent more. In her essay, ‘‘And This Poem Recognizes that Embracing Contrarieties in the Poetry of Nikki Giovanni,’’ Virginia C. Fowler writes about the importance of quilts in Giovanni’s life and in her work. Fowler notes that Giovanni possesses a collection of quilts and that they are a ‘‘most appropriate metaphor’’ for the study of her poetry. A quilt is a whole created from pieces. A life is also a whole created from pieces, from events or episodes and the movement of people in and out of one’s experience. A quilt is pieced together from fragments or leftovers from discarded clothing or unused yardage, from the clothing worn by a child or the curtains from a previous home. A quilt is a chronicle of experiences. Fowler suggests that quilts ‘‘incorporate the vicissitudes of a family’s history.’’ In a quilt there are reminders and memories preserved together. The quilt itself, then, is a link from the past to the promise of the future. In addition to protecting the poet from the cold, the quilts also offer hope. The making of a quilt from the remnants of the past implies a transformation. Giddings states of Giovanni that ‘‘lowered expectations, thinking small, the litany about what we cannot expect do not enchant her.’’ According to Giddings, Giovanni thinks that a human being is the ‘‘only creature on Earth who can convey feelings, who has the possibility of a collective memory. If mankind can remember for centuries backward we can plan for centuries forward.’’ Giovanni believes in the power of the future and of the necessity to plan for the future. At its core, ‘‘Winter’’ represents the promise of the future and the opportunities that the future might bring, if only people look beyond the present and believe in the possibility for change. The poet knows that winter will eventually end and that there will be another time to store the quilts and put away unread books. ‘‘Winter’’ is about change and it is about preparing for change. Winter is inevitable, but sooner or later it ends, and often without warning. One day the ice begins to melt and leaves appear on trees. The bears awaken, as do the frogs and snails. It is as necessary to prepare for winter’s end as to prepare for winter’s beginning. In an

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I DON’T THINK THAT WRITERS EVER CHANGED THE MIND OF ANYBODY. I THINK WE ALWAYS PREACH TO THE SAVED.’’

1983 interview with Claudia Tate, Giovanni is quoted as saying that she thinks that ‘‘things can be changed.’’ For Giovanni life is a process. The inequities of the past are not forgotten, but ‘‘Winter’’ suggests that change in the future is something for which both people and animals should plan. Source: Sheri Metzger Karmiol, Critical Essay on ‘‘Winter,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

Nikki Giovanni and Arlene Elder In the following interview excerpt, Nikki Giovanni discusses her life, philosophy, and poetry with Arlene Elder. Throughout her career, Nikki Giovanni’s poetry has been valued, at least in part, as a touchstone to the latest political and artistic ideas in Black American writing. She, however, never considered herself a spokesperson for any group. She says she is a ‘‘we’’ poet whose work might reflect the thoughts of others but judges it the height of ‘‘arrogance’’ to assume one is the ‘‘voice’’ of a people; people, she is confident, can speak perfectly well for themselves. She feels that her poetry is richer now because she understands more than she did when she was younger; as if to accommodate that fuller understanding, she is experimenting with longer pieces, some of 1200 to 1500 lines. Her forthcoming book is Those Who Ride The Night Winds, to be published later this year by William Morrow. [Elder:] I was interested in your trip to Africa. Have you been there several times? [Giovanni:] I’ve been there three times. . . . interested particularly in terms of your poetry and if you found that it affected your poetry in ways other than as subject matter. I am thinking of perhaps more of an emphasis on orality than you were conscious of previously. No. No more than Mexico or Europe, or, probably, the moon. No. Of course, you are always conscious, just because of the nature of

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the African continent, that you are on the oldest continent and the richest, and that you’re with the first people on earth who were, in fact, civilized, but you don’t all of a sudden say, ‘‘Oh, now I’m a part of that; there’s a tradition here.’’ No, I don’t think so. First of all, it would be very difficult for me to be anything other than western, you know, because I am. I’m not wedded to tradition. I think that when we consider poetry, period, the nature of poetry, if we go pre-biblical, of course, we are going to get right into the African experience. And, of course, the oral arts in Africa are at an extremely high level. So you do have this involvement with the spoken word. I think that that is important, but I also think it’s important to be able to write something down, so I don’t have any conflict. It doesn’t make my day, and it doesn’t break it. Has your attitude toward your relationship to Africa changed over the years, after your firsthand experience there? I really don’t think I have a relationship with Africa. I think I have a relationship with my mother, my son, a number of other things; I don’t think I have a relationship with the continent. I enjoy traveling in Africa. I’m so happy: from the first time I went in 1972, until now, it’s much cheaper to go, and one is more capable of going. And you don’t really have to go through Europe; you can actually go from New York to Dakar without having to stop over, make what amounts to a courtesy stop in Europe. And I think that probably anybody who likes to travel would choose to travel to Africa at some point. I think to not go is a great loss. You are, as I said, on the richest continent, and you are among the first of civilized man. And I think that’s an important part of your experience. I also feel, though, it’s equally important to do other parts of the earth. I’m really looking forward to going to Antarctica. It’s environmentally sound. I don’t want you, or anyone, to think that I am denigrating Africa. Some people say, ‘‘Well, why doesn’t she have a relationship with Africa?’’ or ‘‘why doesn’t she have her day made by going?’’ What I’m just trying to say is that you have to recognize, first of all, in 1982, Earth is a very small planet, and what we do is involve ourselves so that we are properly educated. I would still be remiss in my intellectual growth if I only did Africa. I would certainly be remiss if I did not do it. But it is not

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sufficient unto itself. We have to move around and utilize the best of all cultures. I happen to be in an art that is almost overwhelmingly African because the poets started there. The first codification, of course, that western man recognizes is the Bible, and of course, we’re still on the African continent—never understood how that became the Middle East, when the map says to me that it is Africa. You can see that, and we’re very proud of it, but we also recognize that there are changes that have been made in the profession, and that those changes also are necessary to the life of the profession, in order for art to be serious, if I can use that—there must be a better word—to be viable. It had to remain alive; it has to remain adaptive to whatever forms. I have, of course, recorded some of my poetry: to gospel music in one case, and contemporary music, and some other albums just as a straight reading. It would be ridiculous, the only word I can think of, that I would live in an electronic age and not choose to electronically transmit my voice. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to have the number-onebest-selling record. It’s not likely at all; if I did, it would certainly be a fluke. But you do seek to use the tools that are available to you at that time. Always. You can’t be so, I think the term is, purist. You get those people that say, ‘‘I would never print a book,’’ and I’m sure that when the printing press came, ‘‘that’s not the way you do it.’’ And people continue to think that. I think that our obligation is to use whatever technology is available, because whether or not art is able to be translated tells us something about whether or not it’s, in fact, living, whether or not it’s part of us. Whether it can be translated from one form to another, you mean? To some degree. That’s not the test of it, but to some degree. We were talking about a Shakespeare or a Don Quixote, particularly Don Quixote, but it has lasted so long. Not to denigrate Don Quixote, but essentially it’s your basic soap opera. Every evening, the Spanish Court would gather, and somebody would read it. Well, it had to be interesting; it had to be true; it had to be something that people could connect to. And that’s what you try to do. Now, I don’t know that Don Quixote would make a great movie. Of course we did make it into a play, and I think we’ve done variations on the theme. I’m saying that you don’t write for one medium to

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turn it into another. What I’m trying to say is that, as we are evolving, as the species evolves, we try to make use of all media. So if I were a poet when Gutenberg invented his press, I would say, ‘‘let me recite this, and you write it down, and we’ll get it printed. And we’ll see what this becomes,’’ because you don’t want to ignore the possibilities. And if I understand you correctly, what you see remaining is that human quality that you said is essential for vital art to continue. Well, people have made changes. You take a poem like the Iliad which was composed over some 400 years by a variety of people. We give Homer credit because Homer started it, and I’m sure Homer is delighted to take credit for it. But it kept evolving, because it was a poem being recited. And just a mere translation, just coming from Greek into anything else, just coming from Athens into Sparta would change it as much as coming from New York into Atlanta. So that what you have is something that, in fact, is alive. And it is alive because it has met the test of people. It’s curious, isn’t it, that something like the Aeneid or the Odyssey, maybe even something like Don Quixote, meets the definition of what we now call ‘‘folk art,’’ in the very real sense. And yet, ‘‘folk art’’ is not considered serious. Folk art is not important; it’s not high art. What do you think happened in the course of our, as a people, listening to poetry, participating in poetry, that changed somebody’s mind, anyway, about what was serious and what was not? The rise of the merchant class. I really do. They did a lot for art. I don’t take that away, because they were essentially an unlettered group, and what they did was to go out and purchase it, and at some points they were purchasing that which they understood. And as we got into ‘‘keeping up with the Joneses,’’ it would almost be: ‘‘Well, my poet read this poem last night’’; ‘‘Well, my poet read this poem!’’ Neither one of them gave a damn. . . . But what we got into was more and more exotic, and the poets began, of course, to read for each other: ‘‘Anybody can do what you did. Let me show you what I’ve done.’’ We were talking about V. And I have nothing against V and that kind of exotic novel, that most people won’t read. They won’t have the patience or, really, the interest in wading through it. But you take something that almost

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every kid on Earth reads, science fiction, which is not considered literature. If we charted science fiction on the New York Times best-seller list, I’m sure they would have the first nine without looking beck. Or your mysteries. Which is somehow, again, not considered literature. So then, we also got the rise of the merchants who made money off the poets who were making money off of the merchants. So you got into this publisher class, right? Again, I’m kind of simplifying it. But, then, the publishers were saying, ‘‘okay, then, now we shall determine what is real art.’’ And of course that would be determined by how difficult it is to meet the test of people. Because, therefore, they would have to buy the book. You’re forced to. And of course there’s a marvelous story by an Ohio writer, Charles Chesnutt, whom you probably know, ‘‘Baxter’s Procrustus.’’ And, of course, Baxter bought this book and raved and raved and raved about it, and finally one day the guy opened it, and of course there was nothing inside. And I think to some degree, publishers have played that game historically. And I think to some degree, it is being played now. The publishers, of course, having kept up with the technology, are now playing the game on even a cheaper level, because what they’re saying is not that we’re bringing you something uniquely different that you cannot understand, but that we’re bringing you crap, and what we’re going to do is make use of the electronic media to make you want it. I looked at Sy Hirsch sitting on the Today show the other morning. He’s got a piece in the Atlantic on Kissinger. Now that happens to have some worth. I don’t want you to think that I don’t think Sy Hirsch has any worth. lt’s just that he had to go to the electronic media to sell the competition, really. We can keep saying, television doesn’t have to be in competition, but television is in competition with books. And what you’re saying is, ‘‘we’re conceding that you have my audience, and now can I have a piece of it back?’’ And I just find it fascinating. We sell crap all day long, though. Sy Hirsch would be one of the better examples. Whom do you read now, who is obviously not crap? Whom do you really like? I happen to like my fellow Ohio authors. I’m particularly fond of Toni Morrison, of course, because Toni continues to confound people by continuing to strike a different pose every time.

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Everybody says, ‘‘well, okay, so you wrote The Bluest Eye . . . ’’; well, everybody was looking for her next book, and they thought, ‘‘well, this is going to be the formula, and she’s gonna put it out,’’ and she came back with Sula. ‘‘Oh, well, that must be an accident.’’ Then she came back with Song of Solomon, and we don’t understand. So, she’s in danger right now, because Tar Baby, which is, absolutely, I think, an incredible novel, is now being considered trivial, because nobody can write four brilliant books. That is not possible; therefore, it couldn’t be brilliant. I mean that’s the way the critics have been sort of going at that, and, of course, the Black press has been going at her with that, and this is not each and every, but the Black intellectuals are saying ‘‘well she just writes bestsellers.’’ Well, that’s not really true at all. What she does is write extremely well. I talked to Toni recently, and I said, ‘‘we’re living in the age of Toni Morrison.’’ And I’m not, have no interest really in trying to flatter her, but the reality is that Toni writes so well that the rest of us who write will have to come up to that. And I think it is frightening to, especially, that group of white men— the Philip Roths, Norman Mailers—who have dominated literature for some unknown reason, because it certainly was not based on talent, that all of a sudden, they’re coming up against a Black woman from the Midwest who is clearly, clearly brilliant. And if we were going to compare Toni to somebody in terms of literature, we would probably have to go to South America, the One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez. You get into that level. Americans and Europeans have considered themselves quite fine with the novel. I think that they’re really devoid of ideas. And, again, some of the lovelier novels that have been written lately have been done, in fact, by women, not only Toni, but a woman, Elizabeth Forsyth Hale, A Woman of Independent Means. It’s gotten ripped off eight thousand different ways: ‘‘A woman of substance,’’ ‘‘A woman in a corner pigging’’; they picked it off. It was a collection of letters about a woman, from her first camp letters. Her great-granddaughter found her trunk, and she had kept all these letters. It’s nothing but literature; that’s one of the problems. You can’t turn it into a movie; it won’t be a hit song; you have to read the book. But it’s absolutely, absolutely gorgeous. And, of course, it had a very difficult time finding a publisher, because nobody understood it.

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Judith [Guest] was, I think, lucky if you can use that term, because Ordinary People was quite an extraordinary novel, and it just so happens that Bob Redford is literate, which many, many people are not. And it seemed that he thought, ‘‘well, I should make a movie out of it,’’ which, of course, helped to move that along. But, you know, that came over the transom. That was, ‘‘I wrote this book. Would you consider it?’’ And now, ‘‘we don’t know you: where’s your agent?’’ And you wonder what we’re losing. A Woman of Independent Means went out of print. It only sold everything, right? I think the publisher must have put out about 1500 copies, and they went, whoosh, and all of a sudden he says, ‘‘Oh thank God I got out of that!’’ It was the independent book sellers, who I think are very, very important to all of us. Independents were saying, ‘‘but we’re recommending this book, and we can’t get it.’’ And he’s saying, ‘‘there’s no market for a middle book.’’ A book either, right now, gets at least $250,000 to a half-million dollars in advance, you know, in terms of a paperback, or there’s no room. So, you have a book that’s coming in at a $20,000 advance, and they don’t know what they’re going to do with it. So, finally, it got picked up, because somebody, some place—I’m sure it’s some little old grayhaired lady—read it and said, ‘‘well why don’t we buy this?’’ Which poets do you read? Most of us, most of the time. It’s probably not fair to say it like this, but I don’t really think that I read poetry for the pleasure of it. I’m interested in the profession. So I don’t look at poetry the way I do the novel, for example, because I’m not basically a novel reader. So, it has to be something to really capture me. I read mostly nonfiction. A particular category? History. I thought you were going to say that. Yes, I really have a great love of history and, of course, as you can see, politics. I do a lot with history and politics, which are not all that different. I bear special affection for the poetry of Anne Sexton. I think ‘‘Her Kind’’ is just one of the most outstanding single poems I’ve ever read. And I like a young poet, who in my opinion does not write enough, named Carolyn Rodgers, a Chicago poet. But for the most part, you read

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most poets because you should have some awareness of the profession. . . . Do you think it’s possible for writers to express their convictions strongly enough or imaginatively enough to change the mind of anybody? I don’t think that writers ever changed the mind of anybody. I think we always preach to the saved. Someone from the Post asked me, how would I describe myself, and I said, ‘‘I’m a preacher to the saved.’’ And I don’t think that anybody’s mind has ever been changed. It has been enhanced by an already-meeting-of-theminds. When the reader picks up the book and proceeds to begin a relationship, it will proceed based upon how that book and that reader are already in agreement. Because almost nobody really reads anything that they are totally . . . I mean, I couldn’t read a position paper about the Ku Klux Klan. You mean, you, literally, could not get through it? I wouldn’t even try. Why? Because I already know. To me it’s like reading—which I guess I shouldn’t say to you like this—but it’s like reading anti-abortion literature. I’m totally in opposition to their position. Unless I can read a headline that says they bring something new to the table, then no, I’m not going to do that, because I already know where they are, and what I’m going to do is look for a strengthening of my position, where I am. And everybody does that. And again, I’m out of the tradition of the sixties that sort of crazily believed that there would be the poem that would free everybody. You would say to those people, ‘‘listen, fellows, that’s not going to happen.’’ The big term, of course, was ‘‘sell out,’’ and everybody that didn’t do what certain groups wanted—you know, Leroi Jones and all of them—everybody that didn’t sort of hew the Black aesthetic line had ‘‘soldout.’’ No. There will never be the poem that will free mankind. We would be fools . . . anybody that thinks that is a fool. And I don’t really know another term for that. Anybody that thinks any one thing or one person can make a difference in your life. . . . If we could crucify Jesus, you know, whom we recognize in the western world as being the Son of God, then you know we would shoot down everybody. Now there are people who charismatically do make a difference. We were talking about holding two [opposing] thoughts, but I do

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that a lot. There are people who charismatically embody an age. But they didn’t create the age. They personified it, and people often overlook that. They really think somebody . . . they really think Disraeli made [his age]. He didn’t. He was the one who could personify it. Or Jack Kennedy. Now, I happen to like the Kennedys. I find them interesting people to read about. But Jack didn’t make the sixties. Nor did Martin Luther King. We honor them, and we recognize them, because they personify the best within us. But they didn’t create it. It was the little old ladies that said, ‘‘I’ll walk,’’ that made Martin Luther King. It was the kind that said, ‘‘even after his death we’re antiwar. We’re going to move even this image that we will maintain, but we’re going to move it and make it much more.’’ People overlook that, because they think that you could do something. They’ll tell you, ‘‘Fidel Castro liberated Cuba.’’ I’ll be damned if he did, whatever you feel about Cuba. Fidel personifies that liberation. Therefore, to the Cuban people, it would probably be a loss had he been killed, say twenty years ago. I’m sure that they’re ready to accept it now, not because Fidel was a loss, though of course it would be a loss to whomever loved him, but because he was the embodiment. The same thing with our community. It was so unnecessary to shoot down Martin Luther King. And what happened there was that a man lost his life, but it was a message. And what it said was, ‘‘since we can’t shoot a million people, we’ll shoot this one, so that the million people will know that this is where we are.’’ And of course what you got from that was a perfectly logical response: ‘‘Mother F——, since you did that, we will get you.’’ So that you got, of course, the riots coming. There was no question that the Black community was going to respond to the white community. You sent the message, and we sent the answer. So that everybody said, ‘‘okay, well, tell you what, since I can’t bring back my cities, and you can’t bring back King, why don’t we try peace.’’ And you just wish that people would function on that a little bit, and earlier. We recognize that at some point if the message is sent, and an answer is sent, that we still have to come back to peace. Sounds to me, and correct me if I misunderstood you, that in all that, the role of the writer is very much like that of the historian rather than the prophet. Or possibly the prophecy comes in—and I used the word, ‘‘role,’’ again, I realize, the function

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of the writer—is that the writer recognizes what you just expressed and communicates the meaning of some chaotic event or historical circumstance in whatever way he does it, and people read that because they recognize the writer as someone in whom they trust and believe, and possibly as a result of reading the meaning of what has happened, they are going to understand a little bit more of what’s going to take place next, or, they will understand a little bit more of the consequences of behaviour the next time something comes up. Not that they necessarily agree with what the writer said, but they understand a little bit more. And that’s about all the writer can expect? About all the writer can expect is to be read. That would probably be what most of us get. I think the word I was looking for is ‘‘vitality.’’ You were using ‘‘role’’ and changed it to ‘‘function.’’ But I think that the vitality of the writer, for those of us who are contemporary writers, who are writing contemporaneously—because some of us are literary writers who are not—is that we are just a little bit of both. We’re a little bit of a prophet, and we are a little bit of the historian. And we’re saying, ‘‘this is the meaning that we find. You have to take what you can.’’ We are not Marx; we’re not sitting there saying, ‘‘A is A.’’ We’re not Ayn Rand either. We’re sitting there saying, ‘‘I saw this through my eyes.’’ The word that you used that I do like is ‘‘trust.’’ There are certain writers that no matter what they have to say, no matter how much in agreement you would be with them, you simply don’t trust the writer. I hate a damned liar. I really don’t care what you have to say, or how awful you might think it is, or how awful I might think it is, but I hate a damned liar. Once you have given up that, once you have given up your basic integrity, then you have given up that, once you have given up your basic integrity, then you really have nothing else to offer. And maybe that’s harsh, and I don’t intend to be harsh. But when Norman Mailer, for example, had to pay off Marilyn, the book Marilyn, because it was plagiarized, I don’t know what Mailer could write that I would read. It was hard enough to be bothered with his chauvinism and his crap before that, but to recognize that the man would be in a profession, but would take the work of somebody else. . . . There’s just no way. It couldn’t happen. I mean, Norman’s spirit could descend in this room, and he could start to read from something, and I’d say, ‘‘well I have to leave.’’

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Because the only thing you bring, the only thing any of us, any professional brings, is your honesty. You don’t mind that the patient died on the table, as long as the surgeon wasn’t drunk. It’s sad if he did. It’s sad to you; it’s sad to the patient. It’s probably sad to the surgeon. But you feel like, ‘‘well he tried.’’ And in my profession, if you’re not going to be honest. . . . It’s not that you ask the reader to spend, which I think is ridiculous, 15 dollars upwards for a book, but that you’re asking them for their time. Because they can go get another 15 dollars. That’s not hard to do. You really cannot give back time; you think about the time you spend with a book. I mean, I’m a reader. You’d feel raped to think that you involved your heart and your mind and your time, that there were things you could have been doing, and you were sitting there reading a book to find out that it’s essentially dishonest. You honestly came to that book. You chose it, and that it’s a lie? I mean, it’s not acceptable. Absolutely unacceptable. The profession is not really strong enough to me on your basic plagiarism. I know lawyers who worry about lawyers who are essentially dishonest. Because you can’t always win. Those of us who are writers can’t always be prescient, but we can always be honest. So that if we make a mistake, if we misunderstand something, if we’re journalists and don’t see something, that’s all right, because we know that what was brought to bear there is the best that we have. That’s all any of us are going to do, because you’re going to miss a few calls there. One reason you don’t shoot the umpire is that you know the guy is watching the ball. Now if you have to feel that other team gave him 10 bucks, then there’s no game. There’s absolutely no way that we can play the game. And life I think is like that. It’s tremendously fragile, isn’t it, because it is back to ‘‘trust.’’ We talked before about the formula, learning how to write the formula and just repeating it, repeating it. It takes a while for the reader to catch on that that’s happening especially if that reader has read that writer before and has developed his trust and liking and is willing to invest not only 15 dollars, as you say, but the time and the emotional energy. And so it’s really a very fragile kind of delicate thing between writer and reader. I honestly think—we were talking formula— I think that formula is essentially dishonest. I’m not fighting with my fellow writers who are

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formula writers. I think it’s essentially dishonest, but so is the circus, so is the Hall of Mirrors. And one of the things that I think happens to you when you are involved in that level of lazy writing is that you know what you’re giving, and they know what they’re getting. And I don’t think that is a lack of trust. If I pick up a Frank Yerby, it’s my fault. I’m not picking on Yerby, but it is, because I know exactly what he’s going to do; What does the song say, ‘‘you knew I was a snake when you brought me in’’? I knew that. I happened to like Jacqueline Susann when I’m doing junk-like reading. I can pick up a Jackie Susann and know exactly what I’m going to get. I don’t feel misused. I think that is true of all of us. You kind of know what you’re getting when you pick up a certain level of book. What I do have a serious problem with, though, is your basic plagiarism, because that is actually taking someone else’s work and putting it off as yours. What we are saying here is that, if I’m Steven King, ninety percent of my writing is going to be macabre. Take it or leave it. I’m sure that he considers that he writes as honestly and as well as any of the rest of us. As a matter of fact, he has a lot more money to show for it. What I’m saying is, I don’t think that’s your basic rapes, because it’s Steven King. You might say that someone was unaware that all his books are just alike. But that is very, very hard to do. That is like saying I didn’t learn anything from ‘‘LaVerne & Shirley’’ this week; I’m disappointed. You know damn well you are not going to learn anything from ‘‘LaVerne & Shirley’’ or whatever it is that you’re doing on TV. That is not to say that all of television is a waste. It’s just that you know if you turn on TV, seven to ten, you’re going to get mostly crop, unless it’s Thursday night and there is a show called ‘‘Fame,’’ which somehow or another is surviving; which makes my Thursday. It’s a great little show. I’m just saying, you’ve got to know that, and I don’t think that’s the same level as your basic lie. There is a distinction. Sure. It’s like your professor who reads the same notes every year. He’s not lying. He says, ‘‘this is, for the level of energy that I’m willing to invest in this class, what you need to know. And if my notes have not changed in 5 years, that is not my problem. My subject hasn’t changed, or at least it hasn’t involved me.’’ But that is not a lie. That’s not the guy who stands in the lab and

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manufactures results that he knows never came up. Sure. You get into that, and I think that has to be dealt with much more stringently. A professor of medieval poetry might be dull, but he’s not lying. It seems as if a very mysterious relationship exists between the reader and the writer, which is one, frequently, and I think, charmingly, of awe; that this person has the ability to use language that makes me put down my $15 or makes me take that book out of the library. And there is a love that develops there, because that person has that power over you, and trust, because any time you love, you want to trust. I think that what essentially makes art so potentially dangerous is that it is totally egalitarian. Explain that a little more. Well, the term you use is ‘‘power,’’ that the person has power over you. I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, the writer is totally vulnerable to people that we shall never see. We sit someplace and create something, or explain something, research, and develop certain ideas. We convince a publisher to publish it, or a museum to hang it, or a producer to put it on Broadway, and we are subject to the judgment of people who never even knew us. We could have been dead 800 years before somebody discovered us. Last year, here in Cincinnati, last September, October, and I think a little bit in November, I did a program. I don’t know really how to express it, but I was invited, and I went to a number of elementary schools here in Cincinnati. And the thing that surprised the kids was that I was alive. It may sound strange, but that was the biggest thing, and when you think about how many dead authors we read, it was really not unusual. Just last night, I was at Morehead State. Even going there, people are really looking at you like, ‘‘she’s really alive,’’ and it’s kind of strange. And, again, I think that the dangerous position is that we recognize not our power but people’s power for themselves. The same way that I can sit here and decide whether or not Sy Hirsch, for Christ’s sake, has written a creditable piece on Kissinger. That is a level of egalitarianism that most people don’t have. Most people don’t have to be bothered with that. Sy Hirsch should not have to worry about what some poet in Cincinnati thinks about his work. And I’m not saying that he does. I am just saying that I can make that judgment.

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That certainly is a factor, but don’t you feel power over your own interpretation of the world which really is not dependent upon how well someone else is going to agree with that? Well, it really is, because if you are Ezra Pound and your interpretation of the world is markedly different from the country in which you happened to be born, you will find yourself adjudged insane, which is quite unfair. Do you understand? And that does happen, I think, frequently enough to make us take pause. You get into the whole thing with the Soviets and their writers and, of course, we with ours. We don’t do ours the same way as the Soviets do, because what we do with ours is just buy them out. The end result is the same thing, and if we can’t buy them out, we simply refuse to publish them; we kind of hound them out of the country, essentially. But it all amounts to the same thing. I think that I have a view of the word, that I have an obligation, if not just your basic right, to share. But I don’t consider that, in any respect, that that connotes any power. I still have to go upstairs [even though] they’re locking CETA out. I still have to go to IGA. You know, the artist is not a god, and I mention Mailer because he’s such a prototypical, awful artist. Of all the real dumb things that he’s said recently, the most stupid had to be on the Jack Abbott case. As a writer, you just simply cringe that somebody is justifying murder because the guy can put three words together. It’s totally unacceptable. The writer is not god. It’s what we do for a living. It’s not who we are. And I have a great resentment—you haven’t ruffled my feathers on that one at all, but you will see the hairs on the back of my neck rise— because writing is not who I am. It is what I do. And I think that anybody who fails to separate what they do from who they are, and that is from Ronald Reagan to Lyndon Johnson to Pope John Paul to whomever, is in serious, mental trouble. You’ve got to separate yourself; unfortunately, a lot of people don’t. And a lot of the people who don’t are Reagan, and Pope John, the people who are in power. But, hey, lot of people don’t. The only reason we talk about the people in power is because that is who we know. You want to chart mental illness? We can go right up I-75 to Detroit and see a guy who has been laid off for six months who was a mechanic: who is nothing more. Now, we just don’t talk about him, unless we are Studs

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Terkel. That appears to be a very human trait, but it also appears to be one that we have learned, because if we go back—again we are talking Africa or we go back to Chinese history, for two quickies and two good ones—you will see people and artisans, and what you did was not who you were. Source: Nikki Giovanni and Arlene Elder, ‘‘A MELUS Interview,’’ in MELUS, Vol. 9, No. 3, Winter 1982, pp. 61–75.

SOURCES ‘‘Agriculture Is America’s No. 1 Export and More,’’ http://fb.org/index.php?fuseaction=newsroom.fastfacts (accessed September 2, 2009). Barringer, Mark, ‘‘The Anti-War Movement in the United States,’’ http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/ vietnam/antiwar.html (accessed June 25, 2009). Bashir, Samiya, ‘‘Giovanni’s World,’’ in Black Issues Book Review, Vol. 4, No. 6, November–December 2002, p. 33. Bonner, Carrington, ‘‘An Interview with Nikki Giovanni,’’ Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring 1984, pp. 29–30. Brahic, Catherine, ‘‘Appetite for Frogs’ Legs Harming Wild Populations,’’ in New Scientist, January 19, 2009; http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16446-appetitefor-frogs-legs-harming-wild-populations-.html (accessed September 2, 2009). Browning, Robert, ‘‘Andrea Del Sarto,’’ in Victorian Prose and Poetry, edited by Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom, Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 545. Courtney-Thompson, Fiona, and Kate Phelps, eds., The 20th Century Year by Year, Barnes & Noble, 1998, pp. 256–71, 280–81. Douglas, Susan J., ‘‘1970–1979: Watching the World on TV,’’ in National Geographic Eyewitness to the 20th Century, National Geographic Society, 1998, pp. 277–82. Dusky, Lorraine, ‘‘Fascinating Woman,’’ in Conversations with Nikki Giovanni, edited by Virginia C. Fowler, University Press of Mississippi, 1992, p. 59, originally published in Ingenue, February 1973, pp. 20–24, 81, 83. Emmer, Rick, ‘‘How Do Frogs Survive Winter? Why Don’t They Freeze to Death?’’ in Scientific American, November, 24, 1997; http://www.scientificamerican.com/ article.cfm?id=how-do-frogs-survive-wint (accessed August 28, 2009). Fowler, Virginia C., ‘‘And This Poem Recognizes That: Embracing Contrarieties in the Poetry of Nikki Giovanni,’’ in Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women’s Poetry, University of Tennessee Press, 2002, pp. 112, 114.

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Frum, David, ‘‘A Harvard Plan for the Working Class Man,’’ in How We Got Here: The ’70s, the Decade that Brought You Modern Life for Better or for Worse, Basic Books, 2000, pp. 252–64. Giddings, Paula, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, by Nikki Giovanni, William Morrow, 1978, pp. 12–13. Giovanni, Nikki, ‘‘An Answer to Some Questions on How I Write: In Three Parts,’’ in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, Anchor, 1984, pp. 207, 209, 210. ———, Racism 101, William Morrow, 1994, pp. 140–141. ———, ‘‘Winter,’’ in The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni, William Morrow, 1978, p. 226. ———, and Claudia Tate, ‘‘An Interview,’’ in Conversations with Nikki Giovanni, edited by Virginia C. Fowler, University Press of Mississippi, 1992, p. 144, originally published in Black Women Writers at Work, by Claudia Tate, Continuum, 1983, pp. 60–78. Gould, Stephen Jay, ‘‘A Wolf at the Door: Environmentalism Becomes an Imperative,’’ in The 20th Century, edited by Lorraine Glennon, JG Press, 1999, pp. 510–15. Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 11th ed., Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009, pp. 14, 241, 324–25. ‘‘Income Stable, Poverty Up, Numbers of Americans with and without Health Insurance Rise, Census Bureau Reports,’’ http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/ releases/archives/income_wealth/002484.html (accessed September 2, 2009). ‘‘Information Center the North Dakota Farm Bureau,’’ http://www.ndfb.org/news/detail.asp?newsID=1291 (accessed September 2, 2009). Jennings, Peter, and Todd Brewster, ‘‘Years of Doubt 1969–1981,’’ in The Century, Doubleday, 1998, pp. 424–63. Lund, Elizabeth, ‘‘Nikki Giovanni and Charles Bukowski: New Collections from Poetry’s Icons,’’ in the Christian Science Monitor, April 17, 2007, p. 13. Odell, Digger, ‘‘Drops of Life: A Look at the Use of Religion in the Promotion of Patent Medicines,’’ http:// www.bottlebooks.com/FatherJohn/a_product_of_divine_ inspiration.htm (accessed August 28, 2009). Petrovan, Silviu, ‘‘Endangered Species,’’ in Vivid, June– July 2005; http://www.vivid.ro/vivid73/pages73/endan geredspecies73.htm (accessed September 2, 2009). ‘‘Read Any Good Books Lately?’’ in the New York Times, June 3, 2007, p. 8. Trager, James, The People’s Chronology, Henry Holt, 1992, pp. 1027, 1043.

FURTHER READING Andrews, Ted, Animal-Speak: The Spiritual & Magical Powers of Creatures Great & Small, Llewellyn, 1996.

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This book provides information about animals and how they live and communicate and how people can understand and connect with animals. The author offers a Native American approach to animals as totems for humans and includes a large dictionary to help readers find the animal totem with the strongest connection to the reader’s life. Burnim, Mellonee V., ed., African-American Music: An Introduction, Routledge 2005. This book presents thirty essays that explore the various genres of African American music, including the music of slavery and religious hymns, both of which are interests of Giovanni and provide topics of some of her poetry. Halfpenny, James C., Winter: An Ecological Handbook, Johnson, 1989. Halfpenny explores the physical and ecological demands of winter and its effect on animals and humans. The author explains how to survive in the cold and offers suggestions for having fun, as well as suggesting ways to study winter ecology. Jago, Carol, Nikki Giovanni in the Classroom: The Same Old Danger but a Brand New Pleasure, National Council of Teachers of English, 1999. This book provides a number of suggestions for how to use Giovanni’s poetry in the classroom. The author includes a number of Giovanni’s poems and excerpts from several of her essays, along with suggestions about how to get students involved in Giovanni’s poetry. Josephson, Judith Pinkerton, Nikki Giovanni: Poet of the People, Enslow, 2000. This biography is designed for middle-school students. The author provides information about Giovanni’s life, from her childhood to her adulthood and role as an established poet. Several of Giovanni’s poems are also included. Patton, Sharon F., African-American Art, Oxford University press, 1998. This book includes information about the artistic achievements of African Americans, including art from the 1800s and 1900s created by both slaves and freemen. Rouse, Andy, Animal Portraits, David & Charles, 2006. This beautiful book is filled with portraits of animals, many of which were taken of animals in their natural habitat. Sielman, Martha, Masters: Art Quilts: Major Works by Leading Artists, Lark, 2008. The author presents the works of forty artists, whose quilts have been designated as art. In addition to the photographs of the quilts, the author includes information about materials and techniques.

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Words Are the Diminution of All Things In 2004, Charles Wright first published ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things’’ in his book Buffalo Yoga. This volume is a later one of his over twenty books of poetry, starting with The Grave of the Right Hand in 1970 and continuing through Littlefoot: A Poem in 2007 with more expected to come. Buffalo Yoga can be obtained through any number of bookseller outlets.

CHARLES PENZEL WRIGHT 2004

The poem is set on an afternoon in December, both the December on the calendar and the December of the poet’s life. The word diminution, not a common word, means the process of diminishing or decreasing. The poem contains typical Wright themes about time, darkness, and the winter of life. The latter is described as a time when energy and ability tend to lessen and, according to the poem, leave the person without much left to do, without much left to say. The narrator is watching the sky, the weather, and the blowing leaves and finding in them words that will not be spoken. Particularly for someone who has been a poet, whose life has revolved around words, the fading process means periods of silence. The poem not only has typical Wright themes, but also his distinctive style of dropped lines and his use of the Blue Ridge landscape he can see from his backyard.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY The great-grandson of two Confederate captains and the son of a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) civil engineer, Charles Wright was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, on August 25, 1935, the first baby born in the new hospital built for the TVA. His early childhood was nomadic as the family moved with his father’s job. When Wright was ten, however, the family settled in Kingsport, Tennessee, where his father went into the construction business. Wright became immersed in country music and the activities of his Episcopalian church, spending his teenage years at religious summer camps and small parochial high schools. Both music and spirituality would become important elements of Wright’s poetry. After high school graduation in 1953, Wright got a summer job with the Kingsport Times-News as a police reporter, a job that caused him to think about being a writer. He also read works by William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Ernest Hemingway. He then attended Davidson College, where he majored in history and planned to go to law school. After graduation in 1957, he joined the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps and was schooled in Italian. He spent three years in Verona with the 430th CIC Detachment, during which Wright discovered the works of Ezra Pound and visited the Italian countryside that Pound described in his poems. Profoundly affected by Pound’s work, Wright began composing his own poetry, and in 1961, he enrolled in the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. After earning his master’s degree, he spent two years as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Rome. In 1965, Wright returned to Iowa to pursue a doctoral degree, but abandoned that plan the next year to take a teaching position at the University of California at Irvine. He remained there until 1983 except for a year’s Fulbright lectureship at the University of Padua. In 1969, Wright married Holly McIntire, a photographer; they have one son. Wright’s first major book of poetry was published in 1970, and he has continued to publish collections of poetry every couple years since. Nine of his books are grouped into three trilogies, and each trilogy has its own structure. These trilogies are Country Music, The World of Ten Thousand Things, and the set that includes Chickamauga, Black Zodiac, and Appalachia.

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In 1983, Wright went to the University of Virginia to teach creative writing and was honored there with an endowed chair as the Souder Family Professor. His many published works have earned him numerous prizes, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975), a PEN translation award (1979), a National Book Award in poetry (1983), and a Merit Medal from the American Academy and Institute Arts and Letters (1992). In 1997, he received a National Book Critics Circle Award and in 1998 the Pulitzer Prize for Black Zodiac. Wright was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. As of 2009, he continued to live and work in Charlottesville, Virginia.

POEM TEXT The brief secrets are still here, and the light has come back. The word remember touches my hand, But I shake it off and watch the turkey buzzards bank and wheel Against the occluded sky. All of the little names sink down, weighted with what is invisible, But no one will utter them, no one will smooth their rumpled hair. There isn’t much time, in any case. There isn’t much left to talk about as the year deflates. There isn’t a lot to add. Road-worn, December-colored, they cluster like unattractive angels Wherever a thing appears, Crisp and unspoken, unspeakable in their mute and glittering garb. All afternoon the clouds have been sliding toward us out of the Blue Ridge. All afternoon the leaves have scuttled Across the sidewalk and driveway, clicking their clattery claws. And now the evening is over us, Small slices of silence running under a dark rain, Wrapped in a larger.

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POEM SUMMARY ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things’’ is a partly autobiographical free verse poem consisting of three stanzas, the first two consisting of eight lines with the last one at nine lines. The situation in

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Poets.org sells a CD (made available in 1997) of Charles Wright reading twenty poems from his books Chickamauga and Appalachia, and Adrienne Rich reading a selection from her works. The eighty-twominute CD was recorded on the night in 1996 when Wright won the Lenore Marshall Prize and Rich won the Wallace Stevens Award. A print transcription of an interview of Charles Wright by Elizabeth Farnsworth for the Jim Lehrer NewsHour on PBS is available online. The interview was recorded on April 15, 1998, in response to Wright’s receiving the Pulitzer Prize that year and covers Black Zodiac, Wright’s career, and his thoughts on poetry. A Real Audio version of the interview is available. The Poetry Foundation has made available online a series of recordings called Essential American Poets. The poets were selected in 2006 by poet laureate Donald Hall, and each poet reads his or her own works. Included in this group of important American poets, Charles Wright made his recording in 2008 in a studio in Charlottesville, Virginia. He reads: ‘‘Spider Crystal Ascension,’’ ‘‘Stone Canyon Nocturne,’’ ‘‘Clear Night,’’ ‘‘A Short History of the Shadow,’’ and ‘‘Bedtime Story.’’ The podcast can be found online. The Library of Congress made a sixty-twominute video of Charles Wright and Mark Strand reading their poetry on April 24, 2008. It is available online. Poets.org sells the Academy of American Poets Audio Archive Anthology, Volume I, which is a collection of historic recordings of public readings by various authors over a forty-year time period. Included is Charles Wright reading the introduction to ‘‘It’s Turtles All the Way Down.’’ This archive anthology may also be available from vendors such as Amazon.com.

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the poem is one in which the poet/speaker considers two worlds: the world of his mind that revolves around words, and the world of concrete things that surrounds his backyard. These two become intertwined in his perception. In the following discussion, each stanza is separately numbered starting with its first line as line 1.

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Stanza 1 In the sentence that continues across lines 1 and 2, Wright tells the reader that the secrets are present and the light has returned, but the reader has no idea what those secrets might be or what kind of light has returned. These lines remain to be interpreted as the poem develops. The continuation of a sentence across two lines is not unusual, but Wright’s style of putting the second line in a dropped position, that is, not flush left but indented so that the line is mostly to the right, helps to set off what is said in the second line and make it distinct from the rest of the sentence. In lines 3 and 4, the speaker tells the reader that the word ‘‘remember’’ touches his hand but he shakes it off. ‘‘Remember’’ is emphasized with italics to alert the reader to its importance. The use of personification to suggest that a word can touch a person’s hand tells the reader to expect that there will be a dimension other than reality involved in the poem. What is on his mind quickly shifts to something in the real world— the flight of turkey buzzards. To this point, the poem has a meditative feel, so the sudden introduction of buzzards is a jolt. Buzzards are ugly and their reputation for feasting on carcasses lends foreboding to the poem, not necessarily lessened by the description of their expert flight across a cloudy sky in lines 4 and 5. Line 6 brings the reader back to the words that are on the poet’s mind; little names that sink down from the weight of what is invisible. Line 7 insists that no one will speak these words; no one will try to work with them and make them beautiful. It is as if words are burdened with so many denotative and connotative meanings that they need a writer to lighten their load by choosing one so they can dispose of the rest. Words depend on the writer to make something sensible, something organized out of their disparate meanings. To emphasize the sinking down, Wright uses alliteration with the repeated initial sound of w- in line 7, conveying that these words require the reader to slow down, as if weighted. The w- sound is used again in line 8 with the

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words ‘‘one will’’ used twice in a repetition of phrase that gives rhythm to the line.

Stanza 2 In this stanza, a repeated phrase is repeated to provide rhythm and connect the thoughts. Lines 1, 2 and 4, with line 3 being a dropped line, all start with ‘‘There isn’t.’’ Line 1 states there is not much time to deal with the words; lines 2 and 3 state there is not much left to talk about as the year comes to an end; line 4 states there is not much to add to what has already been said. These lines sound like the excuses of someone who is tired or worn out. The repetition emphasizes the speaker’s resolve to avoid these words. In line 5 the words are described as ‘‘roadworn’’ and ‘‘December-colored,’’ but the reader has to wonder if that describes the words or the speaker. ‘‘December-colored’’ is a clever way to describe something old, again connecting the time of year to the idea of the winter of a person’s life. Line 5 continues by calling the words unattractive angels who gather round, according to line 6, ‘‘whenever a thing appears.’’ It is as if to say that although words are blessed things, they are unattractive or unwanted at this stage, but still they cluster around things in hopes of being used to name or describe that thing. In line 7 the words are described as crisp and new because they are unspoken. Line 7 continues by saying that the words are unspeakable and the implication is that they are unspeakable because, as the first part of the stanza said, there is no use for them. The dropped line 8 adds that they unspeakable because they are mute; they cannot say anything any more, even if they are in ‘‘glittering garb,’’ an alliterated description that sticks out at the end of a dropped line to gain attention.

Stanza 3 In this stanza, Wright spreads a sentence across three lines with unusual line placement and spacing. The position of the words of the sentence are intended to match the thing he is describing: clouds moving across the sky. The speaker says that the clouds have been coming all afternoon out of the Blue Ridge, and they look like they are sliding across the page. The Blue Ridge refers to the Blue Ridge Mountain range that Wright can see from his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. Wright starts off line 3 the same way he started line 1. The purpose of the repetition is

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to stress the passage of time. Lines 4 and 5 describe how the leaves have moved across the sidewalk and driveway, ending in the alliterative and onomatopoeic phrase, which repeats the clsound in a way that actually sounds like the points of dried leaves scraping across concrete. Line 6 indicates that afternoon is passing into evening; even more time has passed when so little is left. Line 7 uses alliteration again in continuing the message of things unspoken by using the s- sound. Line 8 tells the reader that these small slices are running under a dark rain, a darkness that will obliterate them. Line 8 indicates that the small slices of silence are wrapped in a larger silence, perhaps the great silence of death. The buzzards are anticipating death, the speaker anticipates a death that will leave the words unused, even though, as the first stanza points out, the words still carry secrets, still have brought light to new ideas, but there is no point in remembering the power of words because there just is not time for all that anymore.

THEMES Time A recurring theme in Wright’s poetry is time as it relates to the past and to the human lifespan. Wright sees time as the alpha-and-omega dimension in that everything begins and ends in time, even a poem. Time is something that is given, but there’s never enough of it, and time can run out. Time can become an enemy, and time can destroy memories and feelings. In ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things,’’ time is definitely on the poet’s mind because there is not enough time left to do any more work with the words that try to get the his attention. Wright includes several references to time in this poem, regarding the secrets, in terms of how much is left, the time of day and the season, the words that seem worn with the lateness of the year. The title of the poem indicates that time is the critical issue because even the words will diminish until the life of the poet is silenced.

Silence The speaker fears time because it will eventually bring the silence of death. As life fades, things become quieter, and the poet can no longer deal with words. For Wright, words are real entities and as limited in existence as anything else in this

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 





Take Wright’s first line and use it as the first line in a poem you create yourself. In your poem describe a place and a particular time and connect them to the idea of secrets. Then write a one-page analysis of what you learned about your writing and about Wright’s poem by doing this assignment. Wright has received many awards. As a class, make a list of these awards. Then each student should prepare a notecard report on one of these awards answering the following questions: What is the purpose of the award? Is the award for lifetime achievement or for a particular work? How often is the award given? Is it given in any other fields besides poetry? Is there a cash prize that goes with the award? Is the award given to only one person at a time? Find pictures of the Blue Ridge mountains on the Internet or from magazines and travel brochures. Make a collage of these pictures

world. References to silence recur in the poem. At the end of the poem, the poet’s world is wrapped in one big silence, just as it might be at the end of life, and this marks a fitting place for the words on the page to end. After the poem, silence reigns.

Memory and Mortality Among Wright’s recurring themes are memory and mortality. They are, of course, tied together with his theme of time. Memories are images of the past that people hold in the present, and they can sometimes be irrepressible and thereby annoying, if not painful. ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things’’ is a meditation on the passage of time and what that means for one’s mortality. In typical style, Wright blends human mortality with imagination and the natural world. The words he imagines around him still hold their secrets, still hold the power to reveal

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on a poster, leaving room to write in your reactions to or descriptions of these pictures. Added together, these thoughts will probably turn out to sound like a poem of your own or could be polished into one. 

Wright’s father was an engineer who built dams for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an important project of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Divide the class into groups to research and answer the following questions: When and why was the TVA created? What construction has resulted from the TVA? Is the TVA still an active government agency? if so, what does it do now? What benefits have resulted from the work of the TVA? Report back to the rest of the class. Provide appropriate pictures, if possible, and provide links to relevant web sites and/or recommendations for informational books or articles.

something profound, so the light has momentarily come back into his life. However, when the speaker is nudged to remember how he used to work with the words, he shakes it off because he thinks there is no point to it anymore. He can see the buzzards in the sky ready to swoop down upon the dead; they would not be there unless death was imminent. The landscape is communicating transcendence: the skies are getting cloudy, dried leaves on the ground are like dropped notes of warning, the evening approaches, and rain darkens the day, too. Themes of mortality often explore questions about the meaning of life and the nature of death. Wright’s poetry shows an interest in the journey of discovery, the greatest of which is life itself. In this poem, the poet is considering what happens at the end of his journey—the remembrance of words but the inability to utter them, the darkness, the silence. Wright uses his poetry

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The Great Smoky Mountain National Park and Blue Ridge Mountains in the morning (Image copyright gary718, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

to explore the relationship of spirituality to the world around him, to try to decipher the correspondence between nature and the human spirit. In ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things,’’ the reader sees this effort in action as the poet divines his destiny from what he sees not only in his imagination but also in the skies, the weather, and the passage of the day.

STYLE Line Placement and the Stepped Line Wright is known for the way he handles lines of poetry. At about the time Wright was writing ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things,’’ his style was changing a bit as he increasingly condensed subject matter and lengthened the line. His goal was to extend the line of verse as far as he could towards prose without its becoming prose. He wanted to have the conversational quality of prose while maintaining features of free verse, the sound patterns of poetry, and the compressed meaning that can be conveyed by poetry.

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For Wright, poetry is a matter of attitude and perception, the latter being assisted by the look of a poem. His distinctive style is to use the stepped line, also known as a dropped line or, as Wright calls it, the low rider. The stepped line is one that starts flush left, as is normal, but then is broken apart with the second part indented on the next line. Sometimes the dropped line extends to a third line. For example, in the first stanza of ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things’’ lines 1 and 2 are stepped with the separation coming at the point of the coordinating conjunction to emphasize that the two lines are one sentence. Lines 6 and 7 are stepped with the break coming at the comma between the two parts: one establishing that the names are sinking down, the second explaining what is causing them to sink. In the second stanza of ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things,’’ lines 2 and 3 are stepped. There is no coordinating conjunction or comma to indicate two halves of a thought, but the word ‘‘as’’ shows a cause-and-effect relationship when saying that there is not much left to talk

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about because the year is deflating and everything is running out. The last two lines of this stanza are similar in that the second line describes the appearance of the words discussed in the first line. The first three lines of the poem are unique in that they are broken up and spaced, it seems, to mimic the appearance of clouds in the sky. Lines 7 and 8 are stepped to give a visual of the silence running under the rain by placing the second line running under the first. It could be said that line 9 is also part of the step, even though it is not indented, because it talks about wrapping the silence, and the three lines together look like the second line is being wrapped by the other two. This purposeful positioning of the lines gives the poem a sense of energy and allows Wright to qualify or intensify words by means of placement. The white space provides the reader with a visual pause for reflection and gives the poem visual depth and dimension. Wright does not overdo the use of enjambment or stepped lines, reserving them for special impact. His lines are like building blocks or the layers of paint on a canvas; when finished, the lines all join to make a whole, but each has made its own contribution that should be analyzed individually.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Blue Ridge Mountains From the mid-1980s into the early 2000s, Wright lived near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, and he often mentioned them in his poetry, as he did in ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things.’’ These mountains are the largest range of the Appalachian Mountains, running across the states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The name comes from the blue haze that seems to emanate from the mountains. This haze is caused by isoprene being released into the atmosphere by the trees. Rocks along the eastern side of the Blue Ridge are among the oldest in the world, dating back 1.2 billion years. Over 400 million years ago, during the Silurian Period, the Blue Ridge Mountains started to form and then were pushed up higher when North America and Europe collided 320 million years ago. The Blue Ridge contains the highest mountains in the eastern part of the United States with approximately 125 peaks over 5,000 feet and 39 over 6,000 feet. Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina is

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the highest at 6,684 feet. Various peoples lived in this mountainous region for thousands of years. The Powhatan tribe called these mountains Quirank. Sioux Manahoacs, Iroquois, Cherokee, and Shawnee lived in the area as well. Spanish explorers such as Hernando de Soto (1500–1542) made expeditions into the Blue Ridge, but no AngloEuropeans settled there until the English started to arrive in the early seventeenth century. The well-known explorer, William Bertram walked through the Blue Ridge in 1775, calling the mountains the Cherokee Mountains because he found so many of their villages there. However, the Cherokee were forcibly moved by the U.S. government from the Blue Ridge area in Georgia in 1838 and 1839, and the path they took on this tragically difficult trek to Oklahoma is known as the Trail of Tears. In modern times, the Blue Ridge contains the Blue Ridge Parkway, a 469-mile long highway that connects the Great Smoky Mountains National Park at the south end and Shenandoah National Park towards the north end. Noted for its many breathtaking vistas, the parkway also has metamorphic rock formations that have folded bands of colored minerals; the effect is the look of a marble cake. Besides the parkway, part of the famous Appalachian Trail runs through the Blue Ridge. The Appalachian Trail, popular with hikers, starts at Springer Mountain in Georgia, winds over 2,000 miles through 14 states, and ends at Maine’s Mount Katahdin. The Scottish and Irish immigrants who settled the isolated valleys of the Appalachian/Blue Ridge area developed their own dialect, customs, and music. Bluegrass music, played largely with acoustical instruments, began in the late nineteenth century and is based on both Scottish and Irish folk music. Song lyrics are not common for bluegrass, but when there are lyrics they will likely have Christian and rural life themes. Also in the late nineteenth century, the custom of fiddlers’ conventions began to give the many talented fiddle players a chance to compete for prizes and local fame. When radios came on the scene, this venue became commercial. Traditional mountain folk arts such as storytelling, folk dancing, quilt making, and handcrafts also gave unique expression to the way of life in the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains and are preserved at museums and festivals throughout the region. Throughout the twentieth century and into the early 2000s, tourism and folk crafts

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Turkey vulture in flight (Image copyright Rich Lindie, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

were an important source of income for local residents. For early settlers, the Blue Ridge provided wealth from lumber and mining operations. Agriculture and moonshine (illegally made alcohol) productions were also important industries. Once the commercial lumber was gone, the Chattahoochee National Forest was established. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps, which created jobs to bring down the high unemployment rate, built camping grounds and other facilities on the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Appalachian Trail. The Parkway, the nation’s first and longest of its kind, turned into a halfcentury project and was to celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2010. It is the National Park Service’s biggest attraction with around 20 million visitors each year. The area offers whitewater rafting, horseback riding, driving tours, fishing, canoeing, and other recreational activities as well as quaint lodges, rustic farms with split-rail fences, and multiple historic sites. In short, the Blue Ridge Mountains are a beautiful national treasure worthy of awed description in literature.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW The accolades for Wright from the critics contain phrases such as ‘‘the best’’ and ‘‘the greatest’’ of his generation. His numerous awards and his

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classification by poetry organizations and the Library of Congress as ‘‘classic’’ or ‘‘essential’’ indicate his revered position in American poetry. The publication of Buffalo Yoga in 2004 elicited continuing praise for his talent. Brian Henry, in an essay on Wright’s techniques for the Virginia Quarterly Review, noted that the ‘‘most significant stylistic element of Buffalo Yoga is also the most common: Every poem in the book employs the low rider as an integral element not only of the poems’ styles but of their meanings.’’ ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things’’ has several instances of the low rider, or stepped line, all of which effectively add weight and direction to the message of the poem. Donnas Seaman, longstanding reviewer for Booklist, called Buffalo Yoga an ‘‘elegantly contemplative collection’’ and noted that it ‘‘reflects on the most familiar of Wright subjects—sun, moon, wind, clouds, trees.’’ Her superlatives for the book included phrases such as ‘‘penetrating and ravishingly gorgeous lyrical poems,’’ ‘‘classically philosophical and freshly revealing,’’ and ‘‘illuminates and exalts.’’ Seaman’s appreciation stemmed from the way that Wright meshes human and divine in his search for the interconnectivity between the two, and the relationship of this life and the afterlife. In his meditations on time and the spectrum of existence, Seaman stated that Wright is ‘‘a profoundly yogic poet.’’

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Richard Rand, a critic writing for the Harvard Review, commented on the greater transparency that came into Wright’s poetry in the years just prior to the publication of this collection: ‘‘He now offers plenty of elbow room with space for both his own and the reader’s imagination.’’ The book is ‘‘challenging, companionable, pointedly repetitive, and ultimately, rewarding.’’ Rand concluded that Buffalo Yoga is ‘‘a major exercise of and for the imagination’’ and that ‘‘it would be difficult these days to find a book that comes close to it in energy or engagement.’’

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CRITICISM Lois Kerschen

Wright’s poetry seeks to fill those empty spaces in the heart that all people have. For Wright, the material for this solace comes from landscape, which stimulates the imagination and provides images and metaphors he conjures or reinvents for his poetry. Willard Spiegelman in How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry states that ‘‘Wright has developed and maintained a poetic persona.’’ This persona is a mask that can best be defined ‘‘through his use of context, place, situation, anecdote, and natural description. . . . Framing himself within a recollected or perceived landscape, he enacts a pilgrimage toward self-portraiture by painting himself into the landscape.’’ A telltale sign that Wright would agree with Spiegelman is in Wright’s choice of epigraph for his China Trace (1977), a quotation that might serve as a thesis statement for all of his books. Attributed to the sixteenth-century Chinese writer named T’u Lung (also known as T’u Ch’ihshui), the epigraph states: ‘‘being unable to find peace within myself, I made use of the external surroundings to calm my spirit, and being unable to find delight within my heart, I borrowed a landscape to please it.’’ It should be noted that neither poet is referring to landscapes in the sense of nature as used by the romantics. Rather, landscape is more a panorama, the whole scene instead of a particular aspect of it.

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?



Kerschen is an educator and freelance writer. In this essay, she discusses Wright’s use of landscape, particularly in ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things.’’

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Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Black Zodiac: Poems (1998), in which he explores major truths, both reverently and irreverently, through landscapes and language. Walt Whitman’s poetry has influenced Wright’s work. Whitman’s work is collected in Walt Whitman: Selected Poems (2001). This book contains the poet’s major works and is a good introduction to one of the architects of modern American poetry. Emily Dickinson is one of Wright’s favorite poets. Her poems can be found in The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Barnes and Nobel, 2003). This edition includes commentary, background information, study questions, bibliography, and a glossary. Wright began his career in poetry when he read the works of the highly influential American poet and critic Ezra Pound, the founder of the imagist movement. A collection of seventy of Pound’s poems, Early Poems, was published as a Dover Thrift edition in 1996. The Invisible Ladder: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poems for Young Readers, edited by Liz Rosenberg and published in 1996 by Henry Holt, is sophisticated yet designed to appeal to teenage and adult readers. The poems are accompanied by photographs and comments by the poets about how they got interested in this form of writing. In ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things,’’ Wright contemplates the end of life. By contrast, the eighty-five poems in Life Doesn’t Frighten Me at All ask young people to face the good and bad of life ahead. Most of the poems are from modern American writers such as Maya Angelou, but some come from earlier times and writers of different cultures and ethnicities; all were chosen because they are relevant to teenage lives.

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MANY OF HIS POEMS ARE SPIRITUAL MEDITATIONS BASED ON LANDSCAPE, IN WHICH WRIGHT TRIES TO UNDERSTAND WHAT HE CANNOT SEE.’’

Wright said himself in Quarter Notes: Improvisations and Interviews (1995) that his subjects are ‘‘language, landscape, and the idea of God.’’ Wright is not religious, but he does have a spiritual response to landscape. While he does not deny that there is a God, his spiritual search does not rely on a particular religious doctrine. Whatever theological doubts he may have, Wright knows that the earth is real, so while he intuits that the physical world is not all there is, it is the medium through which he reaches for spiritual essence. Many of his poems are spiritual meditations based on landscape, in which Wright tries to understand what he cannot see. In an article for Contemporary Literature, Bonnie Costello states that language ‘‘creates a difference from the seen world, which allows us to view it in a symbolic aspect, and it is in this difference that [Wright’s] ‘idea of God’ takes shape.’’ ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things,’’ is an excellent example of Wright’s use of landscape as a metaphor for his own experience. He compares the passage of time as shown through the seasons to the passing of time in his life. Typically, he also sets the poem in a particular scene, in a specific time and place. For this poem, the speaker in the poem (a persona much like the poet) is imagined in Wright’s backyard on a December afternoon as the day wears into evening. The speaker remarks on the turkey buzzards in the sky, the passing clouds, the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance, and the leaves on his driveway. This seasonal metaphor seems to be more about letting go than about renewing. That is certainly the case in ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things,’’ where the subject is letting go of the words of the poetic craft because there is too little time left in life to handle them. In a sense the speaker cannot take up his words, cannot embrace them with intention.

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Spiegelman, in his critical analysis ‘‘Landscape and Identity: Charles Wright’s Backyard Metaphysics’’ notes that in Wright’s poems ‘‘it is always landscape that occupies the central position, because landscape alone allows the poet to move from present to past, from here to there, and from the visible to the invisible.’’ That is exactly what happens in ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things.’’ The speaker is nudged to remember the past, but he shakes it off. As he considers his present situation, he realizes the words that remain unspoken. He intertwines the description of these unused words with the description of what he sees in the visible scene. It is a narrative, broken into pieces, interrupted with manipulations of language and present, temporal experience. As Spiegelman explains: ‘‘Wright searches for the visible form of the landscape (which he then translates for our benefit into the visible form of the printed page.)’’ Spiegelman adds that Wright depicts space and time as a synthesized unit, as ‘‘merely two facets of a single perceptual phenomenon.’’ After all, nature is always changing. Sand dunes do not stand still so they are ‘‘as much an event in time as an organization of space.’’ Within the blink of an eye, Wright can transform a meditation on place into one on time. That is what he does in ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things’’: He goes back and forth between the imaginary and the real, between the December of his life and the December landscape. In an interview for UVA Today, a University of Virginia publication, Wright is quoted as saying: ‘‘I’m always looking at and thinking about how the exterior landscape reflects the interior and vice versa.’’ Wright indicated that his poems do not start out as ideas but develop from something he has seen. He considers his backyard his ‘‘largest canvas,’’ but also a place where he has ‘‘conversations’’ with the landscape. He explained that although his poems are not personal, he places himself in them and is defined by his poems. He is quoted as saying that he looks for ‘‘what’s behind or might be behind what you see’’ and then projects himself into that view. The reader can imagine that for ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things.’’ Wright might have been sitting in his yard observing the winter sky, the clouds, and the buzzards, and these views caused him to think about end-of-life issues. Perhaps it was a quiet day with the only sound

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Leaves on cobblestone pavement (Image copyright KrisN, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

being dead leaves scuttling across the driveway, and he began to think of the silence that on such an occasion descends upon a poet. Of course, ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things,’’ is not all about landscape. In fact, only eight of the twenty-four lines contain references to the outdoors. Langdon Hammer, writing for American Scholar attributes the impact of those minority lines to ‘‘Wright’s knack for the word sketch, for making landscape pictures with only a few phrases—as if nonchalantly, with a flick of the writst.’’ The rest of the poem is about words and time, the words that will be left unsaid when the poet no longer writes. Wright is just as adept at translating feelings and ideas into images and building a poem upon those images as he is at translating landscape into imagery. In this poem, the images are the personified words wanting attention. They still wear a ‘‘glittering garb’’ but the poet calls them ‘‘unattractive angels’’ nonetheless, perhaps because he is tired of them, perhaps because they have already become mute. The silence he feels creeping up on him has also engulfed the words.

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David Garrison, in ‘‘From Feeling to Form: Image as Translation in the Poetry of Charles Wright,’’ states that the challenge for a poet is to ‘‘translate visceral and emotional knowledge, felt thought, into language, and how to make the unseen, that ordinarily invisible backdrop of eternity, seen.’’ Garrison thinks that for Wright ‘‘The landscape is the hieroglyph of the self inscribed on that backdrop of eternity.’’ Garrison concludes that Wright’s ‘‘images . . . compose a code by which to read the hieroglyphs of the heart.’’ That is to say, Wright translates the language of the natural world into a language his readers can understand and appreciate emotionally. To perform this amazing feat requires taking these hard-to-plumb truths, molding them into image and syntax, and shaping them into carefully constructed and placed lines. American poetry is fortunate that Wright has the talent and technique to execute this difficult task for his audience. Source: Lois Kerschen, Critical Essay on ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

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EVERYBODY READS SOMEONE A LOT IN THE BEGINNING, AND WHOEVER PULLS YOU IN STICKS WITH YOU. AND YOU HOPE SOMEBODY GOOD PULLS YOU IN AND NOT SOMEBODY BAD—SOMEBODY YOU CAN’T GET RID OF.’’

Ted Genoways In the following excerpted interview, Charles Wright discusses with Genoways his life, influences on his poetry, ideas on composing poetry, and plans for future works. Charles Wright’s poetry is a strange alchemy, a fusion of the direct, understated lyrics of ancient Chinese poets like Tu Fu and Wang Wei, the lush language of nineteenthcentury Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the allusive, rhetorical movement—the ‘‘gists and piths’’—of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. The element common to each is a search for transcendence in the landscape of everyday. For Wright that landscape might be the shores of Italy, his native Tennessee, or his own backyard on Locust Avenue in Charlottesville. He calls it ‘‘eschatological naturalism: a school of one.’’ An imaginary argument with Tu Fu in ‘‘China Mail’’ reveals the underpinning—both highbrow and tongue-in-cheek, serious and self-effacing— of Wright’s poetry: ‘‘Study the absolute, your book says. But not too hard,// I add, just under my breath.’’ Wright’s poems yearn for the ideal, but are tempered by a suspicion of futility. This focus on unanswerable questions has allowed Wright’s work to be peopled by family and familiar locales without slouching into private confession. And the unfolding of his ‘‘impersonal autobiography’’ over three decades has earned him the praise of critics—from Harold Bloom to Helen Vendler—and the seemingly unanimous admiration of other poets. In 1979 he won the PEN Translation Prize for his version of Eugenio Montale’s The Storm and Other Things; in ’83 he received the National Book Award for Country Music: Selected Early Poems; and in ’95 he was awarded the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Yet nothing

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could have prepared Wright for the laurels heaped upon his 1998 collection Black Zodiac, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Pulitzer. When we talked in his office at the University of Virginia in early June, he was at the end of a nonstop string of interviews, readings, and appearances. All of which makes Wright both pleased and a bit uneasy. When he joined the military and was assigned to a counterintelligence unit in Italy in 1959, poetry was not an avenue for Wright to gain acclaim but rather a ready escape. It wasn’t until a seminal experience in Italy—reading Pound’s ‘‘Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula’’ at the Grotte di Catullo, on Sirmione Peninsula, the very ground where the poem was conceived—that Wright felt the desire to compose poems of his own. Until that time, his life had followed a very different course. He was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, in 1935, and grew up in nearby Kingsport. While attending Davidson College, in North Carolina, he majored in history and planned to enter a career in law or advertising once he completed his military service. But in Italy he read Pound voraciously, using Selected Poems and The Pisan Cantos as his guidebook, and wrote some of his first verses—including the prose poem ‘‘Nocturne,’’ which commemorates his experience on Sirmione. Soon he had pulled together a small batch of poems and sent them to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He attended the workshop from 1961 to ’63, then spent two years in Italy translating Montale on a Fulbright, and returned to Iowa for 1965–’66. Later that year he took a teaching job at the University of California at Irvine, where he remained— apart from a one-year Fulbright lectureship at the University of Padua—until 1983. Since then he has taught creative writing at the University of Virginia, where he holds the Souder Family Professorship. In fall 1998, Farrar, Straus & Giroux released Appalachia, to be followed by a fine-press edition of North American Bear and another Selected volume in spring 2000. With that publication, the thirtyyear project—the ‘‘trilogy of trilogies’’—will come to an end. We will have to wait to see what comes next. What is certain is that Wright’s is among the most interesting projects in contemporary American poetry. Wedding the Whitmanically inclusive free-verse line with the introspection and wit of Emily Dickinson, Wright’s poems are as

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conversational as they are complex. Though he eschews conventional narrative, the forward tug of time dominates. The quotidian acquires its own transcendence; he remains ever mindful of Dante’s assertion that ‘‘the true purpose of and result of poetry is a contemplation of the divine and its attendant mysteries.’’ Without fanfare or pretension Charles Wright addresses those mysteries. Though soft-spoken, his voice is singular and unmistakable. TG: Talk a bit about what drew you to poetry. CW: Well, I had no interest at all until I graduated from college and realized I wouldn’t be able to write prose, because I had tried to write stories and they had all ended up purple: you know, no storyline, no action, no definition of any kind. And I can remember sitting in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters at Ft. Holleburg, Maryland, and being very proud of myself one evening, because everyone else had gone to the bar and I sat home drinking wine and reading a book of Chinese poems—translations I had found somewhere. And I don’t know whether I liked the poems so much or whether I liked the idea of myself staying away from the riffraff and reading a book of Chinese poems as a twentytwo-year-old second lieutenant. Right after that, I remember going to New York on leave for the weekend and buying—since I was interested in poems by that time (in the abstract)—a copy of The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. When I went out to California to the language school, I didn’t have time to do that sort of business. I was studying every night for hours and every weekend, but I still had Pound’s Selected Poems, and I took that to Europe. When I got to Italy, the book of Chinese poems, somewhere in the mists, got lost. In March 1959, two months after I got to Verona, where I was stationed, a friend of mine had borrowed—when he found out that I had it—the Selected Poems of Pound, and he gave it back to me. I told him I was going one afternoon to Lake Garda, and he said, ‘‘Read this poem, ‘Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula,’ because you will be sitting at the end of Sirmione Peninsula on Catullus’s supposed villa.’’ And I did, and I thought it was fabulous. And it didn’t have a storyline; it was a lyric poem. It worked by accretion—it described the landscape; it had interior questions that were unanswerable, the rhetorical questions one tends to ask in one’s life. I thought this was pretty much it, and from then on I got very much

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interested in trying to write poems. Or what I thought were poems. I didn’t know what a poem was. Of course, I’d taken English courses in college, but I never paid much attention to poetry . . . but I started hearing something, and I continued to hear it as I moved through the rest of the Selected Poems. There was an old bookstore on Villa Mazzini where Arni Schweiwiller published finepress books. Al’insignia del Pesce d’Oro: at the sign of the golden fish. That was his logo. Pound was so weird at that time—just one year back from St. Elizabeth’s and living up in Milano— that he would let Schweiwiller, who had a little press in Verona, have the first editions of his poems; then they would go to Faber & Faber, then to New Directions. This little bookstore had these editions of cantos, of odd poems and translations, and it also had commemorative items. So there was access to some Pound material. That was basically how I came to it, and that was the only thing I knew about poetry—which wasn’t enough, of course, but it was a start. I got a tune in my head. And from there I went to Iowa, where I was never officially admitted. I just sort of walked in and started taking classes. No one knew any different, because there were two teachers [Donald Justice and Paul Engle], and each thought the other had taken me in over the summer. It was very loosely run in those days. I think it was actually much more interesting, and I can say that, because I’ve taught in the current one. I realized from the first day that The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound was not going to get me very far in the workshop, and so I had better start reading something else. When you got to Iowa, you began schooling yourself in and writing a lot of formal poetry. Yes, well . . . It was mostly during the three years afterward—two in Italy and then the third year back at Iowa—that I was writing in pentameter and rhyme and meter, trying to get that under some kind of control. At least get a handle on it. I did experiment with that some at Iowa in the first two years, but since everybody else was doing syllabics, hey, why shouldn’t I? I didn’t know anything; I was doing whatever was happening. I was very lucky to be there during the breakup of the ’50s glacier of strict formalism that Iowa had had. There was still enough of that ice around so that I could find out what it was

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about, but people were leaning toward freer movement in their lines. Syllabics were a halfway house. People had been trying to write some free verse, of course, but it was still OK, and even applauded, to write formal meters too. At the same time, people were doing prose poems. It was a good time; a lot of things were going on. The syllabics you began writing, those that appeared in The Grave of the Right Hand, are all either five-syllable or seven-syllable lines. And your lines still have odd syllable counts. Well, except for every once in a great while. What is the appeal of the odd-syllable line? For one thing, I like numbers. I graduated from high school in ’53, college in ’57, and my laundry number in college was 597 . . . There are all these odd numbers. But mostly it was to keep it out of any kind of normal progression, which is to say that if you have even numbers you’re more likely to fall into tetrameter or pentameter. Easier to keep it out—but still have the ghost of it—with the odd, because you get an extra little syllable. The seven-syllable line is still my ur-line even now, thirty-five years later. And my sevensyllable line will stretch to thirteen, another one I like, or fifteen or seventeen, sometimes nineteen, and then back down to as low as three or five. But the seven-syllable line is the one everything starts from—either goes forward from or stays back from. I suppose that’s because once I started doing that I really heard it in my head, and I can’t get it out. Sort of like someone learned pentameter and then did other things, but when they come back without thinking to what a line of poetry sounds like, it always sounds like pentameter. Well, I didn’t have that; I had the seven-syllable line, and it’s close enough to formal meter that it pleases my ear. It makes a musical sound, and even if you stretch it and shrink it, you have this background of formal meters to overlay your conversation on. Not chitchat, but a conversational tone that keeps it from being, you know, ‘‘What hast thou, O my soul, with paradise?’’—the first line of ‘‘Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula,’’ which I thought was so gorgeous at the time. Still OK, but a little Victorian. Pound was, as we all know, the last great Victorian. He threw his body over the barbed wire, and modernism ran up his back and over into no-man’s-land. He was there, looking, but he still got hung up on the wire the rest of his life. Without him modernism wouldn’t have gotten there, but I’m not sure he ever really caught up.

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He was a great Victorian, just like Hopkins. That has nothing to do with what you asked. . . . But it’s interesting, because both Pound and Hopkins seem to have so profoundly influenced your work. I guess it’s sound patterns. I like sound. That’s no secret, and Hopkins was so idiosyncratic and so odd, inimitable, that you can really enjoy him— or dislike him, I suppose, if you’re William Carlos Williams and think he’s taking everything the wrong way—but you can enjoy him without guilt and without fear. Pound is somewhat the same way. I haven’t read him in twenty, twentyfive years. Everybody reads someone a lot in the beginning, and whoever pulls you in sticks with you. And you hope somebody good pulls you in and not somebody bad—somebody you can’t get rid of. So, yes, I was pulled in by an occasionally great poet, someone who’s very interesting and helped shape the way we look at things in this century. I would rather have been pulled in by Pound than by Eliot, even though I admire Eliot’s poems, and I especially like Four Quartets. But I would much rather have been initiated by Pound, because I think the possibilities for exploration are larger. At least in my case, Pound would be expansive and Eliot restrictive. But I didn’t have a choice—I just happened upon Pound; that’s the way it went. I feel fortunate. The statement at the beginning of Appalachia bills it as the completion of a ‘‘trilogy of trilogies.’’ Hard Freight, Bloodline, and China Trace, together with a prologue from The Grave of the Right Hand, became Country Music; then The Southern Cross, The Other Side of the River, and Zone Journals, together with the epilogue Xionia, became The World of the Ten Thousand Things; and now Chickamauga, Black Zodiac, and Appalachia complete the last trilogy. What do you see each of those sequences as doing, and how do they work as a whole? You describe it as a sequence. It’s an odd sequence. All three trilogies do the same thing, and they have essentially the same structure. Past, present, future: yesterday, today, tomorrow. That’s just the guiding—well, it’s not a thought—the guiding sound bite behind the first trilogy, which actually went that way, I think. Then I wanted to technically alter the way I was writing the line in the next group, and I went on other explorations. For instance, I tried to do more narrative in The Other Side of the River; I did longer poems in Zone Journals. And I wanted to bring in other kinds of business, like raising the

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diary form to a higher level of artifice. I don’t know exactly how to say that, but I wanted to make it a more serious form, and I wanted to see what one could do with it in poetry and still have it be entries. So all that was behind the next group of books, but they’re still structured the same way. There’s the past, the present, and the future, but larger. And so is the last one. I still don’t know the name of the last trilogy, but that’s on top of the second trilogy, so you get an inverted pyramid. It’s the same pyramid but larger each time. So, to answer your question, they’re all doing the same thing, which is a kind of radar echo, I suppose, of the Divine Comedy. You know, I don’t even like to bring those words up, but— the way James Merrill had three books in The Changing Light at Sandover, and the way Pound was trying to write one, the way a lot of people do—that’s the thing the sonar is coming back from that you can never see and never approach. That’s why I said Appalachia is not a paradiso, because I seem to be incapable of writing one. Though mentally, perhaps, certainly spiritually, it’s become a book of the dead, because I can give a pep talk to those who might be true believers, which is what most books of the dead are, the Egyptian books of the dead. That’s why it’s the last one, and, I guess, why it was written so quickly in terms of my usual production. Chickamauga took five long years to write, and both Black Zodiac and Appalachia together took three years and four months. I saw the end in sight, I saw the conclusion of what I was trying to do. And when I didn’t do anything for months and months and months, I realized I really was at the end. I wasn’t just kidding myself. I had had something I was trying to do, and I did it, and that was it. Now I can sort of shut up again, I hope. . . . And Appalachia seems to be a conclusion not only to this trilogy but to all of them. There are references throughout to your earlier books. There are things in Appalachia that go all the way back to the first trilogy, particularly China Trace, because that’s its mirror book. That’s on purpose, not because I didn’t know what else to say. That’s why I said the trilogies are all doing the same thing, only differently, more expansively. Some of these poems seem even to look like the earlier poems. There are a number that are completely left-justified, with none of the trademark drop lines.

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I don’t know why. It’s just the way I was hearing it. Maybe once I sped up and saw the end, the lines moved faster. What I’ve been working on since Appalachia is this thing I started in March, and I’m still . . . I have a couple of stanzas, each about six lines, and one or two of them will be dropped. I do know that every once in a while in Appalachia there seems to be a spate of them with not too many drop lines. I don’t know why that is. How do you decide how the poem will move across the page? How do you decide between a drop line and a line break, for example? I don’t have a program for the way I use them. It’s the way I hear them. If it’s coming together and springing, then I’ll drop it down. If it needs to have a little push, I’ll drop it. If it seems to be breaking under its own weight, then I’ll drop it to the next line. If it doesn’t, I let it go. I don’t have any program: ‘‘Out of every five lines one or two must be dropped.’’ It’s not like that. No, but there is an amazing sense of structure in your work—which is surprising, when so much of it seems to be an argument against narrative. Not really. Do you mean professionally or in my own stuff? In your own stuff. I don’t think you’re being dogmatic. But there is a tension between your resistance to narrative and this overarching architecture—in each individual poem and in constructing a twenty-seven-year cycle. And so many of your books move forward in time, in strict allegiance to chronology. Explain the difference, in your mind, between structure and narrative, and between chronology and narrative. Overt narrative tells a story. Covert narrative also tells a story, but in a different language. Everything has a narrative to it; don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I’m no good at storyline. My story is always underneath, always covert. Chronology perhaps is a way of helping move that mole under the ground, and you watch his little pile behind him as he goes. Structure, of course, is my substitute for storytelling. I guess I’d like to be like Robert Frost and spin yarns in beautiful blank verse, but I can’t do it, so I have to make up my own prosody. Out of a deficiency I’ve tried to make a positive thing. And I talk about it so much that people think, ‘‘Even if I don’t like it, at least he knows what he’s doing.’’ But structure long ago became paramount to me in forming my poems, because narrative is not

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going to hold it together. So the way I layered impressions, images, the observations, is key to covert, unspoken narrative, but it was there inevitably. At least I hope it was there, holding it together, because something has to. You can’t just put it in a box and say, ‘‘There’s a structure.’’ That’s what the New Formalists try to do. The Old Formalists built that box, you know? There’s a big difference. So I was trying to build my own box in a different way. That’s why I have this juxtapositional way of putting things together. That works in poems; it would be disastrous in prose. And it is, which is why I don’t seem able to do essays or that sort of thing, because my mind just doesn’t work in those terms. I can get a thought from A to B, but I go circuitously. I can’t go straight to it. I think I’m going straight to it—I’m trying to—and the storyline gets you there, but as I say, it’s always hidden. Like a punji stick underneath the trail. Sometimes you stumble on it, sometimes you don’t. All I can say in answer to that question is that I perceived in my poetic makeup a huge deficit and deficiency, and I’ve tried to make something out of that void. And others are embarked on similar projects. What sets your work apart for me—and David Young points this out—is your sense of humor. It seems when you’re up against the most serious matters in your poems, you’re at your most selfeffacing. It’s not looking directly into the face of the divine. . . . It’s checking out the belt buckle. As I should. That’s true. It would be foolish to take one’s self as seriously as one’s subject matter. I’m really glad that David Young recognized this, because everybody is always saying, ‘‘This guy is so morbid, so somber,’’ and I never thought of it that way. I thought I was talking about serious things, but never in a way that would be ponderous or turgid. In one’s secret self, one comes up against these things; you have to face them, but you also have to realize that you’re just a song-and-dance man. So you had better sing as best you can and shuffle off to Buffalo. And that’s it. But you don’t want to not go in and do it. I don’t know. It’s hard to talk about that. It’s all so much larger than all of us. You have to be careful how ponderous you can start to sound, or no one is going to take you seriously. You can’t sound like Ecclesiastes all the time. In Appalachia, the poem ‘‘Star Turn II’’ opens with the description of the night sky. There

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are a few comparisons, but after it’s compared to a sequined dress, there’s this drop line: ‘‘—hubba, hubba—.’’ My favorite line in my entire works. I knew it from the second I wrote it. But it’s not the sort of interjection we expect to find in contemporary poems, especially not those tackling the sorts of issues you’re taking on. Yes. The seriousness you’re trying to describe is there, but there is also a little levity to make it easier to take. I think ‘‘hubba hubba’’ is witty—actually, I think it’s funny. Most of my stuff tries to be witty. For instance, there’s the line ‘‘Sainthood the bottomless pity’ someone said.’’ Well, I said that, because I thought it was sort of witty and it had to do with what I was getting ready to say. It’s a serious thought, but it’s also humorous. I’m not as funny as Jim Tate, for instance, who is amazingly and continuously funny. As Woody Allen once put it, ‘‘Too much seriousity is a bad thing.’’ So I try not to have too much seriousity. You’ve spent twenty-seven years creating your poetics and writing this trilogy of trilogies. What are you going to do with next twenty-seven years? I really don’t know. Obviously, I’m going to keep writing poems. This spring has been kind of crazy, but I hope everything will settle down and I can get back to work. I obviously will not have this same path or trajectory in mind, so . . . it’s hard, it’s impossible to change what you’re thinking, but I’ve got to come at it in a different way from the journey this project seems to have been on—from the early poems in Country Music to the last poems of Black Zodiac and Appalachia. At least I see a definite arc—a movement with different weaves to it—but the arc is always the same: from the past to the impossible or possible, the improbable or probable future. And that’s good. I did that. Now I’ve got to figure out how to be interesting to myself with the accouterments that I have accrued over the years. And not write the same poems. We’ve all got maybe four or five ideas in our heads our whole lives. We know that, and we all write basic variations of the same handful of poems, because those are what our interests are. If you don’t write what your interests are, it will be a piece of fluff—or worse, a piece of something else. And so I have my concerns and my interests, and I’ll have to figure out a way to reshuffle them and keep on writing poems. I can’t

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turn into an essayist, because I can’t keep the thoughts straight. If I’d had a life, I could have written a memoir. I never got a life; it’s all in my poems. Or all you’re willing to show.

Well, one wants one’s work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author of Black Zodiac. That’s impossible to do, I know. Some people love the spotlight; I like the shadows. I like the spotlight on my work, because that’s what’s important. It’s better-looking and younger and wealthier and more articulate. No, I never have liked the spotlight. I have friends who love it and are great at it. Not me. The attention for the book is wonderful. I’m not sure it’s gotten me more readers, but I’ve got more buyers, and that’s good. So keep those cards and letters coming to the bookstores. Not me. Source: Ted Genoways, ‘‘An Interview with Charles Wright,’’ in Southern Review, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring 2000, pp. 442–52.

David Garrison In the following excerpt, Garrison discusses Charles Wright’s poetics. He makes a case that Wright in his poems is providing artistic examples of human feeling, human feeling about death, and the importance of human feelings. Perhaps first among the handful of projects available to the lyric poet is the effort to uncover and bring to light that which usually remains dark or unformed in our passing experience, to bring into language the feel of life. . . . That ‘‘experience,’’ that ‘‘consciousness,’’ may be understood as the recurrent but always local and historical theme present in the rag-and-bone shop of the heart: that is, how to translate visceral and emotional knowledge, felt thought, into language, and how to make the unseen, that ordinarily invisible backdrop of eternity, seen. The work of contemporary American poet Charles Wright struggles explicitly with this attempt at translation and imagination. His poems are examples of an artistic representation of human feeling, especially human feeling about death and about feeling itself, what Mary Kinzie

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THE LANDSCAPE IS THE HIEROGLYPH OF THE SELF INSCRIBED ON THE BACKDROP OF

Well, yes. One can’t help but notice that you’ve appeared uncomfortable at times this spring, especially at the Pulitzer reception.

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ETERNITY. IT NUDGES ITS TRUTH TOWARD US IN THE LANGUAGE OF THE POEM.’’

refers to as ‘‘the real content of the inner life’’ (63). His work articulates the idea that human feeling is available to knowledge both as an impression made upon the poet’s sensibility and as an impression made by the poet, through the ‘‘architectural’’ construction of texts, upon the world. The study of Wright’s work reveals the role of the image in this translation of emotion into language, and the conceit that image, shaped by the architecture of lyric, may come to function as declarative statement in the exploration of the metaphysical, especially what Wright terms ‘‘the metaphysics of the commonplace, the metaphysics of the quotidian’’ (Halflife, 22). Wright’s imagery illustrates one technique by which the poet may articulate ‘‘the anarchic prodigalities of consciousness and subconsciousness.’’ Poems selected from among his early work help unpack the construction and significance of Wright’s attempt to translate feeling into form by way of the image. Wright began publishing in literary magazines in the 1960s, and his first book, The Grave of the Right Hand, appeared in 1970. Since then he has published an additional nine books, including the recent Chickamauga (1995) and two collections: Country Music (1982) and The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1991), which together include almost every poem published in book form during the previous twenty years. In 1993 he was awarded the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, and was hailed at the time by Poetry editor Joseph Parisi as ‘‘one of the most distinctive voices in American poetry’’ and as a ‘‘master image maker’’ (qtd. in ‘‘News Notes,’’ 246). Helen Vendler, one of the first critics to take note of Wright’s work, has said of his image-packed poems that they ‘‘cluster, aggregate, radiate, add layers like pearls’’ (1). This creation of images is at the heart of Wright’s poetic practice, of his style. This image-making power—imagination—is, according to Wright, ‘‘closely allied to intelligence

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and logic/reasoning (Quarter Notes, 34). The image is the figure upon which he structures and builds. Many of Wright’s early poems read like the tentative but determined exploration of mental and emotional scars, like knowledge gained with one’s fingertips. They display traces of what one might learn from the scrutiny of the non-verbal life, traces of how experience informs our emotional and cognitive knowing. In ‘‘Dog Creek Mainline,’’ for instance, a poem from the early seventies that marks a new diction and tone for Wright as well as the emergence of a more forceful syntax, we find this metaphor: ‘‘[t]he heart is a hieroglyph’’ (Country Music, 37). What the heart ‘‘knows’’ (and from experience has ‘‘inscribed’’ in the mind) can indeed be read and declared, but not easily, its code as hermetic as holy carving across a husk of grain. At the level of emotional response, Wright suggests, is scripted potential, or potential script, given indeed in language, but at first a language other than the mind’s, images of a landscape other than the eye’s—and yet not entirely other. The poet’s work then as Wright’s texts repeatedly make explicit, is to ‘‘read’’ the hieroglyphs of human feeling, to translate them into human discourse, to transcribe them into textuality. The poem is an attempt to render out of one code and into another a complex, simultaneously social and private series of scars, tattoos, traces. As James McCorkle would have it, there are languages the world uses to write (on) us, and then, subsequently, ‘‘writing is the place of the transference of the world’s languages into our discourse’’ (110). This take-and-give is not ‘‘emotionally recollected in tranquility,’’ exactly, but emotion as tactile hieroglyph translated first from sensibility into ‘‘sense’’ and then transcribed into sound and image, into melody against rhythm, into a fresh cognitive activity meant to generate, a literacy of emotion and felt thought. As Wright himself put it, speaking of ‘‘Dog Creek Mainline,’’ such a poem is ‘‘about memory and how we change memory, how memory changes and memory becomes imagination. And imagination becomes language’’ (Rubin and Heynen, 36; also qtd. in Collins, 465). Memory, in the poet’s practice, becomes image, which must then be lined out through the poem, a known but perhaps densely attenuated code, in language: ‘‘We cannot,’’ writes Steiner, ‘‘save metaphorically, ask in words of that which may lie before words’’ (55). Wright’s way of working out this translation is in the tracing of such pre-verbal scars. What they conjure in their immediate language is

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another not-so-immediate one. ‘‘There are birds that are parts of speech,’’ says the poet in ‘‘Hardin County,’’ a poem on the death of his father (Country Music, 77). A metaphor, yes, but not merely that; as with much of Wright’s work, apparent metaphor eventually unfolds itself to reveal declarative statement. ‘‘Birds’’ is a part of speech, clearly, for to speak or write birds is to name them, to encode them, to situate them syntactically and linguistically, to render them verbal rather than physical. But it is also to remove them from themselves as birds, to translate them, through the peculiarly human tools and practice of language, into a categorical articulation of perception and felt thought. Moreover, the statement suggests the inverse of what has happened to Wright’s father, that now ineffable self transfigured into image, into ‘‘a grain of salt in the salt snow.’’ A poem such as ‘‘Hardin County’’ is possible in the same way that pain is possible: the practice of language makes available the construction of verbal meaning from instances (seamless and otherwise) of feeling and knowing—hieroglyphs of the heart. The poem is the attempt to render those hieroglyphs into meaning. In ‘‘Two Stories,’’ first collected in The Other Side of the River (1984), Wright makes a deliberate and confident return to the past, to the presentation of two emblematic, hieroglyphic traces or scars that help identify the self, that recognize the self while it goes about constructing itself and/or having itself constructed. The poem begins with a Coleridgean, loco-meditative maneuver: the speaker, alone, looks out upon an evening above the Pacific. What he sees there, the pulsing of lights along the shore, calls up traces of similar seeing from his past; he is driven back into childhood, back into the Appalachian Mountains, back into memory by memory. ‘‘The past,’’ he writes, ‘‘with its arduous edges and blind sides,’’ is marked by identifiable traces of what we were and what we are. Memory through the technique of image encoded in language constructs the past; memory, the poem teaches us, constructs memory. One of the two stories, ‘‘a story I swear is true,’’ presents Wright as an eleven-year old who sleepwalks on a camping trip only to be awakened at cliff’s edge by ‘‘the breathing side of a bear.’’ Suddenly, ‘‘truly awake in the throbbing world,’’ he turns away from the bear and the cliff to return, without looking back, to his tent. The

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memory, this trace of memory, is then packed away: . . . I went to sleep And never told anyone Till years later when I thought I knew what it meant, which now I’ve forgot. (76) The scar, the sensible impression made by the tactile experience, is not gone; it can still be traced, fingered, attended to, re-presented. Its meaning, however, cannot; the analytic maneuver necessary to ‘‘explain’’ the event is not the event itself. The poetic maneuver, on the other hand, is one particular trace of the event, one tracing of the scar, one representation. The narrative tracing this story is image-strong; if one doesn’t remember the language, one does remember the elements of the scene: the boy, the tent, the bear, the cliff, the rhododendron. And yet curiously, more than half the narrative is constructed not directly from memory, but from logic. Based on the empirical information available to him upon waking (cliff’s edge, bear’s side) as memory, the speaker constructs a narrative to ‘‘explain’’ his arrival at that point. His explanation is marked by phrases like ‘‘apparently’’ and ‘‘it appears.’’ He uses inference to construct the line or trace of his steps, to lead up to the site of memory’s scar, the source and moment of sensation. The second story—‘‘this one is questionable’’— is even more quickly presented. Its ‘‘questionable’’ status is the result of the fact that it’s a piece of hearsay, ‘‘sworn to me by an old friend.’’ (Note the repeated emphasis on the sworn quality of the words used to convey both stories.) This one ends with a physical image: an old friend, having killed a rattlesnake in the morning, puts it in a sack and then leaves it in the back of his jeep. After a day’s work he remembers the snake: That evening he started to show the snake To someone, and put his hand in the sack to pull it out. As he reached in, the snake’s stump struck him. His wrist was bruised for a week. (World, 77) Very southern, very folksy, but also very emblematic. One secret of poetry is pain, the visceral bruise to the heart; and these stories become interesting in any thought about Wright’s poetic when one observes the use he makes of them in the

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context of ‘‘Two Stories’’: how to think about mortality. A story about a surreal memory from childhood, a memory of how precarious one’s life is, always, and another (once removed through the retelling) of the power of a dead thing to strike out and wound, to bruise, to mark us. Wright’s thinking about mortality is even more apparent in the poems collected in China Trace (1977), about which Wright has said that ‘‘each individual poem was a chapter in an ongoing story about a character who went from childhood to his demise and inscription in the heaven of the fixed stars’’ (Quarter Notes, 115). The brief lyric ‘‘Snow’’ appears as the second poem in China Trace and immediately strikes a mixed tone of resolve, wit, and preoccupation with final things. What at first appears to be serviceable image (deep or surreal) turns out to be declarative statement, rich with overtones of interrogation and ambiguity, presented as material fact. J.D. McClatchy has said that the ‘‘rationalistic logic [of the poem] is used to set up an improbable situation’’ (33), but this is only true at first glance, for logic is not the ultimate engine that drives the poem. Instead, what seems an image, a metaphor, an improbability—rising dust, wind and cloud, ourselves as snow—proves in the unpacking to be declarative: we will become and in fact already are things that fall, that ‘‘snow.’’ But the declarative nature of the statement is suspect, teased in and out of meaning by the tension among syntax, line, and anticipated cultural value: If we, as we are, are dust, and dust, as it will, rises, Then we will rise, and recongregate In the wind, in the cloud, and be their issue, Things in a fall in a world of fall, and slip Through the spiked branches and snapped joints of the evergreens, White ants, white ants and the little ribs. (Country Music, 112) ‘‘Snow’’ is a delicate instruction in the counterpoint between lineation and syntax in the service of the image. The tension generated in the give and take of its single sentence will encourage the formalist to seek resolution and closure. McClatchy, for example, in his attempt to affirm Wright’s control and the unity of the text, claims that ‘‘[t]he poem’s rhetoric is its true binding agent’’ (33), a chemical metaphor

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suggesting that we read the poem for its ‘‘solution.’’ On the contrary, the tensions the poem generates may instead be entertained as opening possible, multiple significations, a plurality of statements encoded in syntax and diction, and aided—not resolved—line by line, image by image: dust, wind, cloud, branches and joints, white ants, little ribs. The dissonance in reading ‘‘Snow’’ is apparent in the first five words. The opening conditional ‘‘If we’’ is immediately rendered unconditional in the following phrase, ‘‘as we are.’’ Or is it? We may read this phrase as removing the condition (of course we are, so whatever follows is), or as asserting a second condition, i.e., that the consequences of the first condition—which we haven’t actually come to yet, have we?—are valid only if we remain fully aware that we are limited to discussing ourselves only as we are, without illusion. And the illusion we must reject in our construction of meaning is the old one, that we are anything more than biology and chemistry. In its six lines marked by balance and counterpoint, its single sentence scored across two tercets of 29 words each, ‘‘Snow’’ reiterates the fall and rise of the (Christian) body, but the lyrics don’t sing (or sign) the old belief; instead, words powder into an unsignifying thingness, and then, like all things, fall—through the poem, through our visual experience of the temporal reading, and through the illusions of cultural Christian coding, coating everything finally in white (space). The ‘‘argument’’ of the poem is located in Wright’s manipulation of images: if we are but dust, and if dust rises, then we will rise. So far so good, and a nicely logical and relatively comfortable doxology for one trained—as Wright was— as an Episcopalian altar boy; yet, despite the biblical imagery and the allusion to the Platonic Wordsworth, this rising is material, not spiritual. Having risen, we become not metaphysical, but the material ‘‘issue’’ of cloud and wind, and as that issue we are named (in this the poem’s first apposition), things that fall. Two reversals of expectation occur: the culturally coded yearning for the transcendent escape of the soul is dismissed. In its place comes a variation on the law of the conservation of matter. Our collective ascension in the first tercet (physical though it be) becomes that which is necessary for the inevitable fall, ‘‘a world of fall,’’ fallen and falling. Helen Vendler remarks that ‘‘Wright persistently imagines himself dead, dispersed, re-elemented

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into the natural order’’ (7). Here we must read ourselves into this re-elemented order to encounter our fate. ‘‘Noon,’’ a later poem in the China Trace volume, is a strong, brief example of this poetic that offers the image as a technique to articulate what one gathers through the feel of ontology, of being-in-the-world, and what one surmises about its potential meaningfulness. ‘‘Half the poem,’’ says Wright, ‘‘is about the physical, the other half is about the probable interior landscape. . . . I don’t think that the interior landscape is any less real than the exterior landscape’’ (Halflife, 104). Made of three balanced stanzas of four lines each, some of which are quite long (up to eighteen syllables), the poem’s exploration of just where the speaker fits into the cosmos carries a subtle reminder of Dante and promises (however ironically) something hopeful, since it is at noon that the Paradiso begins. Yet noon is also of course, in American mythology at least, high time for a shootout. Clearly, something serious and yet self-aware, is at stake. The first stanza illustrates Wright’s willingness to allow ‘‘the physical world . . . to jumpstart the imagination’’ (Quarter Notes, 27); it begins the poem’s succinct move from image to metaphor to statement of belief: I look up at the black bulge of the sky and its belt of stars, And know I can answer to nothing in all that shine, Desire being ash, and not remembered or brought back by the breath, Scattered beneath the willow’s fall, a figure of speech. . . . (Country Music, 145) Like innumerable poems in the romantic tradition before it, ‘‘Noon’’ begins with a speaker looking out at the world, or in this case at the sky, and experiencing the ‘‘jump-start’’ of imagination. But almost immediately, as in ‘‘Snow,’’ while appearing to make direct observation, the language slips from description into double entendre and declaration. ‘‘I can answer to nothing in all that shine’’ may be read as ‘‘I am nothing, ultimately, in the great black shine of cosmology,’’ or, inversely, ‘‘I can answer to nothing, and I do, and this is it.’’ The bright noon light of the poem then falls, without shadow, on the second stanza and the third, in which Wright admits, ‘‘that what I have asked for cannot be granted, that what / Is waiting for me is laced in my 2 shoes. . . . ’’ He accepts,

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in the clarity of all that he senses, that he will one day make his ‘‘slow rise through the dark toward the sweet wrists of the rose.’’ Wright articulates here his own desire (being ash, even so) not only to recognize himself against the vast horizon of time and space—the distinct but vanishing trace of a conceptualized self against a Chinese landscape—but also to create and even name the backdrop of his own life, Crane’s sub specie aeternitatis, and to recognize it now. But the clearest answer against the question of nothingness inherent in the world, raised obliquely in ‘‘Noon,’’ comes in the long, opening poem to The Southern Cross, published in 1981, ‘‘Homage to Paul Ce´zanne.’’ This poem is a meditative, incantatory susurration on the theme of how the unsayable gets said. Its title is significant because, though the poem is not ‘‘about’’ Ce´zanne in any didactic or elegiac sense, it nevertheless signals Wright’s preoccupation with Ce´zanne’s technique and vision, not unlike his own, a technique and vision Bruce Bond refers to as the painter’s attempt to bring into the viewer’s consciousness ‘‘both the immanence of sensation and the seduction of the unseen’’ (264). Like ‘‘Noon’’ as well as ‘‘Snow,’’ ‘‘Homage to Paul Ce´zanne’’ is a structurally balanced poem in which variation within the limits of repetition is a primary value. It is composed of 128 lines laced across eight sections of 16 lines each. Wright alters the stanzaic arrangement within each section so that we never encounter the same pattern twice; we are confronted as it were with the same subject in a variety of mirrors, or different arrangements of color generated through a prism—the same light, perhaps, but its result from a different angle. The first section, for example, is made of four stanzas of, in order, six lines, another six, three, then one; the second is made of four quatrains; the third of two octets; the fourth of eight couplets, and so on. In its opening stanza, ‘‘Homage to Paul Ce´zanne’’ pulls us immediately into the thematic exploration of the relationship between image and word, the pre-verbal and language, the seen and the unseen. Its first three lines, Wright has explained, began after he observed from his window pieces of white paper in a field. The next three lines ratchet up the poem from image toward idea: At night, in the fish light of the moon, the dead wear our white shirts To stay warm, and litter the fields.

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We pick them up in the mornings, dewy pieces of paper and scraps of cloth. Like us, they refract themselves. Like us, They keep on saying the same thing, trying to get it right. Like us, the water unsettles their names. The crucial word is ‘‘refract.’’ Like us, the dead refract themselves. How we make the self present to the self, how we come to the world and say it, how we articulate feeling through form, are acts of neither reflection nor translucence, but of refraction, a process in which experienced felt thought is inevitably distorted by the medium into which it passes. In this case, the medium is words, which, like the dead, we ‘‘keep on saying . . . , trying to get it right (i.e., to get it ‘‘written,’’ and in this case, to make it ‘‘Wright’’). What gets refracted through the poem is one visceral and emotional way of knowing mortality, the felt apprehension of death broken up into constructed verbal units, image-driven lines, verses that turn and angle our pre-verbal selves through their representation in words. And the words themselves are the cause of this refraction, the difficulty we have in saying that which isn’t easily translated into consciousness. The first section of ‘‘Homage to Paul Ce´zanne’’ ends with a cluster of images that present Wright’s recurrent motif, that the physical image is a means of getting at the nonphysical: They reach up from the ice plant. They shuttle their messengers through the oat grass. Their answers rise like rest on the stalks and the spidery leaves. We rub them off our hands. With these lines we are alerted to the primary conceit of the poem, that the unseen, that which we are unable overtly to bring over into consciousness, may be apprehended, if at all, through attention to the seen. The image, especially the image made from the apparent world, and especially as it is pressed toward metaphor, provides a code other than the logical code of ‘‘rational’’ knowing. In his comments on another artist, Giorgio Morandi, Wright provides a clue to his own technique; speaking of two pencil drawings, he says, ‘‘[i]n both, the windows into the invisible are lit; in both, what is not there is at least as powerful and tactile as what is . . . They

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are full of wonder and singularity, lifeline to the unseen’’ (Halflife, 9). The opening lines of the second section of ‘‘Homage’’ make this motif or conceit explicit: ‘‘Each year the dead grow less dead, and nudge / Close to the surface of all things’’ (4). Again, as in ‘‘Snow,’’ with its revelatory ‘‘things that fall,’’ and ‘‘Noon,’’ in which Wright projects his own inevitable ‘‘rise . . . toward the sweet wrists of the rose,’’ here too that which at first appears to be merely image and then metaphor, turns out to be statement: the dead do, through the most normal of organic processes, ‘‘nudge / Close to the surface’’ of the physical world, and become it. This interwoven relationship between image and language is made even more explicit in the second stanza of this section. The nostalgia linking the word to the world is here parodied, but gently. For the dead, words, as they do in ‘‘Snow,’’ have powdered into thingness. Language itself is explicitly imaged as physical, not cognitive: Their glasses let loose, and grain by grain return to the river bank. They point to their favorite words Growing around them, revealed as themselves for the first time: They stand close to the meanings and take them in. The dead, translated as they are into rocks, and stones, and trees, do ‘‘take in,’’ or perhaps take on, the ‘‘meanings’’ about them, grain by grain; in short, they become (the meaning of) the world. By the fourth section, we arrive at lines that place us in the poem and that line out the separation between us and the dead: ‘‘We layer them [the dead] in. We squint hard and terrace them line by line’’ (6). This section draws out the very thin line between what the dead represent—the unseen, the white space—and what we are—the seen, the fussy business of text. There are echoes here of ‘‘Noon’’ and ‘‘Dog Creek Mainline’’: And so we are come between, and cry out, And stare up at the sky and its cloudy panes, And finger the cypress twists. The dead understand all this, and keep in touch, Rustle of hand to hand in the lemon trees,

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Flags, and the great sifts of anger To powder and nothingness. The dead are a cadmium blue, and they understand. To know everything, Wright suggests, is to know nothing, . . . to know nothing. In section six the voice of the poem imagines the dead indoors, lifting us—or lifting consciousness—free from the body, making of us ‘‘what we’ve longed for . . . [a] song without words.’’ But this transcendence is truly imaginary, a wishful construction of this same consciousness that images itself free, for, at the point of some near-death crossing over, the consciousness must re-enter the body, ‘‘Only to hear that it’s not time. / Only to hear that we must re-enter and lie still, our arms at rest at our sides, / The voices rising around us like mist //And dew, it’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right. . . . ’’ (8). Again, the double pun: getting it all into writing, getting all this Wright. In the seventh section, we are returned again to the landscape, where ‘‘[t]he dead fall around us like rain,’’ and where, having been made aware of the presence of the unseen in all the ordinary things of the world, we begin to recognize in those things even ourselves: ‘‘High in the night sky the mirror is hauled up and unsheeted. / In it we twist like stars’’ (9). This is who we are. We are this. Our consciousness of the night sky is the night sky. The night sky, because it is our consciousness, is who we are. What we see, a heaven full of stars, is what we appear to be. In the final section of the poem, this sense of the self as landscape and landscape as the self, this motif—that we come to know the unseen by attending to the seen—comes to fruition. Wright has said, ‘‘I would like to become the mental landscape that I write about’’ (Halflife, 103). In section eight of ‘‘Homage to Paul Ce´zanne’’ this translation has occurred. We are dead: We’re out here, our feet in the soil, our heads craned up at the sky, The stars streaming and bursting behind the trees. The landscape is the hieroglyph of the self inscribed on the backdrop of eternity. It nudges its truth toward us in the language of the poem: What we are given in dreams we write as blue paint, Or messages to the clouds.

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At evening we wait for the rain to fall and the sky to clear. Our words are words for the clay, uttered in undertones, Our gestures salve for the wind.

Henry, Brian, ‘‘New Scaffolding for New Arrangements: Charles Wright’s Low Riders,’’ in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 80, No. 2, Spring 2004, p. 105.

We sit out on the earth and stretch our limbs, Hoarding the little mounds of sorrow laid up in our hearts. The code in question is a code we know, and come to read, by heart.

Seaman, Donna, Review of Buffalo Yoga, in Booklist, Vol. 100, No. 14, March 15, 2004, p. 1259.

It is helpful to remember, as Keats knew and as Bond reminds us, ‘‘sensation serves as a condition of consciousness’’ (265). Wright’s poetry, Bond observes, in a statement that might be applied to any strong lyric poet, is ‘‘an effort to enlarge our range of feeling, to contain and be vitalized by contradiction’’ (269). When image is pressed or compressed into metaphor it is of course a form of contradiction, words and their subsequent images juxtaposed to generate a fresh, intuitive, and intellectual understanding. But the job for the poet is to get from sensation to words, from feeling to form. ‘‘All poems,’’ says Wright, ‘‘are translations’’ (Halflife, 33), and especially so, he would add, since the liberation, hastened by modernism, of the word from the world. The work of the poet is to pit technique against that which resists saying. For Wright, the answer lies in image, manipulated through syntax. His images, like Morandi’s windows, attempt to shine a light into the darkness, to compose a code by which to read the hieroglyphs of the heart. Source: David Garrison, ‘‘From Feeling to Form: Image as Translation in the Poetry of Charles Wright,’’ in Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, Autumn 1999, pp. 33–47.

SOURCES Arnold, Tim, ‘‘‘U.Va. Profiles’: Charles Wright’s Interior Landscape,’’ in UVAToday, February 4, 2008, http:// www.virginia.edu/uvatoday (accessed October 31, 2009). Costello, Bonnie, ‘‘Charles Wright’s Via Negativa: Language, Landscape, and the Idea of God,’’ in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 42, No. 2, Summer 2001, p. 329. Garrison, David, ‘‘From Feeling to Form: Image as Translation in the Poetry of Charles Wright,’’ in Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, Fall 1999, pp. 33, 45, 46. Hammer, Langdon, ‘‘The Latches of Paradise: Charles Wright,’’ in American Scholar, Vol. 74, No. 4, Fall 2005, p. 74.

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Rand, Richard, Review of Buffalo Yoga, in Harvard Review, No. 27, 2004, pp. 203–204, 205.

Spiegelman, Willard, ‘‘Charles Wright and ‘The Metaphysics of the Quotidian,’’’ in How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 84. ———, ‘‘Landscape and Identity: Charles Wright’s Backyard Metaphysics,’’ in Southern Review, Vol. 40, No. 1, Winter 2004, pp. 180, 187, 188. T’u Lung, Epigraph, in Charles Wright, China Trace, Wesleyan University Press, 1977. Wright, Charles, Quarter Notes, University of Michigan Press, 1996, p. 123. ———, ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All Things’’ in Buffalo Yoga, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, p. 45.

FURTHER READING Denham, Robert D., Charles Wright: A Companion to the Late Poetry, 1988–2007, McFarland, 2007. This work is a reader’s guide to seven volumes of Wright’s poetry, including Buffalo Yoga. The book provides commentary and background information on each of 230 poems. Denham, Robert D., Charles Wright in Conversation: Interviews, 1979–2006, McFarland, 2008. In this collection of interviews, accompanied by an extensive bibliography, Wright discusses a broad spectrum of subjects, including his career, techniques, and style. Giannelli, Adam, High Lonesome: On the Poetry of Charles Wright, Oberlin College Press, 2006. This collection of fifteen essays pays particular attention to the trilogy of trilogies, including reviews of individual books. MacGowan, Christopher, Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004. Designed for students, this guide covers historical and social contexts, provides a biographical dictionary of major writers, and discusses themes, movements, and the situation of the arts during the twentieth century. Moffett, Joe, Understanding Charles Wright, University of South Carolina Press, 2008. This study discusses Wright’s books and themes, especially the trilogies, and his spiritual engagement with the landscape.

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Glossary of Literary Terms A Abstract: Used as a noun, the term refers to a short summary or outline of a longer work. As an adjective applied to writing or literary works, abstract refers to words or phrases that name things not knowable through the five senses. Accent: The emphasis or stress placed on a syllable in poetry. Traditional poetry commonly uses patterns of accented and unaccented syllables (known as feet) that create distinct rhythms. Much modern poetry uses less formal arrangements that create a sense of freedom and spontaneity.

its inner qualities as a created object, or what it ‘‘is.’’ Age of Johnson: The period in English literature between 1750 and 1798, named after the most prominent literary figure of the age, Samuel Johnson. Works written during this time are noted for their emphasis on ‘‘sensibility,’’ or emotional quality. These works formed a transition between the rational works of the Age of Reason, or Neoclassical period, and the emphasis on individual feelings and responses of the Romantic period. Age of Reason: See Neoclassicism

Aestheticism: A literary and artistic movement of the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement believed that art should not be mixed with social, political, or moral teaching. The statement ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ is a good summary of aestheticism. The movement had its roots in France, but it gained widespread importance in England in the last half of the nineteenth century, where it helped change the Victorian practice of including moral lessons in literature.

Age of Sensibility: See Age of Johnson

Affective Fallacy: An error in judging the merits or faults of a work of literature. The ‘‘error’’ results from stressing the importance of the work’s effect upon the reader—that is, how it makes a reader ‘‘feel’’ emotionally, what it does as a literary work—instead of stressing

Allegory: A narrative technique in which characters representing things or abstract ideas are used to convey a message or teach a lesson. Allegory is typically used to teach moral, ethical, or religious lessons but is sometimes used for satiric or political purposes.

Agrarians: A group of Southern American writers of the 1930s and 1940s who fostered an economic and cultural program for the South based on agriculture, in opposition to the industrial society of the North. The term can refer to any group that promotes the value of farm life and agricultural society. Alexandrine Meter: See Meter

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Alliteration: A poetic device where the first consonant sounds or any vowel sounds in words or syllables are repeated. Allusion: A reference to a familiar literary or historical person or event, used to make an idea more easily understood. Amerind Literature: The writing and oral traditions of Native Americans. Native American literature was originally passed on by word of mouth, so it consisted largely of stories and events that were easily memorized. Amerind prose is often rhythmic like poetry because it was recited to the beat of a ceremonial drum. Analogy: A comparison of two things made to explain something unfamiliar through its similarities to something familiar, or to prove one point based on the acceptedness of another. Similes and metaphors are types of analogies. Anapest: See Foot Angry Young Men: A group of British writers of the 1950s whose work expressed bitterness and disillusionment with society. Common to their work is an anti-hero who rebels against a corrupt social order and strives for personal integrity. Anthropomorphism: The presentation of animals or objects in human shape or with human characteristics. The term is derived from the Greek word for ‘‘human form.’’ Antimasque: See Masque Antithesis: The antithesis of something is its direct opposite. In literature, the use of antithesis as a figure of speech results in two statements that show a contrast through the balancing of two opposite ideas. Technically, it is the second portion of the statement that is defined as the ‘‘antithesis’’; the first portion is the ‘‘thesis.’’ Apocrypha: Writings tentatively attributed to an author but not proven or universally accepted to be their works. The term was originally applied to certain books of the Bible that were not considered inspired and so were not included in the ‘‘sacred canon.’’ Apollonian and Dionysian: The two impulses believed to guide authors of dramatic tragedy. The Apollonian impulse is named after Apollo, the Greek god of light and beauty and the symbol of intellectual order. The

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Dionysian impulse is named after Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and the symbol of the unrestrained forces of nature. The Apollonian impulse is to create a rational, harmonious world, while the Dionysian is to express the irrational forces of personality. Apostrophe: A statement, question, or request addressed to an inanimate object or concept or to a nonexistent or absent person. Archetype: The word archetype is commonly used to describe an original pattern or model from which all other things of the same kind are made. This term was introduced to literary criticism from the psychology of Carl Jung. It expresses Jung’s theory that behind every person’s ‘‘unconscious,’’ or repressed memories of the past, lies the ‘‘collective unconscious’’ of the human race: memories of the countless typical experiences of our ancestors. These memories are said to prompt illogical associations that trigger powerful emotions in the reader. Often, the emotional process is primitive, even primordial. Archetypes are the literary images that grow out of the ‘‘collective unconscious.’’ They appear in literature as incidents and plots that repeat basic patterns of life. They may also appear as stereotyped characters. Argument: The argument of a work is the author’s subject matter or principal idea. Art for Art’s Sake: See Aestheticism Assonance: The repetition of similar vowel sounds in poetry. Audience: The people for whom a piece of literature is written. Authors usually write with a certain audience in mind, for example, children, members of a religious or ethnic group, or colleagues in a professional field. The term ‘‘audience’’ also applies to the people who gather to see or hear any performance, including plays, poetry readings, speeches, and concerts. Automatic Writing: Writing carried out without a preconceived plan in an effort to capture every random thought. Authors who engage in automatic writing typically do not revise their work, preferring instead to preserve the revealed truth and beauty of spontaneous expression. Avant-garde: A French term meaning ‘‘vanguard.’’ It is used in literary criticism to

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describe new writing that rejects traditional approaches to literature in favor of innovations in style or content.

B Ballad: A short poem that tells a simple story and has a repeated refrain. Ballads were originally intended to be sung. Early ballads, known as folk ballads, were passed down through generations, so their authors are often unknown. Later ballads composed by known authors are called literary ballads. Baroque: A term used in literary criticism to describe literature that is complex or ornate in style or diction. Baroque works typically express tension, anxiety, and violent emotion. The term ‘‘Baroque Age’’ designates a period in Western European literature beginning in the late sixteenth century and ending about one hundred years later. Works of this period often mirror the qualities of works more generally associated with the label ‘‘baroque’’ and sometimes feature elaborate conceits. Baroque Age: See Baroque Baroque Period: See Baroque Beat Generation: See Beat Movement Beat Movement: A period featuring a group of American poets and novelists of the 1950s and 1960s—including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti— who rejected established social and literary values. Using such techniques as stream of consciousness writing and jazz-influenced free verse and focusing on unusual or abnormal states of mind—generated by religious ecstasy or the use of drugs—the Beat writers aimed to create works that were unconventional in both form and subject matter. Beat Poets: See Beat Movement Beats, The: See Beat Movement Belles- lettres: A French term meaning ‘‘fine letters’’ or ‘‘beautiful writing.’’ It is often used as a synonym for literature, typically referring to imaginative and artistic rather than scientific or expository writing. Current usage sometimes restricts the meaning to light or humorous writing and appreciative essays about literature. Black Aesthetic Movement: A period of artistic and literary development among African

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Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s. This was the first major African-American artistic movement since the Harlem Renaissance and was closely paralleled by the civil rights and black power movements. The black aesthetic writers attempted to produce works of art that would be meaningful to the black masses. Key figures in black aesthetics included one of its founders, poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones; poet and essayist Haki R. Madhubuti, formerly Don L. Lee; poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez; and dramatist Ed Bullins. Black Arts Movement: See Black Aesthetic Movement Black Comedy: See Black Humor Black Humor: Writing that places grotesque elements side by side with humorous ones in an attempt to shock the reader, forcing him or her to laugh at the horrifying reality of a disordered world. Black Mountain School: Black Mountain College and three of its instructors—Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson—were all influential in projective verse, so poets working in projective verse are now referred as members of the Black Mountain school. Blank Verse: Loosely, any unrhymed poetry, but more generally, unrhymed iambic pentameter verse (composed of lines of five twosyllable feet with the first syllable accented, the second unaccented). Blank verse has been used by poets since the Renaissance for its flexibility and its graceful, dignified tone. Bloomsbury Group: A group of English writers, artists, and intellectuals who held informal artistic and philosophical discussions in Bloomsbury, a district of London, from around 1907 to the early 1930s. The Bloomsbury Group held no uniform philosophical beliefs but did commonly express an aversion to moral prudery and a desire for greater social tolerance. Bon Mot: A French term meaning ‘‘good word.’’ A bon mot is a witty remark or clever observation. Breath Verse: See Projective Verse Burlesque: Any literary work that uses exaggeration to make its subject appear ridiculous, either by treating a trivial subject with

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profound seriousness or by treating a dignified subject frivolously. The word ‘‘burlesque’’ may also be used as an adjective, as in ‘‘burlesque show,’’ to mean ‘‘striptease act.’’

C Cadence: The natural rhythm of language caused by the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. Much modern poetry— notably free verse—deliberately manipulates cadence to create complex rhythmic effects.

‘‘Characterization’’ is the process by which an author creates vivid, believable characters in a work of art. This may be done in a variety of ways, including (1) direct description of the character by the narrator; (2) the direct presentation of the speech, thoughts, or actions of the character; and (3) the responses of other characters to the character. The term ‘‘character’’ also refers to a form originated by the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus that later became popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is a short essay or sketch of a person who prominently displays a specific attribute or quality, such as miserliness or ambition.

Caesura: A pause in a line of poetry, usually occurring near the middle. It typically corresponds to a break in the natural rhythm or sense of the line but is sometimes shifted to create special meanings or rhythmic effects.

Characterization: See Character

Canzone: A short Italian or Provencal lyric poem, commonly about love and often set to music. The canzone has no set form but typically contains five or six stanzas made up of seven to twenty lines of eleven syllables each. A shorter, five- to ten-line ‘‘envoy,’’ or concluding stanza, completes the poem.

Classical: In its strictest definition in literary criticism, classicism refers to works of ancient Greek or Roman literature. The term may also be used to describe a literary work of recognized importance (a ‘‘classic’’) from any time period or literature that exhibits the traits of classicism.

Carpe Diem: A Latin term meaning ‘‘seize the day.’’ This is a traditional theme of poetry, especially lyrics. A carpe diem poem advises the reader or the person it addresses to live for today and enjoy the pleasures of the moment. Catharsis: The release or purging of unwanted emotions—specifically fear and pity—brought about by exposure to art. The term was first used by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics to refer to the desired effect of tragedy on spectators. Celtic Renaissance: A period of Irish literary and cultural history at the end of the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement aimed to create a romantic vision of Celtic myth and legend. The most significant works of the Celtic Renaissance typically present a dreamy, unreal world, usually in reaction against the reality of contemporary problems.

Classicism: A term used in literary criticism to describe critical doctrines that have their roots in ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and art. Works associated with classicism typically exhibit restraint on the part of the author, unity of design and purpose, clarity, simplicity, logical organization, and respect for tradition. Colloquialism: A word, phrase, or form of pronunciation that is acceptable in casual conversation but not in formal, written communication. It is considered more acceptable than slang.

Celtic Twilight: See Celtic Renaissance

Complaint: A lyric poem, popular in the Renaissance, in which the speaker expresses sorrow about his or her condition. Typically, the speaker’s sadness is caused by an unresponsive lover, but some complaints cite other sources of unhappiness, such as poverty or fate.

Character: Broadly speaking, a person in a literary work. The actions of characters are what constitute the plot of a story, novel, or poem. There are numerous types of characters, ranging from simple, stereotypical figures to intricate, multifaceted ones. In the techniques of anthropomorphism and personification, animals—and even places or things—can assume aspects of character.

Conceit: A clever and fanciful metaphor, usually expressed through elaborate and extended comparison, that presents a striking parallel between two seemingly dissimilar things— for example, elaborately comparing a beautiful woman to an object like a garden or the sun. The conceit was a popular device throughout the Elizabethan Age and Baroque Age and was the principal technique of

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the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets. This usage of the word conceit is unrelated to the best-known definition of conceit as an arrogant attitude or behavior. Concrete: Concrete is the opposite of abstract, and refers to a thing that actually exists or a description that allows the reader to experience an object or concept with the senses. Concrete Poetry: Poetry in which visual elements play a large part in the poetic effect. Punctuation marks, letters, or words are arranged on a page to form a visual design: a cross, for example, or a bumblebee. Confessional Poetry: A form of poetry in which the poet reveals very personal, intimate, sometimes shocking information about himself or herself. Connotation: The impression that a word gives beyond its defined meaning. Connotations may be universally understood or may be significant only to a certain group. Consonance: Consonance occurs in poetry when words appearing at the ends of two or more verses have similar final consonant sounds but have final vowel sounds that differ, as with ‘‘stuff’’ and ‘‘off.’’ Convention: Any widely accepted literary device, style, or form. Corrido: A Mexican ballad. Couplet: Two lines of poetry with the same rhyme and meter, often expressing a complete and self-contained thought. Criticism: The systematic study and evaluation of literary works, usually based on a specific method or set of principles. An important part of literary studies since ancient times, the practice of criticism has given rise to numerous theories, methods, and ‘‘schools,’’ sometimes producing conflicting, even contradictory, interpretations of literature in general as well as of individual works. Even such basic issues as what constitutes a poem or a novel have been the subject of much criticism over the centuries.

D Dactyl: See Foot Dadaism: A protest movement in art and literature founded by Tristan Tzara in 1916. Followers of the movement expressed their outrage at the destruction brought about by

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World War I by revolting against numerous forms of social convention. The Dadaists presented works marked by calculated madness and flamboyant nonsense. They stressed total freedom of expression, commonly through primitive displays of emotion and illogical, often senseless, poetry. The movement ended shortly after the war, when it was replaced by surrealism. Decadent: See Decadents Decadents: The followers of a nineteenth-century literary movement that had its beginnings in French aestheticism. Decadent literature displays a fascination with perverse and morbid states; a search for novelty and sensation—the ‘‘new thrill’’; a preoccupation with mysticism; and a belief in the senselessness of human existence. The movement is closely associated with the doctrine Art for Art’s Sake. The term ‘‘decadence’’ is sometimes used to denote a decline in the quality of art or literature following a period of greatness. Deconstruction: A method of literary criticism developed by Jacques Derrida and characterized by multiple conflicting interpretations of a given work. Deconstructionists consider the impact of the language of a work and suggest that the true meaning of the work is not necessarily the meaning that the author intended. Deduction: The process of reaching a conclusion through reasoning from general premises to a specific premise. Denotation: The definition of a word, apart from the impressions or feelings it creates in the reader. Diction: The selection and arrangement of words in a literary work. Either or both may vary depending on the desired effect. There are four general types of diction: ‘‘formal,’’ used in scholarly or lofty writing; ‘‘informal,’’ used in relaxed but educated conversation; ‘‘colloquial,’’ used in everyday speech; and ‘‘slang,’’ containing newly coined words and other terms not accepted in formal usage. Didactic: A term used to describe works of literature that aim to teach some moral, religious, political, or practical lesson. Although didactic elements are often found in artistically pleasing works, the term ‘‘didactic’’ usually refers to literature in which the message is

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more important than the form. The term may also be used to criticize a work that the critic finds ‘‘overly didactic,’’ that is, heavy-handed in its delivery of a lesson. Dimeter: See Meter Dionysian: See Apollonian and Dionysian Discordia concours: A Latin phrase meaning ‘‘discord in harmony.’’ The term was coined by the eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson to describe ‘‘a combination of dissimilar images or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.’’ Johnson created the expression by reversing a phrase by the Latin poet Horace.

Edwardian: Describes cultural conventions identified with the period of the reign of Edward VII of England (1901-1910). Writers of the Edwardian Age typically displayed a strong reaction against the propriety and conservatism of the Victorian Age. Their work often exhibits distrust of authority in religion, politics, and art and expresses strong doubts about the soundness of conventional values. Edwardian Age: See Edwardian

Dissonance: A combination of harsh or jarring sounds, especially in poetry. Although such combinations may be accidental, poets sometimes intentionally make them to achieve particular effects. Dissonance is also sometimes used to refer to close but not identical rhymes. When this is the case, the word functions as a synonym for consonance.

Electra Complex: A daughter’s amorous obsession with her father.

Double Entendre: A corruption of a French phrase meaning ‘‘double meaning.’’ The term is used to indicate a word or phrase that is deliberately ambiguous, especially when one of the meanings is risque or improper.

Elizabethan Age: A period of great economic growth, religious controversy, and nationalism closely associated with the reign of Elizabeth I of England (1558-1603). The Elizabethan Age is considered a part of the general renaissance—that is, the flowering of arts and literature—that took place in Europe during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. The era is considered the golden age of English literature. The most important dramas in English and a great deal of lyric poetry were produced during this period, and modern English criticism began around this time.

Draft: Any preliminary version of a written work. An author may write dozens of drafts which are revised to form the final work, or he or she may write only one, with few or no revisions. Dramatic Monologue: See Monologue Dramatic Poetry: Any lyric work that employs elements of drama such as dialogue, conflict, or characterization, but excluding works that are intended for stage presentation. Dream Allegory: See Dream Vision Dream Vision: A literary convention, chiefly of the Middle Ages. In a dream vision a story is presented as a literal dream of the narrator. This device was commonly used to teach moral and religious lessons.

E Eclogue: In classical literature, a poem featuring rural themes and structured as a dialogue among shepherds. Eclogues often took specific poetic forms, such as elegies or love poems. Some were written as the soliloquy

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of a shepherd. In later centuries, ‘‘eclogue’’ came to refer to any poem that was in the pastoral tradition or that had a dialogue or monologue structure.

Elegy: A lyric poem that laments the death of a person or the eventual death of all people. In a conventional elegy, set in a classical world, the poet and subject are spoken of as shepherds. In modern criticism, the word elegy is often used to refer to a poem that is melancholy or mournfully contemplative.

Empathy: A sense of shared experience, including emotional and physical feelings, with someone or something other than oneself. Empathy is often used to describe the response of a reader to a literary character. English Sonnet: See Sonnet Enjambment: The running over of the sense and structure of a line of verse or a couplet into the following verse or couplet. Enlightenment, The: An eighteenth-century philosophical movement. It began in France but had a wide impact throughout Europe and America. Thinkers of the Enlightenment valued reason and believed that both the individual and society could achieve a state

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of perfection. Corresponding to this essentially humanist vision was a resistance to religious authority.

Epic Simile: See Homeric Simile Epigram: A saying that makes the speaker’s point quickly and concisely.

Epiphany: A sudden revelation of truth inspired by a seemingly trivial incident. Epitaph: An inscription on a tomb or tombstone, or a verse written on the occasion of a person’s death. Epitaphs may be serious or humorous. Epithalamion: A song or poem written to honor and commemorate a marriage ceremony. Epithalamium: See Epithalamion Epithet: A word or phrase, often disparaging or abusive, that expresses a character trait of someone or something. Erziehungsroman: See Bildungsroman Essay: A prose composition with a focused subject of discussion. The term was coined by Michel de Montaigne to describe his 1580 collection of brief, informal reflections on himself and on various topics relating to human nature. An essay can also be a long, systematic discourse. Existentialism: A predominantly twentiethcentury philosophy concerned with the nature and perception of human existence. There are two major strains of existentialist thought: atheistic and Christian. Followers of atheistic existentialism believe that the individual is alone in a godless universe and that the basic human condition is one of suffering and loneliness. Nevertheless,

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because there are no fixed values, individuals can create their own characters—indeed, they can shape themselves—through the exercise of free will. The atheistic strain culminates in and is popularly associated with the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. The Christian existentialists, on the other hand, believe that only in God may people find freedom from life’s anguish. The two strains hold certain beliefs in common: that existence cannot be fully understood or described through empirical effort; that anguish is a universal element of life; that individuals must bear responsibility for their actions; and that there is no common standard of behavior or perception for religious and ethical matters.

Epic: A long narrative poem about the adventures of a hero of great historic or legendary importance. The setting is vast and the action is often given cosmic significance through the intervention of supernatural forces such as gods, angels, or demons. Epics are typically written in a classical style of grand simplicity with elaborate metaphors and allusions that enhance the symbolic importance of a hero’s adventures.

Epilogue: A concluding statement or section of a literary work. In dramas, particularly those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the epilogue is a closing speech, often in verse, delivered by an actor at the end of a play and spoken directly to the audience.

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Expatriates: See Expatriatism Expatriatism: The practice of leaving one’s country to live for an extended period in another country. Exposition: Writing intended to explain the nature of an idea, thing, or theme. Expository writing is often combined with description, narration, or argument. In dramatic writing, the exposition is the introductory material which presents the characters, setting, and tone of the play. Expressionism: An indistinct literary term, originally used to describe an early twentiethcentury school of German painting. The term applies to almost any mode of unconventional, highly subjective writing that distorts reality in some way. Extended Monologue: See Monologue

F Feet: See Foot Feminine Rhyme: See Rhyme Fiction: Any story that is the product of imagination rather than a documentation of fact. Characters and events in such narratives may be based in real life but their ultimate form and configuration is a creation of the author. Figurative Language: A technique in writing in which the author temporarily interrupts the order, construction, or meaning of the writing for a particular effect. This interruption takes the form of one or more figures of speech such as hyperbole, irony, or simile. Figurative language is the opposite of literal

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language, in which every word is truthful, accurate, and free of exaggeration or embellishment. Figures of Speech: Writing that differs from customary conventions for construction, meaning, order, or significance for the purpose of a special meaning or effect. There are two major types of figures of speech: rhetorical figures, which do not make changes in the meaning of the words, and tropes, which do. Fin de siecle: A French term meaning ‘‘end of the century.’’ The term is used to denote the last decade of the nineteenth century, a transition period when writers and other artists abandoned old conventions and looked for new techniques and objectives. First Person: See Point of View Folk Ballad: See Ballad Folklore: Traditions and myths preserved in a culture or group of people. Typically, these are passed on by word of mouth in various forms—such as legends, songs, and proverbs—or preserved in customs and ceremonies. This term was first used by W. J. Thoms in 1846. Folktale: A story originating in oral tradition. Folktales fall into a variety of categories, including legends, ghost stories, fairy tales, fables, and anecdotes based on historical figures and events. Foot: The smallest unit of rhythm in a line of poetry. In English-language poetry, a foot is typically one accented syllable combined with one or two unaccented syllables. Form: The pattern or construction of a work which identifies its genre and distinguishes it from other genres. Formalism: In literary criticism, the belief that literature should follow prescribed rules of construction, such as those that govern the sonnet form. Fourteener Meter: See Meter Free Verse: Poetry that lacks regular metrical and rhyme patterns but that tries to capture the cadences of everyday speech. The form allows a poet to exploit a variety of rhythmical effects within a single poem. Futurism: A flamboyant literary and artistic movement that developed in France, Italy, and Russia from 1908 through the 1920s. Futurist theater and poetry abandoned

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traditional literary forms. In their place, followers of the movement attempted to achieve total freedom of expression through bizarre imagery and deformed or newly invented words. The Futurists were selfconsciously modern artists who attempted to incorporate the appearances and sounds of modern life into their work.

G Genre: A category of literary work. In critical theory, genre may refer to both the content of a given work—tragedy, comedy, pastoral— and to its form, such as poetry, novel, or drama. Genteel Tradition: A term coined by critic George Santayana to describe the literary practice of certain late nineteenth-century American writers, especially New Englanders. Followers of the Genteel Tradition emphasized conventionality in social, religious, moral, and literary standards. Georgian Age: See Georgian Poets Georgian Period: See Georgian Poets Georgian Poets: A loose grouping of English poets during the years 1912-1922. The Georgians reacted against certain literary schools and practices, especially Victorian wordiness, turn-of-the-century aestheticism, and contemporary urban realism. In their place, the Georgians embraced the nineteenth-century poetic practices of William Wordsworth and the other Lake Poets. Georgic: A poem about farming and the farmer’s way of life, named from Virgil’s Georgics. Gilded Age: A period in American history during the 1870s characterized by political corruption and materialism. A number of important novels of social and political criticism were written during this time. Gothic: See Gothicism Gothicism: In literary criticism, works characterized by a taste for the medieval or morbidly attractive. A gothic novel prominently features elements of horror, the supernatural, gloom, and violence: clanking chains, terror, charnel houses, ghosts, medieval castles, and mysteriously slamming doors. The term ‘‘gothic novel’’ is also applied to novels that lack elements of the traditional Gothic setting but that create a similar atmosphere of terror or dread.

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Graveyard School: A group of eighteenthcentury English poets who wrote long, picturesque meditations on death. Their works were designed to cause the reader to ponder immortality. Great Chain of Being: The belief that all things and creatures in nature are organized in a hierarchy from inanimate objects at the bottom to God at the top. This system of belief was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grotesque: In literary criticism, the subject matter of a work or a style of expression characterized by exaggeration, deformity, freakishness, and disorder. The grotesque often includes an element of comic absurdity.

H Haiku: The shortest form of Japanese poetry, constructed in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively. The message of a haiku poem usually centers on some aspect of spirituality and provokes an emotional response in the reader. Half Rhyme: See Consonance Harlem Renaissance: The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s is generally considered the first significant movement of black writers and artists in the United States. During this period, new and established black writers published more fiction and poetry than ever before, the first influential black literary journals were established, and black authors and artists received their first widespread recognition and serious critical appraisal. Among the major writers associated with this period are Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Hellenism: Imitation of ancient Greek thought or styles. Also, an approach to life that focuses on the growth and development of the intellect. ‘‘Hellenism’’ is sometimes used to refer to the belief that reason can be applied to examine all human experience. Heptameter: See Meter Hero/Heroine: The principal sympathetic character (male or female) in a literary work. Heroes and heroines typically exhibit admirable traits: idealism, courage, and integrity, for example.

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Heroic Couplet: A rhyming couplet written in iambic pentameter (a verse with five iambic feet). Heroic Line: The meter and length of a line of verse in epic or heroic poetry. This varies by language and time period. Heroine: See Hero/Heroine Hexameter: See Meter Historical Criticism: The study of a work based on its impact on the world of the time period in which it was written. Hokku: See Haiku Holocaust: See Holocaust Literature Holocaust Literature: Literature influenced by or written about the Holocaust of World War II. Such literature includes true stories of survival in concentration camps, escape, and life after the war, as well as fictional works and poetry. Homeric Simile: An elaborate, detailed comparison written as a simile many lines in length. Horatian Satire: See Satire Humanism: A philosophy that places faith in the dignity of humankind and rejects the medieval perception of the individual as a weak, fallen creature. ‘‘Humanists’’ typically believe in the perfectibility of human nature and view reason and education as the means to that end. Humors: Mentions of the humors refer to the ancient Greek theory that a person’s health and personality were determined by the balance of four basic fluids in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. A dominance of any fluid would cause extremes in behavior. An excess of blood created a sanguine person who was joyful, aggressive, and passionate; a phlegmatic person was shy, fearful, and sluggish; too much yellow bile led to a choleric temperament characterized by impatience, anger, bitterness, and stubbornness; and excessive black bile created melancholy, a state of laziness, gluttony, and lack of motivation. Humours: See Humors Hyperbole: In literary criticism, deliberate exaggeration used to achieve an effect.

I Iamb: See Foot Idiom: A word construction or verbal expression closely associated with a given language.

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Image: A concrete representation of an object or sensory experience. Typically, such a representation helps evoke the feelings associated with the object or experience itself. Images are either ‘‘literal’’ or ‘‘figurative.’’ Literal images are especially concrete and involve little or no extension of the obvious meaning of the words used to express them. Figurative images do not follow the literal meaning of the words exactly. Images in literature are usually visual, but the term ‘‘image’’ can also refer to the representation of any sensory experience. Imagery: The array of images in a literary work. Also, figurative language. Imagism: An English and American poetry movement that flourished between 1908 and 1917. The Imagists used precise, clearly presented images in their works. They also used common, everyday speech and aimed for conciseness, concrete imagery, and the creation of new rhythms. In medias res: A Latin term meaning ‘‘in the middle of things.’’ It refers to the technique of beginning a story at its midpoint and then using various flashback devices to reveal previous action. Induction: The process of reaching a conclusion by reasoning from specific premises to form a general premise. Also, an introductory portion of a work of literature, especially a play. Intentional Fallacy: The belief that judgments of a literary work based solely on an author’s stated or implied intentions are false and misleading. Critics who believe in the concept of the intentional fallacy typically argue that the work itself is sufficient matter for interpretation, even though they may concede that an author’s statement of purpose can be useful. Interior Monologue: A narrative technique in which characters’ thoughts are revealed in a way that appears to be uncontrolled by the author. The interior monologue typically aims to reveal the inner self of a character. It portrays emotional experiences as they occur at both a conscious and unconscious level. Images are often used to represent sensations or emotions. Internal Rhyme: Rhyme that occurs within a single line of verse.

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Irish Literary Renaissance: A late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement in Irish literature. Members of the movement aimed to reduce the influence of British culture in Ireland and create an Irish national literature. Irony: In literary criticism, the effect of language in which the intended meaning is the opposite of what is stated. Italian Sonnet: See Sonnet

J Jacobean Age: The period of the reign of James I of England (1603-1625). The early literature of this period reflected the worldview of the Elizabethan Age, but a darker, more cynical attitude steadily grew in the art and literature of the Jacobean Age. This was an important time for English drama and poetry. Jargon: Language that is used or understood only by a select group of people. Jargon may refer to terminology used in a certain profession, such as computer jargon, or it may refer to any nonsensical language that is not understood by most people. Journalism: Writing intended for publication in a newspaper or magazine, or for broadcast on a radio or television program featuring news, sports, entertainment, or other timely material.

K Knickerbocker Group: A somewhat indistinct group of New York writers of the first half of the nineteenth century. Members of the group were linked only by location and a common theme: New York life. Kunstlerroman: See Bildungsroman

L Lais: See Lay Lake Poets: See Lake School Lake School: These poets all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single ‘‘school’’ of thought or literary practice, although their works were uniformly disparaged by the Edinburgh Review. Lay: A song or simple narrative poem. The form originated in medieval France. Early French lais were often based on the Celtic legends and other tales sung by Breton minstrels—thus

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the name of the ‘‘Breton lay.’’ In fourteenthcentury England, the term ‘‘lay’’ was used to describe short narratives written in imitation of the Breton lays. Leitmotiv: See Motif Literal Language: An author uses literal language when he or she writes without exaggerating or embellishing the subject matter and without any tools of figurative language. Literary Ballad: See Ballad Literature: Literature is broadly defined as any written or spoken material, but the term most often refers to creative works. Lost Generation: A term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war. Lyric Poetry: A poem expressing the subjective feelings and personal emotions of the poet. Such poetry is melodic, since it was originally accompanied by a lyre in recitals. Most Western poetry in the twentieth century may be classified as lyrical.

M Mannerism: Exaggerated, artificial adherence to a literary manner or style. Also, a popular style of the visual arts of late sixteenth-century Europe that was marked by elongation of the human form and by intentional spatial distortion. Literary works that are selfconsciously high-toned and artistic are often said to be ‘‘mannered.’’ Masculine Rhyme: See Rhyme Measure: The foot, verse, or time sequence used in a literary work, especially a poem. Measure is often used somewhat incorrectly as a synonym for meter. Metaphor: A figure of speech that expresses an idea through the image of another object. Metaphors suggest the essence of the first object by identifying it with certain qualities of the second object. Metaphysical Conceit: See Conceit Metaphysical Poetry: The body of poetry produced by a group of seventeenth-century English writers called the ‘‘Metaphysical Poets.’’ The group includes John Donne and Andrew Marvell. The Metaphysical Poets made use of

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everyday speech, intellectual analysis, and unique imagery. They aimed to portray the ordinary conflicts and contradictions of life. Their poems often took the form of an argument, and many of them emphasize physical and religious love as well as the fleeting nature of life. Elaborate conceits are typical in metaphysical poetry. Metaphysical Poets: See Metaphysical Poetry Meter: In literary criticism, the repetition of sound patterns that creates a rhythm in poetry. The patterns are based on the number of syllables and the presence and absence of accents. The unit of rhythm in a line is called a foot. Types of meter are classified according to the number of feet in a line. These are the standard English lines: Monometer, one foot; Dimeter, two feet; Trimeter, three feet; Tetrameter, four feet; Pentameter, five feet; Hexameter, six feet (also called the Alexandrine); Heptameter, seven feet (also called the ‘‘Fourteener’’ when the feet are iambic). Modernism: Modern literary practices. Also, the principles of a literary school that lasted from roughly the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of World War II. Modernism is defined by its rejection of the literary conventions of the nineteenth century and by its opposition to conventional morality, taste, traditions, and economic values. Monologue: A composition, written or oral, by a single individual. More specifically, a speech given by a single individual in a drama or other public entertainment. It has no set length, although it is usually several or more lines long. Monometer: See Meter Mood: The prevailing emotions of a work or of the author in his or her creation of the work. The mood of a work is not always what might be expected based on its subject matter. Motif: A theme, character type, image, metaphor, or other verbal element that recurs throughout a single work of literature or occurs in a number of different works over a period of time. Motiv: See Motif Muckrakers: An early twentieth-century group of American writers. Typically, their works exposed the wrongdoings of big business and government in the United States.

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Muses: Nine Greek mythological goddesses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory). Each muse patronized a specific area of the liberal arts and sciences. Calliope presided over epic poetry, Clio over history, Erato over love poetry, Euterpe over music or lyric poetry, Melpomene over tragedy, Polyhymnia over hymns to the gods, Terpsichore over dance, Thalia over comedy, and Urania over astronomy. Poets and writers traditionally made appeals to the Muses for inspiration in their work. Myth: An anonymous tale emerging from the traditional beliefs of a culture or social unit. Myths use supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. They may also explain cosmic issues like creation and death. Collections of myths, known as mythologies, are common to all cultures and nations, but the best-known myths belong to the Norse, Roman, and Greek mythologies.

N Narration: The telling of a series of events, real or invented. A narration may be either a simple narrative, in which the events are recounted chronologically, or a narrative with a plot, in which the account is given in a style reflecting the author’s artistic concept of the story. Narration is sometimes used as a synonym for ‘‘storyline.’’ Narrative: A verse or prose accounting of an event or sequence of events, real or invented. The term is also used as an adjective in the sense ‘‘method of narration.’’ For example, in literary criticism, the expression ‘‘narrative technique’’ usually refers to the way the author structures and presents his or her story. Narrative Poetry: A nondramatic poem in which the author tells a story. Such poems may be of any length or level of complexity. Narrator: The teller of a story. The narrator may be the author or a character in the story through whom the author speaks. Naturalism: A literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement’s major theorist, French novelist Emile Zola, envisioned a type of fiction that would examine human life with the objectivity of scientific inquiry. The Naturalists typically viewed human beings as either the

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products of ‘‘biological determinism,’’ ruled by hereditary instincts and engaged in an endless struggle for survival, or as the products of ‘‘socioeconomic determinism,’’ ruled by social and economic forces beyond their control. In their works, the Naturalists generally ignored the highest levels of society and focused on degradation: poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, insanity, and disease. Negritude: A literary movement based on the concept of a shared cultural bond on the part of black Africans, wherever they may be in the world. It traces its origins to the former French colonies of Africa and the Caribbean. Negritude poets, novelists, and essayists generally stress four points in their writings: One, black alienation from traditional African culture can lead to feelings of inferiority. Two, European colonialism and Western education should be resisted. Three, black Africans should seek to affirm and define their own identity. Four, African culture can and should be reclaimed. Many Negritude writers also claim that blacks can make unique contributions to the world, based on a heightened appreciation of nature, rhythm, and human emotions—aspects of life they say are not so highly valued in the materialistic and rationalistic West. Negro Renaissance: See Harlem Renaissance Neoclassical Period: See Neoclassicism Neoclassicism: In literary criticism, this term refers to the revival of the attitudes and styles of expression of classical literature. It is generally used to describe a period in European history beginning in the late seventeenth century and lasting until about 1800. In its purest form, Neoclassicism marked a return to order, proportion, restraint, logic, accuracy, and decorum. In England, where Neoclassicism perhaps was most popular, it reflected the influence of seventeenth- century French writers, especially dramatists. Neoclassical writers typically reacted against the intensity and enthusiasm of the Renaissance period. They wrote works that appealed to the intellect, using elevated language and classical literary forms such as satire and the ode. Neoclassical works were often governed by the classical goal of instruction. Neoclassicists: See Neoclassicism

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New Criticism: A movement in literary criticism, dating from the late 1920s, that stressed close textual analysis in the interpretation of works of literature. The New Critics saw little merit in historical and biographical analysis. Rather, they aimed to examine the text alone, free from the question of how external events— biographical or otherwise—may have helped shape it.

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theme. Most odes, but not all, are addressed to an object or individual. Odes are distinguished from other lyric poetic forms by their complex rhythmic and stanzaic patterns. Oedipus Complex: A son’s amorous obsession with his mother. The phrase is derived from the story of the ancient Theban hero Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother.

New Journalism: A type of writing in which the journalist presents factual information in a form usually used in fiction. New journalism emphasizes description, narration, and character development to bring readers closer to the human element of the story, and is often used in personality profiles and in-depth feature articles. It is not compatible with ‘‘straight’’ or ‘‘hard’’ newswriting, which is generally composed in a brief, fact-based style.

Omniscience: See Point of View

New Journalists: See New Journalism

Oral Tradition: See Oral Transmission

New Negro Movement: See Harlem Renaissance

Oral Transmission: A process by which songs, ballads, folklore, and other material are transmitted by word of mouth. The tradition of oral transmission predates the written record systems of literate society. Oral transmission preserves material sometimes over generations, although often with variations. Memory plays a large part in the recitation and preservation of orally transmitted material.

Noble Savage: The idea that primitive man is noble and good but becomes evil and corrupted as he becomes civilized. The concept of the noble savage originated in the Renaissance period but is more closely identified with such later writers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Aphra Behn.

O Objective Correlative: An outward set of objects, a situation, or a chain of events corresponding to an inward experience and evoking this experience in the reader. The term frequently appears in modern criticism in discussions of authors’ intended effects on the emotional responses of readers. Objectivity: A quality in writing characterized by the absence of the author’s opinion or feeling about the subject matter. Objectivity is an important factor in criticism. Occasional Verse: poetry written on the occasion of a significant historical or personal event. Vers de societe is sometimes called occasional verse although it is of a less serious nature. Octave: A poem or stanza composed of eight lines. The term octave most often represents the first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet. Ode: Name given to an extended lyric poem characterized by exalted emotion and dignified style. An ode usually concerns a single, serious

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Onomatopoeia: The use of words whose sounds express or suggest their meaning. In its simplest sense, onomatopoeia may be represented by words that mimic the sounds they denote such as ‘‘hiss’’ or ‘‘meow.’’ At a more subtle level, the pattern and rhythm of sounds and rhymes of a line or poem may be onomatopoeic.

Ottava Rima: An eight-line stanza of poetry composed in iambic pentameter (a five-foot line in which each foot consists of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable), following the abababcc rhyme scheme. Oxymoron: A phrase combining two contradictory terms. Oxymorons may be intentional or unintentional.

P Pantheism: The idea that all things are both a manifestation or revelation of God and a part of God at the same time. Pantheism was a common attitude in the early societies of Egypt, India, and Greece—the term derives from the Greek pan meaning ‘‘all’’ and theos meaning ‘‘deity.’’ It later became a significant part of the Christian faith. Parable: A story intended to teach a moral lesson or answer an ethical question. Paradox: A statement that appears illogical or contradictory at first, but may actually point to an underlying truth.

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Parallelism: A method of comparison of two ideas in which each is developed in the same grammatical structure. Parnassianism: A mid nineteenth-century movement in French literature. Followers of the movement stressed adherence to well-defined artistic forms as a reaction against the often chaotic expression of the artist’s ego that dominated the work of the Romantics. The Parnassians also rejected the moral, ethical, and social themes exhibited in the works of French Romantics such as Victor Hugo. The aesthetic doctrines of the Parnassians strongly influenced the later symbolist and decadent movements. Parody: In literary criticism, this term refers to an imitation of a serious literary work or the signature style of a particular author in a ridiculous manner. A typical parody adopts the style of the original and applies it to an inappropriate subject for humorous effect. Parody is a form of satire and could be considered the literary equivalent of a caricature or cartoon. Pastoral: A term derived from the Latin word ‘‘pastor,’’ meaning shepherd. A pastoral is a literary composition on a rural theme. The conventions of the pastoral were originated by the third-century Greek poet Theocritus, who wrote about the experiences, love affairs, and pastimes of Sicilian shepherds. In a pastoral, characters and language of a courtly nature are often placed in a simple setting. The term pastoral is also used to classify dramas, elegies, and lyrics that exhibit the use of country settings and shepherd characters. Pathetic Fallacy: A term coined by English critic John Ruskin to identify writing that falsely endows nonhuman things with human intentions and feelings, such as ‘‘angry clouds’’ and ‘‘sad trees.’’ Pen Name: See Pseudonym Pentameter: See Meter Persona: A Latin term meaning ‘‘mask.’’ Personae are the characters in a fictional work of literature. The persona generally functions as a mask through which the author tells a story in a voice other than his or her own. A persona is usually either a character in a story who acts as a narrator or an ‘‘implied author,’’ a voice created by the author to act as the narrator for himself or herself.

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Personae: See Persona Personal Point of View: See Point of View Personification: A figure of speech that gives human qualities to abstract ideas, animals, and inanimate objects. Petrarchan Sonnet: See Sonnet Phenomenology: A method of literary criticism based on the belief that things have no existence outside of human consciousness or awareness. Proponents of this theory believe that art is a process that takes place in the mind of the observer as he or she contemplates an object rather than a quality of the object itself. Plagiarism: Claiming another person’s written material as one’s own. Plagiarism can take the form of direct, word-for-word copying or the theft of the substance or idea of the work. Platonic Criticism: A form of criticism that stresses an artistic work’s usefulness as an agent of social engineering rather than any quality or value of the work itself. Platonism: The embracing of the doctrines of the philosopher Plato, popular among the poets of the Renaissance and the Romantic period. Platonism is more flexible than Aristotelian Criticism and places more emphasis on the supernatural and unknown aspects of life. Plot: In literary criticism, this term refers to the pattern of events in a narrative or drama. In its simplest sense, the plot guides the author in composing the work and helps the reader follow the work. Typically, plots exhibit causality and unity and have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes, however, a plot may consist of a series of disconnected events, in which case it is known as an ‘‘episodic plot.’’ Poem: In its broadest sense, a composition utilizing rhyme, meter, concrete detail, and expressive language to create a literary experience with emotional and aesthetic appeal. Poet: An author who writes poetry or verse. The term is also used to refer to an artist or writer who has an exceptional gift for expression, imagination, and energy in the making of art in any form. Poete maudit: A term derived from Paul Verlaine’s Les poetes maudits (The Accursed Poets), a collection of essays on the French symbolist

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writers Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, and Tristan Corbiere. In the sense intended by Verlaine, the poet is ‘‘accursed’’ for choosing to explore extremes of human experience outside of middle-class society. Poetic Fallacy: See Pathetic Fallacy Poetic Justice: An outcome in a literary work, not necessarily a poem, in which the good are rewarded and the evil are punished, especially in ways that particularly fit their virtues or crimes. Poetic License: Distortions of fact and literary convention made by a writer—not always a poet—for the sake of the effect gained. Poetic license is closely related to the concept of ‘‘artistic freedom.’’ Poetics: This term has two closely related meanings. It denotes (1) an aesthetic theory in literary criticism about the essence of poetry or (2) rules prescribing the proper methods, content, style, or diction of poetry. The term poetics may also refer to theories about literature in general, not just poetry. Poetry: In its broadest sense, writing that aims to present ideas and evoke an emotional experience in the reader through the use of meter, imagery, connotative and concrete words, and a carefully constructed structure based on rhythmic patterns. Poetry typically relies on words and expressions that have several layers of meaning. It also makes use of the effects of regular rhythm on the ear and may make a strong appeal to the senses through the use of imagery. Point of View: The narrative perspective from which a literary work is presented to the reader. There are four traditional points of view. The ‘‘third person omniscient’’ gives the reader a ‘‘godlike’’ perspective, unrestricted by time or place, from which to see actions and look into the minds of characters. This allows the author to comment openly on characters and events in the work. The ‘‘third person’’ point of view presents the events of the story from outside of any single character’s perception, much like the omniscient point of view, but the reader must understand the action as it takes place and without any special insight into characters’ minds or motivations. The ‘‘first person’’ or ‘‘personal’’ point of view relates events as they are perceived by a single character. The main character ‘‘tells’’ the story

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and may offer opinions about the action and characters which differ from those of the author. Much less common than omniscient, third person, and first person is the ‘‘second person’’ point of view, wherein the author tells the story as if it is happening to the reader. Polemic: A work in which the author takes a stand on a controversial subject, such as abortion or religion. Such works are often extremely argumentative or provocative. Pornography: Writing intended to provoke feelings of lust in the reader. Such works are often condemned by critics and teachers, but those which can be shown to have literary value are viewed less harshly. Post-Aesthetic Movement: An artistic response made by African Americans to the black aesthetic movement of the 1960s and early ’70s. Writers since that time have adopted a somewhat different tone in their work, with less emphasis placed on the disparity between black and white in the United States. In the words of post-aesthetic authors such as Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and Kristin Hunter, African Americans are portrayed as looking inward for answers to their own questions, rather than always looking to the outside world. Postmodernism: Writing from the 1960s forward characterized by experimentation and continuing to apply some of the fundamentals of modernism, which included existentialism and alienation. Postmodernists have gone a step further in the rejection of tradition begun with the modernists by also rejecting traditional forms, preferring the anti-novel over the novel and the anti-hero over the hero. Pre-Raphaelites: A circle of writers and artists in mid nineteenth-century England. Valuing the pre-Renaissance artistic qualities of religious symbolism, lavish pictorialism, and natural sensuousness, the Pre-Raphaelites cultivated a sense of mystery and melancholy that influenced later writers associated with the Symbolist and Decadent movements. Primitivism: The belief that primitive peoples were nobler and less flawed than civilized peoples because they had not been subjected to the tainting influence of society. Projective Verse: A form of free verse in which the poet’s breathing pattern determines the

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lines of the poem. Poets who advocate projective verse are against all formal structures in writing, including meter and form. Prologue: An introductory section of a literary work. It often contains information establishing the situation of the characters or presents information about the setting, time period, or action. In drama, the prologue is spoken by a chorus or by one of the principal characters. Prose: A literary medium that attempts to mirror the language of everyday speech. It is distinguished from poetry by its use of unmetered, unrhymed language consisting of logically related sentences. Prose is usually grouped into paragraphs that form a cohesive whole such as an essay or a novel. Prosopopoeia: See Personification Protagonist: The central character of a story who serves as a focus for its themes and incidents and as the principal rationale for its development. The protagonist is sometimes referred to in discussions of modern literature as the hero or anti-hero. Proverb: A brief, sage saying that expresses a truth about life in a striking manner. Pseudonym: A name assumed by a writer, most often intended to prevent his or her identification as the author of a work. Two or more authors may work together under one pseudonym, or an author may use a different name for each genre he or she publishes in. Some publishing companies maintain ‘‘house pseudonyms,’’ under which any number of authors may write installations in a series. Some authors also choose a pseudonym over their real names the way an actor may use a stage name. Pun: A play on words that have similar sounds but different meanings. Pure Poetry: poetry written without instructional intent or moral purpose that aims only to please a reader by its imagery or musical flow. The term pure poetry is used as the antonym of the term ‘‘didacticism.’’

Q Quatrain: A four-line stanza of a poem or an entire poem consisting of four lines.

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R Realism: A nineteenth-century European literary movement that sought to portray familiar characters, situations, and settings in a realistic manner. This was done primarily by using an objective narrative point of view and through the buildup of accurate detail. The standard for success of any realistic work depends on how faithfully it transfers common experience into fictional forms. The realistic method may be altered or extended, as in stream of consciousness writing, to record highly subjective experience. Refrain: A phrase repeated at intervals throughout a poem. A refrain may appear at the end of each stanza or at less regular intervals. It may be altered slightly at each appearance. Renaissance: The period in European history that marked the end of the Middle Ages. It began in Italy in the late fourteenth century. In broad terms, it is usually seen as spanning the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, although it did not reach Great Britain, for example, until the 1480s or so. The Renaissance saw an awakening in almost every sphere of human activity, especially science, philosophy, and the arts. The period is best defined by the emergence of a general philosophy that emphasized the importance of the intellect, the individual, and world affairs. It contrasts strongly with the medieval worldview, characterized by the dominant concerns of faith, the social collective, and spiritual salvation. Repartee: Conversation featuring snappy retorts and witticisms. Restoration: See Restoration Age Restoration Age: A period in English literature beginning with the crowning of Charles II in 1660 and running to about 1700. The era, which was characterized by a reaction against Puritanism, was the first great age of the comedy of manners. The finest literature of the era is typically witty and urbane, and often lewd. Rhetoric: In literary criticism, this term denotes the art of ethical persuasion. In its strictest sense, rhetoric adheres to various principles developed since classical times for arranging facts and ideas in a clear, persuasive, appealing manner. The term is also used to refer to effective prose in general and theories of or methods for composing effective prose.

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Rhetorical Question: A question intended to provoke thought, but not an expressed answer, in the reader. It is most commonly used in oratory and other persuasive genres.

Rhyme Royal: A stanza of seven lines composed in iambic pentameter and rhymed ababbcc. The name is said to be a tribute to King James I of Scotland, who made much use of the form in his poetry.

Rococo: A style of European architecture that flourished in the eighteenth century, especially in France. The most notable features of rococo are its extensive use of ornamentation and its themes of lightness, gaiety, and intimacy. In literary criticism, the term is often used disparagingly to refer to a decadent or over-ornamental style. Romance: A broad term, usually denoting a narrative with exotic, exaggerated, often idealized characters, scenes, and themes. Romantic Age: See Romanticism Romanticism: This term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it refers to a European intellectual and artistic movement

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Romantics: See Romanticism

Rhythm: A regular pattern of sound, time intervals, or events occurring in writing, most often and most discernably in poetry. Regular, reliable rhythm is known to be soothing to humans, while interrupted, unpredictable, or rapidly changing rhythm is disturbing. These effects are known to authors, who use them to produce a desired reaction in the reader.

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of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that sought greater freedom of personal expression than that allowed by the strict rules of literary form and logic of the eighteenth-century neoclassicists. The Romantics preferred emotional and imaginative expression to rational analysis. They considered the individual to be at the center of all experience and so placed him or her at the center of their art. The Romantics believed that the creative imagination reveals nobler truths—unique feelings and attitudes—than those that could be discovered by logic or by scientific examination. Both the natural world and the state of childhood were important sources for revelations of ‘‘eternal truths.’’ ‘‘Romanticism’’ is also used as a general term to refer to a type of sensibility found in all periods of literary history and usually considered to be in opposition to the principles of classicism. In this sense, Romanticism signifies any work or philosophy in which the exotic or dreamlike figure strongly, or that is devoted to individualistic expression, selfanalysis, or a pursuit of a higher realm of knowledge than can be discovered by human reason.

Rhyme: When used as a noun in literary criticism, this term generally refers to a poem in which words sound identical or very similar and appear in parallel positions in two or more lines. Rhymes are classified into different types according to where they fall in a line or stanza or according to the degree of similarity they exhibit in their spellings and sounds. Some major types of rhyme are ‘‘masculine’’ rhyme, ‘‘feminine’’ rhyme, and ‘‘triple’’ rhyme. In a masculine rhyme, the rhyming sound falls in a single accented syllable, as with ‘‘heat’’ and ‘‘eat.’’ Feminine rhyme is a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed, as with ‘‘merry’’ and ‘‘tarry.’’ Triple rhyme matches the sound of the accented syllable and the two unaccented syllables that follow: ‘‘narrative’’ and ‘‘declarative.’’

Rhyme Scheme: See Rhyme

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Russian Symbolism: A Russian poetic movement, derived from French symbolism, that flourished between 1894 and 1910. While some Russian Symbolists continued in the French tradition, stressing aestheticism and the importance of suggestion above didactic intent, others saw their craft as a form of mystical worship, and themselves as mediators between the supernatural and the mundane.

S Satire: A work that uses ridicule, humor, and wit to criticize and provoke change in human nature and institutions. There are two major types of satire: ‘‘formal’’ or ‘‘direct’’ satire speaks directly to the reader or to a character in the work; ‘‘indirect’’ satire relies upon the ridiculous behavior of its characters to make its point. Formal satire is further divided into two manners: the ‘‘Horatian,’’ which ridicules gently, and the ‘‘Juvenalian,’’ which derides its subjects harshly and bitterly. Scansion: The analysis or ‘‘scanning’’ of a poem to determine its meter and often its rhyme

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scheme. The most common system of scansion uses accents (slanted lines drawn above syllables) to show stressed syllables, breves (curved lines drawn above syllables) to show unstressed syllables, and vertical lines to separate each foot. Second Person: See Point of View Semiotics: The study of how literary forms and conventions affect the meaning of language. Sestet: Any six-line poem or stanza. Setting: The time, place, and culture in which the action of a narrative takes place. The elements of setting may include geographic location, characters’ physical and mental environments, prevailing cultural attitudes, or the historical time in which the action takes place. Shakespearean Sonnet: See Sonnet Signifying Monkey: A popular trickster figure in black folklore, with hundreds of tales about this character documented since the 19th century. Simile: A comparison, usually using ‘‘like’’ or ‘‘as,’’ of two essentially dissimilar things, as in ‘‘coffee as cold as ice’’ or ‘‘He sounded like a broken record.’’ Slang: A type of informal verbal communication that is generally unacceptable for formal writing. Slang words and phrases are often colorful exaggerations used to emphasize the speaker’s point; they may also be shortened versions of an often-used word or phrase. Slant Rhyme: See Consonance Slave Narrative: Autobiographical accounts of American slave life as told by escaped slaves. These works first appeared during the abolition movement of the 1830s through the 1850s. Social Realism: See Socialist Realism Socialist Realism: The Socialist Realism school of literary theory was proposed by Maxim Gorky and established as a dogma by the first Soviet Congress of Writers. It demanded adherence to a communist worldview in works of literature. Its doctrines required an objective viewpoint comprehensible to the working classes and themes of social struggle featuring strong proletarian heroes. Soliloquy: A monologue in a drama used to give the audience information and to develop the speaker’s character. It is typically a projection of the speaker’s innermost thoughts.

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Usually delivered while the speaker is alone on stage, a soliloquy is intended to present an illusion of unspoken reflection. Sonnet: A fourteen-line poem, usually composed in iambic pentameter, employing one of several rhyme schemes. There are three major types of sonnets, upon which all other variations of the form are based: the ‘‘Petrarchan’’ or ‘‘Italian’’ sonnet, the ‘‘Shakespearean’’ or ‘‘English’’ sonnet, and the ‘‘Spenserian’’ sonnet. A Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave rhymed abbaabba and a ‘‘sestet’’ rhymed either cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce. The octave poses a question or problem, relates a narrative, or puts forth a proposition; the sestet presents a solution to the problem, comments upon the narrative, or applies the proposition put forth in the octave. The Shakespearean sonnet is divided into three quatrains and a couplet rhymed abab cdcd efef gg. The couplet provides an epigrammatic comment on the narrative or problem put forth in the quatrains. The Spenserian sonnet uses three quatrains and a couplet like the Shakespearean, but links their three rhyme schemes in this way: abab bcbc cdcd ee. The Spenserian sonnet develops its theme in two parts like the Petrarchan, its final six lines resolving a problem, analyzing a narrative, or applying a proposition put forth in its first eight lines. Spenserian Sonnet: See Sonnet Spenserian Stanza: A nine-line stanza having eight verses in iambic pentameter, its ninth verse in iambic hexameter, and the rhyme scheme ababbcbcc. Spondee: In poetry meter, a foot consisting of two long or stressed syllables occurring together. This form is quite rare in English verse, and is usually composed of two monosyllabic words. Sprung Rhythm: Versification using a specific number of accented syllables per line but disregarding the number of unaccented syllables that fall in each line, producing an irregular rhythm in the poem. Stanza: A subdivision of a poem consisting of lines grouped together, often in recurring patterns of rhyme, line length, and meter. Stanzas may also serve as units of thought in a poem much like paragraphs in prose. Stereotype: A stereotype was originally the name for a duplication made during the printing

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process; this led to its modern definition as a person or thing that is (or is assumed to be) the same as all others of its type. Stream of Consciousness: A narrative technique for rendering the inward experience of a character. This technique is designed to give the impression of an ever-changing series of thoughts, emotions, images, and memories in the spontaneous and seemingly illogical order that they occur in life. Structuralism: A twentieth-century movement in literary criticism that examines how literary texts arrive at their meanings, rather than the meanings themselves. There are two major types of structuralist analysis: one examines the way patterns of linguistic structures unify a specific text and emphasize certain elements of that text, and the other interprets the way literary forms and conventions affect the meaning of language itself. Structure: The form taken by a piece of literature. The structure may be made obvious for ease of understanding, as in nonfiction works, or may obscured for artistic purposes, as in some poetry or seemingly ‘‘unstructured’’ prose. Sturm und Drang: A German term meaning ‘‘storm and stress.’’ It refers to a German literary movement of the 1770s and 1780s that reacted against the order and rationalism of the enlightenment, focusing instead on the intense experience of extraordinary individuals. Style: A writer’s distinctive manner of arranging words to suit his or her ideas and purpose in writing. The unique imprint of the author’s personality upon his or her writing, style is the product of an author’s way of arranging ideas and his or her use of diction, different sentence structures, rhythm, figures of speech, rhetorical principles, and other elements of composition. Subject: The person, event, or theme at the center of a work of literature. A work may have one or more subjects of each type, with shorter works tending to have fewer and longer works tending to have more. Subjectivity: Writing that expresses the author’s personal feelings about his subject, and which may or may not include factual information about the subject. Surrealism: A term introduced to criticism by Guillaume Apollinaire and later adopted

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by Andre Breton. It refers to a French literary and artistic movement founded in the 1920s. The Surrealists sought to express unconscious thoughts and feelings in their works. The best-known technique used for achieving this aim was automatic writing— transcriptions of spontaneous outpourings from the unconscious. The Surrealists proposed to unify the contrary levels of conscious and unconscious, dream and reality, objectivity and subjectivity into a new level of ‘‘super-realism.’’ Suspense: A literary device in which the author maintains the audience’s attention through the buildup of events, the outcome of which will soon be revealed. Syllogism: A method of presenting a logical argument. In its most basic form, the syllogism consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. Symbol: Something that suggests or stands for something else without losing its original identity. In literature, symbols combine their literal meaning with the suggestion of an abstract concept. Literary symbols are of two types: those that carry complex associations of meaning no matter what their contexts, and those that derive their suggestive meaning from their functions in specific literary works. Symbolism: This term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it denotes an early modernist literary movement initiated in France during the nineteenth century that reacted against the prevailing standards of realism. Writers in this movement aimed to evoke, indirectly and symbolically, an order of being beyond the material world of the five senses. Poetic expression of personal emotion figured strongly in the movement, typically by means of a private set of symbols uniquely identifiable with the individual poet. The principal aim of the Symbolists was to express in words the highly complex feelings that grew out of everyday contact with the world. In a broader sense, the term ‘‘symbolism’’ refers to the use of one object to represent another. Symbolist: See Symbolism Symbolist Movement: See Symbolism Sympathetic Fallacy: See Affective Fallacy

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to denote any works about the fall of persons from exalted to low conditions due to any reason: fate, vice, weakness, etc. According to the classical definition of tragedy, such works present the ‘‘pathetic’’—that which evokes pity—rather than the tragic. The classical form of tragedy was revived in the sixteenth century; it flourished especially on the Elizabethan stage. In modern times, dramatists have attempted to adapt the form to the needs of modern society by drawing their heroes from the ranks of ordinary men and women and defining the nobility of these heroes in terms of spirit rather than exalted social standing.

Tanka: A form of Japanese poetry similar to haiku. A tanka is five lines long, with the lines containing five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables respectively. Terza Rima: A three-line stanza form in poetry in which the rhymes are made on the last word of each line in the following manner: the first and third lines of the first stanza, then the second line of the first stanza and the first and third lines of the second stanza, and so on with the middle line of any stanza rhyming with the first and third lines of the following stanza. Tetrameter: See Meter Textual Criticism: A branch of literary criticism that seeks to establish the authoritative text of a literary work. Textual critics typically compare all known manuscripts or printings of a single work in order to assess the meanings of differences and revisions. This procedure allows them to arrive at a definitive version that (supposedly) corresponds to the author’s original intention. Theme: The main point of a work of literature. The term is used interchangeably with thesis. Thesis: A thesis is both an essay and the point argued in the essay. Thesis novels and thesis plays share the quality of containing a thesis which is supported through the action of the story. Third Person: See Point of View Tone: The author’s attitude toward his or her audience may be deduced from the tone of the work. A formal tone may create distance or convey politeness, while an informal tone may encourage a friendly, intimate, or intrusive feeling in the reader. The author’s attitude toward his or her subject matter may also be deduced from the tone of the words he or she uses in discussing it. Tragedy: A drama in prose or poetry about a noble, courageous hero of excellent character who, because of some tragic character flaw or hamartia, brings ruin upon him- or herself. Tragedy treats its subjects in a dignified and serious manner, using poetic language to help evoke pity and fear and bring about catharsis, a purging of these emotions. The tragic form was practiced extensively by the ancient Greeks. In the Middle Ages, when classical works were virtually unknown, tragedy came

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Tragic Flaw: In a tragedy, the quality within the hero or heroine which leads to his or her downfall. Transcendentalism: An American philosophical and religious movement, based in New England from around 1835 until the Civil War. Transcendentalism was a form of American romanticism that had its roots abroad in the works of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Coleridge, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of intuition and subjective experience in communication with God. They rejected religious dogma and texts in favor of mysticism and scientific naturalism. They pursued truths that lie beyond the ‘‘colorless’’ realms perceived by reason and the senses and were active social reformers in public education, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. Trickster: A character or figure common in Native American and African literature who uses his ingenuity to defeat enemies and escape difficult situations. Tricksters are most often animals, such as the spider, hare, or coyote, although they may take the form of humans as well. Trimeter: See Meter Triple Rhyme: See Rhyme Trochee: See Foot

U Understatement: See Irony Unities: Strict rules of dramatic structure, formulated by Italian and French critics of the Renaissance and based loosely on the principles of drama discussed by Aristotle in his Poetics.

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Foremost among these rules were the three unities of action, time, and place that compelled a dramatist to: (1) construct a single plot with a beginning, middle, and end that details the causal relationships of action and character; (2) restrict the action to the events of a single day; and (3) limit the scene to a single place or city. The unities were observed faithfully by continental European writers until the Romantic Age, but they were never regularly observed in English drama. Modern dramatists are typically more concerned with a unity of impression or emotional effect than with any of the classical unities. Urban Realism: A branch of realist writing that attempts to accurately reflect the often harsh facts of modern urban existence. Utopia: A fictional perfect place, such as ‘‘paradise’’ or ‘‘heaven.’’ Utopian: See Utopia Utopianism: See Utopia

Verisimilitude: Literally, the appearance of truth. In literary criticism, the term refers to aspects of a work of literature that seem true to the reader. Vers de societe: See Occasional Verse Vers libre: See Free Verse Verse: A line of metered language, a line of a poem, or any work written in verse. Versification: The writing of verse. Versification may also refer to the meter, rhyme, and other mechanical components of a poem.

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Victorian: Refers broadly to the reign of Queen Victoria of England (1837-1901) and to anything with qualities typical of that era. For example, the qualities of smug narrowmindedness, bourgeois materialism, faith in social progress, and priggish morality are often considered Victorian. This stereotype is contradicted by such dramatic intellectual developments as the theories of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud (which stirred strong debates in England) and the critical attitudes of serious Victorian writers like Charles Dickens and George Eliot. In literature, the Victorian Period was the great age of the English novel, and the latter part of the era saw the rise of movements such as decadence and symbolism. Victorian Age: See Victorian Victorian Period: See Victorian

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Weltanschauung: A German term referring to a person’s worldview or philosophy. Weltschmerz: A German term meaning ‘‘world pain.’’ It describes a sense of anguish about the nature of existence, usually associated with a melancholy, pessimistic attitude.

Z Zarzuela: A type of Spanish operetta. Zeitgeist: A German term meaning ‘‘spirit of the time.’’ It refers to the moral and intellectual trends of a given era.

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Cumulative Author/Title Index A A Pie`d (McElroy): V3 Accounting (Alegrı´ a): V21 Ackerman, Diane On Location in the Loire Valley: V19 Acosta, Teresa Palomo My Mother Pieced Quilts: V12 Acquainted with the Night (Frost): V35 Addonizio, Kim Knowledge: V25 Address to the Angels (Kumin): V18 After Apple Picking (Frost): V32 The Afterlife (Collins): V18 An African Elegy (Duncan): V13 After Raphael (Brock-Broido): V26 Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave? (Hardy): V4 Ai Reunions with a Ghost: V16 Aiken, Conrad The Room: V24 Air for Mercury (Hillman): V20 Akhmatova, Anna Everything is Plundered: V32 Midnight Verses: V18 Requiem: V27 Alabama Centennial (Madgett): V10 The Alchemy of Day (He´bert): V20 Alegrı´ a, Claribel Accounting: V21 Alexander, Elizabeth The Toni Morrison Dreams: V22 All I Was Doing Was Breathing (Mirabai): V24 All It Takes (Phillips): V23

Allegory (Bang): V23 Always (Apollinaire): V24 America, America (Youssef): V29 American Poetry (Simpson): V7 Amichai, Yehuda Not like a Cypress: V24 Ammons, A. R. The City Limits: V19 Anasazi (Snyder): V9 An Ancient Gesture (Millay): V31 And What If I Spoke of Despair (Bass): V19 Angelou, Maya Harlem Hopscotch: V2 On the Pulse of Morning: V3 Woman Work: V33 Angle of Geese (Momaday): V2 Annabel Lee (Poe): V9 Anniversary (Harjo): V15 Anonymous Barbara Allan: V7 Go Down, Moses: V11 Lord Randal: V6 The Seafarer: V8 Sir Patrick Spens: V4 Swing Low Sweet Chariot: V1 Anorexic (Boland): V12 Another Night in the Ruins (Kinnell): V26 Answers to Letters (Transtro¨mer): V21 An Anthem (Sanchez): V26 Any Human to Another (Cullen): V3 anyone lived in a pretty how town (cummings): V30 Apollinaire, Guillaume Always: V24 Apple sauce for Eve (Piercy): V22

Archaic Torso of Apollo (Rilke): V27 Arnold, Matthew Dover Beach: V2 Ars Poetica (MacLeish): V5 The Arsenal at Springfield (Longfellow): V17 The Art of the Novel (Saje´): V23 Art Thou the Thing I Wanted (Fulton): V25 An Arundel Tomb (Larkin): V12 Arvio, Sarah Memory: V21 As I Walked Out One Evening (Auden): V4 Ashbery, John Paradoxes and Oxymorons: V11 Self-PortraitinaConvexMirror:V28 Astonishment (Szymborska): V15 At the Bomb Testing Site (Stafford): V8 At the Cancer Clinic (Kooser): V24 An Attempt at Jealousy (Tsvetaeva): V29 Atwood, Margaret Siren Song: V7 Auden, W. H. As I Walked Out One Evening: V4 Funeral Blues: V10 Muse´e des Beaux Arts: V1 September 1, 1939: V27 The Unknown Citizen: V3 Aurora Leigh (Browning): V23 Auto Wreck (Shapiro): V3 Autobiographia Literaria (O’Hara): V34 Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio (Wright): V8

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B Babii Yar (Yevtushenko): V29 Baggott, Julianna What the Poets Could Have Been: V26 Ballad of Birmingham (Randall): V5 Ballad of Orange and Grape (Rukeyser): V10 Bang, Mary Jo Allegory: V23 Baraka, Amiri In Memory of Radio: V9 Barbara Allan (Anonymous): V7 Barbarese, J. T. Walk Your Body Down: V26 Barbie Doll (Piercy): V9 Barot, Rick Bonnard’s Garden: V25 Barrett, Elizabeth Sonnet 43: V2 The Base Stealer (Francis): V12 Basho , Matsuo Falling Upon Earth: V2 The Moon Glows the Same: V7 Temple Bells Die Out: V18 Bass, Ellen And What If I Spoke of Despair: V19 Baudelaire, Charles Hymn to Beauty: V21 The Bean Eaters (Brooks): V2 Because I Could Not Stop for Death (Dickinson): V2 Bedtime Story (MacBeth): V8 Behn, Robin Ten Years after Your Deliberate Drowning: V21 Bell, Marvin View: V25 La Belle Dame sans Merci (Keats): V17 The Bells (Poe): V3 Beowulf (Wilbur): V11 Berry, Wendell The Peace of Wild Things: V30 Berryman, John Dream Song 29: V27 Beware: Do Not Read This Poem (Reed): V6 Beware of Ruins (Hope): V8 Bialosky, Jill Seven Seeds: V19 Bidart, Frank Curse: V26 Bidwell Ghost (Erdrich): V14 Biele, Joelle Rapture: V21 Birch Canoe (Revard): V5 Birches (Frost): V13 Birney, Earle Vancouver Lights: V8

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A Birthday (Rossetti): V10 Bishop, Elizabeth Brazil, January 1, 1502: V6 Filling Station: V12 The Fish: V31 The Man-Moth: V27 The Black Heralds (Vallejo): V26 A Black Man Talks of Reaping (Bontemps): V32 The Black Snake (Oliver): V31 Black Zodiac (Wright): V10 Blackberry Eating (Kinnell): V35 Blackberrying (Plath): V15 Blake, William The Fly: V34 The Lamb: V12 A Poison Tree: V24 The Tyger: V2 A Blessing (Wright): V7 ‘‘Blighters’’ (Sassoon): V28 Blood Oranges (Mueller): V13 The Blue Rim of Memory (Levertov): V17 Blumenthal, Michael Inventors: V7 Bly, Robert Come with Me: V6 Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter: V17 Bogan, Louise Words for Departure: V21 Boland, Eavan Anorexic: V12 It’s a Woman’s World: V22 Outside History: V31 Bonnard’s Garden (Barot): V25 Bontemps, Arna A Black Man Talks of Reaping: V32 Borges and I (Borges): V27 Borges, Jorge Luis Borges and I: V27 The Boy (Hacker): V19 Bradstreet, Anne To My Dear and Loving Husband: V6 Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666: V33 Brazil, January 1, 1502 (Bishop): V6 The Bridegroom (Pushkin): V34 Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art (Keats): V9 Brock-Broido, Lucie After Raphael: V26 Brodsky, Joseph Odysseus to Telemachus: V35 The Bronze Horseman (Pushkin): V28 Bronte¨, Emily Old Stoic: V33 Brooke, Rupert The Soldier: V7 Brooks, Gwendolyn The Bean Eaters: V2

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The Explorer: V32 The Sonnet-Ballad: V1 Strong Men, Riding Horses: V4 We Real Cool: V6 Brouwer, Joel Last Request: V14 Brown, Fleda The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives: V28 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Aurora Leigh: V23 Sonnet 43: V2 Sonnet XXIX: V16 Browning, Robert My Last Duchess: V1 Porphyria’s Lover: V15 Bryant, William Cullen Thanatopsis: V30 Bukowski, Charles The Tragedy of the Leaves: V28 Burns, Robert A Red, Red Rose: V8 Business (Cruz): V16 The Bustle in a House (Dickinson): V10 But Perhaps God Needs the Longing (Sachs): V20 Butcher Shop (Simic): V7 Byrne, Elena Karina In Particular: V20 Byron, Lord Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: V35 The Destruction of Sennacherib: V1 She Walks in Beauty: V14 When We Two Parted: V29

C The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer): V14 Cargoes (Masefield): V5 Carroll, Lewis Jabberwocky: V11 The Walrus and the Carpenter: V30 Carruth, Hayden I, I, I: V26 Carson, Anne New Rule: V18 Carson, Ciaran The War Correspondent: V26 Carver, Raymond The Cobweb: V17 Casey at the Bat (Thayer): V5 Castillo, Ana While I Was Gone a War Began: V21 Cavafy, C. P. Ithaka: V19 Cavalry Crossing a Ford (Whitman): V13 Celan, Paul Late and Deep: V21 The Centaur (Swenson): V30

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The Crime Was in Granada (Machado): V23 Cruz, Victor Hernandez Business: V16 Cullen, Countee Any Human to Another: V3 cummings, e. e. anyone lived in a pretty how town: V30 i was sitting in mcsorley’s: V13 l(a: V1 maggie and milly and molly and may: V12 old age sticks: V3 since feeling is first: V34 somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond: V19 Curse (Bidart): V26 The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter. A Barn in the Urals (Dubie): V12

D Daddy (Plath): V28 The Darkling Thrush (Hardy): V18 Darwin in 1881 (Schnackenberg): V13 Daughter-Mother-Maya-Seeta (Vazirani): V25 Dawe, Bruce Drifters: V10 Daylights (Warren): V13 The Dead (Mitchell): V35 Dear Reader (Tate): V10 The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner (Jarrell): V2 The Death of the Hired Man (Frost): V4 Death Sentences (Lazic´): V22 Deep Woods (Nemerov): V14 Dennis, Carl The God Who Loves You: V20 The Destruction of Sennacherib (Byron): V1 Dickey, James The Heaven of Animals: V6 The Hospital Window: V11 Dickinson, Emily Because I Could Not Stop for Death: V2 The Bustle in a House: V10 ‘‘Hope’’ Is the Thing with Feathers: V3 I Died for Beauty: V28 I felt a Funeral, in my Brain: V13 I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died—: V5 I’m Nobody! Who Are You?: V35 Much Madness Is Divinest Sense: V16 My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close: V8

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A Narrow Fellow in the Grass: V11 The Soul Selects Her Own Society: V1 Success Is Counted Sweetest: V32 There’s a Certain Slant of Light: V6 This Is My Letter to the World: V4 Digging (Heaney): V5 Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee My Mother Combs My Hair: V34 Diving into the Wreck (Rich): V29 Dobyns, Stephen It’s like This: V23 Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night (Thomas): V1 Donne, John Holy Sonnet 10: V2 Song: V35 A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning: V11 Doty, Mark The Wings: V28 Dove, Rita Geometry: V15 This Life: V1 Dover Beach (Arnold): V2 Dream Song 29 (Berryman): V27 Dream Variations (Hughes): V15 Drifters (Dawe): V10 A Drink of Water (Heaney): V8 Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon (Po): V20 Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter (Bly): V17 Drought Year (Wright): V8 The Drunken Boat (Rimbaud): V28 Dubie, Norman The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter. A Barn in the Urals: V12 Du Bois, W. E. B. The Song of the Smoke: V13 Duffy, Carol Ann Originally: V25 Dugan, Alan How We Heard the Name: V10 Dulce et Decorum Est (Owen): V10 Dunbar, Paul Laurence Sympathy: V33 Duncan, Robert An African Elegy: V13 Dunn, Stephen The Reverse Side: V21 Duration (Paz): V18

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Cervantes, Lorna Dee Freeway 280: V30 The Chambered Nautilus (Holmes): V24 The Charge of the Light Brigade (Tennyson): V1 Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales: V14 Chicago (Sandburg): V3 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron): V35 Childhood (Rilke): V19 Chin, Marilyn How I Got That Name: V28 Chocolates (Simpson): V11 Chorale (Young): V25 Christ Climbed Down (Ferlinghetti): V28 The Cinnamon Peeler (Ondaatje): V19 Cisneros, Sandra Once Again I Prove the Theory of Relativity: V19 The City Limits (Ammons): V19 Clampitt, Amy Iola, Kansas: V27 Classic Ballroom Dances (Simic): V33 Clifton, Lucille Climbing: V14 homage to my hips: V29 Miss Rosie: V1 Climbing (Clifton): V14 The Cobweb (Carver): V17 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Kubla Khan: V5 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: V4 Colibrı´ (Espada): V16 Collins, Billy The Afterlife: V18 Come with Me (Bly): V6 The Constellation Orion (Kooser): V8 Concord Hymn (Emerson): V4 The Conquerors (McGinley): V13 Conscientious Objector (Millay): V34 The Continuous Life (Strand): V18 Conversation with a Stone (Szymborska): V27 Cool Tombs (Sandburg): V6 Cooper, Jane Rent: V25 The Cossacks (Pastan): V25 The Country Without a Post Office (Shahid Ali): V18 Courage (Sexton): V14 The Courage That My Mother Had (Millay): V3 Crane, Stephen War Is Kind: V9 The Creation (Johnson): V1 Creeley, Robert Fading Light: V21 The Cremation of Sam McGee (Service): V10

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E The Eagle (Tennyson): V11 Early in the Morning (Lee): V17 Easter 1916 (Yeats): V5 Eating Poetry (Strand): V9 Ego-Tripping (Giovanni): V28 Elegy for My Father, Who is Not Dead (Hudgins): V14

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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (Gray): V9 An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum (Spender): V23 Elena (Mora): V33 Eliot, T. S. The Hollow Men: V33 Journey of the Magi: V7 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: V1 The Waste Land: V20 Emerson, Claudia My Grandmother’s Plot in the Family Cemetery: V27 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Concord Hymn: V4 The Rhodora: V17 The Snow-Storm: V34 Erdrich, Louise Bidwell Ghost: V14 Espada, Martı´ n Colibrı´: V16 We Live by What We See at Night: V13 Ethics (Pastan): V8 Everything is Plundered (Akhmatova): V32 The Exhibit (Mueller): V9 The Explorer (Brooks): V32

F Facing It (Komunyakaa): V5 Fading Light (Creeley): V21 Falling Upon Earth (Basho ): V2 A Far Cry from Africa (Walcott): V6 A Farewell to English (Hartnett): V10 Farrokhzaad, Faroogh A Rebirth: V21 Fenton, James The Milkfish Gatherers: V11 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence Christ Climbed Down: V28 Fern Hill (Thomas): V3 Fiddler Crab (Jacobsen): V23 Fifteen (Stafford): V2 Filling Station (Bishop): V12 Finch, Anne A Nocturnal Reverie: V30 Fire and Ice (Frost): V7 The Fish (Bishop): V31 The Fish (Moore): V14 The Fly (Blake): V34 Follower (Heaney): V30 For a New Citizen of These United States (Lee): V15 For An Assyrian Frieze (Viereck): V9 For Jean Vincent D’abbadie, Baron St.-Castin (Nowlan): V12 For Jennifer, 6, on the Teton (Hugo): V17 For the Sake of Strangers (Laux): V24

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For the Union Dead (Lowell): V7 For the White poets who would be Indian (Rose): V13 The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower (Thomas): V8 Forche´, Carolyn The Garden Shukkei-en: V18 The Forest (Stewart): V22 Four Mountain Wolves (Silko): V9 Fragment 2 (Sappho): V31 Francis, Robert The Base Stealer: V12 Fraser, Kathleen Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted: V29 Freeway 280 (Cervantes): V30 From the Rising of the Sun (Milosz): V29 Frost, Robert Acquainted with the Night: V35 After Apple Picking: V32 Birches: V13 The Death of the Hired Man: V4 Fire and Ice: V7 Mending Wall: V5 Nothing Gold Can Stay: V3 Out, Out—: V10 The Road Not Taken: V2 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: V1 The Wood-Pile: V6 Fu, Tu Jade Flower Palace: V32 Fully Empowered (Neruda): V33 Fulton, Alice Art Thou the Thing I Wanted: V25 Funeral Blues (Auden): V10

G Gacela of the Dark Death (Garcı´ a Lorca): V20 Gallagher, Tess I Stop Writing the Poem: V16 Garcı´ a Lorca, Federico Gacela of the Dark Death: V20 Lament for Ignacio Sa´nchez Mejı´as: V31 The Garden Shukkei-en (Forche´): V18 Geometry (Dove): V15 Ghazal (Spires): V21 Ginsberg, Allen Howl: V29 A Supermarket in California: V5 Gioia, Dana The Litany: V24 Giovanni, Nikki Ego-Tripping: V28 Knoxville, Tennessee: V17 Winter: V35 Glu¨ck, Louise

P o e t r y

The Gold Lily: V5 The Mystery: V15 Go Down, Moses (Anonymous): V11 Goblin Market (Rossetti): V27 The God Who Loves You (Dennis): V20 The Gold Lily (Glu¨ck): V5 Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (Walker): V30 Goodison, Lorna The River Mumma Wants Out: V25 A Grafted Tongue (Montague): V12 Graham, Jorie The Hiding Place: V10 Mind: V17 Grandmother (Mort): V34 Gray, Thomas Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: V9 The Greatest Grandeur (Rogers): V18 Gregg, Linda A Thirst Against: V20 Grennan, Eamon Station: V21 Grudnow (Pastan): V32 Gunn, Thom The Missing: V9

H H.D. Helen: V6 Sea Rose: V28 Hacker, Marilyn The Boy: V19 Hahn, Kimiko Pine: V23 Hall, Donald Names of Horses: V8 HaNagid, Shmuel Two Eclipses: V33 Hanging Fire (Lorde): V32 Hardy, Thomas Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?: V4 The Darkling Thrush: V18 The Man He Killed: V3 Harjo, Joy Anniversary: V15 Remember: V32 Harlem (Hughes): V1 Harlem Hopscotch (Angelou): V2 Hartnett, Michael A Farewell to English: V10 Hashimoto, Sharon What I Would Ask My Husband’s Dead Father: V22 Having a Coke with You (O’Hara): V12 Having it Out with Melancholy (Kenyon): V17 Hawk Roosting (Hughes): V4

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C u m u l a t i v e

P o e t r y

f o r

S t u d e n t s ,

The Hospital Window (Dickey): V11 Housman, A. E. To an Athlete Dying Young: V7 When I Was One-and-Twenty: V4 How I Got That Name (Chin): V28 How We Heard the Name (Dugan): V10 Howe, Marie What Belongs to Us: V15 Howl (Ginsberg): V29 Hudgins, Andrew Elegy for My Father, Who is Not Dead: V14 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Pound): V16 Hughes, Langston Dream Variations: V15 I, Too: V30 Harlem: V1 Mother to Son: V3 The Negro Speaks of Rivers: V10 Theme for English B: V6 Hughes, Ted Hawk Roosting: V4 The Horses: V32 Perfect Light: V19 Hugo, Richard For Jennifer, 6, on the Teton: V17 Hum (Lauterbach): V25 Hunger in New York City (Ortiz): V4 Huong, Ho Xuan Spring-Watching Pavilion: V18 Hurt Hawks (Jeffers): V3 Huswifery (Taylor): V31 Hymn to Aphrodite (Sappho): V20 Hymn to Beauty (Baudelaire): V21

I I Died for Beauty (Dickinson): V28 I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (Dickinson): V13 I Go Back to May 1937 (Olds): V17 I Hear America Singing (Whitman): V3 I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died— (Dickinson): V5 I, I, I (Carruth): V26 I Stop Writing the Poem (Gallagher): V16 I, Too (Hughes): V30 I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (Wordsworth): V33 i was sitting in mcsorley’s (cummings): V13 The Idea of Order at Key West (Stevens): V13 If (Kipling): V22 I’m Nobody! Who Are You? (Dickinson): V35 In a Station of the Metro (Pound): V2 In Flanders Fields (McCrae): V5 In Memory of Radio (Baraka): V9

V o l u m e

3 5

I n d e x

In Music (Milosz): V35 In Particular (Byrne): V20 In Response to Executive Order 9066: All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers (Okita): V32 In the Land of Shinar (Levertov): V7 In the Suburbs (Simpson): V14 Incident in a Rose Garden (Justice): V14 Inventors (Blumentha): V7 Iola, Kansas (Clampitt): V27 An Irish Airman Foresees His Death (Yeats): V1 Island of the Three Marias (Rı´ os): V11 Ithaka (Cavafy): V19 It’s a Woman’s World (Boland): V22 It’s like This (Dobyns): V23

J Jabberwocky (Carroll): V11 Jacobsen, Josephine Fiddler Crab: V23 Jade Flower Palace (Fu): V32 Jarrell, Randall The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner: V2 Losses: V31 Jazz Fantasia (Sandburg): V33 Jeffers, Robinson Hurt Hawks: V3 Shine Perishing Republic: V4 Johnson, James Weldon The Creation: V1 Jonson, Ben On My First Son: V33 Song: To Celia: V23 Journey of the Magi (Eliot): V7 Justice, Donald Incident in a Rose Garden: V14

K Keats, John La Belle Dame sans Merci : V17 Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art: V9 Ode on a Grecian Urn : V1 Ode to a Nightingale: V3 On the Grasshopper and the Cricket: V32 When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be: V2 Kelly, Brigit Pegeen The Satyr’s Heart: V22 Kenyon, Jane Having it Out with Melancholy: V17 ‘‘Trouble with Math in a OneRoom Country School’’: V9 Kilroy: (Viereck): V14 Kim, Sue (Suji) Kwock Monologue for an Onion: V24

3 6 5

Cumulative Author/Title Index

Hayden, Robert Runagate Runagate: V31 Those Winter Sundays: V1 Heaney, Seamus Digging: V5 A Drink of Water: V8 Follower: V30 Midnight: V2 The Singer’s House: V17 Heart’s Needle (Snodgrass): V29 The Heaven of Animals (Dickey): V6 He´bert, Anne The Alchemy of Day: V20 Hecht, Anthony ‘‘More Light! More Light!’’: V6 The Heights of Macchu Picchu (Neruda): V28 Hejinian, Lyn Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance: V27 Helen (H.D.): V6 Herbert, George Virtue: V25 Herbert, Zbigniew Why The Classics: V22 Herrick, Robert The Night Piece: To Julia: V29 To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time: V13 The Hiding Place (Graham): V10 High Windows (Larkin): V3 The Highwayman (Noyes): V4 Hillman, Brenda Air for Mercury: V20 The Hippopotamus (Nash): V31 Hirsch, Edward Omen: V22 Hirshfield, Jane Three Times My Life Has Opened: V16 His Speed and Strength (Ostriker): V19 Hoagland, Tony Social Life: V19 The Hollow Men (Eliot): V33 Holmes, Oliver Wendell The Chambered Nautilus: V24 Old Ironsides: V9 Holy Sonnet 10 (Donne): V2 homage to my hips (Clifton): V29 Hongo, Garrett The Legend: V25 What For: V33 Hope, A. D. Beware of Ruins: V8 Hope Is a Tattered Flag (Sandburg): V12 ‘‘Hope’’ Is the Thing with Feathers (Dickinson): V3 Hopkins, Gerard Manley Pied Beauty: V26 The Horizons of Rooms (Merwin): V15 The Horses (Hughes): V32

A u t h o r / T i t l e

C u m u l a t i v e

A u t h o r / T i t l e

Kindness (Nye): V24 King James Bible Psalm 8: V9 Psalm 23: V4 Kinnell, Galway Another Night in the Ruins: V26 Blackberry Eating: V35 Saint Francis and the Sow: V9 Kipling, Rudyard If: V22 Kizer, Carolyn To an Unknown Poet: V18 Knowledge (Addonizio): V25 Knoxville, Tennessee (Giovanni): V17 Koch, Kenneth Paradiso: V20 Komunyakaa, Yusef Facing It: V5 Ode to a Drum: V20 Slam, Dunk, & Hook: V30 Kooser, Ted At the Cancer Clinic: V24 The Constellation Orion: V8 Kubla Khan (Coleridge): V5 Kumin, Maxine Address to the Angels: V18 Kunitz, Stanley The War Against the Trees: V11 Kyger, Joanne September: V23

L l(a (cummings): V1 The Lady of Shalott (Tennyson): V15 Lake (Warren): V23 The Lake Isle of Innisfree (Yeats): V15 The Lamb (Blake): V12 Lament for Ignacio Sa´nchez Mejı´as (Lorca): V31 Lament for the Dorsets (Purdy): V5 Landscape with Tractor (Taylor): V10 Lanier, Sidney Song of the Chattahoochee: V14 Larkin, Philip An Arundel Tomb: V12 High Windows: V3 Toads: V4 The Last Question (Parker): V18 Last Request (Brouwer): V14 Late and Deep (Celan): V21 Lauterbach, Ann Hum: V25 Laux, Dorianne For the Sake of Strangers: V24 Lawrence, D. H. Piano: V6 Layton, Irving A Tall Man Executes a Jig: V12 Lazic´, Radmila Death Sentences: V22

366

I n d e x

Leda and the Swan (Yeats): V13 Lee, Li-Young Early in the Morning: V17 For a New Citizen of These United States: V15 The Weight of Sweetness: V11 The Legend (Hongo): V25 Lepidopterology (Svenbro): V23 Levertov, Denise The Blue Rim of Memory: V17 In the Land of Shinar: V7 A Tree Telling of Orpheus: V31 Leviathan (Merwin): V5 Levine, Philip Starlight: V8 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin Pantoun for Chinese Women: V29 Lineage (Walker): V31 The Litany (Gioia): V24 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth The Arsenal at Springfield: V17 Paul Revere’s Ride: V2 A Psalm of Life: V7 The Wreck of the Hesperus: V31 Lord Randal (Anonymous): V6 Lorde, Audre Hanging Fire: V32 What My Child Learns of the Sea: V16 Losses (Jarrell): V31 Lost in Translation (Merrill): V23 Lost Sister (Song): V5 The Lotus Flowers (Voigt): V33 Love Calls Us to the Things of This World (Wilbur): V29 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Eliot): V1 Lovelace, Richard To Althea, From Prison: V34 To Lucasta, Going to the Wars: V32 Lowell, Amy The Taxi: V30 Lowell, Robert For the Union Dead: V7 The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket: V6 Loy, Mina Moreover, the Moon: V20

M MacBeth, George Bedtime Story: V8 Machado, Antonio The Crime Was in Granada: V23 MacLeish, Archibald Ars Poetica: V5 Madgett, Naomi Long Alabama Centennial: V10 maggie and milly and molly and may (cummings): V12

P o e t r y

Malroux, Claire Morning Walk: V21 The Man He Killed (Hardy): V3 The Man-Moth (Bishop): V27 Marlowe, Christopher The Passionate Shepherd to His Love: V22 A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (Raine): V7 Marvell, Andrew To His Coy Mistress: V5 Masefield, John Cargoes: V5 Mastectomy (Ostriker): V26 Maternity (Swir): V21 Matsuo Basho  Falling Upon Earth: V2 The Moon Glows the Same: V7 Temple Bells Die Out: V18 Maxwell, Glyn The Nerve: V23 McCrae, John In Flanders Fields: V5 McElroy, Colleen A Pie`d: V3 McGinley, Phyllis The Conquerors: V13 Reactionary Essay on Applied Science: V9 McHugh, Heather Three To’s and an Oi: V24 McKay, Claude The Tropics in New York: V4 Meeting the British (Muldoon): V7 Memoir (Van Duyn): V20 Memory (Arvio): V21 Mending Wall (Frost): V5 Merlin Enthralled (Wilbur): V16 Merriam, Eve Onomatopoeia: V6 Merrill, James Lost in Translation: V23 Merwin, W. S. The Horizons of Rooms: V15 Leviathan: V5 Metamorphoses (Ovid): V22 Midnight (Heaney): V2 Midnight Verses (Akhmatova): V18 Midsummer, Tobago (Walcott): V34 The Milkfish Gatherers (Fenton): V11 Millay, Edna St. Vincent An Ancient Gesture: V31 Conscientious Objector: V34 The Courage That My Mother Had: V3 Wild Swans: V17 Milosz, Czeslaw From the Rising of the Sun: V29 In Music: V35 Song of a Citizen: V16

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3 5

C u m u l a t i v e

(Acosta): V12 My Papa’s Waltz (Roethke): V3 The Mystery (Glu¨ck): V15

P o e t r y

f o r

S t u d e n t s ,

N Names of Horses (Hall): V8 A Narrow Fellow in the Grass (Dickinson): V11 Nash, Ogden The Hippopotamus: V31 Native Guard (Trethewey): V29 The Negro Speaks of Rivers (Hughes): V10 Nemerov, Howard Deep Woods: V14 The Phoenix: V10 Neruda, Pablo Fully Empowered: V33 The Heights of Macchu Picchu: V28 Sonnet LXXXIX: V35 Tonight I Can Write: V11 The Nerve (Maxwell): V23 New Rule (Carson): V18 The Night Piece: To Julia (Herrick): V29 A Nocturnal Reverie (Finch): V30 A Noiseless Patient Spider (Whitman): V31 Not like a Cypress (Amichai): V24 Not Waving but Drowning (Smith): V3 Nothing Gold Can Stay (Frost): V3 Nowlan, Alden For Jean Vincent D’abbadie, Baron St.-Castin: V12 Noyes, Alfred The Highwayman: V4 Nye, Naomi Shihab Kindness: V24 Shoulders: V33 The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd (Raleigh): V14

O O Captain! My Captain! (Whitman): V2 Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats): V1 Ode to a Drum (Komunyakaa): V20 Ode to a Nightingale (Keats): V3 Ode to the West Wind (Shelley): V2 Odysseus to Telemachus (Brodsky): V35 Of Modern Poetry (Stevens): V35 O’Hara, Frank Autobiographia Literaria: V34 Having a Coke with You: V12 Why I Am Not a Painter: V8 Okita, Dwight In Response to Executive Order 9066: All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers: V32 old age sticks (cummings): V3 Old Ironsides (Holmes): V9 Olds, Sharon I Go Back to May 1937: V17 Old Stoic (Bronte¨): V33

V o l u m e

3 5

I n d e x

Oliver, Mary The Black Snake: V31 Music Lessons: V8 Wild Geese: V15 Omen (Hirsch): V22 On Being Brought from Africa to America (Wheatley): V29 On Freedom’s Ground (Wilbur): V12 [On His Blindness] Sonnet 16 (Milton): V3 On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three (Milton): V17 On Location in the Loire Valley (Ackerman): V19 On My First Son (Jonson): V33 On the Grasshopper and the Cricket (Keats): V32 On the Pulse of Morning (Angelou): V3 On the Threshold (Montale): V22 Once Again I Prove the Theory of Relativity (Cisneros): V19 Ondaatje, Michael The Cinnamon Peeler: V19 To a Sad Daughter: V8 One Is One (Ponsot): V24 One of the Smallest (Stern): V26 Onomatopoeia (Merriam): V6 Oranges (Soto): V30 Ordinary Words (Stone): V19 Originally (Duffy): V25 Ortiz, Simon Hunger in New York City: V4 My Father’s Song: V16 Ostriker, Alicia His Speed and Strength: V19 Mastectomy: V26 Our Side (Muske-Dukes): V24 Out, Out— (Frost): V10 Outside History (Boland): V31 Overture to a Dance of Locomotives (Williams): V11 Ovid, (Naso, Publius Ovidius) Metamorphoses: V22 Owen, Wilfred Dulce et Decorum Est: V10 Oysters (Sexton): V4 Ozymandias (Shelley): V27

Cumulative Author/Title Index

Milton, John [On His Blindness] Sonnet 16: V3 On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three: V17 Mind (Graham): V17 Miniver Cheevy (Robinson): V35 Mirabai All I Was Doing Was Breathing: V24 Mirror (Plath): V1 Miss Rosie (Clifton): V1 The Missing (Gunn): V9 Mitchell, Susan The Dead: V35 Momaday, N. Scott Angle of Geese: V2 To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly: V11 Monologue for an Onion (Kim): V24 Montague, John A Grafted Tongue: V12 Montale, Eugenio On the Threshold: V22 The Moon Glows the Same (Basho ): V7 Moore, Marianne The Fish: V14 Poetry: V17 Mora, Pat Elena: V33 Uncoiling: V35 ‘‘More Light! More Light!’’ (Hecht): V6 Moreover, the Moon (Loy): V20 Morning Walk (Malroux): V21 Mort, Valzhyna Grandmother: V34 Mother to Son (Hughes): V3 Much Madness Is Divinest Sense (Dickinson): V16 Muldoon, Paul Meeting the British: V7 Pineapples and Pomegranates: V22 Mueller, Lisel Blood Oranges: V13 The Exhibit: V9 Muse´e des Beaux Arts (Auden): V1 Mushrooms (Plath): V33 Music Lessons (Oliver): V8 Muske-Dukes, Carol Our Side: V24 My Father’s Song (Ortiz): V16 My Grandmother’s Plot in the Family Cemetery (Emerson): V27 My Last Duchess (Browning): V1 My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close (Dickinson): V8 My Mother Combs My Hair (Divakaruni): V34 My Mother Pieced Quilts

A u t h o r / T i t l e

P Pak Tu-Jin River of August: V35 Pantoun for Chinese Women (Lim): V29 Paradiso (Koch): V20 Paradoxes and Oxymorons (Ashbery): V11 Parker, Dorothy The Last Question: V18 The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (Marlowe): V22

3 6 7

C u m u l a t i v e

A u t h o r / T i t l e

Pastan, Linda The Cossacks: V25 Ethics: V8 Grudnow: V32 Paul Revere’s Ride (Longfellow): V2 Pavese, Cesare Two Poems for T.: V20 Paz, Octavio Duration: V18 Sunstone: V30 The Peace of Wild Things (Berry): V30 Perfect Light (Hughes): V19 Phillips, Carl All It Takes: V23 The Phoenix (Nemerov): V10 Piano (Lawrence): V6 Pied Beauty (Hopkins): V26 Piercy, Marge Apple sauce for Eve: V22 Barbie Doll: V9 To Be of Use: V32 Pine (Hahn): V23 Pineapples and Pomegranates (Muldoon): V22 Pinsky, Robert Song of Reasons: V18 Plath, Sylvia Blackberrying: V15 Daddy: V28 Mirror: V1 Mushrooms: V33 A Psalm of Life (Longfellow): V7 Po, Li Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon: V20 Poe, Edgar Allan Annabel Lee: V9 The Bells: V3 The Raven: V1 Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted (Fraser): V29 Poetry (Moore): V17 A Poison Tree (Blake): V24 Ponsot, Marie One Is One: V24 Pope, Alexander The Rape of the Lock: V12 Porphyria’s Lover (Browning): V15 Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End (Santos): V24 Possibilities (Szymborska): V34 Pound, Ezra Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: V16 In a Station of the Metro: V2 The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter: V8 Practice (Voigt): V23 Proem (Tennyson): V19 Psalm 8 (King James Bible): V9 Psalm 23 (King James Bible): V4

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I n d e x

Purdy, Al Lament for the Dorsets: V5 Wilderness Gothic: V12 Pushkin, Alexander The Bridegroom: V34 The Bronze Horseman: V28

Q The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket (Lowell): V6 Queen-Ann’s-Lace (Williams): V6

R Raine, Craig A Martian Sends a Postcard Home: V7 Raleigh, Walter, Sir The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd: V14 Ramanujan, A. K. Waterfalls in a Bank: V27 Randall, Dudley Ballad of Birmingham: V5 The Rape of the Lock (Pope): V12 Rapture (Biele): V21 The Raven (Poe): V1 Reactionary Essay on Applied Science (McGinley): V9 A Rebirth (Farrokhzaad): V21 A Red, Red Rose (Burns): V8 The Red Wheelbarrow (Williams): V1 Reed, Ishmael Beware: Do Not Read This Poem: V6 Remember (Harjo): V32 Remember (Rossetti): V14 Rent (Cooper): V25 Requiem (Akhmatova): V27 Reunions with a Ghost (Ai): V16 Revard, Carter Birch Canoe: V5 The Reverse Side (Dunn): V21 The Rhodora (Emerson): V17 Rich, Adrienne Diving into the Wreck: V29 Rusted Legacy: V15 Richard Cory (Robinson): V4 Rilke, Rainer Maria Archaic Torso of Apollo: V27 Childhood: V19 Rimbaud, Arthur The Drunken Boat: V28 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge): V4 Rı´ os, Alberto Island of the Three Marias: V11 River of August (Pak): V35 The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter (Pound): V8 The River Mumma Wants Out (Goodison): V25

P o e t r y

The Road Not Taken (Frost): V2 Robinson, E. A. Miniver Cheevy: V35 Richard Cory: V4 Roethke, Theodore My Papa’s Waltz: V3 The Waking: V34 Rogers, Pattiann The Greatest Grandeur: V18 The Room (Aiken): V24 Rose, Wendy For the White poets who would be Indian: V13 Rossetti, Christina A Birthday: V10 Goblin Market: V27 Remember: V14 Up-Hill: V34 Ruefle, Mary Sentimental Education: V26 Rukeyser, Muriel Ballad of Orange and Grape: V10 St. Roach: V29 Runagate Runagate (Hayden): V31 Russian Letter (Yau): V26 Rusted Legacy (Rich): V15

S Sachs, Nelly But Perhaps God Needs the Longing: V20 Sailing to Byzantium (Yeats): V2 Saint Francis and the Sow (Kinnell): V9 Saje´, Natasha The Art of the Novel: V23 Salter, Mary Jo Trompe l’Oeil: V22 Sanchez, Sonia An Anthem: V26 Sandburg, Carl Chicago: V3 Cool Tombs: V6 Hope Is a Tattered Flag: V12 Jazz Fantasia: V33 Santos, Sherod Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End: V24 Sappho Fragment 2: V31 Hymn to Aphrodite: V20 Sassoon, Siegfried ‘‘Blighters’’: V28 A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General (Swift): V27 The Satyr’s Heart (Kelly): V22 Schnackenberg, Gjertrud Darwin in 1881: V13 Supernatural Love: V25 Sea Rose (H.D.): V28

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V o l u m e

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C u m u l a t i v e

P o e t r y

f o r

S t u d e n t s ,

Snodgrass, W. D. Heart’s Needle: V29 The Snow-Storm (Emerson): V34 Snyder, Gary Anasazi: V9 True Night: V19 Social Life (Hoagland): V19 The Soldier (Brooke): V7 Some People Like Poetry (Szymborska): V31 somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond (cummings): V19 Song (Donne): V35 Song, Cathy Lost Sister: V5 Song of a Citizen (Milosz): V16 Song of Reasons (Pinsky): V18 SongoftheChattahoochee(Lanier):V14 The Song of the Smoke (Du Bois): V13 Song: To Celia (Jonson): V23 Sonnet 16 [On His Blindness] (Milton): V3 Sonnet 18 (Shakespeare): V2 Sonnet 19 (Shakespeare): V9 Sonnet 29 (Shakespeare): V8 Sonnet 30 (Shakespeare): V4 Sonnet XXIX (Browning): V16 Sonnet 43 (Browning): V2 Sonnet 55 (Shakespeare): V5 Sonnet 75 (Spenser): V32 Sonnet LXXXIX (Neruda): V35 Sonnet 116 (Shakespeare): V3 Sonnet 130 (Shakespeare): V1 The Sonnet-Ballad (Brooks): V1 Soto, Gary Oranges: V30 Small Town with One Road: V7 The Soul Selects Her Own Society (Dickinson): V1 Southbound on the Freeway (Swenson): V16 Soyinka, Wole Telephone Conversation: V27 Spender, Stephen An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum: V23 Spenser, Edmund Sonnet 75: V32 Spires, Elizabeth Ghazal: V21 Spring-Watching Pavilion (Huong): V18 St. Roach (Rukeyser): V29 Stafford, William At the Bomb Testing Site: V8 Fifteen: V2 Ways to Live: V16 Starlight (Levine): V8 Station (Grennan): V21 Stern, Gerald One of the Smallest: V26

V o l u m e

3 5

I n d e x

Stevens, Wallace The Idea of Order at Key West: V13 Of Modern Poetry: V35 Sunday Morning: V16 Stewart, Susan The Forest: V22 The Stolen Child (Yeats): V34 Stone, Ruth Ordinary Words: V19 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (Frost): V1 Storm Ending (Toomer): V31 Story from Bear Country (Silko): V16 Strand, Mark The Continuous Life: V18 Eating Poetry: V9 Strong Men, Riding Horses (Brooks): V4 Success Is Counted Sweetest (Dickinson): V32 Sunday Morning (Stevens): V16 Sunstone (Paz): V30 A Supermarket in California (Ginsberg): V5 Supernatural Love (Schnackenberg): V25 Svenbro, Jesper Lepidopterology: V23 Swenson, May The Centaur: V30 Southbound on the Freeway: V16 Swift, Jonathan A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General: V27 Swing Low Sweet Chariot (Anonymous): V1 Swir, Anna Maternity: V21 Sympathy (Dunbar): V33 Szymborska, Wisława Astonishment: V15 Conversation with a Stone: V27 Possibilities: V34 Some People Like Poetry: V31

Cumulative Author/Title Index

The Seafarer (Anonymous): V8 The Second Coming (Yeats): V7 Seeing You (Valentine): V24 Self-Portrait (Zagajewski): V25 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Ashbery): V28 Sentimental Education (Ruefle): V26 September (Kyger): V23 September 1, 1939 (Auden): V27 Service, Robert W. The Cremation of Sam McGee: V10 Seven Ages of Man (Shakespeare): V35 Seven Seeds (Bialosky): V19 Sexton, Anne Courage: V14 Oysters: V4 Young: V30 Shahid Ali, Agha The Country Without a Post Office: V18 Shakespeare, William Seven Ages of Man: V35 Sonnet 18: V2 Sonnet 19: V9 Sonnet 29: V8 Sonnet 30: V4 Sonnet 55: V5 Sonnet 116: V3 Sonnet 130: V1 Shapiro, Karl Auto Wreck: V3 She Walks in Beauty (Byron): V14 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Ode to the West Wind: V2 Ozymandias: V27 To a Sky-Lark: V32 Shine, Perishing Republic (Jeffers): V4 Shoulders (Nye): V33 Sidney, Philip Ye Goatherd Gods: V30 Silko, Leslie Marmon Four Mountain Wolves: V9 Story from Bear Country: V16 Simic, Charles Butcher Shop: V7 Classic Ballroom Dances: V33 Simpson, Louis American Poetry: V7 Chocolates: V11 In the Suburbs: V14 since feeling is first (Cummings): V34 The Singer’s House (Heaney): V17 Sir Patrick Spens (Anonymous): V4 Siren Song (Atwood): V7 60 (Tagore): V18 Slam, Dunk, & Hook (Komunyakaa): V30 Small Town with One Road (Soto): V7 Smart and Final Iris (Tate): V15 Smith, Stevie Not Waving but Drowning: V3

A u t h o r / T i t l e

T Tagore, Rabindranath 60: V18 A Tall Man Executes a Jig (Layton): V12 Tate, James Dear Reader: V10 Smart and Final Iris: V15 The Taxi (Lowell): V30 Taylor, Edward Huswifery: V31 Taylor, Henry Landscape with Tractor: V10 Tears, Idle Tears (Tennyson): V4 Teasdale, Sara There Will Come Soft Rains: V14

3 6 9

C u m u l a t i v e

A u t h o r / T i t l e

Telephone Conversation (Soyinka): V27 Temple Bells Die Out (Basho ): V18 Ten Years after Your Deliberate Drowning (Behn): V21 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord The Charge of the Light Brigade: V1 The Eagle: V11 The Lady of Shalott: V15 Proem: V19 Tears, Idle Tears: V4 Ulysses: V2 Thanatopsis (Bryant): V30 Thayer, Ernest Lawrence Casey at the Bat: V5 Theme for English B (Hughes): V6 There’s a Certain Slant of Light (Dickinson): V6 There Will Come Soft Rains (Teasdale): V14 A Thirst Against (Gregg): V20 This Is Just to Say (Williams): V34 This Life (Dove): V1 Thomas, Dylan Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night: V1 Fern Hill: V3 The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower: V8 Those Winter Sundays (Hayden): V1 Three Times My Life Has Opened (Hirshfield): V16 Three To’s and an Oi (McHugh): V24 Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth): V2 To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly (Momaday): V11 To a Sad Daughter (Ondaatje): V8 To a Sky-Lark (Shelley): V32 To Althea,From Prison (Lovelace): V34 To an Athlete Dying Young (Housman): V7 To an Unknown Poet (Kizer): V18 To Be of Use (Piercy): V32 To His Coy Mistress (Marvell): V5 To His Excellency General Washington (Wheatley): V13 To Lucasta, Going to the Wars (Lovelace): V32 To My Dear and Loving Husband (Bradstreet): V6 To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time (Herrick): V13 Toads (Larkin): V4 Tonight I Can Write (Neruda): V11 The Toni Morrison Dreams (Alexander): V22 Toomer, Jean Storm Ending: V31 The Tragedy of the Leaves (Bukowski): V28 Transtro¨mer, Tomas Answers to Letters: V21

370

I n d e x

A Tree Telling of Orpheus (Levertov): V31 Trethewey, Natasha Native Guard: V29 Trompe l’Oeil (Salter): V22 The Tropics in New York (McKay): V4 True Night (Snyder): V19 Tsvetaeva, Marina An Attempt at Jealousy: V29 Two Eclipses (HaNagid): V33 Two Poems for T. (Pavese): V20 The Tyger (Blake): V2

U Ulysses (Tennyson): V2 Uncoiling (Mora): V35 Ungaretti, Giuseppe Variations on Nothing: V20 The Unknown Citizen (Auden): V3 Up-Hill (Rossetti): V34 Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666 (Bradstreet): V33

V A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning (Donne): V11 Valentine, Jean Seeing You: V24 Vallejo, Ce´sar The Black Heralds: V26 Van Duyn, Mona Memoir: V20 Vancouver Lights (Birney): V8 Variations on Nothing (Ungaretti): V20 Vazirani, Reetika Daughter-Mother-Maya-Seeta: V25 Viereck, Peter For An Assyrian Frieze: V9 Kilroy: V14 View (Bell): V25 Virtue (Herbert): V25 Voigt, Ellen Bryant The Lotus Flowers: V33 Practice: V23

W Walcott, Derek A Far Cry from Africa: V6 Midsummer, Tobago: V34 Waldner, Liz Witness: V26 Walker, Alice Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning: V30 Women: V34 Walker, Margaret Lineage: V31 Walk Your Body Down (Barbarese): V26

P o e t r y

The Walrus and the Carpenter (Carroll): V30 The Waking (Roethke): V34 The War Against the Trees (Kunitz): V11 The War Correspondent (Carson): V26 War Is Kind (Crane): V9 Warren, Rosanna Daylights: V13 Lake: V23 The Waste Land (Eliot): V20 Waterfalls in a Bank (Ramanujan): V27 Ways to Live (Stafford): V16 We Live by What We See at Night (Espada): V13 We Real Cool (Brooks): V6 The Weight of Sweetness (Lee): V11 What Belongs to Us (Howe): V15 What For (Hongo): V33 What I Would Ask My Husband’s Dead Father (Hashimoto): V22 What My Child Learns of the Sea (Lorde): V16 What the Poets Could Have Been (Baggott): V26 Wheatley, Phillis On Being Brought from Africa to America: V29 To His Excellency General Washington: V13 When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be (Keats): V2 When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer (Whitman): V22 When I Was One-and-Twenty (Housman): V4 When We Two Parted (Byron): V29 While I Was Gone a War Began (Castillo): V21 Whitman, Walt Cavalry Crossing a Ford: V13 I Hear America Singing: V3 A Noiseless Patient Spider: V31 O Captain! My Captain!: V2 When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer: V22 Whoso List to Hunt (Wyatt): V25 Why I Am Not a Painter (O’Hara): V8 Why The Classics (Herbert): V22 Wilbur, Richard Beowulf: V11 Love Calls Us to the Things of This World: V29 Merlin Enthralled: V16 On Freedom’s Ground: V12 Wild Geese (Oliver): V15 Wild Swans (Millay): V17 Wilderness Gothic (Purdy): V12 Williams, William Carlos Overture to a Dance of Locomotives: V11

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C u m u l a t i v e

P o e t r y

f o r

S t u d e n t s ,

Wright, Charles Black Zodiac: V10 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: V35 Wright, James A Blessing: V7 Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio: V8 Wright, Judith Drought Year: V8 Wyatt, Thomas Whoso List to Hunt: V25

Y Yau, John Russian Letter: V26 Yeats, William Butler Easter 1916: V5 An Irish Airman Foresees His Death: V1

V o l u m e

3 5

I n d e x

The Lake Isle of Innisfree: V15 Leda and the Swan: V13 Sailing to Byzantium: V2 The Second Coming: V7 The Stolen Child: V34 Ye Goatherd Gods (Sidney): V30 Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance (Hejinian): V27 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny Babii Yar: V29 Young (Sexton): V30 Young, Kevin Chorale: V25 Youssef, Saadi America, America: V29

Cumulative Author/Title Index

Queen-Ann’s-Lace: V6 The Red Wheelbarrow: V1 This Is Just to Say: V34 The Wings (Doty): V28 Winter (Giovanni): V35 Witness (Waldner): V26 Woman Work (Angelou): V33 Women (Walker): V34 The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives (Brown): V28 The Wood-Pile (Frost): V6 Words Are the Diminution of All Things (Wright): V35 Words for Departure (Bogan): V21 Wordsworth, William I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud: V33 Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey: V2 The Wreck of the Hesperus (Longfellow): V31

A u t h o r / T i t l e

Z Zagajewski, Adam Self-Portrait: V25

3 7 1

Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index Acoma Pueblo Ortiz, Simon Hunger in New York City: V4 My Father’s Song: V16

African American Ai Reunions with a Ghost: V16 Angelou, Maya Harlem Hopscotch: V2 On the Pulse of Morning: V3 Woman Work: V33 Baraka, Amiri In Memory of Radio: V9 Bontemps, Arna A Black Man Talks of Reaping: V32 Brooks, Gwendolyn The Bean Eaters: V2 The Explorer: V32 The Sonnet-Ballad: V1 Strong Men, Riding Horses: V4 We Real Cool: V6 Clifton, Lucille Climbing: V14 homage to my hips: V29 Miss Rosie: V1 Cullen, Countee Any Human to Another: V3 Dove, Rita Geometry: V15 This Life: V1 Dunbar, Paul Laurence Sympathy: V33 Giovanni, Nikki Ego-Tripping: V28

Knoxville, Tennessee: V17 Winter: V35 Hayden, Robert Runagate Runagate: V31 Those Winter Sundays: V1 Hughes, Langston Dream Variations: V15 Harlem: V1 I, Too: V30 Mother to Son: V3 The Negro Speaks of Rivers: V10 Theme for English B: V6 Johnson, James Weldon The Creation: V1 Komunyakaa, Yusef Facing It: V5 Ode to a Drum: V20 Slam, Dunk, & Hook: V30 Lorde, Audre Hanging Fire: V32 WhatMyChildLearnsoftheSea:V16 Madgett, Naomi Long Alabama Centennial: V10 McElroy, Colleen A Pie`d: V3 Phillips, Carl All It Takes: V23 Randall, Dudley Ballad of Birmingham: V5 Reed, Ishmael Beware: Do Not Read This Poem: V6 Sanchez, Sonia An Anthem: V26 Toomer, Jean Storm Ending: V31 Trethewey, Natasha Native Guard: V29

Walker, Alice Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning: V30 Women: V34 Walker, Margaret Lineage: V31 Wheatley, Phillis On Being Brought from Africa to America: V29 To His Excellency General Washington: V13

American Ackerman, Diane On Location in the Loire Valley: V19 Acosta, Teresa Palomo My Mother Pieced Quilts: V12 Addonizio, Kim Knowledge: V25 Ai Reunions with a Ghost: V16 Aiken, Conrad The Room: V24 Alegrı´ a, Claribel Accounting: V21 Alexander, Elizabeth The Toni Morrison Dreams: V22 Ammons, A. R. The City Limits: V19 Angelou, Maya Harlem Hopscotch: V2 On the Pulse of Morning: V3 Woman Work: V33 Ashbery, John Paradoxes and Oxymorons: V11 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror:V28

3 7 3

C u m u l a t i v e

N a t i o n a l i t y / E t h n i c i t y

Arvio, Sarah Memory: V21 Auden, W. H. As I Walked Out One Evening: V4 Funeral Blues: V10 Muse´e des Beaux Arts: V1 September 1, 1939: V27 The Unknown Citizen: V3 Baggott, Julianna WhatthePoetsCouldHaveBeen:V26 Bang, Mary Jo Allegory: V23 Barbarese, J. T. Walk Your Body Down: V26 Barot, Rick Bonnard’s Garden: V25 Bass, Ellen And What If I Spoke of Despair: V19 Behn, Robin Ten Years after Your Deliberate Drowning: V21 Bell, Marvin View: V25 Berry, Wendell The Peace of Wild Things: V30 Berryman, John Dream Song 29: V27 Bialosky, Jill Seven Seeds: V19 Bidart, Frank Curse: V26 Biele, Joelle Rapture: V21 Bishop, Elizabeth Brazil, January 1, 1502: V6 Filling Station: V12 The Fish: V31 The Man-Moth: V27 Blumenthal, Michael Inventors: V7 Bly, Robert Come with Me: V6 Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter: V17 Bogan, Louise Words for Departure: V21 Bontemps, Arna A Black Man Talks of Reaping: V32 Bradstreet, Anne ToMy DearandLovingHusband: V6 Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666: V33 Brock-Broido, Lucie After Raphael: V26 Brodsky, Joseph Odysseus to Telemachus: V35 Brooks, Gwendolyn The Bean Eaters: V2 The Explorer: V32 The Sonnet-Ballad: V1 Strong Men, Riding Horses: V4 We Real Cool: V6

374

I n d e x

Brouwer, Joel Last Request: V14 Bryant, William Cullen Thanatopsis: V30 Bukowski, Charles The Tragedy of the Leaves: V28 Byrne, Elena Karina In Particular: V20 Carruth, Hayden I, I, I: V26 Carver, Raymond The Cobweb: V17 Castillo, Ana While I Was Gone a War Began: V21 Cervantes, Lorna Dee Freeway 280: V30 Chin, Marilyn How I Got That Name: V28 Cisneros, Sandra Once Again I Prove the Theory of Relativity: V19 Clampitt, Amy Iola, Kansas: V27 Clifton, Lucille Climbing: V14 homage to my hips: V29 Miss Rosie: V1 Collins, Billy The Afterlife: V18 Cooper, Jane Rent: V25 Crane, Stephen War Is Kind: V9 Creeley, Robert Fading Light: V21 Cruz, Victor Hernandez Business: V16 Cullen, Countee Any Human to Another: V3 cummings, e. e. anyone lived in a pretty how town: V30 i was sitting in mcsorley’s: V13 l(a: V1 maggie and milly and molly and may: V12 old age sticks: V3 since feeling is first: V34 somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond: V19 Dennis, Carl The God Who Loves You: V20 Dickey, James The Heaven of Animals: V6 The Hospital Window: V11 Dickinson, Emily Because I Could Not Stop for Death: V2 The Bustle in a House: V10 ‘‘Hope’’IstheThingwithFeathers: V3 I Died for Beauty: V28

P o e t r y

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain: V13 I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died—: V5 I’m Nobody! Who Are You?: V35 Much Madness Is Divinest Sense: V16 My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close: V8 A Narrow Fellow in the Grass: V11 The Soul Selects Her Own Society: V1 Success Is Counted Sweetest: V32 There’s a Certain Slant of Light: V6 This Is My Letter to the World: V4 Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee My Mother Combs My Hair: V34 Dobyns, Stephen It’s like This: V23 Dove, Rita Geometry: V15 This Life: V1 Dubie, Norman The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter. A Barn in the Urals: V12 Du Bois, W. E. B. The Song of the Smoke: V13 Dugan, Alan How We Heard the Name: V10 Dunbar, Paul Laurence Sympathy: V33 Duncan, Robert An African Elegy: V13 Dunn, Stephen The Reverse Side: V21 Eliot, T. S. The Hollow Men: V33 Journey of the Magi: V7 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: V1 Emerson, Claudia My Grandmother’s Plot in the Family Cemetery: V27 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Concord Hymn: V4 The Rhodora: V17 The Snow-Storm: V34 Erdrich, Louise Bidwell Ghost: V14 Espada, Martı´ n Colibrı´: V16 We Live by What We See at Night: V13 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence Christ Climbed Down: V28 Forche´, Carolyn The Garden Shukkei-En: V18 Francis, Robert The Base Stealer: V12 Fraser, Kathleen Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted: V29

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C u m u l a t i v e

P o e t r y

f o r

S t u d e n t s ,

Hirsch, Edward Omen: V22 Hirshfield, Jane Three Times My Life Has Opened: V16 Hoagland, Tony Social Life: V19 Holmes, Oliver Wendell The Chambered Nautilus: V24 Old Ironsides: V9 Hongo, Garrett The Legend: V25 What For: V33 Howe, Marie What Belongs to Us: V15 Hudgins, Andrew Elegy for My Father, Who is Not Dead: V14 Hughes, Langston Dream Variations: V15 Harlem: V1 I, Too: V30 Mother to Son: V3 The Negro Speaks of Rivers: V10 Theme for English B: V6 Hugo, Richard For Jennifer, 6, on the Teton: V17 Jarrell, Randall The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner: V2 Losses: V31 Jeffers, Robinson Hurt Hawks: V3 Shine, Perishing Republic: V4 Johnson, James Weldon The Creation: V1 Justice, Donald Incident in a Rose Garden: V14 Kelly, Brigit Pegeen The Satyr’s Heart: V22 Kenyon, Jane Having it Out with Melancholy: V17 ‘‘Trouble with Math in a OneRoom Country School’’: V9 Kim, Sue (Suji) Kwock Monologue for an Onion: V24 Kinnell, Galway Another Night in the Ruins: V26 Blackberry Eating: V35 Saint Francis and the Sow: V9 Kizer, Carolyn To An Unknown Poet: V18 Koch, Kenneth Paradiso: V20 Komunyakaa, Yusef Facing It: V5 Ode to a Drum: V20 Slam, Dunk, & Hook: V30 Kooser, Ted At the Cancer Clinic: V24 The Constellation Orion: V8 Kumin, Maxine Address to the Angels: V18

V o l u m e

3 5

I n d e x

Kunitz, Stanley The War Against the Trees: V11 Kyger, Joanne September: V23 Lanier, Sidney Song of the Chattahoochee: V14 Lauterbach, Ann Hum: V25 Laux, Dorianne For the Sake of Strangers: V24 Lee, Li-Young Early in the Morning: V17 For a New Citizen of These United States: V15 The Weight of Sweetness: V11 Levertov, Denise The Blue Rim of Memory: V17 In the Land of Shinar: V7 A Tree Telling of Orpheus: V31 Levine, Philip Starlight: V8 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin Pantoun for Chinese Women: V29 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth The Arsenal at Springfield: V17 Paul Revere’s Ride: V2 A Psalm of Life: V7 The Wreck of the Hesperus: V31 Lorde, Audre Hanging Fire: V32 What My Child Learns of the Sea: V16 Lowell, Amy The Taxi: V30 Lowell, Robert For the Union Dead: V7 The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket: V6 Loy, Mina Moreover, the Moon: V20 MacLeish, Archibald Ars Poetica: V5 Madgett, Naomi Long Alabama Centennial: V10 McElroy, Colleen A Pie`d: V3 McGinley, Phyllis The Conquerors: V13 Reactionary Essay on Applied Science: V9 McHugh, Heather Three To’s and an Oi: V24 McKay, Claude The Tropics in New York: V4 Merriam, Eve Onomatopoeia: V6 Merrill, James Lost in Translation: V23 Merwin, W. S. The Horizons of Rooms: V15 Leviathan: V5

Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index

Frost, Robert Acquainted with the Night: V35 After Apple Picking: V32 Birches: V13 The Death of the Hired Man: V4 Fire and Ice: V7 Mending Wall: V5 Nothing Gold Can Stay: V3 Out, Out—: V10 The Road Not Taken: V2 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: V1 The Wood-Pile: V6 Fulton, Alice Art Thou the Thing I Wanted: V25 Gallagher, Tess I Stop Writing the Poem: V16 Ginsberg, Allen Howl: V29 A Supermarket in California: V5 Gioia, Dana The Litany: V24 Giovanni, Nikki Ego-Tripping: V28 Knoxville, Tennessee: V17 Winter: V35 Glu¨ck, Louise The Gold Lily: V5 The Mystery: V15 Graham, Jorie The Hiding Place: V10 Mind: V17 Gregg, Linda A Thirst Against: V20 Gunn, Thom The Missing: V9 H.D. Helen: V6 Sea Rose: V28 Hacker, Marilyn The Boy: V19 Hahn, Kimiko Pine: V23 Hall, Donald Names of Horses: V8 Harjo, Joy Anniversary: V15 Remember: V32 Hashimoto, Sharon What I Would Ask My Husband’s Dead Father: V22 Hayden, Robert Runagate Runagate: V31 Those Winter Sundays: V1 Hecht, Anthony ‘‘More Light! More Light!’’: V6 Hejinian, Lyn Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance: V27 Hillman, Brenda Air for Mercury: V20

N a t i o n a l i t y / E t h n i c i t y

3 7 5

C u m u l a t i v e

N a t i o n a l i t y / E t h n i c i t y

Millay, Edna St. Vincent An Ancient Gesture: V31 Conscientious Objector: V34 The Courage that My Mother Had: V3 Wild Swans: V17 Mitchell, Susan The Dead: V35 Momaday, N. Scott Angle of Geese: V2 To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly: V11 Montague, John A Grafted Tongue: V12 Moore, Marianne The Fish: V14 Poetry: V17 Mora, Pat Elena: V33 Uncoiling: V35 Mueller, Lisel The Exhibit: V9 Muske-Dukes, Carol Our Side: V24 Nash, Ogden The Hippopotamus: V31 Nemerov, Howard Deep Woods: V14 The Phoenix: V10 Nye, Naomi Shihab Kindness: V24 Shoulders: V33 O’Hara, Frank Autobiographia Literaria: V34 Having a Coke with You: V12 Why I Am Not a Painter: V8 Olds, Sharon I Go Back to May 1937: V17 Oliver, Mary The Black Snake: V31 Music Lessons: V8 Wild Geese: V15 Ortiz, Simon Hunger in New York City: V4 My Father’s Song: V16 Ostriker, Alicia His Speed and Strength: V19 Mastectomy: V26 Okita, Dwight In Response to Executive Order 9066: All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers: V32 Parker, Dorothy The Last Question: V18 Pastan, Linda The Cossacks: V25 Ethics: V8 Grudnow: V32 Phillips, Carl All It Takes: V23

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I n d e x

Piercy, Marge Apple sauce for Eve: V22 Barbie Doll: V9 To Be of Use: V32 Pinsky, Robert Song of Reasons: V18 Plath, Sylvia Blackberrying: V15 Daddy: V28 Mirror: V1 Mushrooms: V33 Poe, Edgar Allan Annabel Lee: V9 The Bells: V3 The Raven: V1 Ponsot, Marie One Is One: V24 Pound, Ezra Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: V16 In a Station of the Metro: V2 The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter: V8 Randall, Dudley Ballad of Birmingham: V5 Reed, Ishmael Beware: Do Not Read This Poem: V6 Revard, Carter Birch Canoe: V5 Rich, Adrienne Diving into the Wreck: V29 Rusted Legacy: V15 Rı´ os, Alberto Island of the Three Marias: V11 Robinson, E. A. Miniver Cheevy: V35 Richard Cory: V4 Roethke, Theodore My Papa’s Waltz: V3 The Waking: V34 Rogers, Pattiann The Greatest Grandeur: V18 Rose, Wendy For the White poets who would be Indian: V13 Ruefle, Mary Sentimental Education: V26 Rukeyser, Muriel Ballad of Orange and Grape: V10 St. Roach: V29 Salter, Mary Jo Trompe l’Oeil: V22 Sanchez, Sonia An Anthem: V26 Sandburg, Carl Chicago: V3 Cool Tombs: V6 Jazz Fantasia: V33 Hope Is a Tattered Flag: V12 Santos, Sherod Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End: V24

P o e t r y

Schnackenberg, Gjertrud Darwin in 1881: V13 Supernatural Love: V25 Sexton, Anne Courage: V14 Oysters: V4 Young: V30 Shapiro, Karl Auto Wreck: V3 Silko, Leslie Marmon Four Mountain Wolves: V9 Story from Bear Country: V16 Simic, Charles Butcher Shop: V7 Simpson, Louis American Poetry: V7 Chocolates: V11 In the Suburbs: V14 Snodgrass, W. D. Heart’s Needle: V29 Snyder, Gary Anasazi: V9 True Night: V19 Song, Cathy Lost Sister: V5 Soto, Gary Oranges: V30 Small Town with One Road: V7 Spires, Elizabeth Ghazal: V21 Stafford, William At the Bomb Testing Site: V8 Fifteen: V2 Ways to Live: V16 Stern, Gerald One of the Smallest: V26 Stevens, Wallace The Idea of Order at Key West: V13 Of Modern Poetry: V35 Sunday Morning: V16 Stewart, Susan The Forest: V22 Stone, Ruth Ordinary Words: V19 Strand, Mark The Continuous Life: V18 Swenson, May The Centaur: V30 Southbound on the Freeway: V16 Tate, James Dear Reader: V10 Smart and Final Iris: V15 Taylor, Edward Huswifery: V31 Taylor, Henry Landscape with Tractor: V10 Teasdale, Sara There Will Come Soft Rains: V14 Thayer, Ernest Lawrence Casey at the Bat: V5 Toomer, Jean Storm Ending: V31

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V o l u m e

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C u m u l a t i v e

P o e t r y

f o r

S t u d e n t s ,

Argentinian Borges, Jorge Luis Borges and I: V27

Arab American Nye, Naomi Shihab Kindness: V24 Shoulders: V33

Asian American Chin, Marilyn How I Got That Name: V28 Hahn, Kimiko Pine: V23 Hashimoto, Sharon What I Would Ask My Husband’s Dead Father: V22 Hongo, Garrett The Legend: V25 What For: V33 Kim, Sue (Suji) Kwok Monologue for an Onion: V24 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin Pantoun for Chinese Women: V29 Okita, Dwight In Response to Executive Order 9066: All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers: V32 Yau, John Russian Letter: V26

Australian Dawe, Bruce Drifters: V10 Hope, A. D. Beware of Ruins: V8 Wright, Judith Drought Year: V8

Belarusian Mort, Valzhyna Grandmother: V34

Canadian Atwood, Margaret Siren Song: V7 Birney, Earle Vancouver Lights: V8 Carson, Anne New Rule: V18 He´bert, Anne The Alchemy of Day: V20 Jacobsen, Josephine Fiddler Crab: V23 Layton, Irving A Tall Man Executes a Jig: V12 McCrae, John In Flanders Fields: V5

V o l u m e

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I n d e x

Nowlan, Alden For Jean Vincent D’abbadie, Baron St.-Castin: V12 Ondaatje, Michael The Cinnamon Peeler: V19 To a Sad Daughter: V8 Purdy, Al Lament for the Dorsets: V5 Wilderness Gothic: V12 Service, Robert W. The Cremation of Sam McGee: V10 Strand, Mark Eating Poetry: V9

Chilean Neruda, Pablo Fully Empowered: V33 The Heights of Macchu Picchu: V28 Sonnet LXXXIX: V35 Tonight I Can Write: V11

Chinese Chin, Marilyn How I Got That Name: V28 Fu, Tu Jade Flower Palace: V32 Po, Li Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon: V20

Egyptian Cavafy, C. P. Ithaka: V19

English Alleyn, Ellen A Birthday: V10 Arnold, Matthew Dover Beach: V2 Auden, W. H. As I Walked Out One Evening: V4 Funeral Blues: V10 Muse´e des Beaux Arts: V1 September 1, 1939: V27 The Unknown Citizen: V3 Blake, William The Fly: V34 The Lamb: V12 A Poison Tree: V24 The Tyger: V2 Bradstreet, Anne ToMyDearandLovingHusband: V6 Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666: V33 Bronte¨, Emily Old Stoic: V33 Brooke, Rupert The Soldier: V7 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Aurora Leigh: V23

3 7 7

Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index

Trethewey, Natasha Native Guard: V29 Valentine, Jean Seeing You: V24 Van Duyn, Mona Memoir: V20 Vazirani, Reetika Daughter-Mother-Maya-Seeta: V25 Viereck, Peter For An Assyrian Frieze: V9 Kilroy: V14 Voigt, Ellen Bryant The Lotus Flowers: V33 Practice: V23 Waldner, Liz Witness: V26 Walker, Alice Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning: V30 Women: V34 Walker, Margaret Lineage: V31 Warren, Rosanna Daylights: V13 Lake: V23 Wheatley, Phillis On Being Brought from Africa to America: V29 To His Excellency General Washington: V13 Whitman, Walt Cavalry Crossing a Ford: V13 I Hear America Singing: V3 A Noiseless Patient Spider: V31 O Captain! My Captain!: V2 When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer: V22 Wilbur, Richard Beowulf: V11 Love Calls Us to the Things of This World: V29 Merlin Enthralled: V16 On Freedom’s Ground: V12 Williams, William Carlos Overture to a Dance of Locomotives: V11 Queen-Ann’s-Lace: V6 The Red Wheelbarrow: V1 This Is Just to Say: V34 Wright, Charles Black Zodiac: V10 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: V35 Wright, James A Blessing: V7 Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio: V8 Yau, John Russian Letter: V26 Young, Kevin Chorale: V25

N a t i o n a l i t y / E t h n i c i t y

C u m u l a t i v e

N a t i o n a l i t y / E t h n i c i t y

Sonnet XXIX: V16 Sonnet 43: V2 Browning, Robert My Last Duchess: V1 Porphyria’s Lover: V15 Byron, Lord Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: V35 The Destruction of Sennacherib: V1 She Walks in Beauty: V14 When We Two Parted: V29 Carroll, Lewis Jabberwocky: V11 The Walrus and the Carpenter: V30 Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales: V14 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Kubla Khan: V5 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: V4 Donne, John Holy Sonnet 10: V2 Song: V35 A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning: V11 The Waste Land: V20 Eliot, T. S. The Hollow Men: V33 Journey of the Magi: V7 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: V1 Fenton, James The Milkfish Gatherers: V11 Finch, Anne A Nocturnal Reverie: V30 Gray, Thomas Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: V9 Gunn, Thom The Missing: V9 Hardy, Thomas Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?: V4 The Darkling Thrush: V18 The Man He Killed: V3 Herbert, George Virtue: V25 Herrick, Robert The Night Piece: To Julia: V29 To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time: V13 Hopkins, Gerard Manley Pied Beauty: V26 Housman, A. E. To an Athlete Dying Young: V7 When I Was One-and-Twenty: V4 Hughes, Ted Hawk Roosting: V4 The Horses: V32 Perfect Light: V19 Jonson, Ben On My First Son: V33 Song: To Celia: V23

378

I n d e x

Keats, John La Belle Dame sans Merci: V17 Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art: V9 Ode on a Grecian Urn: V1 Ode to a Nightingale: V3 On the Grasshopper and the Cricket: V32 When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be: V2 Kipling, Rudyard If: V22 Larkin, Philip An Arundel Tomb: V12 High Windows: V3 Toads: V4 Lawrence, D. H. Piano: V6 Levertov, Denise The Blue Rim of Memory: V17 In the Land of Shinar: V7 A Tree Telling of Orpheus: V31 Lovelace, Richard To Althea, From Prison: V34 To Lucasta, Going to the Wars: V32 Loy, Mina Moreover, the Moon: V20 Marlowe, Christopher The Passionate Shepherd to His Love: V22 Marvell, Andrew To His Coy Mistress: V5 Masefield, John Cargoes: V5 Maxwell, Glyn The Nerve: V23 Milton, John [On His Blindness] Sonnet 16: V3 On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three: V17 Noyes, Alfred The Highwayman: V4 Owen, Wilfred Dulce et Decorum Est: V10 Pope, Alexander The Rape of the Lock: V12 Raine, Craig A Martian Sends a Postcard Home: V7 Raleigh, Walter, Sir The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd: V14 Rossetti, Christina A Birthday: V10 Goblin Market: V27 Remember: V14 Up-Hill: V34 Sassoon, Siegfried ‘‘Blighters’’: V28 Service, Robert W. The Cremation of Sam McGee: V10

P o e t r y

Shakespeare, William Seven Ages of Man: V35 Sonnet 18: V2 Sonnet 19: V9 Sonnet 29: V8 Sonnet 30: V4 Sonnet 55: V5 Sonnet 116: V3 Sonnet 130: V1 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Ode to the West Wind: V2 Ozymandias: V27 To a Sky-Lark: V32 Sidney, Philip Ye Goatherd Gods: V30 Ozymandias: V27 Smith, Stevie Not Waving but Drowning: V3 Spender, Stephen An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum: V23 Spenser, Edmund Sonnet 75: V32 Swift, Jonathan A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General: V27 Taylor, Edward Huswifery: V31 Taylor, Henry Landscape with Tractor: V10 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord The Charge of the Light Brigade: V1 The Eagle: V11 The Lady of Shalott: V15 Proem: V19 Tears, Idle Tears: V4 Ulysses: V2 Williams, William Carlos Overture to a Dance of Locomotives: V11 Queen-Ann’s-Lace: V6 The Red Wheelbarrow: V1 This Is Just to Say: V34 Wordsworth, William I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud: V33 Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey: V2 Wyatt, Thomas Whoso List to Hunt: V25

French Apollinaire, Guillaume Always: V24 Baudelaire, Charles Hymn to Beauty: V21 Malroux, Claire Morning Walk: V21 Rimbaud, Arthur The Drunken Boat: V28

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C u m u l a t i v e

German

Tagore, Rabindranath 60: V18 Vazirani, Reetika Daughter-Mother-Maya-Seeta: V25

Indonesian Lee, Li-Young Early in the Morning: V17 For a New Citizen of These United States: V15 The Weight of Sweetness: V11

Iranian Farrokhzaad, Faroogh A Rebirth: V21

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Song of the Smoke: V13

Greek Cavafy, C. P. Ithaka: V19 Sappho Fragment 2: V31 Hymn to Aphrodite: V20

Hispanic American Castillo, Ana While I Was Gone a War Began: V21 Cervantes, Lorna Dee Freeway 280: V30 Cruz, Victor Hernandez Business: V16 Espada, Martı´ n Colibrı´: V16 Mora, Pat Elena: V33 Uncoiling: V35 Williams, William Carlos Overture to a Dance of Locomotives: V11 Queen-Ann’s-Lace: V6 The Red Wheelbarrow: V1 This Is Just to Say: V34

Indian Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee My Mother Combs My Hair: V34 Mirabai All I Was Doing Was Breathing: V24 Ramanujan, A. K. Waterfalls in a Bank: V27 Shahid Ali, Agha Country Without a Post Office: V18

P o e t r y

f o r

S t u d e n t s ,

Jamaican Goodison, Lorna The River Mumma Wants Out: V25 McKay, Claude The Tropics in New York: V4 Simpson, Louis In the Suburbs: V14

Ai

Youssef, Saadi America, America: V29

Boland, Eavan Anorexic: V12 It’s a Woman’s World: V22 Outside History: V31 Carson, Ciaran The War Correspondent: V26 Grennan, Eamon Station: V21 Hartnett, Michael A Farewell to English: V10 Heaney, Seamus Digging: V5 A Drink of Water: V8 Follower: V30 Midnight: V2 The Singer’s House: V17 Muldoon, Paul Meeting the British: V7 Pineapples and Pomegranates: V22 Swift, Jonathan A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General: V27 Yeats, William Butler Easter 1916: V5 An Irish Airman Foresees His Death: V1 The Lake Isle of Innisfree: V15 Leda and the Swan: V13 Sailing to Byzantium: V2 The Second Coming: V7 The Stolen Child: V34

Israeli Amichai, Yehuda Not like a Cypress: V24

Italian Apollinaire, Guillaume Always: V24

V o l u m e

Montale, Eugenio On the Threshold: V22 Pavese, Cesare Two Poems for T.: V20 Ungaretti, Giuseppe Variations on Nothing: V20

Japanese

Iraqi

Irish Ghanaian

I n d e x

Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index

Amichai, Yehuda Not like a Cypress: V24 Blumenthal, Michael Inventors: V7 Erdrich, Louise Bidwell Ghost: V14 Mueller, Lisel Blood Oranges: V13 The Exhibit: V9 Rilke, Rainer Maria Archaic Torso of Apollo: V27 Childhood: V19 Roethke, Theodore My Papa’s Waltz: V3 The Waking: V34 Sachs, Nelly But Perhaps God Needs the Longing: V20 Saje´, Natasha The Art of the Novel: V23

N a t i o n a l i t y / E t h n i c i t y

3 5

Reunions with a Ghost: V16 Basho , Matsuo Falling Upon Earth: V2 The Moon Glows the Same: V7 Temple Bells Die Out: V18

Jewish Bell, Marvin View: V25 Blumenthal, Michael Inventors: V7 Brodsky, Joseph Odysseus to Telemachus: V35 Espada, Martı´ n Colibrı´: V16 We Live by What We See at Night: V13 HaNagid, Shmuel Two Eclipses: V33 Hirsch, Edward Omen: V22 Pastan, Linda The Cossacks: V25 Ethics: V8 Grudnow: V32 Piercy, Marge Apple sauce for Eve: V22 Barbie Doll: V9 To Be of Use: V32 Sachs, Nelly But Perhaps God Needs the Longing: V20 Shapiro, Karl Auto Wreck: V3 Stern, Gerald One of the Smallest: V26

Kiowa Momaday, N. Scott Angle of Geese: V2 To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly: V11

3 7 9

C u m u l a t i v e

N a t i o n a l i t y / E t h n i c i t y

I n d e x

Korean

Philippine

Pak Tu-Jin River of August: V35

Barot, Rick Bonnard’s Garden: V25

Lithuanian

Polish

Milosz, Czeslaw From the Rising of the Sun: V29 In Music: V35 Song of a Citizen: V16

Herbert, Zbigniew Why The Classics: V22 Milosz, Czeslaw From the Rising of the Sun: V29 In Music: V35 Song of a Citizen: V16 Swir, Anna Maternity: V21 Szymborska, Wisława Astonishment: V15 Conversation with a Stone: V27 Possibilities: V34 Some People Like Poetry: V31 Zagajewski, Adam Self-Portrait: V25

MacBeth, George Bedtime Story: V8

Senegalese

Malaysian Lim, Shirley Geok-lin Pantoun for Chinese Women: V29

Mexican Paz, Octavio Duration: V18 Sunstone: V30 Soto, Gary Oranges: V30 Small Town with One Road: V7

Native American Ai Reunions with a Ghost: V16 Erdrich, Louise Bidwell Ghost: V14 Harjo, Joy Anniversary: V15 Remember: V32 Momaday, N. Scott Angle of Geese: V2 To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly: V11 Ortiz, Simon Hunger in New York City: V4 My Father’s Song: V16 Revard, Carter Birch Canoe: V5 Rose, Wendy For the White poets who would be Indian: V13 Silko, Leslie Marmon Four Mountain Wolves: V9 Story from Bear Country: V16

Roman Ovid (Naso, Publius Ovidius) Metamorphoses: V22

Romanian Celan, Paul Late and Deep: V21

Serbian Lazic´, Radmila Death Sentences: V22

Spanish Garcı´ a Lorca, Federico Gacela of the Dark Death: V20 Lament for Ignacio Sa´nchez Mejı´as: V31 HaNagid, Shmuel Two Eclipses: V33 Machado, Antonio The Crime Was in Granada: V23 Williams, William Carlos The Red Wheelbarrow: V1

Sri Lankan Ondaatje, Michael The Cinnamon Peeler: V19 To a Sad Daughter: V8

Russian Akhmatova, Anna Everything is Plundered: V32 Midnight Verses: V18 Requiem: V27 Brodsky, Joseph Odysseus to Telemachus: V35 Merriam, Eve Onomatopoeia: V6 Pushkin, Alexander The Bridegroom: V34 The Bronze Horseman: V28 Shapiro, Karl Auto Wreck: V3 Tsvetaeva, Marina An Attempt at Jealousy: V29 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny Babii Yar: V29

Swedish Sandburg, Carl Chicago: V3 Cool Tombs: V6 Jazz Fantasia: V33 Hope Is a Tattered Flag: V12 Svenbro, Jesper Lepidopterology: V23 Transtro¨mer, Tomas Answers to Letters: V21

Vietnamese

Osage

Walcott, Derek A Far Cry from Africa: V6 Midsummer, Tobago: V34

Huong, Ho Xuan Spring-Watching Pavilion: V18 Thomas, Dylan Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night: V1 Fern Hill: V3 The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower: V8

Revard, Carter Birch Canoe: V5

Scottish

Yugoslavian

Burns, Robert A Red, Red Rose: V8 Duffy, Carol Ann Originally: V25

Lazic´, Radmila Death Sentences: V22 Simic, Charles Classic Ballroom Dances: V33

Nigerian Soyinka, Wole Telephone Conversation: V27

Peruvian Vallejo, Ce´sar The Black Heralds: V26

380

Wheatley, Phillis On Being Brought from Africa to America: V29 To His Excellency General Washington: V13

St. Lucian

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Subject/Theme Index A Absurdity Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 60–66 Activism Blackberry Eating: 23 Uncoiling: 276 African American culture Winter: 295, 299, 302 African American history I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 86–87 Afterlife The Dead: 70–71, 73–74 In Music: 103, 106, 108, 112, 114–115 Aging Seven Ages of Man: 215 Alcoholism Miniver Cheevy: 130 Alienation. See also Loneliness Acquainted with the Night: 3 Miniver Cheevy: 129 Odysseus to Telemachus: 165 Allegories The Dead: 73 Winter: 295 Alliteration Acquainted with the Night: 18 Blackberry Eating: 25, 26–27 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 317–318, 318 Allusions Odysseus to Telemachus: 150, 158, 160, 161, 164–165 Ambiguity Miniver Cheevy: 139 Seven Ages of Man: 226–230

Ambivalence Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 56–60 American culture Acquainted with the Night: 6 I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 87 Miniver Cheevy: 131 Seven Ages of Man: 219 American history River of August: 195 Ancients and moderns. See Mythology Anger Uncoiling: 279 Animals Blackberry Eating: 41 River of August: 193 Winter: 297, 299, 301 Anti-pastoralism Seven Ages of Man: 215 Antisemitism Odysseus to Telemachus: 150 Apophasis I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 92–99 Apostrophes Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 45, 50, 53–56 Archetypes Acquainted with the Night: 14–20 Blackberry Eating: 25 The Dead: 76 Art Sonnet LXXXIX: 258 Winter: 308 Asian history River of August: 195, 199–202 Audience Of Modern Poetry: 178–179

Author’s voice Blackberry Eating: 41, 42 Autobiographical fiction Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 45 The Dead: 76 Odysseus to Telemachus: 165, 166 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 316

B Beauty I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 95 In Music: 123 Betrayal River of August: 201 Blank verse Seven Ages of Man: 211, 216–217 Blue Ridge Mountains Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 321–322 British history Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 48

C Capitalization I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 85–86 Change (Philosophy) Blackberry Eating: 31 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 53–55 Winter: 299, 304–306 Chaos Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 61, 63, 66 Characterization Seven Ages of Man: 224–226 Chicana (Literature) Uncoiling: 281–282

3 8 1

S u b j e c t / T h e m e

I n d e x

Childhood Seven Ages of Man: 231 Children Blackberry Eating: 41 Chilean literature Sonnet LXXXIX: 264 Christianity Blackberry Eating: 24, 25, 34–35 The Dead: 71–72, 73, 74–75 I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 82 Of Modern Poetry: 184–185, 186 In Music: 114, 115–123 River of August: 205, 208–209 Song: 236, 237–238, 241, 255–256 Civil rights Uncoiling: 281 Winter: 295 Civil war I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 86–87 Sonnet LXXXIX: 265 Class conflict Blackberry Eating: 27 Uncoiling: 291 Classical allusions Odysseus to Telemachus: 150 Classicism Odysseus to Telemachus: 157–167 Cold War Sonnet LXXXIX: 266–267 Communications Miniver Cheevy: 137, 138 Communism Of Modern Poetry: 185–186 In Music: 104–105 River of August: 195 Sonnet LXXXIX: 258, 259, 265–266, 268 Conceit Miniver Cheevy: 141 Song: 244, 252, 253, 256 Conflict Acquainted with the Night: 17, 18 Blackberry Eating: 33 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 48 Connectedness Of Modern Poetry: 175–176, 177–179 Consciousness Acquainted with the Night: 15–16, 17, 18–19 River of August: 194 Continuity (Philosophy) Sonnet LXXXIX: 263–264 Contradiction Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 56–57, 58–59 Contrast Acquainted with the Night: 19 Seven Ages of Man: 222 Conversational style The Dead: 73

382

Counterculture Winter: 302 Creativity Blackberry Eating: 25, 30 Uncoiling: 287 Cuban history Sonnet LXXXIX: 266–267 Culture Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 51 Song: 242 Uncoiling: 288–294 Winter: 301, 302 Cynicism Song: 244–246

D Death. See also Mortality Acquainted with the Night: 2–3 Blackberry Eating: 33–35 The Dead: 70–75, 76–79 Miniver Cheevy: 126 Of Modern Poetry: 186–187 In Music: 103, 106, 108, 112, 114–115 Seven Ages of Man: 232 Sonnet LXXXIX: 260–261, 263, 270–271 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 331 Deception Miniver Cheevy: 139 Depression Acquainted with the Night: 3 Miniver Cheevy: 125 Direct address Odysseus to Telemachus: 149–150 Disease Seven Ages of Man: 232–233 Doubt In Music: 117 Dreams Of Modern Poetry: 183–185, 189 Song: 253–255 Dualism (Philosophy) Of Modern Poetry: 179, 180 In Music: 108, 113–114

E Economics Acquainted with the Night: 6 Winter: 301–302 Education Acquainted with the Night: 7 I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 87–88 Egalitarianism Blackberry Eating: 33 Seven Ages of Man: 215 Winter: 312 18th Century Acquainted with the Night: 10 Elizabethan Age Song: 241–242, 244–246

P o e t r y

Emotions Seven Ages of Man: 229 Uncoiling: 278–279 English culture Acquainted with the Night: 5–7 Seven Ages of Man: 218–220 English history Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 52–53 Seven Ages of Man: 217–218 Song: 236, 250 Environmentalism Winter: 302 Envy Song: 238 Epics The Dead: 73 Odysseus to Telemachus: 150, 152 Epistolary form Odysseus to Telemachus: 149–150 Erotic love Song: 245, 248–249, 253 Sonnet LXXXIX: 259 Eternity Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 48, 49–50, 53–55 Ethnicity Uncoiling: 285 European culture Odysseus to Telemachus: 155–156 European history Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 51 Odysseus to Telemachus: 155 Exile Odysseus to Telemachus: 165 Sonnet LXXXIX: 265–266 Existence Blackberry Eating: 43 Of Modern Poetry: 189 In Music: 103, 107–108 Experience Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 61–62 Exposure I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 85 Extended metaphors Seven Ages of Man: 217 Uncoiling: 278

F Failure (Psychology) Miniver Cheevy: 137, 141 Faith I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 99 Miniver Cheevy: 142 In Music: 116, 118–119, 120 Fall of man Blackberry Eating: 24, 25 Fate Of Modern Poetry: 187–188 In Music: 114–115 Odysseus to Telemachus: 149

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S u b j e c t / T h e m e

G Generation gap Blackberry Eating: 42 Georgian poetry Acquainted with the Night: 8 Gnosticism In Music: 103, 104, 109, 111, 112–115, 120 God Acquainted with the Night: 15–16 Blackberry Eating: 34 I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 97 In Music: 114 Good and evil In Music: 113–114 Great Depression Of Modern Poetry: 173 The Green Deer Group River of August: 198

Identity I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 84–85, 89–92 Of Modern Poetry: 187–188 Ideology In Music: 104 Imagery (Literature) Miniver Cheevy: 138, 139, 141 In Music: 108–109, 110 Odysseus to Telemachus: 162 River of August: 194, 196, 198–199, 202–204, 206–207, 209–210 Sonnet LXXXIX: 274 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 331, 333–337 Imagination Blackberry Eating: 32 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 57, 61–62 Of Modern Poetry: 168, 170–172, 174, 175–176, 179, 184 In Music: 106 River of August: 202 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 331–332 Imagism Miniver Cheevy: 132 Infidelity Song: 243 Irony The Dead: 72 I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 85, 90–91 Miniver Cheevy: 130, 137, 139, 141 Seven Ages of Man: 222, 227 Song: 246–256 Isolation Winter: 295

J Joy Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 48 Uncoiling: 285–286

H

K

Heroism Uncoiling: 286 Honesty Song: 238 Winter: 311–312 Humanity Miniver Cheevy: 137 Hyperbole Seven Ages of Man: 217

Korean culture River of August: 191, 193, 194, 197–198 Korean history River of August: 191, 192, 195, 197–198, 204

I Iambic pentameter Acquainted with the Night: 4 Idealism River of August: 196

P o e t r y

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L Landscape Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 323–325, 336 Language and languages. See also Translation Acquainted with the Night: 10–12 Blackberry Eating: 35

V o l u m e

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Miniver Cheevy: 134–135, 138, 142 Of Modern Poetry: 178 Uncoiling: 287, 291 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 332, 336 Life (Philosophy) The Dead: 76–79 Miniver Cheevy: 137 In Music: 106, 118 Sonnet LXXXIX: 260–261, 263–264 Winter: 305 Life cycles (Biology) In Music: 108 Loneliness. See also Alienation River of August: 207 Winter: 295 Loss (Psychology) Blackberry Eating: 35 Love Miniver Cheevy: 142 Odysseus to Telemachus: 161–162 Song: 244–245, 246–249, 253 Sonnet LXXXIX: 259, 261–263, 268–271, 272 Lyceums I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 87–88

Subject/Theme Index

Feelings Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 56 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 331–337 Female-male relations Uncoiling: 290–291 Feminine rhyme Miniver Cheevy: 130, 131, 140 Feminism Sonnet LXXXIX: 268 Uncoiling: 279, 281–282, 283 Fidelity River of August: 194–195 First-person narration Blackberry Eating: 27 Folios Seven Ages of Man: 211, 212 Free verse Winter: 295, 299 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 316, 320

I n d e x

M Magic Blackberry Eating: 24, 25 Magic realism Sonnet LXXXIX: 265 Male identity Seven Ages of Man: 222 Martyrdom Odysseus to Telemachus: 163, 164 Masculine rhyme Miniver Cheevy: 130, 131 Meaning of life In Music: 107–108 Memory The Dead: 72, 74 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 319–320, 332–333 Mental disorders Acquainted with the Night: 2, 3–4 Metaphors Blackberry Eating: 27, 30 The Dead: 72–73, 79 Miniver Cheevy: 135, 138, 139 Of Modern Poetry: 168, 170, 172, 176, 177–178, 179 In Music: 106, 114 Odysseus to Telemachus: 158–159 River of August: 207 Seven Ages of Man: 213, 217, 221–222 Uncoiling: 278 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 324, 337

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S u b j e c t / T h e m e

I n d e x

Metaphysical conceit Blackberry Eating: 27 Metaphysics I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 93 In Music: 103, 105, 109, 110–111, 112 Odysseus to Telemachus: 166 Song: 235, 242 Mexican American culture Uncoiling: 281–282, 283–285 Misogyny Song: 240, 244–246 Modernism (Literature) Acquainted with the Night: 13, 14 I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 95–96 Miniver Cheevy: 132 Of Modern Poetry: 170, 172–173, 177 River of August: 198 Song: 243 Sonnet LXXXIX: 267 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 328 Monologue Acquainted with the Night: 4–5 Seven Ages of Man: 217 Morality Miniver Cheevy: 136 Mortality. See also Death Blackberry Eating: 37–38, 39–40 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 319–320, 333 Motivation River of August: 194 Multiculturalism Uncoiling: 282 Music I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 95 In Music: 106 Song: 235, 242 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 316, 321 Mythology Acquainted with the Night: 14–20 The Dead: 69, 71–72, 73–74, 76 Odysseus to Telemachus: 152, 153–157 Song: 237–238

N Narrative poetry Miniver Cheevy: 142, 143 Seven Ages of Man: 223–224, 225 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 329–330 Narrators Blackberry Eating: 27 River of August: 192 Nationalism River of August: 203 Naturalism (Literature) Miniver Cheevy: 131–132 Of Modern Poetry: 183

384

Nature Acquainted with the Night: 10–11 Blackberry Eating: 25–26, 28, 30–32, 39–40 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 45, 47–49, 55–56, 57–58, 59 In Music: 108, 114 River of August: 191, 192, 194, 196, 198, 200, 202–204, 209 Seven Ages of Man: 215 Sonnet LXXXIX: 263, 269–270 Uncoiling: 278–279, 287 Winter: 299, 305 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 319–320 Neoclassicism (Literature) Acquainted with the Night: 10 Neoplatonism I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 97–98 1910 (Decade) Miniver Cheevy: 131 1920s (Decade) Acquainted with the Night: 6 1930s (Decade) Of Modern Poetry: 173 1940s (Decade) Of Modern Poetry: 173 River of August: 197 1950s (Decade) Sonnet LXXXIX: 266 1960s (Decade) Odysseus to Telemachus: 151 River of August: 197 Winter: 305–306 1970s (Decade) Blackberry Eating: 27–28 Winter: 301 1980s (Decade) Blackberry Eating: 28 The Dead: 74 1990s (Decade) In Music: 109 19th Century Acquainted with the Night: 9, 11 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 51 I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 87 Northeastern United States Acquainted with the Night: 7 Nothingness Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 64–66 Numerology Seven Ages of Man: 219, 221

O Occasional poems River of August: 196 Oedipus complex Odysseus to Telemachus: 160–161 Ordinariness Acquainted with the Night: 10–11 Blackberry Eating: 32–40

P o e t r y

Miniver Cheevy: 131–132 Of Modern Poetry: 180–190

P Pantheism Sonnet LXXXIX: 271 Paradoxes Of Modern Poetry: 188 River of August: 207 Seven Ages of Man: 232 Song: 238 Parallelism Winter: 299–300 Parasitism Odysseus to Telemachus: 146 Parent-child relationships Odysseus to Telemachus: 160–161 Pastoral Seven Ages of Man: 215 Patriotism River of August: 196 Personification In Music: 105, 106, 108 River of August: 192, 193, 196 Uncoiling: 278, 279, 280, 284 Winter: 310 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 317 Pilgrimages Song: 243, 245 Point of view (Literature) Odysseus to Telemachus: 147–148 Politics Blackberry Eating: 27–28 I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 87 Of Modern Poetry: 185, 186 In Music: 104–105 Odysseus to Telemachus: 151, 156–157, 159, 164–165 River of August: 192, 195 Sonnet LXXXIX: 258, 265–267 Postmodernism In Music: 109–110 Postwar literature In Music: 110 Poverty Miniver Cheevy: 126 Winter: 301 Power (Philosophy) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 46–47, 49 River of August: 205 Winter: 312–313 Privacy I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 85, 89–92 Protest Odysseus to Telemachus: 151 Winter: 300–301 Psychology Song: 238, 246 Punctuation I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 85–86

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S u b j e c t / T h e m e

Purgatory The Dead: 71–72, 73, 74–75

Q Quartos Seven Ages of Man: 212 Questing Song: 241

R

S Sadness Seven Ages of Man: 222–223 Satire Seven Ages of Man: 222–223 Science Blackberry Eating: 28

P o e t r y

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Suffering In Music: 116–117, 120 Supernatural Odysseus to Telemachus: 149, 152 Surrealism Sonnet LXXXIX: 265, 267 Symbolism. See also Archetypes Acquainted with the Night: 19 I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 94 Miniver Cheevy: 138 River of August: 204–205, 207, 209–210 Uncoiling: 278

Subject/Theme Index

Race relations Uncoiling: 285 Realism (Cultural movement) Acquainted with the Night: 11 Miniver Cheevy: 131–132 Reality Of Modern Poetry: 168, 172–173 In Music: 109–110 Reincarnation The Dead: 73–74, 76–78, 79 In Music: 114 Religions. See also Christianity; Fall of man; Reincarnation Blackberry Eating: 28–29 The Dead: 70–71 Winter: 301 Repetition Of Modern Poetry: 180, 181, 182, 186–189, 190 River of August: 193, 194 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 318 Resurrection Blackberry Eating: 34–35 Rhythm. See also Sonnets Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 50 River of August: 192 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 327–328 Roman history Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 53–54 Romanticism Acquainted with the Night: 9–10 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 45, 50–53, 55–56 Miniver Cheevy: 131–132 River of August: 203 Rural life Acquainted with the Night: 10–11 Russian culture. See also Soviet Union Odysseus to Telemachus: 157–167

Self identity Odysseus to Telemachus: 159–160, 164, 165 Self knowledge Acquainted with the Night: 12–13 17th Century In Music: 110 Song: 235, 242 Sexuality. See also Erotic love Blackberry Eating: 37 Seven Ages of Man: 230 Shape poems Uncoiling: 280–281 Silence I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 96 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 318–319 Similes Blackberry Eating: 22 Seven Ages of Man: 217 16th Century Seven Ages of Man: 217–219 Song: 241 Slant rhyme Miniver Cheevy: 130 Slavery I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 86–87 Social change Miniver Cheevy: 132 Social protest Blackberry Eating: 27–28 Soliloquy Acquainted with the Night: 5 Sonnets Acquainted with the Night: 1, 4, 6, 13–14, 15, 17 Blackberry Eating: 22, 27 Seven Ages of Man: 214, 223–231 Sonnet LXXXIX: 264 Southwest United States Uncoiling: 281 Soviet Union. See also Russian culture Acquainted with the Night: 8 Odysseus to Telemachus: 150–151, 153 Spanish American literature Sonnet LXXXIX: 265 Spanish history Sonnet LXXXIX: 265 Spenserian stanzas Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 50 Spirituality The Dead: 71, 73 I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 94, 97 In Music: 103, 104, 109 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 316, 320, 324 Stepped line Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 320–321, 322 Strength Uncoiling: 279

I n d e x

T Technology and civilization Miniver Cheevy: 131 Theology. See also God In Music: 103, 104, 109, 111, 112–115 Time Blackberry Eating: 31 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 45, 48, 49–50, 53–55, 56, 59 Miniver Cheevy: 129–130 Of Modern Poetry: 170, 172, 175–176 Odysseus to Telemachus: 147–148, 156, 158–159 Seven Ages of Man: 216, 231–233 Winter: 311 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 318, 319, 324 Tradition Blackberry Eating: 41–42 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: 63 The Dead: 71 Transcendence River of August: 196 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 326–327 Transcendentalism Blackberry Eating: 32–40 Translation Odysseus to Telemachus: 145, 146, 153 River of August: 192–193, 208 Sonnet LXXXIX: 267–268, 273–274 Uncoiling: 291 Words Are the Diminution of All Things: 325 Trickery Odysseus to Telemachus: 149 Trochaic tetrameter Song: 240–241 Trojan War Odysseus to Telemachus: 151–152 Trust (Psychology) Winter: 311–312 Truth Song: 255–256

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I n d e x

20th Century Sonnet LXXXIX: 265

V Violence Winter: 301–302 Vision Miniver Cheevy: 137 River of August: 194–195 Visionary (Literature) Acquainted with the Night: 15–16

386

W Wars Blackberry Eating: 27, 28 I’m Nobody! Who are you?: 86–87 Of Modern Poetry: 173 In Music: 104, 110 Odysseus to Telemachus: 151–152, 156–157, 159 River of August: 195 Sonnet LXXXIX: 265, 266–267 Winter: 301

P o e t r y

Women in literature. See also Misogyny Blackberry Eating: 36–38 Song: 238–239 Sonnet LXXXIX: 266, 268, 271–272 Uncoiling: 276, 279, 281–282, 283–285, 292 World War II, 1939-1945 Of Modern Poetry: 173 In Music: 104

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Cumulative Index of First Lines A A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,— (The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket) V6:158 ‘‘A cold coming we had of it (Journey of the Magi) V7:110 A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck (The Cobweb) V17:50 A gentle spring evening arrives (Spring-Watching Pavilion) V18:198 A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands, (Cavalry Crossing a Ford) V13:50 A narrow Fellow in the grass (A Narrow Fellow in the Grass) V11:127 A noiseless patient spider, (A Noiseless Patient Spider) V31:190–91 A pine box for me. I mean it. (Last Request) V14: 231 A poem should be palpable and mute (Ars Poetica) V5:2 A stone from the depths that has witnessed the seas drying up (Song of a Citizen) V16:125 A tourist came in from Orbitville, (Southbound on the Freeway) V16:158 A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt (A Far Cry from Africa) V6:60 a woman precedes me up the long rope, (Climbing) V14:113

About me the night moonless wimples the mountains (Vancouver Lights) V8:245 About suffering they were never wrong (Muse´e des Beaux Arts) V1:148 Across Roblin Lake, two shores away, (Wilderness Gothic) V12:241 After the double party (Air for Mercury) V20:2–3 After the party ends another party begins (Social Life) V19:251 After you finish your work (Ballad of Orange and Grape) V10:17 Again I’ve returned to this country (The Country Without a Post Office) V18:64 ‘‘Ah, are you digging on my grave (Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?) V4:2 All Greece hates (Helen) V6:92 All my existence is a dark sign a dark (A Rebirth) V21:193–194 All night long the hockey pictures (To a Sad Daughter) V8:230 All over Genoa (Trompe l’Oeil) V22:216 All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players (Seven Ages of Man) V35:213 All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding (Names of Horses) V8:141 Also Ulysses once—that other war. (Kilroy) V14:213

Always (Always) V24:15 Among the blossoms, a single jar of wine. (Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon) V20:59–60 Anasazi (Anasazi) V9:2 ‘‘And do we remember our living lives?’’ (Memory) V21:156 And God stepped out on space (The Creation) V1:19 And what if I spoke of despair—who doesn’t (And What If I Spoke of Despair) V19:2 Animal bones and some mossy tent rings (Lament for the Dorsets) V5:190 Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, (The Snow-Storm) V34:195 Any force— (All It Takes) V23:15 April is the cruellest month, breeding (The Waste Land) V20:248–252 As I perceive (The Gold Lily) V5:127 As I walked out one evening (As I Walked Out One Evening) V4:15 As I was going down impassive Rivers, (The Drunken Boat) V28:83 As in an illuminated page, whose busy edges (Bonnard’s Garden) V25:33 As virtuous men pass mildly away (A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning) V11:201 As you set out for Ithaka (Ithaka) V19:114

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At five in the afternoon. (Lament for Ignacio Sa´nchez Mejı´ as) V31:128–30 At night the dead come down to the river to drink (The Dead) V35:69 At noon in the desert a panting lizard (At the Bomb Testing Site) V8:2 At six I lived for spells: (What For) V33:266 Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! (Old Ironsides) V9:172

B Back then, before we came (On Freedom’s Ground) V12:186 Bananas ripe and green, and gingerroot (The Tropics in New York) V4:255 Be happy if the wind inside the orchard (On the Threshold) V22:128 Because I could not stop for Death— (Because I Could Not Stop for Death) V2:27 Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? (Leda and the Swan) V13:182 Before you know what kindness really is (Kindness) V24:84–85 Below long pine winds, a stream twists. (Jade Flower Palace) V32:145 Bent double, like old beggars under slacks, (Dulce et Decorum Est) V10:109 Between my finger and my thumb (Digging) V5:70 Beware of ruins: they have a treacherous charm (Beware of Ruins) V8:43 Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art— (Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art) V9:44 But perhaps God needs the longing, wherever else should it dwell, (But Perhaps God Needs the Longing) V20:41 By the rude bridge that arched the flood (Concord Hymn) V4:30 By way of a vanished bridge we cross this river (The Garden Shukkei-en) V18:107

C Cassandra’s kind of crying was (Three To’s and an Oi) V24:264 Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light, (To His Excellency General Washington) V13:212

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Come with me into those things that have felt his despair for so long— (Come with Me) V6:31 Complacencies of the peignoir, and late (Sunday Morning) V16:189 Composed in the Tower, before his execution (‘‘More Light! More Light!’’) V6:119

D Darkened by time, the masters, like our memories, mix (Black Zodiac) V10:46 Dear Sirs: (In Response to Executive Order 9066: All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers) V32:129 Death, be not proud, though some have called thee (Holy Sonnet 10) V2:103 Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws (Sonnet 19) V9:210 Disoriented, the newly dead try to turn back, (Our Side) V24:177 Do not go gentle into that good night (Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night) V1:51 Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind (War Is Kind) V9:252 Does the road wind up-hill all the way? (Up-Hill) V34:279 Don Arturo says: (Business) V16:2 Drink to me only with thine eyes, (Song: To Celia) V23:270–271 (Dumb, (A Grafted Tongue) V12:92

E Each day the shadow swings (In the Land of Shinar) V7:83 Each morning the man rises from bed because the invisible (It’s like This) V23:138–139 Each night she waits by the road (Bidwell Ghost) V14:2 Even when you know what people are capable of, (Knowledge) V25:113 Everything has been plundered, betrayed, sold out, (Everything Is Plundered) V32:113

F Face of the skies (Moreover, the Moon) V20:153 Falling upon earth (Falling Upon Earth) V2:64 Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; (On My First Son) V33:166

P o e t r y

Far far from gusty waves these children’s faces. (An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum) V23:88–89 Fast breaks. Lay ups. With Mercury’s (Slam, Dunk, & Hook) V30:176–177 First, the self. Then, the observing self. (I, I, I) V26:97 Five years have past; five summers, with the length (Tintern Abbey) V2:249 Flesh is heretic. (Anorexic) V12:2 For a long time the butterfly held a prominent place in psychology (Lepidopterology) V23:171–172 For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming. (The Cossacks) V25:70 For three years, out of key with his time, (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) V16:26 Forgive me for thinking I saw (For a New Citizen of These United States) V15:55 Frogs burrow the mud (Winter) V35:297 From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State (The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner) V2:41 From the air to the air, like an empty net, (The Heights of Macchu Picchu) V28:137

G Gardener: Sir, I encountered Death (Incident in a Rose Garden) V14:190 Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may, (To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time ) V13:226 Gazelle, I killed you (Ode to a Drum) V20:172–173 Glory be to God for dappled things— (Pied Beauty) V26:161 Go, and catch a falling star, (Song) V35:237 Go down, Moses (Go Down, Moses) V11:42 God save America, (America, America) V29:2 Grandmothers who wring the necks (Classic Ballroom Dances) V33:3 Gray mist wolf (Four Mountain Wolves) V9:131

H ‘‘Had he and I but met (The Man He Killed) V3:167

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How would it be if you took yourself off (Landscape with Tractor) V10:182 Hunger crawls into you (Hunger in New York City) V4:79

I I am fourteen (Hanging Fire) V32:93 I am not a painter, I am a poet (Why I Am Not a Painter) V8:258 I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions (Mirror) V1:116 I am the Smoke King (The Song of the Smoke) V13:196 I am trying to pry open your casket (Dear Reader) V10:85 I became a creature of light (The Mystery) V15:137 I cannot love the Brothers Wright (Reactionary Essay on Applied Science) V9:199 I caught a tremendous fish (The Fish) V31:44 I died for Beauty—but was scarce (I Died for Beauty) V28:174 I don’t mean to make you cry. (Monologue for an Onion) V24:120–121 I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, (I felt a Funeral in my Brain) V13:137 I gave birth to life. (Maternity) V21:142–143 I have been one acquainted with the night. (Acquainted with the Night) V35:3 I have eaten (This Is Just to Say) V34:240 I have just come down from my father (The Hospital Window) V11:58 I have met them at close of day (Easter 1916) V5:91 I have sown beside all waters in my day. (A Black Man Talks of Reaping) V32:20 I haven’t the heart to say (To an Unknown Poet) V18:221 I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear (I Hear America Singing) V3:152 I heard a Fly buzz—when I died— (I Heard a Fly Buzz— When I Died—) V5:140 I know that I shall meet my fate (An Irish Airman Foresees His Death) V1:76 I know what the caged bird feels, alas! (Sympathy) V33:203 I leant upon a coppice gate (The Darkling Thrush) V18:74

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I lie down on my side in the moist grass (Omen) v22:107 I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over. (Wild Swans) V17:221 I love to go out in late September (Blackberry Eating) V35:23 I met a traveller from an antique land (Ozymandias) V27:173 I prove a theorem and the house expands: (Geometry) V15:68 I saw that a star had broken its rope (Witness) V26:285 I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, (I go Back to May 1937) V17:112 I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death. (Conscientious Objector) V34:46 I shook your hand before I went. (Mastectomy) V26:122 I sit in one of the dives (September 1, 1939) V27:234 I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed (Hawk Roosting) V4:55 I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron: (An Ancient Gesture) V31:3 I thought wearing an evergreen dress (Pine) V23:223–224 I, too, sing America. (I, Too) V30:99 I wandered lonely as a cloud (I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud) V33:71 I was angry with my friend; (A Poison Tree) V24:195–196 I was born in the congo (EgoTripping) V28:112 I was born too late and I am much too old, (Death Sentences) V22:23 I was born under the mudbank (Seeing You) V24:244–245 I was sitting in mcsorley’s. outside it was New York and beautifully snowing. (i was sitting in mcsorley’s) V13:151 I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, (The Lake Isle of Innisfree) V15:121 If all the world and love were young, (The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepard) V14:241 If ever two were one, then surely we (To My Dear and Loving Husband) V6:228 If every time their minds drifted, (What the Poets Could Have Been) V26:261 If I should die, think only this of me (The Soldier) V7:218

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Had we but world enough, and time (To His Coy Mistress) V5:276 Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! (To a SkyLark) V32:251 Half a league, half a league (The Charge of the Light Brigade) V1:2 Having a Coke with You (Having a Coke with You) V12:105 He clasps the crag with crooked hands (The Eagle) V11:30 He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be (The Unknown Citizen) V3:302 He was seen, surrounded by rifles, (The Crime Was in Granada) V23:55–56 Hear the sledges with the bells— (The Bells) V3:46 Heart, you bully, you punk, I’m wrecked, I’m shocked (One Is One) V24:158 Her body is not so white as (QueenAnn’s-Lace) V6:179 Her eyes the glow-worm lend thee; (The Night Piece: To Julia) V29:206 Her eyes were coins of porter and her West (A Farewell to English) V10:126 Here, above, (The Man-Moth) V27:135 Here they are. The soft eyes open (The Heaven of Animals) V6:75 His Grace! impossible! what dead! (A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General) V27:216 His speed and strength, which is the strength of ten (His Speed and Strength) V19:96 Hog Butcher for the World (Chicago) V3:61 Hold fast to dreams (Dream Variations) V15:42 Hope is a tattered flag and a dream out of time. (Hope is a Tattered Flag) V12:120 ‘‘Hope’’ is the thing with feathers— (‘‘Hope’’ Is the Thing with Feathers) V3:123 How do I love thee? Let me count the ways (Sonnet 43) V2:236 How is your life with the other one, (An Attempt at Jealousy) V29:23 How shall we adorn (Angle of Geese) V2:2 How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, (On His Having Arrived at the Age of TwentyThree) V17:159

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If you can keep your head when all about you (If) V22:54–55 If you want my apartment, sleep in it (Rent) V25:164 I’m delighted to see you (The Constellation Orion) V8:53 I’m Nobody! Who are you? (I’m Nobody! Who Are You?) V35:83 ‘‘Imagine being the first to say: surveillance,’’ (Inventors) V7:97 Impatient for home, (Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End) V24:214–215 In 1790 a woman could die by falling (The Art of the Novel) V23:29 In 1936, a child (Blood Oranges) V13:34 In a while they rose and went out aimlessly riding, (Merlin Enthralled) V16:72 In China (Lost Sister) V5:216 In ethics class so many years ago (Ethics) V8:88 In Flanders fields the poppies blow (In Flanders Fields) V5:155 In India in their lives they happen (Ways to Live) V16:228 In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, (The Rhodora) V17:191 In such a night, when every louder wind (A Nocturnal Reverie) V30:119–120 In the bottom drawer of my desk . . . (Answers to Letters) V21:30–31 In the evening (Another Night in the Ruins) V26:12 In the groves of Africa from their natural wonder (An African Elegy) V13:3 In the Shreve High football stadium (Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio) V8:17 In the sixty-eight years (Accounting) V21:2–3 In Xanadu did Kubla Khan (Kubla Khan) V5:172 Ink runs from the corners of my mouth (Eating Poetry) V9:60 Is it the boy in me who’s looking out (The Boy) V19:14 It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted. (Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter) V17:63 It is an ancient Mariner (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) V4:127 It is in the small things we see it. (Courage) V14:125

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It is said, the past (Russian Letter) V26:181 It little profits that an idle king (Ulysses) V2:278 It looked extremely rocky for the Mudville nine that day (Casey at the Bat) V5:57 It must be troubling for the god who loves you (The God Who Loves You) V20:88 It seems vainglorious and proud (The Conquerors) V13:67 It starts with a low rumbling, white static, (Rapture) V21:181 It was in and about the Martinmas time (Barbara Allan) V7:10 It was many and many a year ago (Annabel Lee) V9:14 It was not dying: everybody died. (Losses) V31:167–68 It was the schooner Hesperus, (The Wreck of the Hesperus) V31:317 Its quick soft silver bell beating, beating (Auto Wreck) V3:31 I’ve got the children to tend (Woman Work) V33:289 I’ve known rivers; (The Negro Speaks of Rivers) V10:197

J Januaries, Nature greets our eyes (Brazil, January 1, 1502) V6:15 Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota (A Blessing) V7:24 just once (For the White poets who would be Indian) V13:112

L l(a (l(a) V1:85 Las casitas near the gray cannery, (Freeway 280) V30:62 Leave Crete and come to me now, to that holy temple, (Fragment 2) V31:63 Legs! (Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted) V29:262 Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet 116) V3:288 Let us console you. (Allegory) V23:2–3 Listen, my children, and you shall hear (Paul Revere’s Ride) V2:178 Little Fly, (The Fly) V34:70 Little Lamb, who made thee? (The Lamb) V12:134 Long long ago when the world was a wild place (Bedtime Story) V8:32

P o e t r y

M Made of the first gray light (One of the Smallest) V26:141 maggie and milly and molly and may (maggie & milly & molly & may) V12:149 Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table (The Death of the Hired Man) V4:42 May breath for a dead moment cease as jerking your (Curse) V26:75 Men with picked voices chant the names (Overture to a Dance of Locomotives) V11:143 Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, (Miniver Cheevy) V35:126 Morning and evening (Goblin Market) V27:92 ‘‘Mother dear, may I go downtown (Ballad of Birmingham) V5:17 Much Madness is divinest Sense— (Much Madness is Divinest Sense) V16:86 My black face fades (Facing It) V5:109 My dear Telemachus, (Odysseus to Telemachus) V35:146 My father stands in the warm evening (Starlight) V8:213 My friend, are you sleeping? (Two Eclipses) V33:220 my grandmother (Grandmother) V34:95 My grandmothers were strong. (Lineage) V31:145–46 My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains (Ode to a Nightingale) V3:228 My heart is like a singing bird (A Birthday) V10:33 My life closed twice before its close— (My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close) V8:127 My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree (After Apple Picking) V32:3 My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130) V1:247 My uncle in East Germany (The Exhibit) V9:107

N Nature’s first green is gold (Nothing Gold Can Stay) V3:203 No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness (The Weight of Sweetness) V11:230 No monument stands over Babii Yar. (Babii Yar) V29:38

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O O Captain! my Captain, our fearful trip is done (O Captain! My Captain!) V2:146 O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens (Psalm 8) V9:182 O my Luve’s like a red, red rose (A Red, Red Rose) V8:152 O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, (La Belle Dame sans Merci) V17:18 ‘‘O where ha’ you been, Lord Randal, my son? (Lord Randal) V6:105 O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being (Ode to the West Wind) V2:163 Oh, but it is dirty! (Filling Station) V12:57 old age sticks (old age sticks) V3:246 On a shore washed by desolate waves, he stood, (The Bronze Horseman) V28:27 On either side the river lie (The Lady of Shalott) V15:95 On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. The infinite (60) V18:3 Once some people were visiting Chekhov (Chocolates) V11:17 Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary (The Raven) V1:200 One day I’ll lift the telephone (Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead) V14:154 One day I wrote her name upon the strand, (Sonnet 75) V32:215

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One foot down, then hop! It’s hot (Harlem Hopscotch) V2:93 one shoe on the roadway presents (A Pie´d) V3:16 Our vision is our voice (An Anthem) V26:34 Out of the hills of Habersham, (Song of the Chattahoochee) V14:283 Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day (The Wood-Pile) V6:251 Oysters we ate (Oysters) V4:91

P Pentagon code (Smart and Final Iris) V15:183 Poised between going on and back, pulled (The Base Stealer) V12:30

Q Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir (Cargoes) V5:44 Quite difficult, belief. (Chorale) V25:51

R Recognition in the body (In Particular) V20:125 Red men embraced my body’s whiteness (Birch Canoe) V5:31 Remember me when I am gone away (Remember) V14:255 Remember the sky you were born under, (Remember) V32:185 Riches I hold in light esteem, (Old Stoic) V33:143

S Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day? (Sonnet 18) V2:222 She came every morning to draw water (A Drink of Water) V8:66 She reads, of course, what he’s doing, shaking Nixon’s hand, (The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives) V28:273 She sang beyond the genius of the sea. (The Idea of Order at Key West) V13:164 She walks in beauty, like the night (She Walks in Beauty) V14:268 She was my grandfather’s second wife. Coming late (My Grandmother’s Plot in the Family Cemetery) V27:154 Side by side, their faces blurred, (An Arundel Tomb) V12:17 since feeling is first (since feeling is first) V34:172 Since the professional wars— (Midnight) V2:130

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Since then, I work at night. (Ten Years after Your Deliberate Drowning) V21:240 S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) V1:97 Sky black (Duration) V18:93 Sleepless as Prospero back in his bedroom (Darwin in 1881) V13:83 so much depends (The Red Wheelbarrow) V1:219 So the man spread his blanket on the field (A Tall Man Executes a Jig) V12:228 So the sky wounded you, jagged at the heart, (Daylights) V13:101 Softly, in the dark, a woman is singing to me (Piano) V6:145 Some say it’s in the reptilian dance (The Greatest Grandeur) V18:119 Some say the world will end in fire (Fire and Ice) V7:57 Something there is that doesn’t love a wall (Mending Wall) V5:231 Sometimes walking late at night (Butcher Shop) V7:43 Sometimes, a lion with a prophet’s beard (For An Assyrian Frieze) V9:120 Sometimes, in the middle of the lesson (Music Lessons) V8:117 somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond (somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond) V19:265 South of the bridge on Seventeenth (Fifteen) V2:78 Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, (Funeral Blues) V10:139 Strong Men, riding horses. In the West (Strong Men, Riding Horses) V4:209 Such places are too still for history, (Deep Woods) V14:138 Sundays too my father got up early (Those Winter Sundays) V1:300 Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, (Virtue) V25:263 Swing low sweet chariot (Swing Low Sweet Chariot) V1:283

Cumulative Index of First Lines

Nobody heard him, the dead man (Not Waving but Drowning) V3:216 Not like a cypress, (Not like a Cypress) V24:135 Not marble nor the gilded monuments (Sonnet 55) V5:246 Not the memorized phone numbers. (What Belongs to Us) V15:196 Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs (Fern Hill) V3:92 Now as I watch the progress of the plague (The Missing) V9:158 Now I rest my head on the satyr’s carved chest, (The Satyr’s Heart) V22:187 Now one might catch it see it (Fading Light) V21:49

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T Take heart, monsieur, four-fifths of this province (For Jean Vincent D’abbadie, Baron St.-Castin) V12:78

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Take sheds and stalls from Billingsgate, (The War Correspondent) V26:235 Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean (Tears, Idle Tears) V4:220 Tell me not, in mournful numbers (A Psalm of Life) V7:165 Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind, (To Lucasta, Going to the Wars) V32:291 Temple bells die out. (Temple Bells Die Out) V18:210 That is no country for old men. The young (Sailing to Byzantium) V2:207 That negligible bit of sand which slides (Variations on Nothing) V20:234 That time of drought the embered air (Drought Year) V8:78 That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall (My Last Duchess) V1:165 The apparition of these faces in the crowd (In a Station of the Metro) V2:116 The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold (The Destruction of Sennacherib) V1:38 The bored child at the auction (The Wings) V28:242 The brief secrets are still here, (Words Are the Diminution of All Things) V35:316 The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder (Hurt Hawks) V3:138 The bud (Saint Francis and the Sow) V9:222 The Bustle in a House (The Bustle in a House) V10:62 The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard (Out, Out—) V10:212 The couple on the left of me (Walk Your Body Down) V26:219 The courage that my mother had (The Courage that My Mother Had) V3:79 The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day (Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard) V9:73 The fiddler crab fiddles, glides and dithers, (Fiddler Crab) V23:111–112 The force that through the green fuse drives the flower (The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower) V8:101 The grasses are light brown (September) V23:258–259 The green lamp flares on the table (This Life) V1:293

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The house is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin (‘‘Blighters’’) V28:3 The ills I sorrow at (Any Human to Another) V3:2 The instructor said (Theme for English B) V6:194 The king sits in Dumferling toune (Sir Patrick Spens) V4:177 The land was overmuch like scenery (Beowulf) V11:2 The last time I saw it was 1968. (The Hiding Place) V10:152 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want (Psalm 23) V4:103 The man who sold his lawn to standard oil (The War Against the Trees) V11:215 The moon glows the same (The Moon Glows the Same) V7:152 The old South Boston Aquarium stands (For the Union Dead) V7:67 The others bent their heads and started in (‘‘Trouble with Math in a One-Room Country School’’) V9:238 The pale nuns of St. Joseph are here (Island of Three Marias) V11:79 The Phoenix comes of flame and dust (The Phoenix) V10:226 The plants of the lake (Two Poems for T.) V20:218 The poetry of earth is never dead: (On the Grasshopper and the Cricket) V32:161 The rain set early in to-night: (Porphyria’s Lover) V15:151 The river brought down (How We Heard the Name) V10:167 The room is full (My Mother Combs My Hair) V34:132 The rusty spigot (Onomatopoeia) V6:133 The sea is calm tonight (Dover Beach) V2:52 The sea sounds insincere (The Milkfish Gatherers) V11:111 The slow overture of rain, (Mind) V17:145 The Soul selects her own Society— (The Soul Selects Her Own Society) V1:259 The summer that I was ten— (The Centaur) V30:20 ‘‘The sun was shining on the sea, (The Walrus and the Carpenter) V30:258–259 The surface of the pond was mostly green— (The Lotus Flowers) V33:107

P o e t r y

The time you won your town the race (To an Athlete Dying Young) V7:230 The way sorrow enters the bone (The Blue Rim of Memory) V17:38 The whiskey on your breath (My Papa’s Waltz) V3:191 The white ocean in which birds swim (Morning Walk) V21:167 The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees (The Highwayman) V4:66 The windows were open and the morning air was, by the smell of lilac and some darker flowering shrub, filled with the brown and chirping trills of birds. (Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance) V27:291 There are blows in life, so hard . . . I just don’t know! (The Black Heralds) V26:47 There are strange things done in the midnight sun (The Cremation of Sam McGee) V10:75 There have been rooms for such a short time (The Horizons of Rooms) V15:79 There is a hunger for order, (A Thirst Against) V20:205 There is a pleasure in the pathless woods (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, stanzas 178–184) V35:46 There is no way not to be excited (Paradiso) V20:190–191 There is the one song everyone (Siren Song) V7:196 There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, (There Will Come Soft Rains) V14:301 There you are, in all your innocence, (Perfect Light) V19:187 There’s a Certain Slant of Light (There’s a Certain Slant of Light) V6:211 There’s no way out. (In the Suburbs) V14:201 These open years, the river (For Jennifer, 6, on the Teton) V17:86 These unprepossessing sunsets (Art Thou the Thing I Wanted) V25:2–3 They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair (The Bean Eaters) V2:16 They said, ‘‘Wait.’’ Well, I waited. (Alabama Centennial) V10:2 They say a child with two mouths is no good. (Pantoun for Chinese Women) V29:241 they were just meant as covers (My Mother Pieced Quilts) V12:169

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W wade (The Fish) V14:171 Wailing of a flute, a little drum (In Music) V35:105 Wanting to say things, (My Father’s Song) V16:102 We are saying goodbye (Station) V21:226–227 We came from our own country in a red room (Originally) V25:146–147 We cannot know his legendary head (Archaic Torso of Apollo) V27:3 We could be here. This is the valley (Small Town with One Road) V7:207 We met the British in the dead of winter (Meeting the British) V7:138 We real cool. We (We Real Cool) V6:242 Well, son, I’ll tell you (Mother to Son) V3:178 What dire offense from amorous causes springs, (The Rape of the Lock) V12:202 What happens to a dream deferred? (Harlem) V1:63 What of the neighborhood homes awash (The Continuous Life) V18:51 What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache selfconscious looking at the full moon (A Supermarket in California) V5:261 Whatever it is, it must have (American Poetry) V7:2 When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads, and the assassin . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs (Cool Tombs) V6:45 When despair for the world grows in me (The Peace of Wild Things) V30:159 When he spoke of where he came from, (Grudnow) V32:73 When I consider how my light is spent ([On His Blindness] Sonnet 16) V3:262 When I die, I want your hands on my eyes: (Sonnet LXXXIX) V35:259 When I go away from you (The Taxi) V30:211–212 When I have fears that I may cease to be (When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be) V2:295

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When I heard the learn’d astronomer, (When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer) V22:244 When I see a couple of kids (High Windows) V3:108 When I see birches bend to left and right (Birches) V13:14 When I was a child (Autobiographia Literaria) V34:2 When I was born, you waited (Having it Out with Melancholy) V17:98 When I was one-and-twenty (When I Was One-and-Twenty) V4:268 When I watch you (Miss Rosie) V1:133 When Love with confine´d wings (To Althea, From Prison) V34:254 When the mountains of Puerto Rico (We Live by What We See at Night) V13:240 When the world was created wasn’t it like this? (Anniversary) V15:2 When they said Carrickfergus I could hear (The Singer’s House) V17:205 When we two parted (When We Two Parted) V29:297 When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold (The City Limits) V19:78 When you look through the window in Sag Harbor and see (View) V25:246–247 When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes (Sonnet 29) V8:198 Whenever Richard Cory went down town (Richard Cory) V4:116 Where dips the rocky highland (The Stolen Child) V34:216 While I was gone a war began. (While I Was Gone a War Began) V21:253–254 While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead (The RiverMerchant’s Wife: A Letter) V8:164 While the long grain is softening (Early in the Morning) V17:75 While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire (Shine, Perishing Republic) V4:161 While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth, (The Afterlife) V18:39

Cumulative Index of First Lines

This girlchild was: born as usual (Barbie Doll) V9:33 This is a litany of lost things, (The Litany) V24:101–102 This is my letter to the World (This Is My Letter to the World) V4:233 This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling, (The Arsenal at Springfield) V17:2 This is the black sea-brute bulling through wave-wrack (Leviathan) V5:203 This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, (The Chambered Nautilus) V24:52–53 This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level (Paradoxes and Oxymorons) V11:162 This tale is true, and mine. It tells (The Seafarer) V8:177 Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness (Ode on a Grecian Urn) V1:179 Three days Natasha’d been astray, (The Bridegroom) V34:26 Three times my life has opened. (Three Times My Life Has Opened) V16:213 Time in school drags along with so much worry, (Childhood) V19:29 to fold the clothes. No matter who lives (I Stop Writimg the Poem) V16:58 To him who in the love of Nature holds (Thanatopsis) V30:232–233 To replay errors (Daughter-MotherMaya-Seeta) V25:83 To weep unbidden, to wake (Practice) V23:240 Toni Morrison despises (The Toni Morrison Dreams) V22:202–203 Tonight I can write the saddest lines (Tonight I Can Write) V11:187 tonite, thriller was (Beware: Do Not Read This Poem) V6:3 Truth be told, I do not want to forget (Native Guard) V29:183 Turning and turning in the widening gyre (The Second Coming) V7:179 ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves (Jabberwocky) V11:91 ’Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land, (On Being Brought from Africa to America) V29:223 Two roads diverged in a yellow wood (The Road Not Taken) V2:195 Tyger! Tyger! burning bright (The Tyger) V2:263

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Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston? (In Memory of Radio) V9:144 Whose woods these are I think I know (Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening) V1:272 Whoso list to hunt: I know where is an hind. (Whoso List to Hunt) V25:286 Why should I let the toad work (Toads) V4:244

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L i n e s

With thorns, she scratches (Uncoiling) V35:277

Y You are small and intense (To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly) V11:173 You can’t hear? Everything here is changing. (The River Mumma Wants Out) V25:191

P o e t r y

You do not have to be good. (Wild Geese) V15:207 You should lie down now and remember the forest, (The Forest) V22:36–37 You stood thigh-deep in water and green light glanced (Lake) V23:158 You were never told, Mother, how old Illya was drunk (The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter) V12:44

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Cumulative Index of Last Lines A . . . a capital T in the endless mass of the text. (Answers to Letters) V21:30–31 a fleck of foam. (Accounting) V21:2–3 A heart that will one day beat you to death. (Monologue for an Onion) V24:120–121 A heart whose love is innocent! (She Walks in Beauty) V14:268 a man then suddenly stops running (Island of Three Marias) V11:80 A perfect evening! (Temple Bells Die Out) V18:210 a space in the lives of their friends (Beware: Do Not Read This Poem) V6:3 A sudden blow: the great wings beating still (Leda and the Swan) V13:181 A terrible beauty is born (Easter 1916) V5:91 About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. (Thanatopsis) V30:232–233 About my big, new, automatically defrosting refrigerator with the built-in electric eye (Reactionary Essay on Applied Science) V9:199 about the tall mounds of termites. (Song of a Citizen) V16:126 Across the expedient and wicked stones (Auto Wreck) V3:31

affirming its brilliant and dizzying love. (Lepidopterology) V23:171 Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? (A Supermarket in California) V5:261 All losses are restored and sorrows end (Sonnet 30) V4:192 Amen. Amen (The Creation) V1:20 Anasazi (Anasazi) V9:3 and a vase of wild flowers. (The War Correspondent) V26:239 and all beyond saving by children (Ethics) V8:88 and all the richer for it. (Mind) V17:146 And all we need of hell (My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close) V8:127 And, being heard, doesn’t vanish in the dark. (Variations on Nothing) V20:234 and changed, back to the class (‘‘Trouble with Math in a OneRoom Country School’’) V9:238 and chant him a blessing, a sutra. (What For) V33:267 And covered up—our names— (I Died for Beauty) V28:174

And dances with the daffodils. (I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud) V33:71 And death i think is no parenthesis (since feeling is first) V34:172 And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die (Holy Sonnet 10) V2:103 and destruction. (Allegory) V23:2–3 And drunk the milk of Paradise (Kubla Khan) V5:172 and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise. (The City Limits) V19:78 And Finished knowing—then— (I Felt a Funeral in My Brain) V13:137 And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies (Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio) V8:17 and go back. (For the White poets who would be Indian) V13:112 And handled with a Chain— (Much Madness is Divinest Sense) V16:86 And has not begun to grow a manly smile. (Deep Woods) V14:139 And his own Word (The Phoenix) V10:226 And I am Nicholas. (The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter) V12:45 And I let the fish go. (The Fish) V31:44 And I was unaware. (The Darkling Thrush) V18:74 And in the suburbs Can’t sat down and cried. (Kilroy) V14:213

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And it’s been years. (Anniversary) V15:3 and joy may come, and make its test of us. (One Is One) V24:158 And kept on drinking. (Miniver Cheevy) V35:127 And laid my hand upon thy mane— as I do here. (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, stanzas 178–184) V35:47 and leaving essence to the inner eye. (Memory) V21:156 And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair (Mother to Son) V3:179 And like a thunderbolt he falls (The Eagle) V11:30 And makes me end where I begun (A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning) V11:202 And ‘midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name. (The Rape of the Lock) V12:209 And miles to go before I sleep (Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening) V1:272 and my father saying things. (My Father’s Song) V16:102 And no birds sing. (La Belle Dame sans Merci) V17:18 And not waving but drowning (Not Waving but Drowning) V3:216 And oh, ‘tis true, ‘tis true (When I Was One-and-Twenty) V4:268 And reach for your scalping knife. (For Jean Vincent D’abbadie, Baron St.-Castin) V12:78 and retreating, always retreating, behind it (Brazil, January 1, 1502) V6:16 And settled upon his eyes in a black soot (‘‘More Light! More Light!’’) V6:120 And shuts his eyes. (Darwin in 1881) V13: 84 and so cold (This Is Just to Say) V34:241 And so live ever—or else swoon to death (Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art) V9:44 and strange and loud was the dingoes’ cry (Drought Year) V8:78 and stride out. (Courage) V14:126 and sweat and fat and greed. (Anorexic) V12:3 And that has made all the difference (The Road Not Taken) V2:195 And the deep river ran on (As I Walked Out One Evening) V4:16 And the midnight message of Paul Revere (Paul Revere’s Ride) V2:180

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L i n e s

And the mome raths outgrabe (Jabberwocky) V11:91 And the Salvation Army singing God loves us. . . . (Hopeis a Tattered Flag) V12:120 And therewith ends my story. (The Bridegroom) V34:28 and these the last verses that I write for her (Tonight I Can Write) V11:187 and thickly wooded country; the moon. (The Art of the Novel) V23:29 And those roads in South Dakota that feel around in the darkness . . . (Come with Me) V6:31 and to know she will stay in the field till you die? (Landscape with Tractor) V10:183 and two blankets embroidered with smallpox (Meeting the British) V7:138 and waving, shouting, Welcome back. (Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead) V14:154 And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son! (If) V22:54–55 and whose skin is made dusky by stars. (September) V23:258–259 And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’ (Whoso List to Hunt) V25:286 And would suffice (Fire and Ice) V7:57 And yet God has not said a word! (Porphyria’s Lover) V15:151 and you spread un the thin halo of night mist. (Ways to Live) V16:229 and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless. (Odysseus to Telemachus) V35:147 And Zero at the Bone— (A Narrow Fellow in the Grass) V11:127 (answer with a tower of birds) (Duration) V18:93 Around us already perhaps future moons, suns and stars blaze in a fiery wreath. (But Perhaps God Needs the Longing) V20:41 aspired to become lighter than air (Blood Oranges) V13:34 As any She belied with false compare (Sonnet 130) V1:248 As ever in my great Task-Master’s eye. (On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three) V17:160 As far as Cho-fu-Sa (The RiverMerchant’s Wife: A Letter) V8:165 as it has disappeared. (The Wings) V28:244

P o e t r y

As the contagion of those molten eyes (For An Assyrian Frieze) V9:120 As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and clothes, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes (The Bean Eaters) V2:16 as we crossed the field, I told her. (The Centaur) V30:20 As what he loves may never like too much. (On My First Son) V33:166 at home in the fish’s fallen heaven (Birch Canoe) V5:31 away, pedaling hard, rocket and pilot. (His Speed and Strength) V19:96

B Back to the play of constant give and change (The Missing) V9:158 Beautiful & dangerous. (Slam, Dunk, & Hook) V30:176–177 Before it was quite unsheathed from reality (Hurt Hawks) V3:138 before we’re even able to name them. (Station) V21:226–227 behind us and all our shining ambivalent love airborne there before us. (Our Side) V24:177 Black like me. (Dream Variations) V15:42 Bless me (Hunger in New York City) V4:79 bombs scandalizing the sanctity of night. (While I Was Gone a War Began) V21:253–254 But, baby, where are you?’’ (Ballad of Birmingham) V5:17 But be (Ars Poetica) V5:3 But for centuries we have longed for it. (Everything Is Plundered) V32:34 but it works every time (Siren Song) V7:196 but the truth is, it is, lost to us now. (The Forest) V22:36–37 But there is no joy in Mudville— mighty Casey has ‘‘Struck Out.’’ (Casey at the Bat) V5:58 But we hold our course, and the wind is with us. (On Freedom’s Ground) V12:187 by a beeswax candle pooling beside their dinnerware. (Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End) V24:214–215 by good fortune (The Horizons of Rooms) V15:80

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C Calls through the valleys of Hall. (Song of the Chattahoochee) V14:284 chickens (The Red Wheelbarrow) V1:219 clear water dashes (Onomatopoeia) V6:133 Columbia. (Kindness) V24:84–85 come to life and burn? (Bidwell Ghost) V14:2 Comin’ for to carry me home (Swing Low Sweet Chariot) V1:284 cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink. (The Man-Moth) V27:135 crossed the water. (All It Takes) V23:15

D

E endless worlds is the great meeting of children. (60) V18:3 Enjoy such liberty. (To Althea, From Prison) V34:255

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F fall upon us, the dwellers in shadow (In the Land of Shinar) V7:84 Fallen cold and dead (O Captain! My Captain!) V2:147 False, ere I come, to two, or three. (Song) V35:237 filled, never. (The Greatest Grandeur) V18:119 Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays (Cargoes) V5:44 Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? (Ode to a Nightingale) V3:229 For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.’’ (Lord Randal) V6:105 For nothing now can ever come to any good. (Funeral Blues) V10:139 For the coming winter (Winter) V35:297 For the love of God they buried his cold corpse. (The Bronze Horseman) V28:31 For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand. (The Stolen Child) V34:217 forget me as fast as you can. (Last Request) V14:231 from one kiss (A Rebirth) V21:193–194

G garish for a while and burned. (One of the Smallest) V26:142 going where? Where? (Childhood) V19:29

H Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard (The Unknown Citizen) V3:303 Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on (Mus,e des Beaux Arts) V1:148

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half eaten by the moon. (Dear Reader) V10:85 hand over hungry hand. (Climbing) V14:113 Happen on a red tongue (Small Town with One Road) V7:207 hard as mine with another man? (An Attempt at Jealousy) V29:24 Has no more need of, and I have (The Courage that My Mother Had) V3:80 Has set me softly down beside you. The Poem is you (Paradoxes and Oxymorons) V11:162 Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord! (The Destruction of Sennacherib) V1:39 He rose the morrow morn (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) V4:132 He says again, ‘‘Good fences make good neighbors.’’ (Mending Wall) V5:232 He writes down something that he crosses out. (The Boy) V19:14 here; passion will save you. (Air for Mercury) V20:2–3 History theirs whose languages is the sun. (An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum) V23:88–89 How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm (The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower) V8:101 How can I turn from Africa and live? (A Far Cry from Africa) V6:61 How sad then is even the marvelous! (An Africian Elegy) V13:4

Cumulative Index of Last Lines

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? (The Tyger) V2:263 ‘‘Dead,’’ was all he answered (The Death of the Hired Man) V4:44 deep in the deepest one, tributaries burn. (For Jennifer, 6, on the Teton) V17:86 Delicate, delicate, delicate, delicate—now! (The Base Stealer) V12:30 Die soon (We Real Cool) V6:242 Do what you are going to do, I will tell about it. (I go Back to May 1937) V17:113 down from the sky (Russian Letter) V26:181 Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past (Piano) V6:145 Downward to darkness, on extended wings. (Sunday Morning) V16:190 drinking all night in the kitchen. (The Dead) V35:69 Driving around, I will waste more time. (Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter) V17:63 dry wells that fill so easily now (The Exhibit) V9:107 dust rises in many myriads of grains. (Not like a Cypress) V24:135 dusty as miners, into the restored volumes. (Bonnard’s Garden) V25:33

Eternal, unchanging creator of earth. Amen (The Seafarer) V8:178 Eternity of your arms around my neck. (Death Sentences) V22:23 even as it vanishes—were not our life. (The Litany) V24:101–102 ever finds anything more of immortality. (Jade Flower Palace) V32:145 every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow. (The Afterlife) V18:39

I n d e x

I I am a true Russian! (Babii Yar) V29:38 I am black. (The Song of the Smoke) V13:197 I am going to keep things like this (Hawk Roosting) V4:55 I am not brave at all (Strong Men, Riding Horses) V4:209 I could not see to see— (I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died—) V5:140 I cremated Sam McGee (The Cremation of Sam McGee) V10:76 I didn’t want to put them down. (And What If I Spoke of Despair) V19:2 I have been one acquainted with the night. (Acquainted with the Night) V35:3

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I have just come down from my father (The Hospital Window) V11:58 I hear it in the deep heart’s core. (The Lake Isle of Innisfree) V15:121 I know why the caged bird sings! (Sympathy) V33:203 I never writ, nor no man ever loved (Sonnet 116) V3:288 I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. (The Peace of Wild Things) V30:159 I romp with joy in the bookish dark (Eating Poetry) V9:61 I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES (Why I Am Not a Painter) V8:259 I shall but love thee better after death (Sonnet 43) V2:236 I should be glad of another death (Journey of the Magi) V7:110 I stand up (Miss Rosie) V1:133 I stood there, fifteen (Fifteen) V2:78 I take it you are he? (Incident in a Rose Garden) V14:191 I, too, am America. (I, Too) V30:99 I turned aside and bowed my head and wept (The Tropics in New York) V4:255 If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? (Ode to the West Wind) V2:163 I’ll be gone from here. (The Cobweb) V17:51 I’ll dig with it (Digging) V5:71 Imagine! (Autobiographia Literaria) V34:2 In a convulsive misery (The Milkfish Gatherers) V11:112 In balance with this life, this death (An Irish Airman Foresees His Death) V1:76 in earth’s gasp, ocean’s yawn. (Lake) V23:158 In Flanders fields (In Flanders Fields) V5:155 In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. (The Idea of Order at Key West) V13:164 In hearts at peace, under an English heaven (The Soldier) V7:218 In her tomb by the side of the sea (Annabel Lee) V9:14 in the family of things. (Wild Geese) V15:208 in the grit gray light of day. (Daylights) V13:102 In the rear-view mirrors of the passing cars (The War Against the Trees) V11:216 In these Chicago avenues. (A Thirst Against) V20:205

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L i n e s

in this bastion of culture. (To an Unknown Poet) V18:221 in your unsteady, opening hand. (What the Poets Could Have Been) V26:262 iness (l(a) V1:85 Into blossom (A Blessing) V7:24 Is Come, my love is come to me. (A Birthday) V10:34 is love—that’s all. (Two Poems for T.) V20:218 is safe is what you said. (Practice) V23:240 is still warm (Lament for the Dorsets) V5:191 It asked a crumb—of Me (‘‘Hope’’ Is the Thing with Feathers) V3:123 It had no mirrors. I no longer needed mirrors. (I, I, I) V26:97 It is our god. (Fiddler Crab) V23:111–112 it is the bell to awaken God that we’ve heard ringing. (The Garden Shukkei-en) V18:107 it over my face and mouth. (An Anthem) V26:34 It rains as I write this. Mad heart, be brave. (The Country Without a Post Office) V18:64 It was your resting place.’’ (Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?) V4:2 it’s always ourselves we find in the sea (maggie & milly & molly & may) V12:150 its bright, unequivocal eye. (Having it Out with Melancholy) V17:99 It’s the fall through wind lifting white leaves. (Rapture) V21:181 its youth. The sea grows old in it. (The Fish) V14:172

J Judge tenderly—of Me (This Is My Letter to the World) V4:233 Just imagine it (Inventors) V7:97

K kisses you (Grandmother) V34:95

L Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation (Chicago) V3:61

P o e t r y

Learn to labor and to wait (A Psalm of Life) V7:165 Leashed in my throat (Midnight) V2:131 Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s un-resting sea (The Chambered Nautilus) V24:52–53 Let my people go (Go Down, Moses) V11:43 Let the water come. (America, America) V29:4 life, our life and its forgetting. (For a New Citizen of These United States) V15:55 Life to Victory (Always) V24:15 like a bird in the sky . . . (Ego-Tripping) V28:113 like a shadow or a friend. Colombia. (Kindness) V24:84–85 Like Stone— (The Soul Selects Her Own Society) V1:259 Little Lamb, God bless thee. (The Lamb) V12:135 Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. (When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer) V22:244 love (The Toni Morrison Dreams) V22:202–203 Loved I not Honour more. (To Lucasta, Going to the Wars) V32:291 Luck was rid of its clover. (Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance) V27:292

M ‘Make a wish, Tom, make a wish.’ (Drifters) V10: 98 make it seem to change (The Moon Glows the Same) V7:152 May be refined, and join the angelic train. (On Being Brought from Africa to America) V29:223 may your mercy be near. (Two Eclipses) V33:221 midnight-oiled in the metric laws? (A Farewell to English) V10:126 Monkey business (Business) V16:2 More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake! (Tintern Abbey) V2:250 My foe outstretchd beneath the tree. (A Poison Tree) V24:195–196 My love shall in my verse ever live young (Sonnet 19) V9:211 My soul has grown deep like the rivers. (The Negro Speaks of Rivers) V10:198 My soul I’ll pour into thee. (The Night Piece: To Julia) V29:206

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O O Death in Life, the days that are no more! (Tears, Idle Tears) V4:220 O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! (Psalm 8) V9:182 O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost (Names of Horses) V8:142 o, walk your body down, don’t let it go it alone. (Walk Your Body Down) V26:219 Of all our joys, this must be the deepest. (Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon) V20:59–60 of blackberry-eating in late September. (Blackberry Eating) V35:24 of blood and ignorance. (Art Thou the Thing I Wanted) V25:2–3

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of gentleness (To a Sad Daughter) V8:231 of love’s austere and lonely offices? (Those Winter Sundays) V1:300 of peaches (The Weight of Sweetness) V11:230 Of the camellia (Falling Upon Earth) V2:64 Of the Creator. And he waits for the world to begin (Leviathan) V5:204 of our festivities (Fragment 2) V31:63 Of what is past, or passing, or to come (Sailing to Byzantium) V2:207 Of which the chronicles make no mention. (In Music) V35:105 Oh that was the garden of abundance, seeing you. (Seeing You) V24:244–245 Old Ryan, not yours (The Constellation Orion) V8:53 On rainy Monday nights of an eternal November. (Classic Ballroom Dances) V33:3 On the dark distant flurry (Angle of Geese) V2:2 on the frosty autumn air. (The Cossacks) V25:70 On the look of Death— (There’s a Certain Slant of Light) V6:212 On the reef of Norman s Woe! (The Wreck of the Hesperus) V31:317 On your head like a crown (Any Human to Another) V3:2 One could do worse that be a swinger of birches. (Birches) V13:15 ‘‘Only the Lonely,’’ trying his best to sound like Elvis. (The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives) V28:274 or a loose seed. (Freeway 280) V30:62 Or does it explode? (Harlem) V1:63 Or help to half-a-crown.’’ (The Man He Killed) V3:167 Or if I die. (The Fly) V34:70 Or just some human sleep. (After Apple Picking) V32:3 or last time, we look. (In Particular) V20:125 or last time, we look. (In Particular) V20:125 Or might not have lain dormant forever. (Mastectomy) V26:123 or nothing (Queen-Ann’s-Lace) V6:179 Or pleasures, seldom reached, again pursued. (A Nocturnal Reverie) V30:119–120

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or the one red leaf the snow releases in March. (ThreeTimes My Life Has Opened) V16:213 ORANGE forever. (Ballad of Orange and Grape) V10:18 our every corpuscle become an elf. (Moreover, the Moon) V20:153 Our love shall live, and later life renew.’’ (Sonnet 75) V32:215 outside. (it was New York and beautifully, snowing . . . (i was sitting in mcsorley’s) V13:152 owing old (old age sticks) V3:246

P patient in mind remembers the time. (Fading Light) V21:49 Penelope, who really cried. (An Ancient Gesture) V31:3 Perhaps he will fall. (Wilderness Gothic) V12:242 Petals on a wet, black bough (In a Station of the Metro) V2:116 Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair (The Highwayman) V4:68 Powerless, I drown. (Maternity) V21:142–143 Pra´ise him. (Pied Beauty) V26:161 Pro patria mori. (Dulce et Decorum Est) V10:110

Cumulative Index of Last Lines

never to waken in that world again (Starlight) V8:213 newness comes into the world (Daughter-Mother-MayaSeeta) V25:83 Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten. (Spring-Watching Pavilion) V18:198 No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair (Facing It) V5:110 no—tell them no— (The Hiding Place) V10:153 Noble six hundred! (The Charge of the Light Brigade) V1:3 nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands (somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond) V19:265 Nor swim under the terrible eyes of prison ships. (The Drunken Boat) V28:84 Not a roof but a field of stars. (Rent) V25:164 not be seeing you, for you have no insurance. (The River Mumma Wants Out) V25:191 Not even the blisters. Look. (What Belongs to Us) V15:196 Not of itself, but thee. (Song: To Celia) V23:270–271 Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless (High Windows) V3:108 Nothing gold can stay (Nothing Gold Can Stay) V3:203 Now! (Alabama Centennial) V10:2 nursing the tough skin of figs (This Life) V1:293

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R Rage, rage against the dying of the light (Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night) V1:51 Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear. (The Singer’s House) V17:206 Remember. (Remember) V32:185 Remember the Giver fading off the lip (A Drink of Water) V8:66 Ride me. (Witness) V26:285 rise & walk away like a panther. (Ode to a Drum) V20:172–173 Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish (Mirror) V1:116

S Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. (Seven Ages of Man) V35:213 Shall be lifted—nevermore! (The Raven) V1:202 Shall you be overcome. (Conscientious Objector) V34:46 Shantih shantih shantih (The Waste Land) V20:248–252

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share my shivering bed. (Chorale) V25:51 she’d miss me. (In Response to Executive Order 9066: All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers) V32:129 Show an affirming flame. (September 1, 1939) V27:235 Shuddering with rain, coming down around me. (Omen) V22:107 Simply melted into the perfect light. (Perfect Light) V19:187 Singing of him what they could understand (Beowulf) V11:3 Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs (I Hear America Singing) V3:152 Sister, one of those who never married. (My Grandmother’s Plot in the Family Cemetery) V27:155 Sleep, fly, rest: even the sea dies! (Lament for Ignacio Sa´nchez Mejı´ as) V31:128–30 slides by on grease (For the Union Dead) V7:67 Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (The Second Coming) V7:179 so like the smaller stars we rowed among. (The Lotus Flowers) V33:108 So long lives this, and this gives life to thee (Sonnet 18) V2:222 So prick my skin. (Pine) V23:223–224 so that everything can learn the reason for my song. (Sonnet LXXXIX) V35:260 Somebody loves us all. (Filling Station) V12:57 Speak through my words and my blood. (The Heights of Macchu Picchu) V28:141 spill darker kissmarks on that dark. (Ten Years after Your Deliberate Drowning) V21:240 Stand still, yet we will make him run (To His Coy Mistress) V5:277 startled into eternity (Four Mountain Wolves) V9:132 Still clinging to your shirt (My Papa’s Waltz) V3:192 Stood up, coiled above his head, transforming all. (A Tall Man Executes a Jig) V12:229 strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate. (Originally) V25:146–147 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:

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and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever (Psalm 23) V4:103 syllables of an old order. (A Grafted Tongue) V12:93

T Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns . . . tell me if the lovers are losers . . . tell me if any get more than the lovers . . . in the dust . . . in the cool tombs (Cool Tombs) V6:46 Than from everything else life promised that you could do? (Paradiso) V20:190–191 Than that you should remember and be sad. (Remember) V14:255 that does not see you. You must change your life. (Archaic Torso of Apollo) V27:3 that might have been sweet in Grudnow. (Grudnow) V32:74 That then I scorn to change my state with Kings (Sonnet 29) V8:198 that there is more to know, that one day you will know it. (Knowledge) V25:113 That when we live no more, we may live ever (To My Dear and Loving Husband) V6:228 That’s the word. (Black Zodiac) V10:47 the bigger it gets. (Smart and Final Iris) V15:183 The bosom of his Father and his God (Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard) V9:74 the bow toward torrents of veyz mir. (Three To’s and an Oi) V24:264 The crime was in Granada, his Granada. (The Crime Was in Granada) V23:55–56 The dance is sure (Overture to a Dance of Locomotives) V11:143 The eyes turn topaz. (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) V16:30 the flames? (Another Night in the Ruins) V26:13 The frolic architecture of the snow. (The Snow-Storm) V34:196 The garland briefer than a girl’s (To an Athlete Dying Young) V7:230 The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills. (On the Grasshopper and the Cricket) V32:161

P o e t r y

The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind. (Cavalry Crossing a Ford) V13:50 The hands gripped hard on the desert (At the Bomb Testing Site) V8:3 The holy melodies of love arise. (The Arsenal at Springfield) V17:3 the knife at the throat, the death in the metronome (Music Lessons) V8:117 The Lady of Shalott.’’ (The Lady of Shalott) V15:97 The lightning and the gale! (Old Ironsides) V9:172 The lone and level sands stretch far away. (Ozymandias) V27:173 the long, perfect loveliness of sow (Saint Francis and the Sow) V9:222 The Lord survives the rainbow of His will (The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket) V6:159 The man I was when I was part of it (Beware of Ruins) V8:43 the quilts sing on (My Mother Pieced Quilts) V12:169 The red rose and the brier (Barbara Allan) V7:11 The self-same Power that brought me there brought you. (The Rhodora) V17:191 The shaft we raise to them and thee (Concord Hymn) V4:30 the skin of another, what I have made is a curse. (Curse) V26:75 The sky became a still and woven blue. (Merlin Enthralled) V16:73 The spirit of this place (To a Child Running With Outstretched Arms in Canyon de Chelly) V11:173 The town again, trailing your legs and crying! (Wild Swans) V17:221 the unremitting space of your rebellion (Lost Sister) V5:217 The woman won (Oysters) V4:91 The world should listen then—as I am listening now. (To a Sky-Lark) V32:252 their dinnerware. (Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End) V24:214–215 their guts or their brains? (Southbound on the Freeway) V16:158 Then chiefly lives. (Virtue) V25:263 There are blows in life, so hard . . . I just don’t know! (The Black Heralds) V26:47

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To the moaning and the groaning of the bells (The Bells) V3:47 To the temple, singing. (In the Suburbs) V14:201 To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night? (The Taxi) V30:211–212 torn from a wedding brocade. (My Mother Combs My Hair) V34:133 Turned to that dirt from whence he sprung. (A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General) V27:216

U Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond. (The Continuous Life) V18:51 until at last I lift you up and wrap you within me. (It’s like This) V23:138–139 Until Eternity. (The Bustle in a House) V10:62 unusual conservation (Chocolates) V11:17 Uttering cries that are almost human (American Poetry) V7:2

W War is kind (War Is Kind) V9:253 watching to see how it’s done. (I Stop Writing the Poem) V16:58 water. (Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted) V29:262 We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die? (Losses) V31:167–68 we tread upon, forgetting. Truth be told. (Native Guard) V29:185 Went home and put a bullet through his head (Richard Cory) V4:117 Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs. (Out, Out—) V10:213 Were toward Eternity— (Because I Could Not Stop for Death) V2:27 What will survive of us is love. (An Arundel Tomb) V12:18 When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose (The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner) V2:41 when they untie them in the evening. (Early in the Morning) V17:75 when you are at a party. (Social Life) V19:251

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When you have both (Toads) V4:244 Where deep in the night I hear a voice (Butcher Shop) V7:43 Where ignorant armies clash by night (Dover Beach) V2:52 Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! (My Last Duchess) V1:166 Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen. (The God Who Loves You) V20:88 which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it (Having a Coke with You) V12:106 which only looks like an l, and is silent. (Trompe l’Oeil) V22:216 whirring into her raw skin like stars (Uncoiling) V35:277 white ash amid funereal cypresses (Helen) V6:92 Who are you and what is your purpose? (The Mystery) V15:138 Why am I not as they? (Lineage) V31:145–46 Wi’ the Scots lords at his feit (Sir Patrick Spens) V4:177 Will always be ready to bless the day (Morning Walk) V21:167 will be easy, my rancor less bitter . . . (On the Threshold) V22:128 Will hear of as a god.’’ (How we Heard the Name) V10:167 Wind, like the dodo’s (Bedtime Story) V8:33 windowpanes. (View) V25:246–247 With courage to endure! (Old Stoic) V33:144 With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine. (To His Excellency General Washington) V13:213 with my eyes closed. (We Live by What We See at Night) V13:240 With silence and tears. (When We Two Parted) V29:297 with the door closed. (Hanging Fire) V32:93 With the slow smokeless burning of decay (The Wood-Pile) V6:252 With what they had to go on. (The Conquerors) V13:67 Without cease or doubt sew the sweet sad earth. (The Satyr’s Heart) V22:187 Would scarcely know that we were gone. (There Will Come Soft Rains) V14:301

Cumulative Index of Last Lines

There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught— they say— God, when he walked on earth (Shine, Perishing Republic) V4:162 there was light (Vancouver Lights) V8:246 They also serve who only stand and wait.’’ ([On His Blindness] Sonnet 16) V3:262 They are going to some point true and unproven. (Geometry) V15:68 They have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit. (A Black Man Talks of Reaping) V32:21 They rise, they walk again (The Heaven of Animals) V6:76 They say a child with two mouths is no good. (Pantoun for Chinese Women) V29:242 They think I lost. I think I won (Harlem Hopscotch) V2:93 They’d eaten every one.’’ (The Walrus and the Carpenter) V30:258–259 This is my page for English B (Theme for English B) V6:194 This Love (In Memory of Radio) V9:145 Tho’ it were ten thousand mile! (A Red, Red Rose) V8:152 Though I sang in my chains like the sea (Fern Hill) V3:92 Till human voices wake us, and we drown (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) V1:99 Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink (When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be) V2:295 Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul. (A Noiseless Patient Spider) V31:190–91 To an admiring Bog! (I’m Nobody! Who Are You?) V35:83 To every woman a happy ending (Barbie Doll) V9:33 to glow at midnight. (The Blue Rim of Memory) V17:39 to its owner or what horror has befallen the other shoe (A Pie´d) V3:16 To live with thee and be thy love. (The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd) V14:241 To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume. (‘‘Blighters’’) V28:3 To strengthen whilst one stands.’’ (Goblin Market) V27:96 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield (Ulysses) V2:279

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Wrapped in a larger. (Words are the Diminution of All Things) V35:316

Y Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know (Ode on a Grecian Urn) V1:180

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Yea, beds for all who come. (Up-Hill) V34:280 You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes (Sonnet 55) V5:246 You may for ever tarry. (To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time) V13:226

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you who raised me? (The Gold Lily) V5:127 You’re all that I can call my own. (Woman Work) V33:289 you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. (Ithaka) V19:114

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