the terrifying form of monstrosity

He placed a jar upon a hill, and that placement created a center, around which all the wilderness of Tennessee was ordered. Quite an artificial and arbitrary center, wouldn't you agree? Setting down the jar set forth the landscape, no longer wild, freeplay locked out; the jar is within Tennessee and yet also outside it.

ANECDOTE OF THE JAR

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was grey and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

            — Wallace Stevens

poplar of water

Here, short sentences bequeath a universe. Roethke conjures for us the anticipation; the act; the recollection. Everything is simple, brief. But not so simple is the coiled meaning we might find 'neath the meandering leaves of his mild willow tree.

THE VISITANT

                                     I
A cloud moved close. The bulk of the wind shifted.
A tree swayed overwater.
A voice said:
Stay. Stay by the slip-ooze. Stay.

Dearest tree, I said, may I rest here?
A ripple made a soft reply.
I waited, alert as a dog.
The leech clinging to a stone waited;
And the crab, the quiet breather.

                                    II
Slow, slow as a fish she came,
Slow as a fish in coming forward,
Swaying in a long wave;
Her skirts not touching a leaf,
Her white arms reaching towards me.

She came without a sound,
Without brushing the wet stones,
In the soft dark of early evening,
She came,
The wind in her hair,
The moon beginning.

                                    III
I woke in the first of morning.
Staring at a tree, I felt the pulse of a stone.
Where’s she now, I kept saying,
Where’s she now, the mountain’s downy girl?

But the bright day had no answer.
A wind stirred in a web of appleworms;
The tree, the close willow, swayed.

            — Theodore Roethke

till the sun breaks down

A homeless man on the street walked up to me and recited...

AFTER THE FUNERAL
(IN MEMORY OF ANN JONES)

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap happily of one peg in the thick
Grave's foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black,
The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves,
Morning smack of a spade that wakes up sleep,
Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat
In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,
That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout,
After the feast of the tear-stuffed time and thistles,
In a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern.
I stand, for this memorial's sake, alone
In the snivelling hours with dead, humped Ann
Whose hooded, fountain heart once fell in puddles
Round the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun
(Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly
Magnified out of praise; her death was a still drop;
She would not have me sinking in the holy
Flood of her heart's fame; she would lie dumb and deep
And need no druid of her broken body).
But I, Ann's bard on a raised hearth, call all
The seas to service that her wood-tongued virtue
Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,
Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods
That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel,
Bless her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.
Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue
With the wild breast and blessed and giant skull
Is carved from her in a room with a wet window
In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.
I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands
Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare
Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,
Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;
And sculpted Ann is seventy years of stone.
These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental
Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm
Storm me forever over her grave until
The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love
And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.

             — Dylan Thomas

hope deferred no more

It is a poem saturated with allusion, the most immediate being Aeschylus: the epigraph is Agamemnon's line "Alas, I am struck deep with a mortal blow." Is T. S. Eliot trying to say we too deserve that fate, slippery silver bathtub walls our final bed? The prevalent animals are also a curious feature: ape, zebra, giraffe, dog, nightingale, and murderous paws.

SWEENEY AMONG THE NIGHTINGALES

ώμοι, πέπληγμαι καιρίαν πληγήν έσω.

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.

The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the horned gate.

Gloomy Orion and the Dog,
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
The person in the Spanish cape
Tries to sit on Sweeney's knees

Slips and pulls the table-cloth
Overturns a coffee-cup,
Reorganized upon the floor
She yawns and draws a stocking up;

The silent man in mocha brown
Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in oranges
Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;

The silent vertebrae in brown
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel née Rabinovich
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;

She and the lady in the cape
Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

Leaves the room and reappears
Outside the window, leaning in,
Branches of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;

The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid droppings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

            — T. S. Eliot

the hyperreal itself

Is this the time, this generation, when simulation overtakes everything, when, as in the Borges fable, the map supersedes the empire? Zelda's poetry, often spiritual, asks questions of the will that moves these stars, points of light projected on the dome of a planetarium. No matter how we may try to become used to it, this new reality is strange, and amid the torpor of our will the precession of simulacra continues.

A DRUNK, EMBROILED WILL

A drunk, embroiled, bleeding will
that imposed itself on constellations,
on the world's secret,
is blazing in my generation's heart.
Fettering the free, festive air,
with a strict hand.
The sun and the deeps are wheel horses
on its farm.

It is strange to be a woman,
simple, domestic, feeble,
in an insolent, violent generation,
to be shy, weary,
in a cold generation, a generation of wheelers and dealers,
for whom Orion, Pleiades, and moon
are advertisement lights, golden marks, army badges.
To march in a shaded street
reflecting, slowly, slowly,
to taste China
in a perfumed peach,
to look at Paris
in a cold movie theater,
while they fly
around the world,
while they fly in space.
To be among conquerors
and conquered,
while every creature is ashamed, afraid,
alone.

It is strange to wither before clouds of enmity,
while the heart is drawn
to a myriad of worlds.

           — Zelda Mishkovsky, translated from the Hebrew by Marcia Falk

this altar of certitude

It would be amiss to not list the poem from which this blog's title springs. Of all his dictums, MacLeish's truest surely is that a poem should be equal to: not true. For of this melancholy demeanor a poem well stands, outside of fear and favor, the proper art of poetry.

ARS POETICA

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds


A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs


A poem should be equal to:
Not true

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be

            — Archibald MacLeish

up to the sphere of fire

Sound of a name on the tongue, this man’s madeleine, the trappings of taste, snatch him away like Dante’s eagle to a deep recollection next the shores of the deep. A word a woman a spoken a stroke of the tide, seasrun past Odysseus and Penelope...very much a call, Caribbeans wake. Walcott’s language throughout Omeros is truly extraordinary, and this scene is but one example.

from OMEROS, Book I, Ch. II

“O-meros,” she laughed. “That’s what we call him in Greek,”
stroking the small bust with its boxer’s broken nose,
and I thought of Seven Seas sitting near the reek

of drying fishnets, listening to the shallows’ noise.
I said “Homer and Virg are New England farmers,
and the winged horse guards their gas-station, you’re right.”

I felt the foam head watching as I stroked an arm, as
cold as its marble, then the shoulders in winter light
in the studio attic. I said, “Omeros,”

and O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was
both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,
os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes

and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore.
Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves, and the washes
that echoed from a cave-mouth when the tide has ebbed.

The name stayed in my mouth. I saw how light was webbed
on her Asian cheeks, defined her eyes with a black
almond's outline, as Antigone turned and said:

“I’m tired of America, it’s time for me to go back
to Greece. I miss my islands.” I write, it returns—
the way she turned and shook out the black gust of hair.

I saw how the surf printed its lace in patterns
on the shore of her neck, then the lowering shallows
of silk swirled at her ankles, like surf without noise,

and felt that another cold bust, not hers, but yours
saw this with stone almonds for eyes, its broken nose
turning away, as the rustling silk agrees.

But if it could read between the lines of her floor
like a white-hot deck uncaulked by Antillean heat,
to the shadows in its hold, its nostrils might flare

at the stench from manacled ankles, the coffled feet
scraping like leaves, and perhaps the inculpable marble
would have turned its white seeds away, to widen

the bow of its mouth at the horror under her table,
from the lyre of her armchair draped with its white chiton,
to do what the past always does: suffer, and stare.

She lay calm as a port, and a cloud covered her
with my shadow; then a prow with painted eyes
slowly emerged from the fragrant rain of black hair.

And I heard a hollow moan exhaled from a vase,
not for kings floundering in lances of rain; the prose
of abrupt fishermen cursing over canoes.

            — Derek Walcott

in you everything sank

How does Neruda do it, from what deep pool of language, transcending English and Spanish, does he pull his words Ebrio de trementina y largos besos...rápido y lento en la energía subceleste? His language is the speech of the raw senses, clear as the beaded droplets of the late-night rain on the Andes, the crystal ceiling of the airy Altiplano, fallen from height to the material realm of the flesh.

DRUNK WITH PINES

Drunk with pines and long kisses,

like summer I steer the fast sail of the roses,

bent towards the death of the thin day,

stuck into my solid marine madness.

Pale and lashed to my ravenous water,

I cruise in the sour smell of the naked climate,

still dressed in gray and bitter sounds

and a sad crest of abandoned spray.

Hardened by passions, I go mounted on my one wave,

lunar, solar, burning and cold, all at once,

becalmed in the throat of the fortunate isles

that are white and sweet as cool hips.

In the moist night my garment of kisses trembles

charged to insanity with electric currents,

heroically divided into dreams

and intoxicating roses practicing on me.

Upstream, in the midst of the outer waves,

your parallel body yields to my arms

like a fish infinitely fastened to my soul,

quick and slow, in the energy under the sky.

           —Pablo Neruda, translated from the Spanish by W. S. Merwin

use language we can comprehend

An apostrophe to a fair star in the night sky, and one which extols an ancient virtue. Keat's star is removed, cold, absent, a center outside structure. Yea, steadfast, but too far from fair love or foul earth.

BRIGHT STAR

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

            — John Keats

above the heads of his hearers

To what degree was Porphyria's death planned? Not at all. For Porphyria's lover "found" a thing to do with her, and that act was not done in wrath or revenge, but out of love. And as her laughing eyes attest, Porphyria would have cast no blame.  A poem about a madman? Possibly, perhaps, yet probably not.

PORPHYRIA'S LOVER

The rain set early in to-night,
  The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
  And did its worst to vex the lake:
  I listen'd with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
  She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneel'd and made the cheerless grate
  Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
  Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
  And laid her soil'd gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
  And, last, she sat down by my side
  And call'd me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
  And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
  And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
  And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me—she
  Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
  From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
  And give herself to me for ever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
  Nor could to-night's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
  For love of her, and all in vain:
  So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I look'd up at her eyes
  Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipp'd me: surprise
  Made my heart swell, and still it grew
  While I debated what to do.
The moment she was mine, mine, fair,
  Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
  In one long yellow string I wound
  Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
  I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
  I warily oped her lids: again
  Laugh'd the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untighten'd next the tress
  About her neck; her cheek once more
Blush'd bright beneath my burning kiss:
  I propp'd her head up as before,
  Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
  The smiling little rosy head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
  That all it scorn'd at once is fled,
  And I, its love, am gain'd instead!
Porphyria's love: she guess'd not how
  Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
  And all night long we have not stirr'd,
  And yet God has not said a word!

        —Robert Browning

how the stars did fall

It is a poem of old age, and asks comparison to Tennyson's “Ulysses.” Yet the two are very different poems, for at the heart of each rest quite distinct desires. The speaker of “Sailing to Byzantium” is an artist, an man of intellect, one who wishes to transcend the dying animal of his body, ever dragging him down. In contrast, Tennyson's Ulysses is not directly looking for spiritual transcendence, but rather understands and accepts his mortal fate, whether it be bleak nothingness or a burning flame in the Eighth Circle. Ulysses and Byzantium are simply different responses to the gaze of eternity.

SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unaging intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enameling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

            — William Butler Yeats

death closes all

With apologies to Wimsatt and Beardsley, Keats's poetic fragment “This living hand” opens best to analysis via consideration of the way it affects the reader. For rather than resulting in vague ruminations and statements, or false generalities about the emotions of the reader, deconstructing what little we have and psychoanalytically understanding Keats's fragment will be able to tell us more about the poem than a mere New Critical analysis ever could. For indeed from the New Critical perspective, there is not much to analyze. Nevertheless, it will prove a useful starting point, a structuralist direction of entry to significant post-structuralist depths. What is missing from our primary analysis will be the point of entry to the second, and that which is absent from both interpretations will be the gateway to the third. So we will begin in our attempt to motivate the concept of the partial poem—I use the word concept very deliberately here, with a nod toward its Latin roots, in the sense of a taking in, creation of something one might hold or grasp with one's hand, con capere—in addition to explicating the methodology involved.

THIS LIVING HAND

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again

And thou be conscience-calm'd—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.

            — John Keats

Keats opens with the image of a hand. It is immediate, it is impersonal. Whose hand is it? We don't know. This is a hand. By not specifying the owner of the hand, Keats dismembers it from the body to which it earlier belonged. It is a strange focus for Keats—why the hand? We will return to this and understand the strangeness his choice imparts, but for now it is best to continue. This warm hand, still capable of conception, of grasping, is quickly supplanted by a cold, dead one, a hand “in the icy silence of the tomb.” Yet this cold hand is the one that reaches out to the living all the more earnestly—its “reach” a mockery of the hand's reach in life, for no longer does the hand stretch out innocently to the living, but the hand haunts the living, haunting every day and extending even to “chill thy dreaming nights.”

In fact, this hand does not simply haunt the living, no—this hand and poetic fragment is more personal than that. The hand haunts you. It haunts you so that you would wish to be dead, if that would only let the hand's owner live again. There is not even any other way you can have a clear conscience. The hand, from beyond the grave, calls you to your grave. See it, here it is, immediate and personal: the speaker holds out his hand towards you. One certainly sympathizes if the reader tries to recoil from the speaker's touch.

You may notice that so far I have not called Keats's lines supposed to have been addressed to Fanny Brawne a poem. It is seven lines of blank verse followed by the half-line “I hold it towards you.” The fragmentary nature of the piece suggests separation; it is like a limb cut off from a tree, a fragment broken off from some unimaginably greater complete poem. The last line breaks the meter, as if to emphasize this. Most poems have more than one “sentence;” this poem only has one, which builds and gathers clauses until it suddenly and abruptly ceases. The poem is like the speaker's hand; perhaps the poem is itself the hand reaching out from the tomb.

How does Keats create this effect of revulsion, how does he affect the reader in this way? By the last half-line the hand protrudes from the universe of the poem, reaching out through a symbolic rupture in the page towards the reader. Perhaps instead of recoiling from the speaker's touch, we should take hold of his hand with a morbid curiosity, and see how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Can Keats's lines be read as a dream, should they be read as a dream, what do we gain by looking at his lines through Freud's dream-logic? The very nature of this fragment's existence suggests that the answer to our first two questions is yes. John Keats composed these lines in the margins of another work, The Cap and Bells, a sentimental fairy tale he would never finish. Furthermore they are brief and broken, much as a dream is—the living hand presented without introduction, and hand held out in a moment of tension at the end, unresolved—qualities of a dream-world.

Who are the characters of the dream? There are two: the speaker, presumably owner of the hand, and the spoken to, the figure referenced as “thy/thou,” which we shall refer to as the reader. Since either figure is a possible candidate for the dreamer of this poem-dream, we will consider both perspectives, and investigate how the poem can then be seen as the fulfillment of a wish.

From the point of view of the reader (making him the dreamer's character), what is the wish-fulfillment? Perhaps we can read the fragment as follows: the hand presented to the reader—the thing you are supposed to “see,” for “here it is”—is really the living hand of the first line, an interruption of the wandering thought of the previous lines. The speaker was wondering what it would be like if that good living hand were now cold and lost—but at the end the speaker stops his reverie and in comfort, to calm the reader, extends forth his still-living hand. But then why does the last line have its unsettling effect? That is because of the other possibility, whether we are consciously aware of both or not: perhaps this hand extended to us runs with “red life” only because we wished our hearts “dry of blood.” The reader is dead but our wish is fulfilled: the living hand has been restored. But now should not the reader doubt his existence?

The alternate choice of characters is to make the speaker the dreamer. In this case the wish-fulfillment is less obvious, but the structure of the lines assist us here. This poetic fragment is not a question, it is a statement: the speaker's hand will haunt the reader's days. But it is also not fact, which gives it multiple dreamlike qualia. Keats did not say the hand “might...so haunt thy days..,” he said “would...so haunt thy days...” That is the wish. The speaker wishes to be remembered by the reader, to be remembered and wanted by someone who would rather die than have let the speaker die. The performative act of reading the fragment fulfills the speaker's wish by making someone take the place of the reader. With even a single reader, the speaker's wish to not die, to have someone die instead of himself, is fulfilled. The speaker to the reader: “you will eventually die, but thank you, I will die no longer, for by fulfilling your purpose, you have given me new life.” Or: “I will die no longer because you have read me.”

If those desires are the focus of the dream-poem, why the focus on the image of hands, why the specific displacement? This point is especially crucial because of the seeming dependence of the odd power of Keats's lines on that disembodied image. His work would not have the same “strangeness” if he had written about this “living foot” or “living neck” instead. Keats chose to write about what he used to write those very lines: his living hand. He separated that external human part which most positively make humans active rather than passive beings. The hand extended in the poem is familiar, we all have a hand: but it is strange, it is weird, because we know not what realm it reaches from, deathly pale or otherwise. And perhaps the strangeness is entirely due to the fact that we do not know, that there exists an essential ambiguity.

Likewise, it does not matter who the reader and the speaker are, which is which: for both are one. In grasping the hand the speaker offers, the reader identifies his hand and joins it with the speaker's—a marriage of the dual identities. It is some perverse inversion of Lacan's mirror stage, the reader identifying in the speaker an image of what is to come, to come at the end. Instead of being a fragmented body who looks into the mirror and sees a premonition of a future self, an I, by the very fact that the reader is an I the reader must see reflected in Keats's poem dismembered limbs, a floating hand. You the reader look into the mirror—see here it is—your future of inevitable death.