Abstract Lyric Elsewhere: Strategies of Poetic Remove

Erica Levy McAlpine

2011

This dissertation analyzes the poems of fourteen poets writing primarily between

Romanticism and the present day by focusing on their defensive qualities—when the

lyric voice suddenly changes in character or tone, or when the poem's grammar, syntax,

language, or way of depicting images denies or sets aside temporarily its main subject

matter. I argue that the formal strategies lyric poets use when writing their poems often

correspond to the intrapsychic phenomena, including projection, introjection,

displacement, repression, and others, that encompass people's inner lives. As such, these

psychoanalytic concepts represent the closest possible models for understanding how

many of lyric poetry's rhetorical and imaginative processes work. Clarifying this relation

between lyric form and intrapsychic defense not only sheds light on how poets compose

but also goes some way towards providing a theory for what gives certain poems urgency

and broad appeal.

My introduction describes the context for my considering poetic craft

transhistorically in terms of mechanisms of defense. In the opening pages, I situate my

argument among the works of other critics who relate poetry and defense as well as those

who represent what has been called the "New Lyric Studies"; I also provide a working

definition for "lyric." Each of my four subsequent chapters draws on psychoanalytic

ideas in considering poems by three or four authors whose individual poetics share

particular modes of defense.

Chapter one considers poems by George Herbert, Thomas Hardy, James Wright

and Frank Bidart, whose formal strategies, akin to defensive mechanisms such as

projection and introjection, figure a lyric speaker temporarily assuming somebody else's

voice. In chapter two, I address poems by Edward Thomas, Anthony Hecht, and

Elizabeth Bishop that withhold or repress their primary subject matter, either by

poetically framing it within a less important narrative or by briefly obscuring the images

they claim to prioritize. My third chapter searches the poems of Emily Dickinson, Robert

Frost, James Merrill, and Paul Muldoon for jokes, slips, puns, and other psychologically-

informed verbal strategies of remove—when a word or a phrase is used unexpectedly or

even secretly in a way that may seem to undermine the poem's truth-telling but that

actually gives it extra depth and authenticity. Chapter four investigates the work of John

Keats, John Clare, and Yusef Komunyakaa—three poets who attempt to recast the world

around them in purely textual, and therefore aesthetic, terms. I formulate their poetics

vis-a-vis certain unconscious and adaptive defensive maneuvers—including what

Sigmund Freud terms "phantasying" and what D. W. Winnicott refers to as "transitional

phenomena"—that allow for the safe-enough expression of conflictual wishes and

forbidden desires.

Together these chapters describe a phenomenon that I call "lyric elsewhere,"

when a poem, like a mind, denies or escapes its own scenario and enters a realm beyond

itself. Implicit in this study is my belief that lyric elsewhere, as a poetic mode that

seconds a universal component of human experience, represents a crucial element in the

making of certain poems—and is one of the main reasons why we like them.

Lyric Elsewhere: Strategies of Poetic Remove

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School

of Yale University

in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

by Erica Levy McAlpine

Dissertation Directors: David Bromwich and Langdon Hammer

May 2011

UMI Number: 3467518

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© 2011 by Erica Levy McAlpine All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

Images ii

Acknowledgements iii

Introduction: LYRIC ELSEWHERE 1

Chapter One: ASSUMING VOICE 26 1. George Herbert 35 2. Thomas Hardy 43 3. James Wright 50 4. Frank Bidart 60

Chapter Two: KEEPING THE SUBJECT AT BAY 75 5. Edward Thomas 83 6. Anthony Hecht 94 7. Elizabeth Bishop 109

Chapter Three: DEPARTING WORDS 138 8. Emily Dickinson 145 9. Robert Frost 157 10. James Merrill 173 ll.PaulMuldoon 192

Chapter Four: OCCUPYING OTHER WORLDS 202 12. John Keats 208 13. John Clare 229 14. Yusef Komunyakaa 259

Coda: RETURNING FROM ELSEWHERE 271

Works Cited

IMAGES

1. Elizabeth Bishop, Meridafrom the Roof 129

2. Elizabeth Bishop, Cabin with Porthole. 131

3. Elizabeth Bishop, Interior with Extension Cord. 131

4. Elizabeth Bishop, 41 Charles Street. 132

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many of the ideas in this dissertation have come about through thought-provoking

discussions and workshops with my family, friends, and teachers. I would like to thank a

few people in particular. My terrific advisors, David Bromwich and Langdon Hammer,

for their generosity, encouragement, and help; Leslie Brisman and Paul Fry, for their

cheery willingness to read and comment on portions along the way; Geoffrey Hartman,

for his notes on the pages about Clare in particular; Mary Jacobus, for getting me started

and for giving me my first literary dose of Freud; my wonderful classmates and friends at

Yale, including Emily Coit, Andrew Goldstone, Susannah Hollister, Anna Lewis, Sarah

Mahurin, Emily Setina, and Matthew Valdiviez, for their intellect and humor in equal

parts; my undergraduate teachers, in particular Jorie Graham, Elisa New, Peter Sacks, and

Helen Vendler, who gave me poetry, the greatest gift; my husband, Bruce McAlpine, for

his love and patience; my parents, Carol and Steve Levy, for their enthusiasm and

wisdom. Time and money to pursue work on this project has generously been provided

by the John F. Enders Dissertation Research Fund, the Yale Graduate School, and the

Cambridge Commonwealth Scholarship Fund; I am grateful for their support.

in

The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.

Wallace Stevens

Introduction

LYRIC ELSEWHERE

A little boy is caught making ugly faces at his schoolmaster while he is being

scolded for misbehavior. The schoolmaster, his face wrinkled and distorted with anger,

looks down upon the child, only to find the boy's own twitching and distorted

countenance grimacing up at him.

A little girl is too scared to wander across the hall at night for fear of encountering

ghosts. The next night, her parents observe her flailing and wiggling her arms as she

walks, her wild gestures silhouetted black against their home's darkened walls.

The boy is neither the innocent victim of a nervous facial tic nor an importune

clown purposefully exacerbating his after-school punishment in order to save face among

his peers. The girl has not been possessed, nor is she, as Anna Freud explains, displaying

the early signs of some impending psychotic break. Rather, these children are performing

"one of the most natural and widespread modes of behavior," which Freud calls

"identification with the aggressor." By aligning themselves with the object of their

dread—in one case the boy involuntarily imitates his schoolmaster's angry expression, in

the other, the girl pretends to be a ghost—the children are able to master their anxiety and

"[convert it] into pleasurable security."1 Anna Freud's father and predecessor in

psychoanalytic study observes a similar phenomenon among children playing. When a

' The concepts and case material in these first three paragraphs have been adapted from Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, revised edition, trans. Cecil Barnes (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1966), 110-11.

1

child endures, as a passive recipient, some small feeling of fright or discomfort, he or she

will often transfer this feeling to another child: "As the child passes over from the

passivity of the experience to the activity of the game, he hands on the disagreeable

experience to one of his playmates and in this way revenges himself on a substitute."2

I will be suggesting, throughout this dissertation, that analogues for such

mechanisms of defense can be found in the formal strategies that make up lyric poems.

With the above case studies in mind, we can observe, for example, how the psychological

turn from passive to active operates in the grammatical elements of Seamus Heaney's

"Bog Queen." Heaney's poem is a dramatic monologue delivered in the voice of a female

corpse that has been exhumed from a peat bog in Jutland. In relating her tale of

preservation and decay warring through a body from which almost all personal agency

has drained ("my body was braille/ for the creeping influences"), the "bog queen" very

nearly settles into passive submission, as her concluding grammar suggests—

I was barbered and stripped by a turfcutter's spade

—until, in the final stanza, her passive voice gives rise to action again:

and I rose from the dark, hacked bone, skull-ware, frayed stitches, tufts, small gleams on the bank.3

Her shift from passive to active verb across the poem's final lines, wherein the plaintive

"I was barbered/ and stripped" is transposed into the resurrective "I rose from the dark,"

2 Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," in vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, in 24 volumes, ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 17.

3 Seamus Heaney, "Bog Queen," in Opened Ground (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 109.

2

conveys in grammatical terms the subtle and often secret pleasure most human beings

associate with the resumption of agency after the experience of powerlessness. The

poem's subject matter also suggests this passive to active transformation (the bog people

of Jutland, many of whom were murdered as part of an ancient ritual of sacrifice, are

symbols themselves, just as the poems are). But the formal strategy Heaney uses here in

his sequence of verbs enacts, in a purely aesthetic way, the kind of transformation that we

usually think of as occurring on a psychological level.

This complex but crucial analogy between psychological mechanisms and

poetical choices is the subject of this study. In considering the formal strategies of poems

like Heaney's, I suggest that these aesthetic choices, which have been a part of the lyric

tradition since its inception, have their counterparts in intrapsychic processes of defense.

My interest in this topic has come out of a longstanding curiosity about how poems are

made; I find, in thinking about lyric structures and poetic craft, that many of the

organizing principles poets use to give their poems voice, narrative, and shape are similar

to the ways that people adaptively refashion—usually outside of their conscious

awareness—the conflicts encompassing their inner lives. As such, an understanding of

depth psychology can inform critical readings of lyric, since this kind of mental

refashioning is especially important when dealing with the intensity of conflict that often

corresponds to the occasions for lyric—and sometimes even the totality of a poet's work.

4 For more detailed readings of Heaney's interest in and use of P.V. Glob's book The Bog People, see Neil Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, a Critical Study, 2nd edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1998) and Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney (London' Fontana Press, 1999). Corcoran points out that Heaney first thought, upon reading Glob's account of the bodies exhumed in Jutland, that the corpses looked like his own ancestors in photos. This initial analogy on the poet's part is already suggestive of the kind of cross-cultural and cross-historical impact his poems have had on readers

3

I demonstrate in the following pages how aspects of a poet's creativity—or, his

poetical character—can be defined by his aesthetic use of adaptive defensive maneuvers,

which appear in poems as varying types of formal displacements. These include

displacement of voice, setting, meaning, and perspective. I hypothesize that lyric remove

involves the aesthetically-pleasing employment of "literary defense." A poet achieves

remove by relocating or transforming subject matter that might feel too disturbing to

write about directly, and he does so in a manner that reflects his own intrapsychic

processes as well as his mastery of the very issue that gives his poetry urgency and broad

appeal. Dissociation, projection, introjection, repression—processes comprehensively

explored by psychoanalysts beginning with Freud—thus serve as a matrix for examining

the poetic strategies of writers such as John Clare, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Hecht, Paul

Muldoon, and many others.

Aspects of the relation between poetic trope and psychological defense have been

the subject of studies before this one; Harold Bloom was among the first critics to place

these two subject matters into close relation, and he does so with a particular interest in

investigating the origins of poetic creativity:

the creative... "moment" is a negative moment...[that] tends to rise out of an encounter with someone else's prior moment of negation.... "Creativity" is thus always a mode of repetition and of memory and also of what Nietzche called the will's revenge against...time's statement of: "It was." What links repetition and revenge is the psychic operation that Freud named "defense".. .5

Bloom explores the poet's work as it comes into being as a result of intrapsychic

processes predicated on defense, whereby the poem originates both as an interpoetic text

5 Harold Bloom, "Freud and the Poetic Sublime, " inAntaeus 30/31 (1978): 361. Quote excerpted from Joseph H. Smith, "Introduction," in The Literary Freud- Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will, ed. Joseph H. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), x.

4

and as a result of the poet's own complex and unconscious wish to avoid death—to deny

"time's statement of: 'It was.'" His interest here and elsewhere is in the poetic will—

what he calls "an argument against time"—and how that argument is advanced in text.7

My study keeps as its core interest particular formal elements of lyric poems, arguing that

lyric poetry encompasses idiosyncratic mechanisms related to its making that correspond

to defensive processes that occur universally. While Bloom aims his formulation about

defense and its relation to the poetic will at the works of "strong poets," my argument

towards a method of reading lyric that includes comparison between form and

intrapsychic process is perhaps applicable more broadly.8 The strategies of remove that I

describe matter not only in relation to poets but also in relation to readers. I illustrate the

ways in which poems model not so much minds as mental acts. These acts, as manifest

in the formal elements of poems, can be serviceable and pleasing to the reader as well as

the poet, and not necessarily because they serve a defensive function for specific conflicts

in the reader (as could be traced, potentially, in the poet) but because they artfully

represent aspects of psychic problem-solving that may feel familiar, since they are

universal. My interest is in how poets structure aesthetic effects like psychological ones;

for Bloom, aesthetic effects are psychological effects.

The poems that I include in this study are chosen because they contain examples

of aesthetic strategies that can be linked to defense in terms of aspects of their form rather

6 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2n Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5.

7 Harold Bloom, "Freud's Concepts of Defense and the Poetic Will," in The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will, ed. Joseph H. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 6. In describing the poetic will elsewhere, Bloom suggests that it exists as a result of Freudian "defense" and exemplifies, among other instinctual urges, the oedipal desire to move "towards discontinuity with the precursor"—to overturn or replace him. Anxiety, 14.

Bloom, Anxiety, 5.

5

than aspects of their being (which might include their anxious relation to prior texts)

There are many occasions on which Bloom, too, explores the aesthetic uses of defense on

a purely formal level, removed from the biography of the poet, for instance, in A Map of

Misreading he writes of the aesthetic uses of reaction-formation that the "dialectical

images of presence and absence, when manifested in a poem rather than a person,

convey a saving atmosphere of freshness " However, this sort of particularized

reading of defense as it appears in poetic form remains ancillary to his broader

investigations of Freudian concepts and trope—investigations that occasionally lead him

to conclude a thesis inverse to mine For instance, in considering several of Freud's own

writings to be "High Romantic crisis-poems,"10 Bloom asserts that "the drives and the

defenses are modeled upon poetic rhetoric, whether or not one believes that the

unconscious is somehow structured like a language " n Which direction this debt actually

goes, if any—whether the mind is ultimately a poetical structure or whether poetic

structure is ultimately a mental one—feels less interesting to me than the practical

implications of their relation within readings of lyric poems themselves (Indeed there

are many studies devoted to exploring the complex permutations of this question,

encouraging me to leave, for the purpose of this dissertation, well-enough alone )12

Other critics have been interested in the psychological underpinnings of poems in

less dogmatic ways than Bloom, and their considerations of psychoanalysis's relevance

9 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading with a new Preface (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2003), 97

10 Bloom, "Freud's Concepts of Defense," 9

" Bloom, "Freud's Concepts of Defense," 22

12 On the psychoanalytic and theoretical literature surrounding the question of the mind and its linguistic structures, see, initially, Jacques Denida, Of Grammatology, trans Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) and Jacques Lacan, Ecrits the first complete edition in English, trans Bruce Fink (New York W W Norton and Company, 2006)

6

and relation to literary theory as well as their psychoanalytic readings of specific texts

have been valuable in our discipline's slow working out of how best to incorporate

1 ^

Freud's imaginative insights into its own ways of writing and thinking about literature

Morris Dickstem, for instance, offers an analytically-mmded reading of Blake's Songs of

Experience that works "in the tolerant spirit of mtertextual hindsight" to reveal Blake's

profound sense of "psychological acuity" in the age before Freud ! Eugene Vance uses

Freud's essay "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious" to unpack the relation

between "figures of poet and audience" in twelfth-century "trouvere" lyric 15 Meredith

Anne Skura compares Freud's ideas about dreams to forms of allegory in late medieval

and early modern texts 16 The first and third of these essays are collected in a volume

edited by Joseph H Smith entitled The Literary Freud Mechanisms of Defense and the

Poetic Will (1980), which provides a broad overview of psychoanalytic perspectives on

and through literature as they were emerging in the 1970s Since this collection

appeared, there has been a general move away from psychoanalytic reading that has

corresponded in the humanities to the rise of the New Histoncism and in general culture

to a decline in Freud's reputation My literary interest in psychoanalysis stems not from

its relevance as a science or philosophy or method for treatment (as it exists in other

disciplines) but from its usefulness as a rhetoric for describing elements of poems rather 13 For a full-scale study of this kind, see David J Gordon, Literary Art and the Unconscious (Baton Rouge Louisiana State University Press, 1976)

1 Morris Dickstem, "The Price of Experience Blake's Reading of Freud," in The Literary Freud Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will, ed Joseph H Smith (New Haven Yale University Press, 1980), 71,67

1 Eugene Vance, "Greimas, Freud, and the Story of Trouvere Lyric," in Lyric Poetry Beyond the New Criticism, ed Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1985), 93 105

16 Meredith Anne Skura, "Revisions and Rereadmgs in Dreams and Allegories," in The Literary Freud Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will, ed Joseph H Smith (New Haven Yale University Press, 1980), 345 78

7

than their authors. The recent turning away from this rhetoric, coupled with the

lastingness of Bloom's contributions and other studies (including several in Smith's

collection) that apply analytic perspectives to literary texts, suggests to me the necessity

of a practical study like this one: psychological concepts and lyric forms are inextricably

linked, and one of our most rewarding and illuminating tasks as readers might be to

disentangle the gifts—and the complexities—that one provides to the other.

I am aware, in selecting and reading poems towards an argument relating form

and defense, that my own particularized definition of "lyric" necessarily emerges. But I

do not mean for my definition to be prescriptive. The poems included here do not

conform to any specific prior notion of lyric among the many that have been offered by

writers and critics since poetry's earliest days. My treatment of a very long poem in

Chapter One (Frank Bidart's "The Second Hour of the Night") will appear to challenge,

for instance, the prevailing idea that a lyric poem is "short." And my reading of a portion

of Wordsworth's Prelude later in this introduction will seem to defy a consensus that

lyric poetry is "non-narrative." Northrop Frye, in commenting on the difficulty of

defining lyric—one doesn't want to be "inflexible," he explains, nor should one call

"anything in verse a lyric that is not actually divided into twelve books"—settles on the

task of describing what lyric is not: it is not simply the "subjective" poem, nor is it

merely "discontinuous" writing, nor is it only the "verbal essence of a life... enclosed in a

framework of words," nor is it just poetry that is "musical," though the lyric poem may at

times be any one of these things. In his "glossary of terms," M. H. Abrams is more

declarative: lyric is "any fairly short, non-narrative poem presenting a single speaker who

17 Northrop Fiye, "Approaching the Lyric," in Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 32.

8

1 8

expresses a state of mind or a process of thought and feeling " Other definitions of the

lyric characterize it more broadly—either as "overheard" speech or "personal utterance"

based on the "fictive representation" of actual speech 19 These latter definitions, which

still represent only a small portion of the critical accounts of lyric and which are, Annabel

Patterson complains, too narrowly based on notions of subjectivity and "self expression"

that developed during Romanticism —seem to culminate in Helen Vendler's cheerily

spare assertion that the lyric poem embodies a "single voice" that is a representation of

some particular self not necessarily the poet's own 21

The issue of voice, or speech, in lyric immediately brings up the question of its

relation to the dramatic My inclusion of Bidart's poem is, in part, an argument towards

understanding the dramatic monologue as a part of the lyrical genre When considered

together, the lyrical and the dramatic do feed off of each other, as Herbert Tucker

demonstrates in his essay "Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric," which

claims for the dramatic monologue a kind of independence insofar as it is capable of

incorporating lyrical moments without ever being overrun by them And yet Tucker's

way of defining the dramatic, in terms of its modes of "resistance" to lyric, corresponds

18 M H Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 4l edition (New York Holt, Rmehart and Winston, 1981), 99

19 See John Stuart Mill, "What is Poetry''" in Essays on Poetry ed F Parvm Sharpless (Columbia, SC University of South Carolina Press, 1976), 12, Barbara Herrnstem Smith, On the Margins of Discourse (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1978), 8, and Jonathan Culler, "Changes in the Study of Lyric," in Lyric Poetry Beyond the New Criticism, ed Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1985), 38

20 Annabel Patterson, "Lyric and Society in Jonson's Under-wood," m Lyric Poetry Beyond the New Criticism, ed Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca Cornell University Pi ess, 1985), 151

21 For variations on Vendler's definition, see, Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made Strategies of Poetic Redefinition (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1995), x-xi, Invisible Listeners Lyric Intimacy in Herbert Whitman and Ashbery (Princeton Princeton University Press, 2005), 1, and The Art of Shakespeare s Sonnets (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1997), 14-21

9

to the defensive qualities that underlie certain lyric forms, too. His examples from

Browning show how the moments in dramatic monologues when one hears a shift toward

the lyrical strain are the very moments that confirm them as dramatic, since it is

paradoxically in such poetry's resistance to generic formulation that it achieves its finest

character. (Here the drama of the poet can be felt within the drama of the speaker.)

However these "lyrical interludes," which simultaneously define the poem as dramatic,

also codify it as lyric: for, as I argue throughout this dissertation, it is in these sorts of

intra-poetic turns, these strategies of otherness, that the lyric mode comes across most

strongly and is usually most appealing. It is in this context that I read the dramatic

monologue as a subgenre whose formal elements demonstrate, as do those of more

typical lyric poems, a correspondence with mental actions predicated on defense.

While I do not devote much space in this dissertation to monologues of this sort

(my discussion of Bidart's poem comes closest), it goes without saying that the dramatic

mode in lyric is as susceptible to the phenomenon that I describe later in this introduction

as "elsewhere" as any other kind of poem within the genre—and perhaps even more so, if

Tucker is right in declaring that "one way to begin explicating a dramatic monologue ...

is to identify a discursive shift, a moment at which either of the genre's constitutive

modes—historical line or punctual lyric spot—breaks into the other."24 The power of the

dramatic monologue may indeed rest in its ability to resist or defend against what it is

Herbert Tucker, "Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric," in Lyric Poetry Beyond the New Criticism, ed Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 231.

23 Tucker, "Dramatic Monologue," 234.

Tucker, "Dramatic Monologue," 232.

10

(and in so doing to seek out an elsewhere that reaffirms it). For instance, in comparing

Browning's monologues to Tennyson's, Tucker proposes that "Browning's Ulysses, had

he invented one, would speak while bound to the mast of a ship bound elsewhere; his life

would take its bearing from what he heard the Sirens sing, and their music would remain

an unheard melody suffusing his monologue without rising to the surface of utterance."

This secondary—yet crucial—strain (or song or voice) "suffusing" a more primary layer

of lyric voice is the formal element common to each of the poems that I discuss in

Chapter One; and although the speakers in these poems are not monologists in the

traditional sense, they share with most dramatic speakers a defensive drive to incorporate,

within their outward vocal modes, a private, lyrical otherness that confirms rather than

denies their primacy.

And so, returning to broader questions of lyric, my taste for simplicity, my own

Romantic leanings, and my wish to go ahead and settle the question of "lyric" for the

purposes of this study nearly induce me to adopt something close to Vendler's definition

of lyric here. Yet her notion of a "single voice"—whether it is a dramatic, character-

driven voice or an intensely private voice that is merely "overheard"—does not feel quite

encompassing enough: I am suspicious, as my readings in Chapter One show, of the idea

that lyric poets always present a voice that is singular within the limits of a poem. And so

presently I enlarge this scope to allow that lyric poems can embody a single psyche that is

itself a representation; as such, they comprise the multitude of voices, patterns, dramas,

contradictions, leaps, neuroses, defenses, and so on, that a human psyche is capable of

25 The writer of a dramatic monologue, Tucker explains, "comes into his own by renouncing." "Dramatic Monologue," 234-35.

26 Tucker, "Dramatic Monologue," 231.

11

displaying over a period of time (or, m some cases, at one time). My own definition

leads me back to Bloom, who writes at the beginning of Poetry and Repression that "the

poem, as text, is represented or seconded by what psychoanalysis calls the psyche."28 His

formulation, inverse to mine, is a polemical (and somewhat mystical) reaction to

Derrida's claim for poetry as a representation of the psyche and prompts him to elaborate

that "a poetic text, as I interpret it, is not a gathering of signs on a page, but is a psychic

battlefield upon which authentic forces struggle for the only victory worth winning, the

divinating triumph over oblivion.. ,."29 This definition is suggestive and does account for

the psychological element of poems, but I find it too solipsistic to adopt here. According

to Bloom's interpretation, poetry is the essential form of the contest within the self that

creates all the idiosyncrasies of "defense"; that is, poetic texts cannot exist "without

reference to other texts," and they come about in relation to what came before them in

"1 A

their effort to ward off "oblivion." Bloom would have no poets who are not "strong"

and no poetry that is not "authentic." He describes a Utopia of critical reading—but all

critics cannot work under such particular conditions, and Bloom's perspective in this case

discounts the overdeterminism of poetic motive.

This enlargement of scope resounds what Mutlu Biasing calls the "poetic emotion" and "nonrational order" that lyric preserves in the face of society's tendency towards "discursive logic " Her definition of lyric—"a formal practice that keeps in view the linguistic code and the otherness of the material medium of language to all that humans do with it - refer, represent, express, narrate, imitate, communicate, think, reason, theorize, philosophize"—recognizes, like mine, the broad spectrum of human acts (and desires and urges) that language is capable of representing withm a measured or confined space Lyric Poetry the Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 2

Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven Yale University Press, 1976), 1

Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 2

3 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 2

12

Lyric poems, regardless of their methods of coming into being, appear to behave

on the page like mental actions. As representations of a psyche, they depict in their

formal structures the aesthetic versions of defensive acts that arise within the psyche. My

analysis, over the course of this dissertation, of these structures and their analogues leads

me to explore a subsequent—or perhaps I should say symptomatic—phenomenon that I

call "lyric elsewhere." Just as intrapsychic mechanisms such as repression, dissociation,

regression, and projection can allow human beings to rearrange the contingencies of their

psychological experience, so lyric poems achieve, by means of formal displacements, or

"removes," a kind of elsewhere that is pleasing—pleasing in part because it occupies the

magical realm of artistic fantasy that the act of reading poems allows us to slip into and in

part because it reminds us of the relief we feel in fashioning solutions to conflicts that

allow for adequate satisfaction of wishes and protection from worries. But lyric

elsewhere is not simply an escape from the world around the poet or reader (as would be

constituted by the virtual world created in every work of art) but rather an even further

remove—an elsewhere within that virtual world. Northrop Frye may describe the feeling

of entering a lyric elsewhere when he refers to certain moments in lyric poems as the

entrance to another world of experience....This world is one of magic and mystery, one that we must soon leave if we are to retain our reputations as sober citizens of the ordinary one. But there is still a residual sense that something inexhaustible lies behind it, that it is good not merely to be there, but.. .to remain there.31

The pleasure of "another world of experience" is not merely the joy of reading but the joy

of departure within the experience of reading, when the text, itself a representation and a

remove, seeks further dominion in an elsewhere beyond itself. Such escape is common

31 Frye, "Approaching the Lyric," 36.

13

within the complex structures worked out by the human psyche; it follows that this

phenomenon will find its way into the structures of poems, too.

In seeking out for this dissertation diverse cases of remove that produce a kind of

elsewhere space within the lines, I find myself wanting to distinguish between poetry

whose formal and aesthetic strategies lead it "elsewhere" and poetry whose rhetorical and

imaginative powers render it "Sublime" in the Romantic sense. And so in order to

describe what I mean by elsewhere and to differentiate it from the Sublime, I shall rely on

a fairly extended example: a spot in Wordsworth's Prelude that epitomizes the sense of

lyric elsewhere I aim to distill and explore throughout the following chapters.32 I choose

it partly for it succinctness as a passage, partly for its prominence (it appears in nearly

every major study of Wordsworth, and many minor ones), and partly because it directly

follows another spot in The Prelude that the critic Thomas Weiskel has influentially

deemed the height of "The Romantic Sublime."33 The passage I mean, near the end of

Book VI, describes Wordsworth's traumatic descent, with his friend Robert Jones,

through Gondo Gorge, just after they have unknowingly and anti-chmactically "crossed

the Alps." Immediately after Wordsworth's brief and now famous poetic apostrophe

Much in the same way that lyrical interludes can exist withm dramatic monologues (which are themselves lyric occasions in a broader sense), longer narrative poems like The Prelude frequently contain withm them shorter instances of the lyric mode, as such, these poems display, during certain moments, the same kinds of psychically-mformed aesthetic elements as do poems that might be considered "lyric" in the conventional sense Accordingly, I treat in my discussion such instances of the lyrical mode, or lyric moments, as I do other, more traditional forays into the genre For other ways of thinking about the lyrical mode, see G Gabnelle Starr, Lyric Generations Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore. The John Hopkins University Press, 2004), which explores the presence of lyric in the eighteenth-century novel, and Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1982)

Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976)

34 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, in The Major Works, ed Stephen Gill (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2000), 464, vi 524

14

concerning the nature of the Imagination,35 the poet launches into a description of the

road he and his companion traveled downwards—a road they initially missed and were

later directed to by the very "peasant" who revealed the unhappy news about their having

missed the big event—crossing the Alps—for which they had initially set out:

The dull and heavy slackening that ensued Upon those tidings by the peasant given Was soon dislodged. Downwards we hurried fast, And entered with the road which we had missed Into a narrow chasm. The brook and road Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy pass, And with them did we journey several hours At a slow step. The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And everywhere along the hollow rent Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, Black drizzling crags that spoke by the wayside As if a voice were in them, the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream, The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light— Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree, Characters of the great apocalypse, The types and symbols of eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

Wordsworth's best critics, led in part by Weiskel and Geoffrey Hartman, have claimed

that these lines were so daunting for the poet to write that he devised his entire outburst

on the Imagination, which immediately precedes this passage in the text, as way to delay

writing and thinking about the gorge—as preemptive compensation for the "[gloom]," the

35 The apostrophe begins: "Imagination—lifting up itself/ Before the eye and progress of my song/ Like an unfathered vapour, here that power,/ In all the might of its endowments, came/ Athwart me!" Wordsworth, Prelude, 463, vi: 525-29.

36 Wordsworth, Prelude, 464, vi: 549-72.

15

"blasts," the "torrents," the "forlornfness]," the "tumult," and the "darkness" that take

place within it. Weiskel goes as far as to say that the Gondo Gorge passage is so dark

and devoid of the poet's usual "I," the great subjectivity and ego of The Prelude, that it

"is simply not the way Wordsworth writes or thinks, not his kind of greatness."37 Paul

Fry similarly subordinates these lines on the gorge to those that immediately precede

them, calling the apostrophe on the Imagination "a visitation of that which will preordain

the mood of the poet's descent and will indeed permeate everything."38 Hartman is

willing to grant that the lines on the gorge represent a return to the glory of nature and

(more important) to the human subject's relation to nature. But even he points out that

Wordsworth's tribute to "Imagination" severs the original temporal sequence, and forestalls nature's renewal of the bodily eye with ecstatic praise of the inner eye.

The apocalypse of the gloomy straight loses by this the character of a terminal experience. Nature is again surpassed, for the poet's imagination is called forth, at the time of writing, by the barely scrutable, not by the splendid emotion; by the disappointment, not the fulfillment. This (momentary) displacement of emphasis is the more effective in that the style of [the passage], and the very characters of the apocalypse, suggest that the hiding places of power cannot be localized in nature.39

Hartman's idea about the locality of power—its source in the poet's "inner eye" despite

Wordsworth's seeming turn towards nature—suggests a distinction between the

heightened moments of lyric that constitute the Romantic Sublime and lines that merely

celebrate or describe nature, typified, perhaps, by the episode of Gondo Gorge. Mary

Jacobus corroborates this distinction, writing that the "characteristic alternations in The

Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, 197.

38 Paul Fry, A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 135.

39 Geoffrey Hartman, "The Romance of Nature and the Negative Way," in William Wordsworth's The Prelude, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 62.

16

Prelude—between the uproarious waterspout and the murmuring stream, inspiration and

reflection, invocation and narrative—become a sign of this tension between poetic self-

assertion and self-immersion. Wordsworth's final sleight of hand may well be that of

divesting himself of the Sublime altogether while investing it in Nature instead."40

All four of these critics are particularly interested in the poetic Imagination, which

both leads to and constitutes the Sublime. And they write about it in terms of its

psychologically adaptive qualities—its ability to defend against and displace what is, for

whatever reason, not Sublime in the world and in the text. Under these conditions, we

might indeed consider the Sublime a kind of "elsewhere" within poetry, since it is a mode

(if not a mood) that allows the poet to defend against the presence of subject matter that

is conflictual by momentarily delaying or escaping it. (Gondo Gorge is the perfect

example of this kind of displaced content, not only because of its treacherousness but also

because of where it arrives in Wordsworth's journey—at the very moment of the hikers'

disappointment at having reached, but not fully experienced, the height of the

mountains). But I am suggesting here that the lyric in general, apart from the poetic

Imagination, has its own capabilities in this regard, its own formal tropes that allow for a

kind of escape without resorting to apostrophe or the rhetoric of transcendence that

normally typifies the Sublime. We might recognize these formal mechanisms towards a

lyric elsewhere as defensive, too, and yet in thinking about them, it is important to

remember that they are merely analogous to what we think of as intrapsychic defenses,

since they are not actually involuntary acts of the mind, but rather the poet's strategic

choices—the deliberately arranged building blocks of the lyric poem.

40 Mary Jacobus, "Apostrophe and Lyric Voice in The Prelude," in William Wordsworth's The Prelude, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 148.

17

Returning to the passage about Gondo Gorge, I would like to suggest, again, that

these lines are not just the impetus for Wordsworth to enter the Sublime beforehand as a

kind of compensatory act (although they may indeed be the reason why he does). The

lines on Gondo Gorge are also an elsewhere in their own right, apart from the Sublime,

because of their formal and aesthetic qualities of remove. Why else would Wordsworth,

upon entering into the description, announce that the "dull and heavy slackening that

ensued/ Upon those tidings by the peasant given/ Was soon dislodged"? Is not this

"dislodgement" a kind giving over to elsewhere, an additional breaking free at the very

moment that most critics cite as Wordsworth's return? If Wordsworth indeed reaches the

Sublime during the Imagination apostrophe separating the moment in the text when he

crosses the Alps from the moment when he descends into Gondo Gorge, then the Gorge

passage must be another kind of elsewhere altogether—both distinct from Sublimity and

apart from nature (which is where Hartman and Jacobus place the passage).

The idea that these lines are neither sublime nor "natural" is discernable enough.

Critics have always praised the beauty and specificity of phrases like "the immeasurable

height/ Of woods decaying, never to be decayed" and "The stationary blasts of

waterfalls" and "Black drizzling crags that spoke by the wayside." But there is a kind of

purposed impossibility in each of these lines, too—for the woods surely will decay, and

though the waterfall may seem stationary, it does of course move, and the drizzling crags

cannot actually speak, though they seem to. Wordsworth was never aiming to be literal

here, never interested in returning to the actuality of nature. Rather, his lines define, in

their small vignettes of impossibility, the very dislodgement he attaches to the passage as

a whole in its first line. The elements he describes here, like the passage itself within The

18

Prelude, claim a kind of sourcelessness not unlike the "unfathered vapour" that

characterizes the Imagination in the apostrophe above. The winds "[thwart]" themselves,

the "torrents [shoot] from the clear blue sky," and the clouds are "unfettered." These

features are of somewhere else—not Wordsworth's world, and not the world of his

Imagination either, since he just left that one. I posit that they result from a poetic

dislodgement of form akin to Sublimity, but different from it, since this dislodgement is

clearly headed "downwards" as opposed to the upwards trajectory of the poetic

Imagination, which Wordsworth figures as "lifting up itself twenty-five lines above.41

Wordsworth first characterizes this dislodgement as a release from "slackening,"

implying it quickens him, but at the end of the process lies apocalypse: a prospect so

scary and so foreign to the poet that he enacts, poetically, the very kind of remove he has

been describing vis-a-vis nature. The passage's final leap into elsewhere occurs in its last

line, seemingly a reaction to the idea of apocalypse itself:

Characters of the great apocalypse, The types and symbols of eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.42

Line 572's allusion to Adam and Eve's hymn in the fifth book of Paradise Lost—"On

Earth join all ye Creatures to extol/ Him first, him last, him midst, and without end"—

might initially seem like a defensive and compensatory nod towards some kind of

divinity, a way for Wordsworth to recognize nature's lasting majesty by analogizing it, in

41 Weiskel, in claiming Sublimity for both passages (because he believes the lines on Gondo Gorge are in service of the Imagination), calls these adjacent sections of The Prelude "the positive and negative poles of the Romantic sublime." Romantic Sublime, 204.

42 Wordsworth, Prelude, 464, vi: 570-72.

19

his own epic poem, to the god of Milton's But I would suggest instead that

Wordsworth's turn in these last lines is of a different kind altogether—his is not an

escape to divinity, from earth to spirit, but rather an escape from one poem to the next a

turning away from primary narrative to lyric elsewhere, and to another lyric from

elsewhere by means of allusion The dislodgement from slackening at the passage's

beginning leads to this further dislodgement of text

Wordsworth's leap mto Paradise Lost here is certainly not the first, or even the

most surprising, example of his turning towards one of his precursor poets Allusions to

Milton are all over The Prelude and Wordsworth's other poems, and each can be seen as

a kind of ventriloquism or, as Hartman has written with regard to a different Miltonic

moment in Wordsworth, a submission to the "inner voice " What is most interesting

about Wordsworth's "hearing" of Milton in Gondo Gorge and his subsequent "voicing"

of him into what I am calling a lyric elsewhere is the fact that once Wordsworth occupies

Milton's voice, both "defensively" and "mspirationally," as Hartman has suggested, he

never quite returns from it—at least to the terrors of Gondo Gorge Rather, the traumatic

passage simply concludes there, with Wordsworth himself nowhere to be seen, the poem

picks up after a space of hours with an entirely new verse paragraph that fittingly signals

John Milton, Paradise Lost, in John Milton Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed Merritt Y Hughes (Indianapolis Hackett Publishing Company, 2003), 306, v 164-65

44 Hartman writes "It is as if Wordsworth quotefs] Milton to resist in himself a similar presumption Usurpation by a voice, then, is itself a mixed traumatic event It is both defensive and inspirational It at once blocks and originates the poem It breaks into thought m a way that breaks thought, yet it has something of the divinity of oracle or fiat On the one hand, the carefree wish becomes a burden through the intervention of an ominous quotation On the other hand, the poem is launched, and works against that perspective, and establishes a development of soits The poet becomes active from passive and voices the voice he hears " "Diction and Defense in Wordsworth," in The Literary Freud Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will ed Joseph H Smith (New Haven Yale University Press, 1980), 208-09

20

lodgment at last: "That night our lodging was in an Alpine house...." This verbal

acknowledgement, in the use of the term "lodging," of his prior escape and his present

return reminds us that the elsewhere Wordsworth turns to within, and especially at the

end of, the Gondo Gorge passage is an elsewhere that is itself made of words. Although

the poet seems to be escaping his poem, or at least poetic thought, by his final, embedded

quotation, it is words themselves (Milton's here, but Shakespeare's and others',

elsewhere) that offer respite from words—a poetic elsewhere from poetry, so to speak.

If the Imagination apostrophe indicates a mental transcendence into the realm of poetry, a

realm that is distinct from nature and characterized by the "inner eye," then the Gondo

Gorge passage indicates an even further remove—a temporary turning away from poetry

itself, into its own lyric elsewhere comprised of the formal and aesthetic elements that

make up poems. This elsewhere, like the outcomes of most mental defenses, allows for

an experience that draws from reality but that occurs outside of its bounds. Wordsworth's

allusion is just one kind of remove—a dislodgement that, like the other kinds of formal

displacements I explore in this dissertation (most of which do not involve flight into the

language of another poet), sends the poem temporarily beyond itself. It denies its own

reality, and in doing so, creates a new poetic world that is pleasing for the very fact of its

denial—a lyric elsewhere that reminds us of the ways that we psychologically adapt to

the actual world we face when we look up from the page.

Devising this lyric theory of elsewhere and applying it to my readings of poems

across several periods takes for granted the idea that lyric poetry is a transhistorical genre

45 Wordsworth, Prelude, 464, vi: 573

For a thorough account of Wordsworth's long interest in the wntten-ness of words and his own act of writing (as opposed to speaking), see Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2007).

21

defined primarily by the formal characteristics that make up poems rather than by the

intentions of poets or the responses of readers. But recent theories of the lyric, and in

particular the "New Lyric Studies" as embodied by several articles collected in the

January 2008 issue of P'MLA, have challenged this kind of craft-based approach. Yopie

Prins, through her rethinking of prosody and its relation to sound in Victorian poetry,

calls for subsequent approaches to lyric that draw on "historical poetics," thus "taking

into account generic shifts in the production and circulation of poetry and insisting on the

cultural specificity of poetic genres rather than assuming the continuity of 'the

lyric'...." 7 Such studies would call into question the notion of lyric utterance as the

heard or overheard speech issuing from a single voice—or even an individual psyche—in

favor of considering, perhaps primarily, the medium through which the poem is delivered

to its audience as a way of defining and exploring the genre. (In contemporary poetics,

these media might include the MP3 file, the podcast, and the webpage). Other critics of

the lyric are less interested in media or "mediation" but might still be suspicious of the

individuation of poets (as psychologically-idiosyncratic makers) that this study implies.

Jonathan Culler, differentiating lyric from narrative forms of literature, and in so doing,

freeing it from what he calls a "deadly" comparison to the novel in current pedagogy,

attends to lyric as "discourse addressed, a rhetorical transaction," thus allowing for a

focus on the Classical and other transhistorical elements of the genre as well as what he

refers to as "hyperbolic forms" that often render lyric personae distinct from the more

natural-seeming characters that appear in (most) novels. Culler is interested less in lyric

47 Yopie Prins, "Historical Poetics, Dysprosody, and The Science of English Verse," in PMLA 123, no. 1 (January 2008). 233

48 Jonathan Culler, "Why Lyric?," in PMLA 123, no. 1 (January 2008): 202, 205.

22

poetry's "inwardness" than he is in its "extravagance" through rhetoric; and yet these two

modes are in constant exchange, since the outward formal elements that make up poems

issue directly from the choices made by individual poets whose poetic processes, because

they are solitary processes, are essentially inward.49 A focus on rhetoric is indeed at the

heart of this study, which reveals the ways that rhetorical devices (such as those

celebrated by Culler) reflect the psychoanalytic characteristics of their makers.

Reacting to this newly-reignited debate about what constitutes "lyric," Virginia

Jackson suggests that one way to approach our interpretation of lyric poems is through

their reception history, or what she calls "the history of lyricization."5 In Dickinson's

Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading she posits that lyric, from the mid-nineteenth century

onwards, is a genre that is defined by modes of "lyric interpretation" rather than by texts

themselves.51 "To be lyric is to be read as lyric—and to be read as lyric is to be printed

and framed as lyric," Jackson writes, introducing her book-length example of the

reception of Emily Dickinson as a model of lyric making via "lyric reading."52 Jackson

points out how the cultural and historical contexts of poems and their reception

necessarily engrave the texts we read and think of as lyric. Her way of defining lyric

poems relies on parameters very different from mine, but her central argument—that lyric

poetry, as a genre, is formed in part by the poet's presentation of text as lyric and in part

by the practices of reading that we apply to it—shares a thread of ambiguity with this

49 Culler, "Why Lyric''," 205.

50 Virginia Jackson, "Who Reads Poetry?," in PMLA 123, no. 1 (January 2008): 183.

Virginia Jackson, Dickinson's Misery A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton. Princeton University Press, 2005), 6

Jackson, Dickinson's Misery, 6

23

dissertation's treatment of lyrics as representations of a single psyche. That is, both

Jackson's study and this one bring up the difficult question of authorial intention, and just

as we might conjecture about the degree to which Dickinson's own consideration of her

writings as lyric poems results in their status as such, so we also must wonder how the

make up of a poet's own psyche factors into our interpretations of the "psyches" that they

write and that we read as texts.

The short answer to this complex line of inquiry is that I take care in the following

pages to avoid the vagueness of psychobiography. Yet in exploring the many different

kinds of aesthetic structures in poems, I do mean to show how psychological insight can

illuminate the poetic strategies that characterize the work of certain poets. So a related

question that this study inevitably raises is to what extent the poets whose work I

examine here are aware of—or even knowingly employ—the removes I describe. The

pages on Anthony Hecht's "A Hill" particularly speak to this question, in part because

Hecht is explicit in his poem about his interest in the mind, and in part because interview

transcripts allow us to know more of the details around his poem's composition than we

do about, say, the composition of George Herbert's "Deniall" or Thomas Hardy's "The

Voice." Hecht is self-consciously analytic in a way that many twentieth-century poets

(including Elizabeth Bishop, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Frank Bidart, to name others in

this study) are, having lived their entire lives in a post-Freudian world and having moved

in literary circles particularly attentive to psychoanalytic theory. My discussion might in

places seem to suggest that poets are in full control as they effect the aesthetic

transformations of unconscious processes into literary devices that solve conflictual tasks

(i.e. mourning, forgetting, distancing, confessing) in compelling and appealing poetic

24

forms; however, it is equally possible that such conscious purposefulness is only partial

(especially in the case of Clare). I am aware that certain aspects of a poet's writing

process are ultimately unknowable; but in the following readings of poems, I nevertheless

attempt to discern, wherever possible, the poet's own self-consciousness regarding the

dynamics of his remove—in keeping with the self-revelation inherent to the lyric form.

25

Chapter One

ASSUMING VOICE

There are moments when speech is but a mouth pressed Lightly and humbly against the angel's hand.

—James Merrill, "A Dedication "

Among the strategies of lyric that appear as analogues for mechanisms of defense, no

aesthetic component is more immediate or readily apparent to the reader of poems than

the voice that cries out from the page—the lyric persona's textual medium of expression.

I begin this practical exploration of elsewhere with examples in which lyric poets, outside

of the occasions for writing traditional dramatic monologues, begin their poems by

assuming somebody else's voice. Why would a lyric poet choose to speak in a voice not

his own? George Herbert assumes the voice of God. Thomas Hardy takes on the voice

of his late wife Emma Gifford. James Wright speaks as Horace. Frank Bidart invokes

the speech of multiple personae—Berlioz, Ovid, Myrrha—each one representing some

different aspect of his own self. Could the aesthetic decision to adopt somebody else's

way of speaking aid the poet in resolving the poem's action? What other sources and

motives behind such trans-locations of self might be discovered? To answer such

questions draws on the nature of lyric as a spoken form and leads back to its origins in the

poetic practices of antiquity, where my inquiry begins.

1 James Merrill, Collected Poems, ed J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (New York. Alfred A Knopf, 2002), 123

" For my own formulation of the relation between lyric and dramatic monologue, see pages 9-11 of my introduction

26

In its earliest known instances in the Western tradition—in Homer's epics and,

later, in Greek dithyramb and drama—poetry was almost solely experienced as vocal

performance. In The Poetics, Aristotle defines poetic language not in terms of how it is

read but how it sounds when it is spoken aloud, its "diction":

The following parts comprise the entire scope of diction: letter, syllable, connective, noun, verb, inflection and sentence. A letter is an indivisible sound.... The subdivisions of this category of "letter" are vowel, semi-vowel, and mute. A vowel is the sound that is audible without the contact of any of the physical structures of the mouth.. ..3

His architectural description of the elements of language is based upon the phonetic sense

of words as they occur within a speaker's mouth; poets choose words, Aristotle implies,

according to their audible properties—the way they affect a person's ears as he listens,

not a person's eyes or mind as he reads. Such scrupulous attention to "diction" in this

sense would have been crucial to the ancient Greek poets, whose primary method of

disseminating their work was either to deliver it orally or to have it spoken by actors on a

stage. Aristotle is in fact not writing about lyric poetry at all—rather, epic, drama, and

history. But how important is the audibility of poetic language in later eras of literary

richness, including today, where more personal "lyric" forms have all but replaced the

overtly social and oral genres of poetry?

In poetry of the modern period (from Elizabethan times onward), language is

almost always encountered within the silence of an individual's private reading

experience. And yet contemporary definitions of lyric often describe the speaker of the

Aristotle, The Poetics, in Aristotle's Poetics, A Translation and Commentary for Students of Literature, trans. Leon Golden, comm. by O.B. Hardison (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1981), 20: 1-9.

27

poem as embodying a "single voice."4 So what makes a lyric voice a "voice"—that is, a

sound that is spoken rather than a text printed on a page? Partly it has to do with those

hard to quantify aspects of poetic language that imitate the subtleties of how people talk:

tone, mood, dialect, and inflection. Robert Frost, the American poet whose lyric voice

most obviously aspires to these qualities, has said that "poetry is the reproduction of the

tones of actual speech."5 Partly, too, lyrics seem "voiced" because of how we, as

readers, encounter them—as if we, along with the poem's addressee (if there is one), are

being spoken to, even if it is from the isolated depths of the speaker's soul. When we

"hear" lyrics, or when we "overhear" them, we are listening to the sounds of a private

utterance delivered in solitary meditation. To that end, the voice of a lyric poem can

either address its reader or some other, more specific individual as long as he speaks to

him or her indirectly—that is, within the limits of a poetic realm that lies beyond the

possibility for live colloquy.

The difficulty of articulating one's own lyric voice is often taken up by poets as

the subject of their poems. For some poets, the pursuit of a voice can lead to months or

years of silence. Seamus Heaney has compared the process to the strange moment when

a widgeon hunter, having shot and killed the bird, blows into its throat, forcing it to make

a sound:

While he was plucking it

See, for example, Vendler, The Given and the Made, x-xi; Invisible Listeners, 1; and The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, 14-21

5 Robert Frost, "Some Definitions," in Robert Frost Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: The Library of America, 1995), 701. Frost's assertion is only a few steps beyond Wordsworth's rule in the "Preface" to the 1802 Lyrical Ballads that poems should be written in the "language really used by men " The Major Works, 597

Mill writes, "Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard " "What is Poetry?," 12

28

he found, he says, the voice b o x —

like a flute stop in the broken windpipe—

and blew upon it unexpectedly his own small widgeon cries.7

Striking the traditional pose of a Classical poet "plucking" his lyre, Heaney's poet-hunter

takes the bird for his instrument, sounding its cries rather than his own.8 Wallace Stevens

likewise describes the problem of creating poetic speech in his voice box poem, "The

Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad." Citing his poetic illness as "the malady of the quotidian"

and punning on the two meanings of "dumb," Stevens's "man" laments, "I am too

dumbly in my being pent." Rather than stopping writing entirely, these poets and others

who at certain times in their poetic careers face difficulties breaking the silence, have

developed a different strategy for sounding lyric voice: they use somebody else's, in

whose "being" they are not "pent."

Somebody else's voice need not always be so foreign as Heaney's "widgeon

cries." An "other" voice can even be a version of the poet's own that is somehow

dislocated from the self or heard at a distance from it, as though it has been thrown or

ventriloquized. Stevens writes in his Adagia that "when the mind is like a hall in which

thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is always that of someone else."10 In his poem

Seamus Heaney, "Widgeon," in Opened Ground (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 217.

Perhaps Heaney received the inspiration for his anatomically-interested "Widgeon" from Emily Dickinson's "Split the Lark," a poem in which the hunter does indeed "split" the bird he catches in order to prove where its song comes from. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 412.

' Wallace Stevens, "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad," in Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: The Library of America, 1997), 81.

10 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 907.

29

called "The Creations of Sound," Stevens explains that the "music" of a particular poet—

he names him "X"—is not "chosen" by the poet himself but by "a separate author, a

different poet" from whom "we," as readers, "collect":

...a separate author, a different poet, An accretion from ourselves, intelligent Beyond intelligence, an artificial man

At a distance, a secondary expositor, A being of sound, whom one does not approach Through any exaggeration. From him, we collect.

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made dirtier. It is more than an imitation for the ear.

He lacks this venerable complication. His poems are not of the second part of life. They do not make the visible a little hard

To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind Or peculiar horns, themselves eked out By the spontaneous particulars of sound.

We do not say ourselves like that in poems. We say ourselves in syllables that rise From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.

Although "X" thinks he owns his poems, Stevens reminds him (and himself) that poetic

syllables "rise/From the floor" in "speech we do not speak." Thus a poet's best strategy

for making sound is in fact a strategy of inaction, of letting "the spontaneous particulars

of sound" do their own bidding on the page. Counter-intuitively, this ineffectuality on

the part of the poet is more liberating than not for Stevens (he calls it "freedom" in an

earlier stanza). By absolving himself from the agency of his poems' voice, Stevens does

" Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 275.

30

not have to feel beholden to or responsible for it. There is never any voice that he must

fully call his own.

Heaney and Stevens are pursuing in these poems the nature of a strategy that

many poets take up at some point in their careers, when the writing of a particular poem

seems especially difficult, perhaps, or when their own voice does not feel adequate as a

place to begin. Making a lyric voice of any kind, because it represents an inner life,

always comes with a significant amount of vulnerability. For instance, poems often use

biographical details from the poet's own life to establish, at a remove, their particular

dramas, which become fictionalized representations by virtue of their being text. But

there are certain moments in a poet's career when he or she is particularly susceptible—

moments when delivering a lyric voice that is a dramatization of an inner life (maybe his

or her own, though not necessarily) might seem unbearably painful or difficult. These

could include a poet's experiencing doubt or confusion about his faith or the nature of his

god; or when a poet's perception of reality is shaken by the recent death of a beloved; or

when, faced with the impending loss of a parent, the poet begins to re-evaluate his own

self worth; or when the nature of a poet's sexual desire feels shameful, forbidden, or

inexpressible. At these moments, poets sometimes assume the lyric voice of an "other"

in order to better represent, by temporarily resisting, the selves they are creating.

The poems I have chosen to reflect on in the following pages represent four

different cases of the defensive strategy I call "assuming voice." George Herbert, faced

with the ongoing challenge of his religious faith, constructs a scenario of "denial" where,

by imagining his own abandonment by God, he is able to assume the deity's voice in his

absence. Voicing God allows Herbert a special kind of embodiment that both renews his

31

faith in God's relationship to mankind and also empowers him privately as a poet.

Thomas Hardy, grieving the loss of his wife, is able to reconstitute her briefly by

mimicking the sound of her imagined voice calling him in his own poetic voice calling

her. Bringing Emma back in this way is part of his process of mourning. By

incorporating her sounds as his, and by experiencing her as real even though he knows

she is a figment of his imagination, Hardy is able to locate himself in relation to the

actuality of his circumstance. James Wright's "Prayer to the Good Poet" assumes not the

voice of the biological father he is praying for but the voice of the poetic father he is

praying to. By reinforcing his own lyric voice with the metrical and stylistic acuities of

his much-admired Horace, Wright trades the human companionship of his dying father

for the lasting influence of a mentor who has long been dead, and can therefore never

leave him. Frank Bidart, conflicted about the nature of his own sexual desire, writes a

poem in which he assumes several voices, all of which help him express his belief that

the lack of volition that humans experience as the sexual urge is present also in the poet's

need to write poems.

Poets can assume other people's voices in several ways. There is of course a

whole sub-genre of lyric dedicated to the poet's practice of appropriating another

person's speech: "dramatic monologues" represent a poetic speaker who is clearly not the

poet speaking directly to another person who is implied to be present at the moment the

poem is being delivered. However in the lyric poems that I discuss in this chapter, the

speaker retains his self-hood even as he assumes another person's voice; and unlike in

dramatic monologues, he is necessarily alone in his circumstance, writing from the

perspective of lyric privacy rather than during interpersonal discourse. A lyric speaker's

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assuming the voice of an other does not amount to his being the other; rather, the speaker

adopts certain aspects of somebody else's voice in order to help make or strengthen his

own. Frost suggests three ways that this transfer can happen in his sonnet "Never Again

Would Birds' Song Be the Same":

He would declare and could himself believe That the birds there in all the garden round From having heard the daylong voice of Eve Had added to their own an oversound, Her tone of meaning but without the words. Admittedly an eloquence so soft Could only have had an influence on birds When call or laughter carried it aloft. Be that as may be, she was in their song. Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed Had now persisted in the woods so long That probably it never would be lost. Never again would birds' song be the same. And to do that to birds was why she came.12

In venturing to describe how the voice of Eve enters the song of birds, Frost offers not

one but three different characterizations of how the blent sound is achieved. The first,

suggested by his initial quatrain, is that birds add "to their own an oversound,/Her tone of

meaning but without the words." The second, which arrives in line nine, is simply that the

birds have her "in their song"—rather than "over" it. Finally, in line ten, the strategy

feels a little contrary: "her voice upon their voices crossed." One could argue that these

three mixtures he describes are roughly synonymous. Indeed Frost never makes

definitively clear what the relationship is between the assumed voice of Eve and the

birds' song. But, then, how could he, when to do so would be to pin down the very

nature of the poetic art in whose mystery rests his entire livelihood?

12 Frost, "Never Again Would Birds' Song be the Same," in The Collected Poems, Prose and Plays (New York: The Library of America, 1995), 308.

33

It is probably the case that the process by which one voice assumes the qualities

of another voice is necessarily variable; it is affected not only by the relationship that

exists between the owner of the original voice and its other, but also by the circumstances

under which the assuming happens. In the poems that follow, all three of Frost's modes

are used, and more: God is certainly "in" Herbert's song, as Horace is "in" Wright's;

Hardy adopts Emma as an "oversound," achieving her "tone of meaning" in his own

"words"; and Bidart especially finds his lyric voice "crossed" with other voices. What

interests me most among these examples is why the lyric speaker would choose to begin

in this way, how assuming voice achieves the pleasant sense of elsewhere we enjoy in

poems, and how this crossing and blending of voices relates to the defensive processes of

the human psyche that appears within the poems only as representation.

The discipline of psychoanalysis is particularly rich in its discussions of

intersubjectivity, which is at the heart of any artist's rendering of an "other" and is

certainly a component of the poems I look at here. We know that it is during a person's

earliest periods of psychological development that he begins to establish boundaries

between himself and others (an infant, for instance, does not distinguish between his

mother and himself). In adulthood, the fluidity of boundaries between self and object

remains an important aspect of a person's psychological life—in particular, it is

responsible for the defensive mechanisms of introjection and projection, by which mental

content, especially conflictual mental content, gets exchanged between the ego and the

outside world. It might be said that the concept of projection can be applied to all

literature that is not overtly autobiographical, since literature represents a kind of

externalization, on the part of the author, of his own experience (or imagined experience)

34

onto the life of a fictionalized other. And yet within many poems of assumed voice, there

is a further kind of externalization akin to what Melanie Klein has called "projective

identification," where the self, out of his own inability or unwillingness to act, forces

somebody else to act, as a way of fulfilling his own desire.13 (Freud in The Interpretation

of Dreams points out a similar process whereby a person's unconscious wishes often get

displaced in dreams as the behaviors of other people.)1

I will be examining in the following pages how the poet's decision to speak as a

lyric "other" not only aids him in the development of his own poetic self but also helps

him produce poetry that reflects the psychological conditions that surround the process of

making art. What we find is that it is not only during periods of profound self-awareness

that poets can write powerfully about themselves. Rather, even during a poet's weakest

hour or in his most conflicted state, there are strategies by which he can establish a lyric

non-presence, a poetic remove into lyric elsewhere, that will movingly and secretly lead

him back to himself.

1. George Herbert

Perhaps there is no poet who more readily admits to the practice of using somebody

else's voice in his poetry than George Herbert. Dedicating his only book, The Temple, to

God, Herbert immediately qualifies this act by explaining that the poems in it are "not

13 See Melanie Klein, The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1986).

14 See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Macmillan Press, 1913).

35

mine neither; for from thee they came."15 The idea that a poem can be "written" both by

and for the same person who is not the poet would not have been new in Herbert's day.

Indeed, Classical poets quite often attribute the composition of their poems to the muse or

muses toward whom the poems are also addressed. For Herbert, who devoted most of his

working life to the priesthood, the act of ventriloquizing God would have seemed

especially natural: he was giving sermons long before he began to write poetry. In the

poem "The Windows," Herbert alludes to the magnitude of such an effort: "Lord, how

can man preach thy eternal word?/ He is a brittle crazy glass."16 Answering himself in

the next few lines, the always reverent poet offers only this:

Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window, through thy grace.17

Within "thy temple," Herbert explains, man becomes a "window"—a glass through

which God's light is transmitted directly onto those who worship him. But what about in

Herbert's Templel How does the lyric poet, who composes not in church, but rather,

alone in his private room, and not per se, for a congregation, but rather, in private reverie,

1 8

gain access to the voice of God?

It may well be that the readiness of such a question is part of the reason why

Herbert's poems, though loosely attributed to God in "The Dedication" and elsewhere,

are generally spoken in the lower register of human speech and most often take as their 15 George Herbert, "The Dedication," in The Works, ed F E Hutchinson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1941), 5,1.2. 16 Herbert, The Works, 67,11 1-2.

17 Herbert, The Works, 67,11. 3-5

18 The Temple was not published during the poet's lifetime, although manuscripts of his poems were presumably circulated among his friends (in his later years, he had the reputation of being a poet), Herbert's friend submitted The Temple for publication immediately after the poet's death.

36

form prayers and hymns spoken to God rather than holy blessings or decrees said by him.

When the actual voice of God does enter the poetry, it is usually very brief and often in

response to some particular action or query on the part of the poem's speaker, as in "The

Collar," when God gently quiets the raving man—"Me thoughts I heard one calling,

ChildY,x9—or in "A true Hymne," when God "supplie[s] the want" in the poet's verse:20

As, when th'heart sayes (sighing to be approved) O, could I lovel and stops: God writeth, Loved.

In these examples, God's speech is always framed by the poet's verbal cues. "God

writeth," Herbert offers by way of introducing his interlocutor; likewise with, "Me

thoughts I heard one calling...." Organizing the words of God in the context of call and

response or simple conversation, Herbert achieves a kind of dialogue with his "invisible

listener" (to use Helen Vendler's apt phrase) who is always present for the poet's writing.

The effect is not unlike Sir Philip Sidney's ventriloquizing his muse the beginning of

Astrophel and Stella: "'Fool,' said my muse to me; Took in thy heart and write.'"22

But Herbert's poem "Deniall" remains an exception to his usual models of

assumed speech. Unlike his typical speaker, who engages in devout colloquy with an

always listening God, the speaker of "Deniall" never receives a response—not because,

as Richard Strier mistakenly suggests, the prayer the poem makes remains as-yet

unanswered, but because the speaker's voice is intrinsically tied to God's, is his word:

19 Herbert, The Works, 153, 11. 35.

20 Herbert, The Works, 168,11. 17.

21 Herbert, The Works, 168,11. 19-20.

22 Sir Philip Sidney, "Sonnet 1," Astrophel and Stella, in The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 153.

23 Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 190-91.

37

When my devotions could not pierce Thy silent ears;

Then was my heart broken, as was my verse; My breast was full of fears

And disorder,

My bent thoughts, like a brittle bow, Did fly asunder:

Each took his way; some would to pleasures go, Some to the wars and thunder

Of alarms.

As good go any where, they say, As to benumb

Both knees and heart, in crying night and day, Come, come, my God, O come,

But no hearing.

O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue To cry to thee,

And then not hear it crying! all day long My heart was in my knee,

But no hearing.

Therefore my soul lay out of sight, Untuned, unstrung:

My feeble spirit, unable to look right, Like a nipped blossom, hung

Discontented.

O cheer and tune my heartless breast, Defer no time;

That so thy favors granting my request, They and my mind may chime,

And mend my rime.24

Though complaining that his "devotions" are not heard—that God will not descend to

give his grace—this lyric speaker begins his "broken.. .verse" at the height of his

rhetorical powers and sustains them throughout. First acknowledging the effects God's

indifference has had on his poetry, then going on to describe the suffering this

Herbert, The Works, 79.

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indifference has wrought on his thoughts, body and soul, Herbert's speaker

systematically explores the consequences of God's purported "denial." Without divine

intervention in the form of "cheer[ing] and tun[ing his] heartless breast," he complains,

there are a number of inimical directions his thoughts may go: to "pleasures" as well as

"wars" and "alarms." The implication is that these locales are unfit subjects for

poetry—subjects supported only by the id-like alter-ego who argues in stanza three that

he would rather send thoughts somewhere then see the his mental faculty "benumbed."26

Herbert's ego, not quite yet numb, regains control in stanza four to make a humble plea:

"O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue.../ And then not hear it crying!" The soul,

figured in stanza five as the lyre, "untuned" and "unstrung," then resumes its posture of

waiting. Finally, describing itself in terms of a dying blossom with its head "hung/

Discontented," the poem's lyric voice feigns total "disorder," begging for the grace that

would allow God's favors and his own mind "to chime."

But the poetic tropes Herbert's speaker uses in these stanzas challenge the truth in

such disorder. Firstly, Herbert's initial conceit, that his thoughts are like "brittle bows"

flown "asunder" in line seven, is successfully anchored by line one's "devotions," which

"could not pierce" God's "silent ears." Likewise, the phrase "my heart was in my knee"

in stanza four works both as a rendering of emotional destitution (i.e. my heart is sunk) as

well as an accurate physical posturing—the speaker is doubled over in prayer, so that his

25 That "bent" thoughts appear here like a "bow" suggests further their associations with sm—the "bow and arrow" being symbols primarily of desire (they are Cupid's instruments) rather than devotion.

26 In his discussion of Herbert at the end of his Oxford lecture, The Redress of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), Seamus Heaney alludes to this subtle predilection of Herbert's towards a forbidden world of licentiousness. "[The Pulley] does not have those surprising local effects of lyric joy which remind us how available this poet once felt himself to be to a more erotic genre, how capable he would have been of a delicious squandering had he not made sacred poetry his whole vocation " Redress, 16.

39

heart literally lies on the same horizontal plane as his knee. The two similes in stanza

five are equally representative of a poetic speaker who is "fallen," who would indeed be

both mute as a broken instrument and slouched as a plant whose final fruition (its flower)

is cut just before blooming.

Of course neither of these similes turns out to be true of this poem's speaker,

whose perceptive accuracy and technical skills are only strengthened by his own feigned

ineptitudes. Herbert's stanza, with its four interlocking lines that rhyme in stark contrast

to the exaggeratedly shortened and dissonant fifth, is expertly matched to the information

it conveys. When the poet says his verse is "broken" in line three, indeed he breaks it,

replacing the musical iambs of the first two lines with harsher trochees and spondees.

When the poet is unable to rhyme, he mis-rhymes gloriously, with words that mean what

they sound like: "disorder," "alarms," "no hearing," "discontented." And when, at the

poem's very end, the speaker in a figurative sense opens his heart to God by asking him

to "cheer and tune my heartless breast" and "mend my rime," the verse mends itself

immediately, adapting the fifth line of the stanza (the last line of the poem) to the

rhyming second and fourth, resolving the sonic dissonance at the very recognition of the

powers of God's grace.

It has been the general critical consensus that the rhymed ending of this poem

marks an unspoken resolution between the speaker and God. Once the prayer is made,

40

God's favor is readily granted, ending his denial as well as the poem. Indeed, God is

responsible for that final rhyme; he never denies his human subject in this poem or in any

other in Herbert's Temple. But it should be noted also that God is in fact present

throughout the duration of this poem and not just in its final lines. I have explained in the

paragraphs above a few of the formal techniques that appear early in this poem, implying

God's presence long before he purportedly steps in for the verse's "mending." But there

is another, more secret sign of God in these stanzas as he truly exists—that is, within the

words themselves. We need only reconsider the poem's most common noun, "heart,"

which appears in four of the poem's six stanzas, to realize that in these lines about God's

refusal to listen, he has in fact been following the speaker constantly, embedding his

hidden voice within the very fabric of the poem's language. In each weary complaint of

the speaker's broken "heart," God speaks "hear," and also, by virtue of homonym,

"here," thus chiming with the voice of the poet all along and assuring him that he is

listening. Indeed, when Helen Vendler remarks that Herbert's is a God who "often

resides (in the horizontal plane) not only within the poet's room but inside his heart, and,

in an extraordinary way, inside poetry itself,"28 her meaning in the case of "Deniall"

might be taken literally, as God's voice actually resides within this poem's very "heart."29

27 Richard Stner's account of this ending in Love Known is one of the few dissenting voices He writes, "The poet is asking that God do something to him analogous to what he has done in the poem—but not identical with it " Strier sees the "rime" in the last line as "metaphorical," explaining that the poet merely asks God to perform such a favor in the future, for "there is something odd about a prayer which implies that it has already received what it is requesting " Love Known, 190-91 For the more common view (which 1 adopt and amend), see Stanley Fish, The Living Temple George Herbert and Catechizing (Los Angeles. University of California Press, 1978), and Joseph H Summers, George Herbert His Religion and Art (Bmghampton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1981)

2 Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton Princeton University Press, 2005), 4

29 Vendler does not mention "Deniall" in her account of Herbert's "invisible listener," peihaps because it is a poem in which God is less of a listener and more of an active, if secret, voice

41

By assuming God's voice as his own and yet complaining of its absence, Herbert

makes the work of his poem twofold Not only is the "Deniall" here God's seeming

refusal of the poet's wish to be heard (a wish that is granted temporarily by the poem's

reader), but it is also a psychological denial on the speaker's part of what he must

generally believe to be true that even though he bestows voice on the speaker of his

poem, God, as Herbert says in his "Dedication," is the ultimate voice behind all poetry

The chiming that Herbert asks for in the final stanza is m fact a wish that has already

been fulfilled and was indeed responsible for the poem's articulation in the first place, it,

more than anything, is the denial referred to by the poem's title What Herbert actually

reveals by the subtleties of the poem's form and in the verse's final rhyme is his

conviction that God's omnipresence, manifest here in the intricacies of language and

poetry, is the reason he is able to write at all

One might ask, as one could ask of all defenses, what the poet has to gain by

denying his belief in God's presence in the emphatic manner that he does here What this

poem refers to as denial (besides the primary meaning of the word—that God is denying

htm) actually reflects a complex series of defensive maneuvers that include what Freud

calls "negation"—when, through the process of actively refuting an idea that is in some

way conflictual (in this case, the poets' denying the idea that God constantly hears him),

the ego actually "[takes] cognizance" of such an idea without fully accepting it31

Negating, Freud suggests, is the mind's way of making conscious what has previously

30 This second, more psychological sense of "denial" was indeed in use during Heibert's lifetime The OED's second definition for "denial" states "The asserting (of anything) to be untrue or untenable, contradiction of a statement or allegation as untrue or invalid, also, the denying of the existence or reality of a thing" First used in 1576 "Fleming, Panopl Epist 107, 193

31 Freud, "Negation," in The Standard Edition, vol 19, 235-36

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been unconscious by positively asserting that it is not so. In the poem, we observe

Herbert's speaker reconfirming his faith in God by contradictorily expressing it through

"a negative formula." It may be the case that for him, a crucial component of religious

faith is the ongoing practice of enacting disbelief, of challenging that faith. Such denials

and negations certainly seem to bring about steady, if small, renewals for this speaker (as

we can see in the subtle ways that God actually appears throughout the poem); and these

poetic devices make a further appeal to the sympathetic reader, who may recognize in the

poem's negations his or her own defensive postures towards belief (religious or

otherwise).33 By assuming God's voice and yet all the time defending against its

presence, the poet is able to confirm God's constancy within an aesthetic medium that

reflects psychological processes that are universal. Denying faith—enumerating the very

real temptations and doubts that all men of faith surely experience ("pleasures," "wars,"

"alarms")—is the mechanism by which Herbert reinvests his verse with God, knowing he

has been there all along.

2. Thomas Hardy

Unlike Herbert, who assumes the voice of God to confirm the reality of his presence,

Hardy assumes another person's voice as a way of denying its irreality. In the first three

out of four metrically elaborate stanzas of his elegy "The Voice," Hardy addresses his

late wife, Emma, whose phantom call he only imagines hearing "across the wet mead":

32 Freud, "Negation," in The Standard Edition, vol. 19, 240.

33 The process is not dissimilar to the questioning of catechism. See Fish's The Living Temple.

43

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness Travelling across the wet mead to me here, You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness, Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward, Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, And the woman calling.34

Hardy's poem is in fact comprised of two voices: his own and the voice of the "woman

much missed." The way he distinguishes these sounds from each other is complicated by

the fact that both are fabrications—the one a lyric utterance and the other a figment of the

poet's imagination. Most simply, the woman's call is identified with the withering

rhythm of the dactyls in the poem's first three stanzas (as well as line three of the fourth)

and the poet's own voice is represented by the stuttering trochees and spondees of the last

stanza (minus the penultimate line).35 But this distinction in form does not account for

the fact that both of these metrical patterns are spoken in the poet's words, not Emma's

(it is, to re-quote Frost, her "tone of meaning but without the words"). When Hardy

begins his poem, he does so as himself, but in a string of falling dactyls that mimic the

Thomas Hardy, "The Voice," in Selected Poetry, ed. Samuel Hynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 87.

35 Susan Stewart argues that the poem's third stanza adopts a different metrical pattern from the first two as well as from the fourth. For her exhaustive formal treatment of this poem and its relation to music, see her Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 132-38.

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ghost-voice's fading call. This overlaying of her sound onto his message blurs the line

between them in the poem by means of a seemingly aesthetic or psycho-poetic

"introjection": he is certainly addressing the woman, and not vice versa, but since the

sound of his voice exists only in a kind of similitude to hers, he, too, becomes a listener

(mirroring his position in the poem's narrative). Unwilling to let go of the pleasure he

gains by the memory of her, he incorporates her into his own voice in the same manner

that an ego will sometimes "[introject] a good object... as a defense against anxiety."37 In

so doing, he mitigates the feelings of loss and makes them more gradual: rather than

simply disappearing, she poetically "dissolves," and not just through his voice but in a

deterioration of poetic form that the reader can simultaneously feel.

Hardy's drama of intersubjectivity, which in the first two stanzas of the poem

helps him re-vitalize his lost beloved, is introduced in the first line. "Woman much

missed, how you call to me, call to me," he begins, immediately diminishing the power of

his own initial vocative by drawing attention to hers. "How you call to me, call to me," he

exclaims, the repetition of the line's last three words not only emphasizing the poem's

virtuosic rhyme scheme (in which the third-to-last words are rhyming and the second-to-

last and last words match) but also confusing its syntax. If the first "call to me" is simply

his way of describing what he imagines hearing, then surely the second "call" is more

forceful than that. Here the phantom's voice seems to leap onto the page—her faithful,

spousal response come instinctively to complete her husband's double-dactyl.

Underneath her echo lies the poet's own unconscious wish: call to me, he pleads, hoping

36 In the series of elegies to which "The Voice" belongs, there are two actual dramatic monologues spoken by Emma ("The Haunter" and "The Spell of the Rose").

37 Melanie Klein, "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms," in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 27(1946): 101.

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the sound he hears is her voice, worrying it is not. This subtle back and forth that takes

place between the poet and the imaginary woman, as well as Hardy's insistence, at least

at first, that she is calling him even though the nature of elegy as a poetic form suggests it

T O

must be the other way around, gives the first half of this poem its pathos.

But the poem pivots at its middle when the poet's insistence on the presence of

his phantom voice begins to waver. What causes Hardy's failure to suspend his

disbelief? When in stanza one the poet conjures Emma's voice he does so only

conditionally; that is, Emma speaks not as her older self (the self with whom Hardy

eventually fell out of love—the marriage had been strained for nearly 20 years—and the

self who actually died) but as she did in her youth, "when our day was fair." In its

approach to him, the "voice" crosses not only the threshold between death and life but

also the span of nearly forty years. "Let me view you, then" the poet asks, remembering

Emma early on in their relationship, "standing as when [he] drew near to the town." And

here his memory gives way to a vision so disturbing it brings about the dissolution of her

imaginary presence: "even to the original air-blue gown!" For Hardy, the sight of Emma

in her youth, depicted in the color "air-blue"—perhaps it was a favorite gown or what she

wore when they met—sets off a recollection of her death. Even in the comfort of

Many of the traditional conventions of elegy are employed by Hardy, his tendency toward repetition and echo being only one Peter Sacks writes in The English Elegy Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats that the "repetition of words and refrains and the creation of a certain rhythm of lament have the effect of controlling the expression of grief while also keeping that expression m motion." And later, "The echo particularly suits this recogmtional function of repetition, for it makes the voicing of loss seem to come from beyond the self, from the objective world of fact. .Our earlier discussion of the mourner's replayed entry into language reinforces our sense of how the echo might represent the elegist's particular sensitivity to the fact that the language he uses is and is not his own " See also Sacks's own psychoanalytically informed reading of "The Voice" in the same book (Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 23-25, 247-50

46

memory, in a period when their love was fresh, her image still appears to him ghost-like,

thin, "wan and wistless" as the breeze that eventually replaces her in the third stanza.

When the sight of Emma fails Hardy, so does her sound—both recede at once.

The soft musicality of her "calling" that had informed his dactyls slips into harsher

cadence and metrical irregularity. At the same time, the grim actuality of his landscape—

the "wet mead," the "wind," the "leaves falling"—comes into view rather than the

imagined realm of their youth. By the fourth stanza, nearly all back and forth between

the husband and wife is gone; Hardy is no longer capable of appropriating her sound to

make his poem. "Thus I; faltering forward," he writes, the tetrameter deteriorating into

trimeter as the soft echo of each dactyl's final syllable drops off. For a moment, in the

long, aberrant penultimate line, Hardy tries to re-assume her in the rhythm of the "wind

oozing thin through the thorn," but her voice soon dies away. The poem's final

resolution, "and the woman calling," is surprisingly cognitive rather than perceptive.

Hardy insists that Emma's voice abides, and yet he (and we) can no longer hear it.39 As

soon as the presence of his interlocutor is compromised (which happens at the point of

"air-blue") the poem's original premise as an affirmation of the beloved's existence

begins to flag. The poem's only dialogue now exists indirectly between the poet and his

distant readers, its original lyric voice, the first line's "woman," having dissolved away.

Because Hardy gives us, through the use of echo, dactyl, and ballad tetrameter,

Emma's voice without any of her words (only the discursive paraphrasing of lines two

and three), we are forced to experience both him and her simultaneously. The result is

that when we begin to lose her in the transition to stanza three, and when she drops away

39 Sacks rightly notes that the change from "Woman" in stanza one to "the woman" in stanza four is a "forsaking [of] both address and familiarity." English Elegy, 250.

47

entirely in stanza four, we feel the loss more acutely because it is rendered through the

very fabric of our reading. The contrast between the perfection of the original meter and

the asymmetry of the final stanza manifests Hardy's own grief. What was at first slow,

sad music changes later into sob and sigh; what was at first a communion between the

poet and the beloved changes later into a lonely, third-person description of "the"

woman. Both of these effects are set into motion by the spell of the poem's speaker in

those first few lines, who temporarily conjures up the dead by modulating his lyric voice

to the voice of the object he invokes. His seemingly unconscious regressive dissolution

of self-object boundaries as a way of mitigating loss is both familiar and terrifying to the

reader who has probably experienced similar kinds of regressions in dreams, where

"thought is transformed into visual images and speech" and where "primitive methods of

expression and representation take the place of the usual ones." : Part of Hardy's

achievement here is translating such unconscious processes into artful lyric tropes, so that

both his speaker and his reader experience loss concurrently—the one through a

representational process of mourning and the other likely by being reminded of some

personal experience of loss that has occurred outside of the poem's context but whose

negotiation is mirrored in its form.

Sacks differentiates "the woman" here from the "Woman" in the poem's first line by explaining that the generalized form (without "the") conveys both the "totalizing" effect Emma has on Hardy's life but also the "familiar" way in which he can address her This familiarity is lost in the poem's final line—a sign that the poet recognizes (even if he does not accept) her death English Elegy, 248

Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams," in The Standard Edition, vol 4, 534, 548 Freud explains that the transformation of thought into image, which occurs here as well as in dreams, is "regressive" because "Instead of being transmitted towards the motor end of the apparatus it moves towards the sensory end and finally reaches the perceptual system If we describe as 'progressive' the direction taken by psychical processes arising fiom the unconscious during waking life, then we may speak of dreams as having a 'regressive' charactei " "The Interpretation of Dreams," 542

48

But even apart from its unusual fluidity between self and object, Hardy's poem is

still not a typical poem of direct address. For one thing, it does not exist in isolation. The

fact that it comes ninth in the series of elegies Hardy wrote from 1912 to 1913 has some

bearing on how we receive its lyric voice. For instance, we could ask, is "The Voice" a

continuation of the particular poems that precede it? Or a kind of response to them, as

Susan Stewart has proposed ("The Haunter," which in the series comes right before "The

Voice," is one of the two elegies truly spoken by Emma herself, suggesting that it could

be the "calling" Hardy refers to)?42 But in a certain sense, these questions could be

applied to all poems, since with the exception of a poet's very first piece of writing, every

work of poetry follows another. (And, as Bloom has reminded us, no poet stands in

isolation: every poem is responsive, no origin is originary.) Still, the serial nature of "The

Voice" is one of its key features. The silence that is broken by the vocative "Woman" in

line one is not a long silence but rather a calculated breath in a longer cycle of grieving.

Because "The Voice" is a poem whose object is not living (and therefore a fictive

presence in the poem from the very beginning), the problem of assuming Emma's voice

is related to the problem of understanding and accepting her death. Talking to Emma,

and getting her to talk within the poem, is an act akin to conjuring the dead—a not

uncommon fantasy for any mourner. If we compare the necessary seriousness and

desperation of Hardy's assumed speech to, say, the colloquial nature of poems whose

listener is living, the stylistic difference is palpable.43 The voice that Hardy is creating

has to exist outside of the normal limits of time, in a lyric elsewhere that draws on

42 Stewart, Poetry, 134.

43 Some examples might include Horace's Odes, Coleridge's "conversation" poems, and Frost's dialogues in North of Boston.

49

fantasy, dream, and memory. He is relying on something imagined for nearly all of his

expressive momentum. The invocation of "woman" at the beginning of "The Voice" is

not just a case of man calling on wife, of subject speaking to object, but a reaching out to

the dead for a source of poetic power during a period of debilitating grief. When this

power, only briefly granted, fades, the devastating falseness of the poem's initial

harmony, in which the poet and his wife seemed to "call" to one another, serves only as a

reminder of her death.

3. James Wright

If "The Voice" is a poem whose linguistic power hinges on its speaker's ability to

conjure the woman he invokes in the first line, James Wright's "Prayer to the Good Poet"

follows a similar arc. Published in the 1973 volume Two Citizens—a book largely

underappreciated by critics, partly because Wright himself disqualifies it as "a bust,"

"badly written," "obscure" and "self-indulgent"44—the poem addresses the Classical poet

Horace on the subject of the poet's dying father. Here are its first three stanzas:

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, my good secret, Now my father, a good man in Ohio, Lies alone in pain and I scarcely Know where to turn now.

Dave Smith, "James Wright: The Pure Clear Word, an Interview" in American Poetry Review 9 (1980): 30, cited in David Dougherty, James Wright (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 95. For an example of one of the damning critiques of Two Citizens, see J. D. McClatchy's "Sitting Here Strangely on Top of the Sunlight" in Twenty Questions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 136.

45 Dudley Wright, James's father, was 80 when he died in 1973. This poem was probably written during the previous year See letter to Gibbon Ruark, Dec 6, 1972 in James Wright, A Wild Perfection the Selected Letters of James Wright, ed Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Maley, with Jonathan Blunk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) James Wright himself would die of mouth cancer seven years after his father, at the age of 52

50

Fifty years he worked in that bitter factory He learned how to love what I found so ugly Ugliness What is it? A bitter Taste of one body

Now, if I ask anything, I would ask you How to gather my father into your bosom He knew, after all, how to love Italians Others said dagoes 6

Like so many poets before him, Wright, faced with impending personal loss, turns to

poetry as a form of mourning as well as consolation But Wright's poetic voice is

mediated here, as Hardy's was, by the voice of someone external to the immediate

circumstances of the speaker—this time not the recent ghost of the beloved (his father is

indeed not yet a "ghost"), but a distant literary precursor, Horace, whose poetic example

both directs and comforts the grieving son

Although Horace's actual voice does not appear in these lines or anywhere else in

"Prayer's" twelve stanzas, his influence on the sound of the lyric can be felt throughout

it is the very basis for the poet's own utterance In a letter to the poet Gibbon Ruark on

December 6, 1972, Wright begins to characterize the effect Horace has on his poetry

during this period (and on this poem in particular)

Gib, your immortal poem about your father brought finally to a focus my own wanderings about my own father, and that is what turned me to my Latin again, for some reason, my beautiful Horace, who is probably so great a poet because he understood and said we can probably live 7

Wright's belief in the ancient poet's "understanding" of his own situation as a poet and

mourner is crucial to his ability to turn his "wanderings" about his father into verse

James Wright, Above the River The Complete Poems (New Yoik Fanar, Straus and Giroux, 1990) 227, 11 1-12

7 James Wright, A Wild Perfection 380 Ruark's "immortal poem" is "Night Fishing," reprinted m his Passing Through Customs New and Selected Poems (Baton Rouge Louisiana State University Press, 1999)

51

Horace may not be the "my father" of Wright's opening lines, but he certainly is a father

to the poet—one who allows Wright a useful kind of transference in which the difficult-

to-render essence of the particular dying man is replaced by the voice of another father

figure whose presence is easier to conjure because his loss is not felt so acutely. About

the unconscious phenomenon of transference in therapeutics, Freud writes:

If someone's need for love is not entirely satisfied by reality, he is bound to approach every new person whom he meets with libidinal anticipatory ideas; and it is highly probable that both portions of his libido, the portion that is capable of becoming conscious as well as the unconscious one, have a share in forming that attitude. Thus it is a perfectly normal and intelligible thing that the libidinal cathexis of someone who is partly unsatisfied, a cathexis which is held ready in anticipation, should be directed as well to the figure of the doctor.48

Freud is referring to here to a phenomenon that occurs between analysand and analyst

when the patient is experiencing dissatisfaction in romantic love; but presumably a

similar kind of transference can happen when there is anxiety over the loss (or lack) of

parental love as well. Wright's poem, which figures a speaker displacing feelings of

love and grief towards a dying father onto a substitute father who is easier to identify

with is not just a method of mourning, but a lyric strategy—a formal way of arranging

poetic speech that most accurately reflects for his readers the feelings and unconscious

maneuvers that we associate with loss in our own lives.

Counterintuitively, Wright's "Prayer" to Horace begins in explication rather than

supplication. Instead of appealing directly to his newly substituted poetic "father" for

technique or inspiration, as would be the normal way when invoking an ancient source or

muse, the speaker of Wright's poem delays, detaining Horace, once he has called on him,

with the details of his father's illness and his own guilt: "Now my father, a good man in

48 Freud, "The Dynamics of Transference," in The Standard Edition, vol. 12, 110.

52

Ohio/ Lies alone in pain...." The intensely personal and emotionally-charged portrait he

paints of the elderly Dudley Wright in the first two stanzas—figuring not only his current

affliction but also the "ugliness" of his earlier, working life (he was a laborer at Hazel-

Atlas Glass Company)—arrives in surprising contrast to the formal, somewhat public-

sounding invocation in the first line. By calling out the Roman poet's full praenomen,

nomen and cognomen, Wright conditions the reader to expect an equally grand, fully

formed "prayer" to follow it. Instead, we get the speech of private confessional: "I

scarcely know where to turn now," and "Ugliness. What is it?" By placing the

grandiloquence of public address alongside the pain of private suffering, Wright is setting

into balance those two disparate factors that characterize so much of his poetry; here, the

outward poise of good, formal writing must contend with the psychological turmoil of the

speaker's inner life.

But what does Wright do with Horace once he has invoked him, since the actual

prayer only comes several lines down (with the self-deprecatingly tentative, "Now, if I

ask anything..." in line nine)? As Hardy does in "The Voice," Wright sets his poem into

motion by turning its imagined recipient into an integral part of its making. When

Wright's speaker invokes "Quintus Horatius Flaccus" in those first lines, he calls out

using Horace's actual cry—a succession of three hendecasyllabic lines (eleven syllables

long, or a close variant) followed by the clipped, five-syllable ending of the standard

Horace himself rarely performs this kind of formalized naming in his Odes, which frequently address themselves to real figures in the poet's life, but usually adopting only one of the individual's three names.

53

sapphic stanza used frequently in the Odes Not only is such a stanza significant

because it is Horatian, therefore allowing the speaker of the poem into the linguistic

realm of his predecessor, but it is also a form that is particularly appropriate to his subject

matter Just as the overall shape of Hardy's poem figures the dissolution of the voice that

the poem's speaker conjures in the way that its fourth stanza cuts short the long and

beautiful dactyls that preceded it, so Wright's sapphic stanza on a micro-level enacts the

feeling of loss he already anticipates, with its long first three lines m sharp contrast to the

sudden truncation of the fourth

Part of the "secret" Wright admits to in the first line, then, is his own Classicism,

which, in a poetry so rife with personal outcry, often in the form of free verse, reveals

itself only in subtle ways—in the sapphics of a poem like this one, for instance, or in the

quiet respect so many of his poems have for labor and rural life, or even in the way so

many of them seem to arrange their observations around some kind of overarching

aesthetic or moral demand 51 In a 1978 interview, Wright said,

As far as I'm concerned I'm a Horatian I believe in the 'whole' of a poem and the subordination of style to some wholeness of structure and some wholeness of vision about the nature of things

In "Prayer," Wright is hardly claiming that Horace, or even his own "Horatian-ness," is

some kind of secret (though we may suspect that the poet takes more than a little pleasure

50 Twenty-five of Horace's Odes are written in sapphics, a meter derived from the poetry of the Greek lyric poet Sappho Thirty seven others are written in alcaics, a similar form using hendecasyllabic lines but without the shorter fragment at the end of the stanza Several of Wright's stanzas seem like a mixture of the sapphic and the alcaic (for instance, when the third line is 9 rather than 11 syllables long) For a well-annotated Latin text that describes these meters, see Horace The Odes, ed Kenneth Quinn (London Macmillan Education Ltd, 1980)

51 For a fuller account of Wright's Classicism, see Peter Campion, "I Have a Secret with Myself James Wright's Classicism" in Parnassus Poetry in Review 29, no 1-2 (2005) 272-291

59 Quoted in Campion, "I Have a Secret with Myself"

54

in announcing Horace's full Latin name when others use merely the shortened Anglicized

version), but rather that his debt to the earlier poet is manifest secret-/y—like his quiet

doubling of "Now" and "now" in lines two and four of the first stanza of "Prayer," a

repetition that is reminiscent of the "iam... iam... " construction so frequently found in

Latin verse.53 The poem may be addressing Horace, but it does so by assuming his poetic

mannerisms, so that the speaker's voice in the poem and the object of its invocation seem

for a time blended. For Wright's poetic speaker, this identification, on a formal level,

with a "father" and hero who lived at a great distance from him presumably lessens the

pain of knowing that he will lose his actual father soon. The pleasure in using "Quintus

Horatius Flaccus," as Horace would have been addressed during his own lifetime, allows

this speaker to transport himself into a prior world far removed from his grief; Wright's

invocation—and subsequent identification through formal devices—provides him and his

reader access to the admired "elsewhere" of his mentor where his grief is held at bay. In

the poem, this distance may temporarily relieve the speaker from some of the pain of

mourning; but it may also be pleasurable to a reader who is attuned to the way in which

identifying with a revered hero can mitigate the suffering that comes with losing someone

else. In this way the formal elements of lyric illustrate palpably for the reader how

intrapsychic defenses against loss take place. And so even as Wright's speaker is initially

reluctant to make explicit demands of his addressee ("If I ask anything, I would ask

you..."), he makes use of Horace's voice in a more subtle and elemental way—a way that

is similar to how Herbert incorporates God into his verse, or how the mourner of Hardy's

elegy both listens to and sounds Emma's call.

i.e. "even now, at every moment," or "at one time...at another," etc.

55

When Wright's speaker finally does ask his tentative question of Horace, making

his prayer an active one, the utterance feels strange: "I would ask you/ How to gather my

father into your bosom." Why not ask Horace "how to gather me in your bosom"? After

all, it is the speaker of the poem, not his father, who "hardly know[s] where to turn." Or,

if it must be the father who is gathered—as if he could join the pagan Horace in heaven—

why not ask Horace himself "to gather" his father rather than asking him "how to gather,"

implying that the speaker must do the gathering, even if it is into Horace's bosom? If the

action is to be performed by the poem's speaker, not Horace, then we are to assume that

it must be a kind of poetic gathering, about which Horace is equipped to advise. As such,

by framing his poem to Horace through his voice, the speaker ensures that his poetic

father will take at least some part in the gathering.5 Because the speech of the poem is in

fact informed by another, prior speech, "your bosom" becomes, in a way, both bosoms,

since the voice rendered in prayer is simultaneously spoken by the speaker as well as his

imagined listener.

For Wright, the project of making this kind of double prayer—in which both

himself and his object are the recipients—at the same time involves the somewhat

arduous task of drawing parallels between his own culture and Horace's. The majority of

the poem's middle stanzas are taken up by this process, which includes the poet's

absolving his father of blame in the common prejudices held against Italians in their Mid-

Western community (Horace is considered Italian, not Roman, in the poem for this very

reason). The poem's fourth through ninth stanzas perform this work:

54 The religiously symbolic word "gather" is not only important m "Prayer to the Good Poet" but is one of the key words in Wright's poetry in general. He uses it in several of the poems in Two Citizens, as well as in the title of his earlier volume Shall We Gather at the River (1968), and elsewhere

56

One good friend of mine, Bennie Capaletti, Told me how in a basketball game, one person Called him a dirty guinea, and Bennie Did not even slug him.

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, my good secret, Bennie Capaletti had the fastest Hands in that fast Ohio Valley. He could have killed him.

More than love, my father knew how to bear love, One quick woman a dark river of labor. He led me and my two good brothers To gather and swim there.

I still love the fine beauty of his body. He could pitch a very good Sunday baseball. One afternoon he shifted to left hand And struck out three men.

Every time I go back home to Ohio, He sits down and tells me he loves Italians. How can I tell you why he loves you, Quintus Horatius?

I worked once in the factory that he worked in. Now I work in that factory that you live in. Some people think poetry is easy, But you two didn't.55

Wright's turning from one subject to the next in these stanzas is indicative of his situation

in the first: "I scarcely/Know where to turn now." Already having addressed Horace as

well as having assumed his voice and poetic posture, Wright goes about "gathering" his

father by turning away from Horace (at least explicitly) and towards the important

elements of his father's life. Without limiting his poem to any one train of thought,

Wright moves from Bennie Capaletti (the poem's modern Horace, characterized by his

integrity and restraint), to his mother ("one quick woman"), to his brothers, to baseball,

Wright, Above the River, 227-28,11. 13-36.

57

to, finally, the factory near the all-encompassing Ohio River. The problem of "where to

turn" is indeed captured in the structure of these stanzas, which not only move abruptly

from one subject to the next but also figure their directional shifts through dramatic

enjambments. Wright is somewhat rambling here, and in places obscure (to use the

charge he made against himself), but at the very least these stanzas typify the emotional

state of a poet who is anxious to find a way of elegizing his father and therefore calls

upon and receives an external voice to guide him.

Once Wright comes around again to the subject of his father's factory in stanza

nine, the issue of making poetry—and particularly of the difficulty of making this

poem—rises to the surface again. By explaining to Horace (and himself) that he now

"work[s] in the factory that you live in," Wright translates the only image of labor that his

own father knows, the factory, into the language of poetry. Calling both himself and

Horace factory laborers, Wright begins to change, once more, the recipient of his poem's

address. Now, in stanzas ten and eleven, not only Horace but his real father is implored

to—two laborers in two factories along the banks of two rivers:

Easy, easy, I ask you, easy, easy. Early evening, by Tiber, by Ohio, Give the gift to each lovely other. I would be happy.

Now my son is another poet, fathers, I can go on living. I was afraid once Four loving fathers meeting together Would be a cold day in hell.5

The speaker's voice has split now; "easy, easy," he calls to one father, then, "easy, easy,"

to the other. His ability to realize both fathers, the biological and the poetic, laboring

56 Wright, Above the River, 228,11. 37-44.

58

assiduously beside their respective rivers is solace earned by the prior stanzas which

develop a lyric voice that is both his own and his mentor's. The prayer itself has changed

now: "Give the gift" (of poetry? of labor? of voice?) "to each lovely other," he asks his

two fathers. The gathering has transformed into a "gifting" that seems at first to be

exclusive of the poem's speaker; however, because the poetic voice is shared here among

the speaker and his two fathers, he is a recipient, too. Wright will complicate this

exchange further: "Now my son is another poet" he tells his "fathers." In a line that

recalls the description of Horace's saying "we can probably live" in Wright's letter to

Ruark, the poem's speaker explains, "I can go on living." By setting three laborers into

conversation with one another across time and generations (with Franz Wright, the son

and fourth father being "gathered" as well), and also by rationalizing his own poetic labor

as a legitimate inheritance to be passed along, the speaker of the poem is beginning to

work his way out of grief.57

As the need for Horace's presence diminishes, so does the poem itself. Because

this speaker's ability to communicate arises from his assumption of Horace's voice in the

original stanza, his shedding of the external voice means the end of this particular poetic

utterance. In the last stanza, the lyric voice separates fully from the voice of the "other":

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, my good father, You were just the beginning, you quick and lonely Metrical crystals of February.

CO

It is just snow.

57 We may flunk of this complex description of losing one father while also becoming a father a poetical narrative of defensive identification, in which, as Freud explains, the mourner, rather than immediately replacing his love for the lost object onto another object, instead "[withdraws it] into the ego" and thus "[establishes] an identification of the ego with the abandoned object " Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," m The Standard Edition, vol 14, 248-49

58 Wright, Above the River, 228,11 45-48

59

As a final farewell, the speaker acknowledges Horace's fatherhood as he plays with the

idea of beginnings (not only did Horace write nearer to "the beginning" of lyric poetry

itself, but he was also at "the beginning" of this poem). The enigmatic and beautiful

syntax of the second-to-last sentence changes the ancient poet back into a figment of the

poet's imagination in its emotionally-charged apposition "you quick and lonely metrical

crystals of February." Here Horace dissolves into "quick" poetical whiteness (the word

"quick" meaning both "fast" and also "living") much the way Hardy's Emma becomes

the "wind, oozing thin" in that poem's penultimate line. At the very moment the speaker

reassumes his own life—"I can go on living"—the voice he has conjured becomes "just

snow."5 By changing the second-person address of "Quintus Horatius Flaccus" into the

third-person "it" in the final line, Wright reenters the poem in his own speech; the

addressee, who was initially responsible for the poem's voice, is now entirely gone.

4. Frank Bidart

Raised on a potato farm in Bakersfield, California and educated at the University of

California, Riverside, Frank Bidart had early artistic inclinations towards film, not poetry.

"In college, I was determined to become a film director, and a serious film director," he

tells Mark Halliday in an interview in 1983.60 Such aspirations, even in light of his

achievements in the realm of contemporary poetry, do not seem wholly misplaced.

Indeed much of Bidart's poetry feels like it could be the script of a. serious film, with its

59 In Hardy's poem, the dissolution of the voice into the wind is less promising—not yielding new life for the mourner but rather the continuation of his series of elegies in some other meter and voice.

60 Mark Halliday, "Interview," in In the Western Night Collected Poems 1965-90 (New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 226.

60

shifting angles of perspective, its focus on speech, its attention to the nuance of character,

its tendency towards montage. Helen Vendler has even described Bidart's lyric in terms

of "cinematic flashes," : and it is true that the settings of many of his poems are

formulated in terms of "scenes" in which characters from life come and go, speak and fall

silent, like actors on a screen flashing in and out of view. And yet to talk about the

composition of Bidart's poems in relation to the editorial rendering of films is perhaps to

overestimate his poetry's visual component. Bidart's poetry is, after all, more overtly

spoken than most poetry being published today. He is always reminding us, as he does in

his poem "Borges and I," that poetry is a space "where voice.. .has replaced silence."

The unusual punctuation and typography of his verse, with its bursts of italics and

striking capitalizations, speak especially to the primacy of Bidart's interest in how his

speakers sound. "Everything in the prosody," Bidart says later in his interview with

Halliday, "is in service of the voice."63 It is not surprising, then, that the poems of

Bidart's that particularly emphasize "voice" have tended to be his most critically

acclaimed. These include, among others, his extraordinary dramatic monologues and

three of his longest poems, the "First," "Second," and "Third Hour[s] of the Night."

To describe Bidart's qualities of voice is not necessarily to describe Bidart's

voice. Since very early on in his career, this poet's method for composing poetry has

often included the strategy of assuming voices that are not his own. Writing in somebody

else's speech and tone has arguably been Bidart's most distinguishable poetic idiom since

61 Vendler, "Frank Bidart," in The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 430.

62 Bidart, "Borges and I," in Desire (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 9-10.

63 Halliday, "Interview," 235.

61

his very first book Although much of the poetry in Golden State (1973) is

autobiographical, the opening poem begins in the speech of an "other," a necrophihac

child-murderer, "Herbert White"

"When I hit her on the head, it was good,

and then I did it to her a couple of times,—64

An auspicious, if unlikely, beginning for a poet just starting to develop his own style

And yet over his next three collections, this "style" would be partly determined by his

surprising willingness to embody the voices of people and characters who might not

otherwise be heard There are all kinds of "others" in Bidart's poems—ranging from the

anorexic woman Ellen West, to the Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, to artists like Hector

Berlioz and Benvenuto Cellini, to Myrrha, the Cypnot princess in Ovid's

Metamorphoses Bidart's "others"—his voices—tend to be unhappy and sometimes

violent They are plagued with mental illness (in their convincingness they often raise the

question of what it means to be mentally ill), occasionally harm other people or

themselves, and usually speak in a full scale of emotional tenors that can be represented

by various typographical notations on the page

One thing that ties these disparate personas together across Bidart's books is their

particular interest in "making " Ellen West, for instance, is an amateur poet, Nijinsky,

Berlioz and Cellini are all professional artists (in ballet, music, and sculpture,

64 Bidart, "Herbert White," in Golden State, in In The Western Night Collected Poems 1965-1990 (New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 127 Quotation marks, italics, spacing and all other typographical signs are Bidart's own unless otherwise noted

65 For Helen Vendler's map of Bidart's typography in the "Nyinksy" monologue, see her "Frank Bidart," in The Music of What Happens, 424-30 In general, Bidart's usage of italics, capitalization and other notation is not uniform from poem to poem, and even within poems His punctuation, caps, italics, dashes, tend to vary and conespond as often to the poem's particular musical or lhythmic necessities as to its characters' tones oi attitudes at any given moment

62

respectively), and Myrrha, though not an artist by trade, appears not only as the main

subject of the poem she inhabits but also as a moonlighting storyteller within it

(somewhat in the manner of Scheherazade, who herself appears briefly in Bidart's "First

Hour of the Night"). This interest in creating things, which is shared among so many of

Bidart's characters, is obviously a main concern of the poet, too. As Dan Chiasson has

pointed out in his article "Presence: Frank Bidart," this poet seeks to represent himself by

"fill[ing] pre-existing forms" (be they characters from history, myth, etc) whereby his

own voice and the voice he assumes "mutually remake each other." 7 The voices spoken

by the subjects of his poems are not always like his own, but they often at the very least

share in the poet's desire to make art out of self-expression.

I describe in these next several pages how "The Second Hour of the Night"

achieves self-expression for its own speaker through a series of repeated beginnings in

which that speaker temporarily takes on voices that are not his own. Like the other

examples of assumed voice I have explored in this chapter, Bidart's poem is written

during a period in the poet's life that renders him particularly emotionally vulnerable—he

is writing, after all, about the death of a friend.68 What differentiates "The Second Hour

of the Night" from Bidart's other poems of assumed voice is that here, unlike in "Ellen

The topic of "making" art is taken up more directly in Bidart's Star Dust, in which ars poeticas like "Hammer," "Lament for the Makers," and "The Poem as Veil" explicitly address the process of creating art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). As for the last poem in the book, "The Third Hour of the Night," which in its opening lines implies that the first and second "Hours" address "sex and metaphysics," the poet tells Adam Travis in an interview (reproduced at the end of Star Dust) that it is "about making." "An Interview with Frank Bidart," 85.

7 Dan Chiasson, "Presence: Frank Bidart," in On Frank Bidart Fastening the Voice to the Page, ed. Liam Rector and Tree Swenson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007), 49-50. The phrase "fill pre-existing forms" is quoted from Bidart's poem "Borges and 1" in Desire (the line is repeated in "The Second Hour of the Night"), 9, 56.

68 Joe Brainard. Many of the poems in the volume Desire are elegies for Bramaid

63

West" or "The War of Vaslav Njinksy," the speaker's voice represents a version of

Bidart's "original" voice rather than somebody else's, even if he occasionally morphs

into and out of other personae along the way. Unlike the sustained voices that appear in

Bidart's dramatic monologues, the speaker of "The Second Hour of the Night" (as well as

the speaker of the "First" and "Third" Hours) comprises a lyric "self speaking from

within the private confines of the poem, not in the public company of a listener. Even

though at certain moments the voice of this "self changes to embody the voices of his

subjects (Hector Berlioz first, then Ovid, then Myrrha), it always re-emerges later in the

verse, the way Hardy's and Wright's voices re-emerge out of the assumed tenors of

Emma and Horace at the end of their poems. By contrast, the voices that speak in

Bidart's dramatic monologues are not actually "assumed" in the way that God or Emma

or Horace is assumed. Because the desired effect of the dramatic monologue is in fact for

the reader to believe that the poem's speaker is the character uttering the voice (rather

than a lyric self who is merely imitating that character), the speaker of such a poem

cannot slip into and out of character the way speakers in Bidart's "Hours" so effectively

do.69 What is astonishing about the voice in the "Hours" is the fact that its integrity as a

lyric self can be compromised by fits of memory, literary influence, or association, each

It is worth noting that although the three poems Bidart numbers as "Hours of the Night" are connected to each other in terms of form, they can also be read m isolation from one another. They were written over a period spanning seventeen years, published in three separate collections, and deal with distinct subject matters (according to Bidart in the "Third Hour" and in a subsequent interview, they address "metaphysics," "sex," and "making," respectively) Regarding the poems as a sequence, Bidart remarks to Adam Travis in his interview. "1 don't imagine the poems printed together as a series, one 'hour' read after another hour. They are more like symphonies you don't listen to Beethoven's symphonies consecutively, as you at least initially read the Iliad or even (perhaps) the Duino Elegies. But the fact that Beethoven's Fifth follows the Third and Fourth has meaning, as does the fact that the 'Pastorale' follows the Fifth." "Interview," 86

64

of which force it into assuming other identities that have voices of their own, and it will

still continually return.

"The Second Hour of the Night" accordingly begins in the lyric speaker's own

voice, uttering a phrase he will need to repeat and amend three times before arriving at

his real subject matter:

On such a night

after the countless

assemblies, countless solemnities, the infinitely varied voyagings in storm and in calm observing the differences

among those who are born, who live together, and die,

On such a night

at that hour when

slow bodies like automatons begin again to move down

into the earth beneath the houses in which they live bearing the bodies they desired and killed and now

bury in the narrow crawl spaces and unbreathing abrupt descents and stacked leveled spaces these used

bodies make them dig and open out and hollow for new veins whose ore could have said I have been loved but whose

voice has been rendered silent by the slow bodies whose descent into earth is as fixed as the skeletons buried within them

On such a night

at that hour in the temple of

delight, when appetite feeds on itself—

On such a night, perhaps, Berlioz wrote those pages

65

in his autobiography which I first read when my mother was dying...

Here we find a speaker sputtering into ignition, trying and re-trying his line "On such a

night" until the engine finally catches at the point where its voice no longer embodies the

lyric self, but rather is made indirect, changed into the persona of Berlioz. What these

distinct opening sections, which are separated through a series of dots (the poem as a

whole is also broken into three long "movements," the second and third of which are

numbered "II" and "III"), show us is a speaker feeling his way into poetry, as if his words

are merely tools of rhetoric working their way towards—but not yet entirely reaching—

meaning. "On such a night" is a phrase that nods to the originary myth of Bidart's

"Hours,"71 but it is also a form of anaphora, gesturing in the direction of the story that

will follow it but always re-beginning itself in the process. Thus each time the phrase is

repeated, it accrues new meaning before starting again: first we learn of "countless

assemblies," then of'"...that hour w/zen/slow bodies like automatons begin" (a partly

self-descriptive phrase), then of the "temple of/delight," and finally of Berlioz's dead

wife, who, Bidart's speaker tells us before launching into the story, stands in for his own

mother. The "Third Hour of the Night" begins with a similar kind of progression of

phrases, except in that poem there is more than just one:

When the eye

When the edgeless screen receiving light from the edgeless universe

70 Frank Bidart, "The Second Hour of the Night," in Desire, 27-28.

71 Frank Bidart mentions it in his interview with Travis—the "Hours" represent the twelve territories of the underworld the sun must pass through before morning, written in the Book of Gates on the tomb of the Egyptian king Seti I, 85 Bidart also mentions Seti's tomb in the short lyric, "Book of Night," which directly precedes the "First Hour" in In the Western Night, 182.

66

When the eye first

When the edgeless screen facing

outward as if hyptnotized by the edgeless universe

When the eye first saw that it72

Starting a poem the way he does in these two "Hours," by the repetition and slow

accretion of words and phrases, Bidart is able to create a fugue-like reverie through

which the speaker can interleave other "selves" that temporarily embody—and, in the

poem, displace—his own. Like harmonies, these selves are both complementary to his

own lyric voice and also distinct from it.

If we think of the beginning of "The Second Hour of the Night" as a kind of

fugue, then, in which particular melodies weave through and around each other within the

verse, Bidart's assuming a composer's voice in the relatively short first "movement" of

the poem is not a wholly un-autobiographical act; lyric, after all, in its original sense is a

form of musical composition.74 But what seems surprising about the four pages that

Bidart devotes to Berlioz is the nature of the story they tell. It is not in fact a tale of

Berlioz's own life or art (in which the comparison between Bidart's lyric self and the

composer would be easier to draw) but his meditations and recollections about Harriet

Smithson, his late wife—her rise to fame on the Paris stage, her fall, and the misery and

sickness that would ruin her spirit as well as their relationship in the years before her

11 Bidart, Star Dust, 37, 11 1-7.

73 This poetic act of embodiment will be mirrored in the poem's real act of embodiment m its third and final section, where, after leaving Berlioz and Myrrha behind, the lyric speaker asks his dead lover to "inhabit [his] body." Bidart, Desire, 58

74 Bidart in fact writes a poem more explicitly of this nature, called "Little Fugue," m Star Dust, and it does resemble his form at the beginning of the "Hours," repeating a few short phrases ("at birth you were handed a ticket" and "or say " m particular) and changing them as they encounter one another. Star Dust, 9.

67

death. There is not space here to treat Bidart's retelling of Berlioz's story at length, but

suffice it to say that not only is his relation of Smithson's life not in any obvious way

analogous to the situation of his own speaker-as-artist, but it is also seemingly far from

the story of his mother's life and death, to which he ties it "inextricably" in the first few

lines.75 Without making his reader privy to any particular likeness that may actually exist

between the two women (Smithson and the poet's mother), Bidart allows us to feel

further and further alienated from his poem's original persona and closer and closer to

Berlioz, expanding what is already a great distance between the voice who spoke "On

such a night" and the voice speaking now. Berlioz's voice in this section represents a

poetic remove in which the autobiographical urge that usually drives the lyric self is

postponed indefinitely—a postponement which actually spurs on rather than squelches

the poet's productivity. The effect is not unlike the intrapsychic process by which the

repression of one particular thought can effectively necessitate the invention of a new

one—or even several new ones. As readers, part of our pleasure in encountering this

analogy in the poem may come from our conscious appreciation of it, but part may also

come from our more instinctive attunement to what Bidart is doing and how it relates to

our own defensive mechanisms.

Such is the state of the speaker's voice when he slips out of the figure of Berlioz

at the end of the poem's first movement and briefly into himself again. What is surely

repressed (or, perhaps, displaced) is what has yet to surface anywhere—the speaker's

5 Bidart says the pages of Berlioz's autobiography "mextricably/call up/not only her death but her life:—" Desire, 28

76 Chiasson, in his commentary on the poem, attempts to reconcile the two voices by pointing out Bidart's "presence" behind the Berlioz in its "subtleties of pacing, timing, linear and prosodic organization " "Presence," 61

68

own story. Appearing in its stead is yet another tale seemingly unrelated to his own: at

the moment Berlioz's voice is released, the speaker's original opening resumes its steady

progression, this time becoming a prelude to the poem's twenty-five-page middle section

about a girl named Myrrha:

On such a night, at such an hour

she who still carries within her body the growing body made by union with what she once loved, and now

craves or 77

loathes, she cannot say —;

These lines near the end of the Berlioz section prepare us for what will comprise the

poem's second movement, the story of a Cypriot princess and her father Cinyras as told

by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. Here, the plot—a daughter's impregnation by her father

and her forbidden yet unrelenting sexual desire for him—is introduced by Bidart's own

lyric speaker, as if it were the story he had tried to begin in those initial, inconclusive

opening lines.

But the story does not continue in this "vein." Instead the speaker assumes the

voice of an outsider, a kind of Ovidian storyteller who is both present enough in the story

to render private emotional material but removed enough from the characters as well as

from the lyric self to narrate in the third person without interfering with their actions or

judging them. The "I" of the poem is buried temporarily, as Bidart tells us that

Ovid tells the tale:— or, rather, Ovid tells us that

Orpheus sang it in that litany of tales with which he

77 Bidart, "Second Hour," in Desire, 31-32.

69

filled the cruel silence...

Removed from himself, and removed also from Ovid who himself assumed the voice of

Orpheus, the speaker begins revealing Myrrha's incestuous desire and eventual

banishment in a voice wholly devoid of the poem's original persona and yet still in its

mode, with Bidart's characteristic punctuation and typographical notation. Some of

Ovid's own language remains—certain lines are translated directly, others amended

slightly—but much of the material is new. Here we will look at just one element of the

story that is invented by Bidart: that is, the way that much of the material the speaker

reveals about Myrrha is in fact made up by Myrrha herself, who acts in this tale (much

more than in Ovid's) as the poet's surrogate storyteller.79 Every night, Myrrha dreams up

a different beginning to the story of her fate, which is the consummation of her desire to

sleep with Cinyras:

In the earliest version whose making and remaking Myrrha remembers,

she and her father escape from Cyprus

in a small boat...80

Dreaming new "versions" of her own tale, "making" and "remaking" the consequences of

her desire (as if she were the poet assuming the tale from Orpheus), Myrrha discovers

that no matter how she begins her dream, it always ends the same way, with her father

"enter[ing] her"—an act that reflects Bidart's own position in assuming her story, and

occasionally her voice, for his poem.

7 Bidart, "Second Hour," in Desire, 32.

79 The embarrassing pun pairing the poet to the girl—"Frankinsence and Myrrh"—is never mentioned except for one use of the word "frankincense." Bidart, Desire, 54.

80 Bidart, "Second Hour," in Desire, 35.

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By likening his fate as artist to the fate of his subject, Bidart makes a profound

judgment about his own free will as a poet; there is little choice in "making" and

"remaking," he suggests, or rather, all choice within the making of a poem is an illusion.

No matter which way he begins, which "On such a night" culminates in the poem's

action, the story will still lead to the same place. The motion suggested by his repeated

beginning is captured in the terrifying refrain that describes Myrrha's own predicament as

she tries to avoid consummating her desire (a desire which comes to represent poetry

itself): "four steps forward then/one back, then three/back, then four forward.. .."81 She is

always moving, and indeed always deciding to move, but her location remains constant in

spite of it. Embodied by the speech of Bidart's Ovidian narrator, Myrrha laments for him

the futility of the poet's artistic vision:

.. .she can delay, he can delay because what is sweet about deferral is that what arrives

despite it is revealed as inevitable:—

The inevitability of Myrrha's sin, which counter-intuitively stands also for Bidart's poetic

achievement, turns into a crucial element of this poem's subject matter. The climax of

the poem in the moments just before Myrrha arrives at her father's bed puts forth, in

addition to Myrrha's defense, the motives behind the poet's own need to assume other

voices in his poem:

what draws her forward is neither COMPULSION nor FREEWILL : —

or at least freedom, here choice, is not to be imagined as action upon

81 Bidart, "Second Hour," in Desire, 38-41.

82 Bidart, "Second Hour," in Desire, 36.

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preference: no creature is free to choose what allows it its most powerful, and most secret, release:

I fulfill it, because I contain it— it prevails because it is within me—

it is a heavy burden, setting up longing to enter that realm to which I am called within...

For Bidart, that "most powerful, and most secret, release" is more than sexual desire

(even if, as Chiasson reminds us, this poem is "an elegy for a man Bidart loved but never

made love to").84 The battle between "compulsion" and "freewill" in art is also at stake

here, made explicit not only in Myrrha's submission to her sexual desire but, perhaps

more important, in the inevitability of the narrative she is able to make because of it.

Here the compulsion to write is figured as sexual desire; just as "no creature is free to

choose," the poet cannot preside over his subject matter or his voice. Instead, Bidart

argues, his voices "prevail" because they are "within" him, and when he "fulfills" them

he does so not through choice but because he has to. These remarks are full of the weight

of manifesto; they defend little less than the strength of the poet's own artistic vocation.

In these lines—which are among only a handful in his Myrrha story that revert to the first

person "I" of the lyric speaker—Bidart asserts his share in the lyric tradition—a "realm"

toward which he is "called" by the very voices he inhabits there.

In the last section of the "Hour," when the speaker returns from his remove,

releasing his Ovidian narrator and resuming the story that still begins "On such a night,"

he is finally prepared (because he believes it is inevitable) to voice, as himself, the ending

83 Bidart, "Second Hour," in Desire, 46.

84 Chiasson, "Presence," 63.

72

of "The Second Hour of the Night." The tale includes a narration of his own, forbidden

sexual desire, which, because the beloved is dead, can only occur in "dream, half-/dream,

half-/light," the way Hardy's hearing of Emma can only occur within the static noise of

falling leaves and wind:

When I look I can see my body away from me, sleeping.

I say Yes. Then you enter it

like a shudder as if eager again to know what it is to move within arms and legs.

I thought, I know that he will return it85

Now the sexual act reinvents the poetic one, Bidart's speaker at once describing his

desire but also the process by which he himself as the agent "enters" the poem and moves

within it. When the speaker asserts finally that he knows his body will be returned, he

knows because the act of "returning" is analogous to the act of ending, which he has

discovered, by assuming the character of Myrrha, is inevitable. Completing his own

poem, Bidart finally makes explicit this connection between the involuntariness of sexual

desire and the need to write poetry:

infinite the sounds of poems

seeking to be allowed to S UB MI T,— that this

dust become seed

like those extinguished stars whose fires still give us light

Bidart, "Second Hour," in Desire, 58.

Bidart, "Second Hour," in Desire, 59.

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The poet, out of his wish to make something, surrenders to the "sounds of poems," their

voices. In this "Hour," which tells a story not only about forbidden sexual desire but also

about the loss of a friend, the poet's need for remove in the form of an outside lyric voice

"seeking to be allowed to S U B M I T" is particularly great. Bidart achieves his lyric self

here in the only way he can, by creating a lyric elsewhere via other people's voices that

are similar to his own and discovering his own story within the intimate details of theirs.

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Chapter Two

KEEPING THE SUBJECT AT BAY

A moving translation of an unfinished poem by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy appeared

recently in The New Yorker. To the majority of the magazine's readership, who would be

unfamiliar with Cavafy's life and work, these lines must have seemed puzzling. Unlike

most "unfinished" or "unpublished" poems that nevertheless seem polished when they

posthumously appear in magazines, Cavafy's lines sound and feel tentative. The poet

introduces a scene and hints at an ensuing narrative, but trails off before pursuing either.

Yet, in The New Yorker, the poem is titled, formatted and made to look complete:

IT MUST HAVE BEEN THE SPIRITS

It must have been the spirits that I drank last night, it must have been that I was drowsing, I'd been tired all day long.

The black wooden column vanished before me, with the ancient head; and the dining-room door, and the armchair, the red one; and the little settee. In their place came a street in Marseille. And freed, now, brazenly, my soul appeared there once again and moved about, along with the form of a sensitive, pleasure-bent youth— the dissolute youth: that, too, must be said.

It must have been the spirits that I drank last night, it must have been that I was drowsing, I'd been tired all day long.

My soul was released; the poor thing, it's always constrained by the weight of the years.

My soul was released and it showed me a sympathique street in Marseilles, with the form of the happy, dissolute youth who never felt ashamed, not he, certainly.1

1 C. P. Cavafy, "It Must Have Been the Spirits," trans. Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker (January 26, 2009).

75

Separated by a refrain that also serves as title, these two memories of a youth in Marseille

may well have been the underpinnings of what the author intended to be a much longer

and more developed piece. And yet The New Yorker editors and Cavafy's translator allow

the elements of the poem to stand alone as they are: enigmatic, raw, suggestive, rather

than finished. Why should it be so with these particular lines or this particular poem?

Part of the reason "It Must Have Been the Spirits" comes across so effectively

despite its being incomplete is that the scenario Cavafy starts off describing—a man who

is involuntarily removed from his room at home and delivered to the realm of memory—

is itself characterized by a more profound and psychological sense of unfinishedness. The

fact that the poet shifts the setting of his poem from one place to another presumably

occurs because unresolved or unfinished feelings about the person and event he

remembers are manifesting themselves unexpectedly. That a poem about shame,

dissolution, and involuntary remembrance would itself exist in an unfinished state is not

impossible to imagine (though this confluence of content and form was probably not

Cavafy's intention). Another reason that these fragmentary lines feel like a poem in spite

of their trailing off is that there are indeed many finished poems that sound like them.

Poets often write about the feeling of displacement or disorientation in this manner—that

is, by suddenly describing a shift in location or line of sight, or by initially keeping the

primary subject of their poem hidden from view, only to reveal it a few lines later—as the

poems explored in this chapter show. In the case of Cavafy's lines, the repressed or

displaced event he is aiming to conjure, a youth in Marseille, is mediated through a

catalytic "antechamber," the poet's house, where the image-making can take place.

76

By ironically claiming that his dramatic shift in place and time is caused by "the

spirits that [he] drank last night," Cavafy is raising interesting questions about poetic

process.2 For instance, how do important events from one's past, buried in the

unconscious, re-enter consciousness? What is the most genuine and effective way to

represent an unanticipated emotional event within the formal constraints of a poem? The

poet's light-hearted way of answering these concerns—to blame it on the drink—belies

his much sadder and more serious message about the permanence of feelings associated

with absence, shame, and loss, even when these feelings occur early in life. It is in fact

no wonder that his poem continues to withhold, as his mind does, the remembered event

at its beginning by hiding it within the walls of his house; Cavafy eases into what may

have been an emotionally difficult "vision" of Marseille by formally framing it in a space

that would be readily available to him without the pains of remembrance. Because

Cavafy associates the event he is describing with feelings of shame (the "youth" feels no

shame—but presumably he does), it may not be possible or desirable for him to begin his

poem describing it directly. As Cathy Caruth has explained about traumatic events that

are belated in their appearance to the conscious mind, because a flashback cannot be

produced at will, and because it is likely that the traumatic event it contains was not

originally experienced as traumatic during the moments that it actually happened, the

event, when it does occur, does not occupy its original space—only elsewhere. The

belated trauma is by its very nature a displaced event, since it "literally has no place.'"1'

2 The word "spirits" carries with it the sense that such displacements may have other-worldly sources, too.

3 Cathy Caruth, "Introduction," in Trauma, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 153.

77

This chapter explores three types of poetic strategies by which poets temporarily

and defensively withhold their primary subject matter, as Cavafy does above, within the

poem itself. Edward Thomas delays his description of the landscape of an English town

by temporarily mis-focusing his poem on the linguistic features of the town's name.

Anthony Hecht begins a poem about a hill in Poughkeepsie by first describing a market

in Rome. Elizabeth Bishop withholds the places, people, and things she means to

describe by disorienting her reader and sometimes overtly concealing her poetry's

primary object. Why do these poets, and others, make their subjects less directly

accessible to their readers, rather than more, and how do these concealments correspond

to the related intrapsychic phenomena of repression, denial, and displacement?

Freud writes about displacement in terms of the unconscious removal and

reappearance of "conceptions" within the mind:

A conception—or any other mental element—which is now present to my consciousness may become absent the next moment, and may become present again, after an interval, unchanged, and, as we say, from memory, not as a result of a fresh perception by our senses.5

This common transfer of "mental conceptions" from conscious to unconscious thought

and back forms the basis of the lyric displacements described in this chapter, too. Just as

a person may first repress, and then remember, an event from his early life, so the poet

can conceal and then reveal a particular object at some unexpected moment within the

poem based on stimuli set up to trigger the speaker's memory or unconscious thoughts.

When poets avoid, even for a short time, addressing the very subject they have willfully

4 Each of these poems at least partially conceals some element of violence—the Thomas is composed during wartime, Hecht mentions a gunshot, and Bishop refers obliquely to Spanish conquest (though it isn't her primary subject).

Sigmund Freud, "A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis," in A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. John Rickman (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 47.

78

taken up to describe (think of the eternal delay in Cavafy's unfinished plot), it often

corroborates, in aesthetic form, the human psyche's unconscious desire to un-vealize the

very experience they have set out to realize—to keep a particular conception at bay and

so prevent it from becoming actual. "Repression is a preliminary phase of

condemnation," Freud explains in his essay on "Repression." Elsewhere, he writes:

We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, or alienating him from actuality.... The neurotic turns away from reality because he finds it unbearable—either the whole or parts of it.7

While it would not be accurate to compare every poem to a neurotic gesture of repression

or denial or displacement, the concept Freud suggests here is certainly relevant to many

of the strategies that lyric poets—who use the same medium as analysands (language) to

relate their private experiences—employ in expressing poetic material, especially when it

causes anxiety or is displeasing in some way. Derrida has suggested that "writing is

unthinkable without repression," and it may follow that displacements (which support

repression) occurring within the bounds of poems themselves will be linked to that

original repression, since nearly every poem is, at least in part, a narration of the story of

its own making.

In keeping with the reflexivity of lyric poetry more generally, there are poems that

openly address the relation between psychological displacement and the formal qualities

of placement and orientation within texts. For instance, the final stanza of Seamus

Heaney's "The Aerodrome" (published in District and Circle, whose title, naming two

Freud, "Repression," m A General Selection, 89

7 Freud, "Formulations Regarding the Two Principles in Mental Functioning," in A General Selection, 38

Jacques Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing and Difference, trans Alan Bass (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1978), 226.

79

parallel underground train routes in London, implies the poet's concern with questions of

placement and travel), describes both "self and "love" in terms that could equally be

used to map out the placement and displacement of images and events within the verse:

If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.9

These concluding lines, which confess a kind of personal disorientation, are explicitly

interested in how the "stance" of the self can be mirrored in the stance of "markings" on

the page. But the poem begins very differently, with a narrative account of the changes

that occurred on the landscape around "Toome Aerodrome" during the fifty years that

followed its use in World War II. Heaney then retrieves from memory an image of the

original place in 1944, where he experienced, during that year, a brief but traumatic

fantasy of being rejected by his girlfriend for a fighter pilot. The poem's ending, above, a

meditation on love, comes directly out of this fantasy and builds on several metaphors,

the most important of which is the idea that poetical images and thoughts are placed and

arranged in poems in the same manner as they are in our memories (both are described

here in aeronautical terms). Just as the image of the wartime aerodrome gives way to a

recollection of the speaker and his girlfriend only after he has conjured the more palatable

image of Toome's present day landscape (the aerodrome buildings now constitute "The

Creagh Meadows Industrial Estate"), the memories themselves come about not linearly

but "here and there and now then." "Stance," or the poet's relative position with regard

to his material, is as important here as narrative or plot. Heaney's poetic conceit—the

9 Heaney, "The Aerodrome," in District and Circle, 12.

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pilot's skills at measuring his own location—applies not only to the "self and to "love"

but also to his poetic processes.

D. H. Lawrence similarly devotes his poem "Piano" to describing this feeling of

spatial and temporal disorientation—Heaney's "here and there and now and then." The

poem replays a flashback to the poet's childhood three separate times, once per stanza:

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

For Lawrence, the sound of a singer (which is in turn the model for his own poetic song)

triggers his memory, removing him to a childhood home where he sits underneath the

piano. Pressing her feet, just as the poet now measures his own metrical feet, the young

boy hears the sound of his mother playing. Lawrence effects the poetic transport between

"now" and "then" in three ways: first the singing "[takes him] back down the vista of

years"; then the song "betrays [him] back"; and finally, the past is simply "upon [him]."

Each of these descriptions is noticeably passive: instead of searching for the past, the poet

"is taken," "is betrayed." The poem is as much about the poet's experience of being

removed from present to past—and his final, active, weeping for it—as it is about the

D. H. Lawrence, "Piano," in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (New York: W. W Norton and Company, 1970), 1177-78.

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facts of the past themselves. Each stanza allows ample space for the poet's present space

of making (his antechamber, to return to the example of Cavafy's house) as well as for

the space of the withheld or repressed event (the old room and the mother's playing).

Lawrence's poem, like the poems explored as case studies in this chapter, uses a

temporary poetic space in order to catalyze a description of an other, an elsewhere, that

emerges at the poem's core.

The poets whose work I discuss in this chapter withhold, repress, and displace

events, images, and locations within their poems in different ways. Edward Thomas

delays addressing both the significance and the landscape of a town called "Adlestrop"

by examining the appearance and the sound of its name rather than the place itself But

his predilection for linguistic play is in fact a method for developing a particularly strong

sense of place; his delay in writing the landscape is part of his strategy for conjuring it

later on. Anthony Hecht, having fought in World War II and having dealt with the effects

of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of that experience, poignantly conveys an

unexpected vision from his memory as one who is particularly acquainted with the

sudden arousal of conflictual feelings from the past. The displaced but all-important

object in Hecht's poem—a hill—has little to do with his experience in the war (the hill is

a remembered landscape from his boyhood), but his understanding of repression, which

comes from his disorder as well as years of treatment in and study of psychoanalysis,

facilitates his use of flashback as an aesthetic form. Elizabeth Bishop, a person

"displaced" from Canada to Florida to South America and back, situates the images and

settings of her poems in careful ways: in the poems I discuss, almost no object or scene is

ever fully revealed, and a further exploration of Bishop's way of "painting" what she

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sees—both literally (in her watercolors) as well as in her poems—suggests that her

preferred way of revealing the actual is by initially compromising its clarity.

In a move similar to the psyche's way of using defensive maneuvers adaptively—

to allow for the safe-enough expression of conflictual wishes—these three poets use

formal and aesthetic displacements as a way of bringing inaccessible content into focus

without losing sight of its special status as repressed or withheld or displaced (in doing

so, such content appears more crucial to the poem, not less). Often, a poet's most

effective way to approach a subject of particular psychological import is to avoid or

displace it initially. We find that that the pressure of the psychological is expressed in the

poem in part by being occluded. Whether this strategy comes about because of a personal

experience of trauma or pain, or a more general belief that the world is essentially

inaccessible to the human eye, or a notion that language alone can endow poets with the

ability to know and create, Thomas, Hecht, and Bishop find ways to communicate that

involve temporarily and defensively compromising their own modes of expression.

5. Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas, a Welshman living in England and then France, became best known for

his descriptions of landscapes and objects that were initially foreign to him. Out of all of

Thomas's one-hundred-and-forty poems, none is more frequently anthologized or

admired than "Adlestrop," about the poet's brief experience at a small train depot in rural

England. It was written in January 1915, just three months after Thomas began writing

poems and seven months before he would enlist in the Artists' Rifles (he would later

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serve as a Lieutenant m England and eventually in France).11 The already-accomplished

prose author began writing poetry under the guidance and persuasion of his good friend

Robert Frost, who had just moved back to the United States after having lived in England

1 9

for several years. Both the form of "Adlestrop" and its conversational tone reflect

Frost's influence:

Yes, I remember Adlestrop— The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. No one left and no one came On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.13

Thomas would write more than one-hundred-and-forty poems in the next two-and-a-half years before being killed by a stray shell in the Battle of Arras (in April of 1917)

12 Thomas reviewed Frost's second book, North of Boston, favorably in several British publications The friendship was the closest either man would have with another writer, Frost writes in a letter to Amy Lowell " the closest I ever came in friendship to anyone in England or anywhere else m the world I think was with Edward Thomas who was killed at Vimy last spring He more than anyone else was accessory to what I had done and was doing We were together to the exclusion of every other person and interest all through 1914—1914 was our year I never had, I never shall have anothei year of friendship " The Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed Lawrence Thompson (New York Holt, Rmehart, and Winston, 1964), 220

13 Edwaid Thomas, "Adlestrop," in The Poems of Edward Thomas, ed Peter Sacks (Handsel Press New York, 2003), 35

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The poem is determinedly measured, Thomas having distilled these stanzas from a more

journalistic diary entry recording the incident how it actually occurred.14 Readers have

always appreciated the quiet comedy of Thomas's title—a name at once so properly

English and yet also so silly—whose two halves, "Adle" and "strop," both convey

associations with being "addled" and "stroppy" and phonetically imply the sense that

people or things might "stop" or "drop" in to this town in order to be "idle." (The stillness

and silence on the platform corroborate this latter notion more subtly.) Rhythmically,

Thomas uses highly punctuated and varied syntax in the first two stanzas, including the

initial comma after "Yes," the dash, the qualifying phrase "the name," and the

exaggeratedly short sentences, along with jerky line breaks to effect the physical sense of

an "express" train pulling up unexpectedly at what should have been a "local" stop.

But any local charm that Adlestrop—the town—has remains elusive to the poet at

first. No people populate the place except for those already on the train, and the train

itself, with its awkwardly noisy passengers ("someone cleared his throat") seems almost

hostile to the depot, "hissing" steam there the way a frightened animal might hiss in

defense when entering another animal's territory. In fact, Adlestrop's status as "local" in

the poem is largely determined by the rail schedule, not by any personal assessment of

the town's size or its surrounding country on the part of the poem's speaker. And yet

something causes the speaker's perception of the place to shift midway through the poem.

How is it that "Adlestrop" can change from a bare train platform filled with unpleasant

1 The diary notes, below, are reprinted in John Bayley's essay, "The Self in the Poem," in The Art of Edward Thomas, ed Jonathan Barker (Bridgend, Mid Glamorgen: Poetry Wales Press, 1987), 43: "we stopped m Adlestrop, through the willows could be heard a chain of blackbirds' songs at 12.45 and one thrush and no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam. Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass, willowherb and meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between two periods of travel—looking out on grey dry stones between metals and over it all the elms, willows and long grass—one man clears his throat—a greater than rustic silence, No house in view. Stop only for a minute till signal is up."

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noises in the poem's first half to a place of meadows, clouds, and birds in the last?

Counter-intuitively, this transformation occurs as the result of the speaker's

insistence on the "name" Adlestrop (which he repeats three times including the title)

rather than by observing its visual qualities as a place. "Yes," Thomas tells his reader (or

some other listener with whom he is speaking in the poem), "I remember Adlestrop—the

name," and later, "What I saw/ was Adlestrop—only the name..." By acknowledging

that his initial remembrance consists merely in a linguistic signifier, rather than, say, in

the place's physical appearance or some other sensory detail, Thomas suggests two

things: first, that the ensuing description of the place is informed somehow by this textual

marker, and second, that a place's name and its actual locality can be separate entities

(since the former seems to exist without the latter in his mind). The first idea, that

language is somehow crucial to Thomas's ability to create a landscape, is important to

our understanding of the transformation that occurs between the characterization of

"Adlestrop" as a word at the beginning of the poem and the further description of the

countryside Thomas later sees or imagines around it. The blackbird, the meadows, the

clouds—all these seem to have developed from the poet's triple conjuring of the name

"Adlestrop" just preceding them; they consist, somehow, in the name. Part of Thomas's

ability to realize them is contingent upon the power of his own poetic materials—

language and text. The making of "Adlestrop"—the poem—thus occurs in two parts:

first the poet remembers "Adlestrop" as a linguistic object; only from there he is able to

establish its features as a place (i.e. the "cloudlets" and the birdsong).

There are other examples in Thomas's writing of this kind of name-object

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displacement, including the following passage about "Hereford" in his autobiographical

essay "This England":

It was a part of the country I had never known before, and I had no connections with it. Once only, during infancy, I had stayed here at a vicarage, and though I have been told things about it which it gives me, almost as if they were memories, a certain pleasure to recall, no genuine memory survives from the visit. All I can say is that the name, Hereford, had somehow won in my mind a very distinct meaning; it stood out among county names as the most delicately rustic of them all, with a touch of nobility given it long ago, I think, by Shakespeare's 'Harry of Hereford, Lancaster, and Derby.'15

Thomas recalls "the name, Hereford," having "distinct meaning" for him long before he

had any knowledge of the actual place. Interestingly, it is the sonic qualities of the word,

"Hereford," and their associations in prior literature that imbue it with significance.

Thomas hears a kind of "nobility" in the sound of the name said aloud—it is "delicate"

and "rustic" and it reminds him of Shakespeare (in whose plays he presumably

remembers seeing the word in written form). But these evaluations have no bearing on

any real experience with Hereford as a physical place. They derive solely from qualities

that a poet would consider to be important: music, nature, and tradition.

A similar kind of dissociation between word and object occurs at the end of a

letter Thomas writes to Frost in May of the following year:

By the way, there was a beautiful return of sun yesterday after a misty moisty morning, & everything smelt wet & warm & cuckoos called, & I found myself with nothing to say but 'God bless it'. I laughed a little as I came over the field, thinking about the 'it' in 'God bless it.'16

15 Edward Thomas, "This England," originally printed in The Nation (November 7, 1914) and reprinted in Elected Friends: Robert Frost and Edward Thomas to One Another, ed. Matthew Spencer (New York: Handsel Books, 2003), 31.

1 Edward Thomas, letter on May 3, 1915, in Elected Friends, 52.

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Thomas is offering Frost a window into his poetical sensibilities. On this particular

morning, after observing the sun "return" from a mist, and smelling the earth, and hearing

birdsong, it is not, finally, these natural phenomena that capture the poet's fancy as he

continues to walk, but rather his own linguistic determination of them in the phrase "God

bless it." Why Thomas laughs over the word "it" remains a mystery; possibly he finds

humor in his choice of the singular pronoun, "it," (rather than the plural, "them") for such

a varied set of observations, or maybe he laughs self-deprecatingly because of his failure

to secure a more specific or descriptive word, or maybe the word "it" has come to

embody the landscape so completely that Thomas laughs at the scene itself when he

speaks the word that signifies it. What is clear is that in his moment of pastoral

perambulation, the poet is far more interested in the particular language he chooses to

represent the things he sees than he is in those things themselves. Mary Jacobus gives us

a partial explanation for this kind of internal landscaping when she suggests that "looking

at landscape involves ideas about absence and distance, and can even imply looking

away. In this sense, landscape is less what we see in the mind's eye than what we don't

see—our peculiar, unconscious way of relating to an inner world and to its internal

objects."17 The "return of sun" offers Thomas the possibility for internal "reverie" as

much as it shows him exterior beauty; as a poet who thinks and imagines through the

medium of words, Thomas values this "interior landscape" of text over the physical scene

around him.1

17 Mary Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 54.

Jacobus, Psychoanalysis, 54.

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Several of Thomas's poems explicitly address his interest in how words and

names can remain distinct from their corresponding physical objects or places. For

instance, the first stanza of the poem "Old Man," about a plant by that name:

Old Man, or Lad's-love, —in the name there's nothing To one that knows not Lad's-love, or Old Man, The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree, Growing with rosemary and lavender. Even to one that knows it well, the names Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is: At least, what that is clings not to the names In spite of time. And yet I like the names.1

Here the herb has not one but two names, the significance of each diminished by the

existence of the other. After all, how accurate can the name "Old Man" be if the same

plant is simultaneously called Lad's-love (which, logically speaking, means "young

girl")? Thomas writes, with Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" in mind, that "the names"—

meaning, in a sense, all names—"half decorate, half perplex," and indeed so it seems

these two names do, as well as "Adlestrop" and "Hereford" and others. For Thomas,

names are both embellishments and also informative. "And yet I like the names," he

writes, acknowledging that on the specific level of this poem, they give rise to his

particular sentiments, and, more generally, that poems are in a sense "names" themselves

in so far as they half-decorate and half-perplex the material within them. Poems, because

of their formal properties and their indirect nature, necessarily remain at a distance from

what they describe, no matter how immediate they sound or feel.

Looking again to "Adlestrop," we might notice how Thomas's speaker in fact

distances himself even farther from Adlestrop (the place) than he does just by delaying

his description of its physical features. Because the poem is spoken from the perspective

19 Thomas, "Old Man," in Poems, 10.

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of memory, rather than immediate experience, the sensory details that Thomas provides

at the end of it are even more removed from his present situation writing the poem.

When the name finally conjures up those images of birds and willows and clouds, it does

so only in recollection. And Thomas's starting with the word "yes" indicates that his

remembrance occurs at another person's prompting rather than naturally; the layers of

temporal and linguistic remove between this speaker and his actual moment of being in

Adlestrop's train station are crucial to the success of this poem. Only by setting himself

so far apart from his material, only by using his poem to "decorate" and "perplex" (rather

than simply to represent) Adlestrop, can Thomas make so much out of such a tiny

moment in time.

Several of Thomas's best critics have tried to link this kind of distancing impulse

to the poet's particular mode of self-expression, arguing that the poet's willingness—

even preference—for removing himself from the "scene" of his poem helps him effect,

ironically, a stronger and more natural-seeming presence in it. John Bayley calls this

phenomenon Thomas's "disappearance" in poems.20 He notices in "Adlestrop" "an

elusive sense of personality fulfilled and come to fruition at last in its own

disappearance" since the poet is replaced, in the end, by the singing of the birds, and he

argues more generally that Thomas has a habit of establishing his poetic "self in his

early poems "by means of his own removal from [them]." Similarly, Peter Howarth

writes that Thomas's "self-expression" is "inseparable from self-dispossession" and uses

Bayley, "The Self," 41.

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the term "ecstasy" to describe this poet's ideal state of mind when writing.21 To these

accounts about Thomas's propensity for self-removal I will add the following point: that

when he "disappears," or appears in a state of "ecstasy" (that is, himself outside of

himself) in his poems, he is mimicking the necessary dislocation of language—words and

names—from its intended referents. Removing, and acknowledging the removal, of the

name of an object (or place) from the object itself is the way that Thomas poetically

reconstructs material from the physical world.

Because Thomas reflects his own way of relating to the world around him in the

way words relate to their objects, his poems often address the theme of "words" directly.

The word "word" appears frequently in his work, and there are entire poems based on it,

like this one, excerpted here, called "The Word":

One name that I have not— Though 'tis an empty thingless name—forgot Never can die because Spring after Spring Some thrushes learn to say it as they sing. There is always one at midday saying it clear And tart—the name, only the name I hear.

The name suddenly is cried out to me From somewhere in the bushes by a bird Over and over again, a pure thrush word.

Not human words but the word of a thrush is Thomas's subject, and yet we see a similar

displacement between sound (or song) and its referents. Thomas is insistent that the

word—he calls it here, as in "Adlestrop" and other poems "the name"—is "empty" and

"thingless," at least at first. And yet this thinglessness does not diminish language's

21 Peter Howarth, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 68. Howarth takes his cue from Thomas's poem "Words" (see below, in text) where the word "ecstasy' is used by the poet himself.

22 Thomas, "The Word," in Poems, 103,11. 11-16, 20-22.

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power, but quite the opposite: we get the sense, in the last line, that words' emptiness,

their independence from what they represent, is a kind of "purity" that makes them

memorable and more meaningful to the poet. Thomas uses this same idea of poetic words

as being initially pure of their uses in his poem called "Words":

Out of us all That make rhymes, Will you choose Sometimes— As the winds use A crack in the wall Or a drain, Their joy or their pain To whistle through— Choose me, You English words?

In these Miltonic opening lines, Thomas invokes "English words" rather than the English

"Muse." The choice is important in the way it suggests how poems form in Thomas's

mind; that is, he is not struck by some meaning or vision or object, which he then turns

into poetry using words. Rather, Thomas is struck, or "chosen", by the words

themselves—he is a conduit through which words can choose and make their meanings,

rather than the other way around.

Applying this logic to "Adlestrop," we can see how it is possible that

"Adlestrop—the name" is the catalyst (like Cavafy's room, his antechamber) that gives

rise to the landscape that grows up around it (and likewise how "Old Man"/"Lad's-love"

is a name first, an herb only later—the plant being in some ways cultivated from the very

texture of language itself). The last stanza of the poem only partially enters this

landscape. Thomas conjures up the song of the "blackbird," but this specific song is so

Thomas, "Words," in Poems, 101,11. 1-11.

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archetypal that it feels only partly actual, more symbolic. And so we receive, in addition

to the town Adlestrop, a greatly enlarged sense of place. The birds of Oxfordshire and

Gloucestershire, shrouded in mist and, he tells us, "farther and farther," are themselves

figments or figures—the many ("birds") now standing in for the particular ("blackbird")

the way language can. As for why Thomas prefers to use language as a preamble to his

images, a textual door into subject matter, it is hard to know with any certainty. One can

conjecture that for a young poet and soldier about to embark on scenes horrific to the eye,

language was a safe haven, a way into a world much more difficult to come to terms with

than the "terms" themselves. But it seems equally likely for Thomas, who spent his early

adult years outside of his own country and would certainly be conscious of any small

difference between his personal dialect, his "Welsh-ness," and the language common to

his more cosmopolitan literary life in London, that words and phrases had begun to take

on a larger-than-life quality in their ability to remake and resituate him as an English

writer (and later an English soldier) rather than simply a Welsh one. It may be that

Thomas felt words' power to re-place him, not just in terms of representation (as any

writer is represented or seconded by his work) but also physically, from Wales to

England to France and perhaps even to the world beyond. In this way, the name

"Adlestrop," which the speaker happily recollects at the beginning of that poem, comes to

signify the acts of remembering and memorializing more generally. One gets the feeling

that Thomas, who defensively celebrates words' emptiness (through his aestheticization

of them) and fixates on names' "nobility," would hope the same could someday be said

of his own—"Yes, I remember Edward Thomas—the name"—beyond the physicality of

his presence, beyond his living self. That train depot, upon whose "bare platform" "no

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one left and no one came" symbolizes a kind of substanceless or unpeopled world, an

elsewhere, inhabited by the nobility of what exists before the train and afterward—just

the name on the platform, on the page, remembered and re-figured above all else.

6. Anthony Hecht

At the end of Robert Frost's "The Most of It," the poem's lonely protagonist stands

watching as a strange "embodiment" approaches him from the opposite shore of a lake:

Instead of proving human when it neared And someone else additional to him, As a great buck it powerfully appeared, Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, And landed pouring like a waterfall, And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, And forced the underbrush—and that was all.24

Frost devotes nearly his entire poem to framing and describing this specific moment of

epiphanic vision. Beginning with the archetypal man ("He thought he kept the universe

alone"), and ending with the sharp disappearance of the buck, he only deviates from

relating the narrative facts of the man's experience when he adds at the very end of the

poem, "and that was all." These last four words, both vague and blunt at once, are

strange; they seem, more than any other part the poem, like commentary on Frost's part

rather than an extension of poem's circumstances. It is certainly not uncommon for Frost

to treat a poem's last line in this way—as a final opportunity to reflect upon its overall

message or bring a deeper meaning to surface.25 And yet at the end of "The Most of It,"

24 Frost, "The Most of It," in Collected Poems, 307.

25 Consider these examples: "We love the things we love for what they are," or, "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches," or, "And that has made all the difference." Frost, Collected Poems, 115, 117, 103.

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Frost only half carries out this kind of assessment his final phrase is clipped and

ambiguous—as though the very nature of his poem's vision would be compromised by

anything more than the brief commentary suggested by those four words By stopping

short of saying what the crashing embodiment stands for, by merely stating "and that was

all," Frost allows his poem to remain a simple recreation of that "strange embodiment"

for the reader, rather than a more subjective retelling of it "And that was all" is a phrase

that occurs on the boundaries of the vision—both withm it and outside of it the words

could as easily be felt by the poem's protagonist as they are spoken by the poet himself26

So when Anthony Hecht reuses Frost's four words to close out his own epiphamc

vision in his poem "A Hill," he immediately situates questions of boundaries—between

poetic vision and actual experience, between past and present, fiction and fact,

imagination and memory, one location and another, even between one poem and the

next—at the heart of his poem's concerns In an interview with Philip Hoy, Hecht

acknowledges that some of the descriptive power of "A Hill" can be traced to skills

related to "looking" that he learned from reading Frost27 In what is perhaps an

intentional similitude, the plot (in so far as lyric poems have a plot) of "A Hill," like the

plot of Frost's "The Most of It," is centered on the narrative of a solitary man seemingly

at odds with his surroundings The intervening object that faces the speaker of Hecht's

poem is no "great buck" but the hill itself Here is the poem in full

Frost is occupying here that tenuous space between raw creation and artists' perception that Wordsworth claimed foi poets in the lines he wrote near Tmtern Abbey "both what they half-create,/And what perceive, " "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tmtern Abbey," in The Major Works, 134

77 Hecht tells Philip Hoy "Youi juxtaposition of 'Apprehensions with 'A Hill' seems to me shrewd and right their emotional trajectories turn in opposite directions I think there may be some connection with the idea of 'looking' as a crucially important act One of the things I think 1 learned from Bishop, from Hardy, from Frost, concerned particularity and clarity of seeing Seen with enough precision, things become wonderful, and one can see a world in a gram of sand Philip Hoy, Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy (London Between the Lines, 1999), 63

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In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur, I had a vision once - though you understand It was nothing at all like Dante's, or the visions of saints, And perhaps not a vision at all. I was with some friends, Picking my way through a warm sunlit piazza In the early morning. A clear fretwork of shadows From huge umbrellas littered the pavement and made A sort of lucent shallows in which was moored A small navy of carts. Books, coins, old maps, Cheap landscapes and ugly religious prints Were all on sale. The colors and noise Like the flying hands were gestures of exultation, So that even the bargaining Rose to the ear like a voluble godliness. And then, when it happened, the noises suddenly stopped, And it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved And even the great Farnese Palace itself Was gone, for all its marble; in its place Was a hill, mole-colored and bare. It was very cold, Close to freezing, with a promise of snow. The trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap Outside a factory wall. There was no wind, And the only sound for a while was the little click Of ice as it broke in the mud under my feet. I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge, But no other sign of life. And then I heard What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed; At least I was not alone. But just after that Came the soft and papery crash Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.

And that was all, except for the cold and silence That promised to last forever, like the hill.

Then prices came through, and fingers, and I was restored To the sunlight and my friends. But for more than a week I was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had seen. All this happened about ten years ago, And it hasn't troubled me since, but at last, today, I remembered that hill; it lies just to the left Of the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy I stood before it for hours in wintertime.28

Anthony Hecht, "A Hill," in Collected Earlier Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 2-3.

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Hecht's vision of the hill, unlike Frost's of the buck, is framed on both sides by narrative,

making the poem in its entirety feel as much like an exploration of how the human mind

crosses physical and temporal boundaries as it does a raw poetic vision. When Hecht

reproduces Frost's phrase at the end of his description of the hill, the effect is very

different from the end of "The Most of It." Here, the words form a structural barrier

between the actual vision and the rest of the poem that comes after it. Hecht offsets his

mysterious experience of the hill by ending the initial strophe with it and re-beginning the

"present" of the poem after a space that represents his adjustment in both time and

location. When he writes, "And that was all," he does so not immediately after the vision

or somehow in extension of the vision but rather from a contemplative and self­

consciously poetic place—at the beginning rather than at the end of a sentence, and far

from the actual experience of the hill. If there is any irony in Frost's usage of the phrase,

any understatement in his saying "that was all" after facing a sight so obviously

surprisingly and profound, that irony is absent in Hecht's verse. Hecht's poetic speaker is

genuinely confused and disoriented by his encounter with the hill; when he claims, "And

that was all," he does so almost in complaint, as though he would have expected a more

finished feeling from his vision, or at least some immediate sign of why it happened and

what it stood for.

Of course, the vision's mysterious coming on—the fact that its arrival seems

dislocated from any reasonable or predictable impetus—is what fascinates Hecht most

about it. The difference between Hecht's "And that was all...," which signals the

regaining of the poet's senses ("prices came through, and fingers"), and Frost's ".. .and

that was all," which signals the loss of poet's senses (the poem ends when the vision

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does) characterizes Hecht's anxiety over his capacity for poetic vision (how does it

happen? when does it happen?) and allows the circumstances of the vision's making to

become part of the poem's subject matter in addition to the vision itself. Vision, in "A

Hill," is not just a means for poetic language but an outcome, a product necessarily

removed from its source. The distance, both temporal and physical, between that

source—the experience of the Italian piazza at the poem's beginning—and the

remembrance of the childhood experience at the poem's end is what allows the vision to

take place. The poem would not be possible without the remove between them: it is

Hecht's strategy for poetry-making as well as an integral part of his poem's subject.

Hecht seems to gloss over the particular moment at which the busy Italian scene

gives way to the dark solitude of the hill (he writes, simply, "And then, when it

happened..."), but the immediate circumstances surrounding the point at which the

speaker is taken over by his vision into elsewhere are important to the poem for several

reasons. First, Hecht's poetic vision notably occurs outside of the normal boundaries of

the poet's natural workplace: instead of imagining the hill from within the privacy of his

personal library or study as Cavafy does when he remembers Marseille (one wonders

about Thomas's location when he exclaims "Yes" in recollecting "Adlestrop"), Hecht

renders it from a public and foreign space, a Roman market. The colorful and noisy

economy of the locals selling souvenirs alongside objects of seemingly higher cultural

value—books and coins and maps—triggers the speaker's initial displacement, as though

both the general idea of "sale" along with the specific mixture of high and low details

affords him the necessary conditions for poetic transport. "Bargaining," even with its

"exultations" and ironic "godliness," becomes a thematic portal for lyric meditation, in

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part because to bargain—to determine whether this is worth that—relates conceptually to

the poetic act of substitution via conceit or metaphor. Hecht's poetry here and elsewhere

is almost always concerned with conveying both the "cheap" and the "exalted," the

"ugly" and the "godly," and determining what this or that image is worth, both in terms

of the quality of the representation and the depth of its meaning, is itself a kind of

marketplace-dealing akin to what the speaker of the poem witnesses and internalizes as

he picks his way through the piazza.29 Similarly, the loss of present consciousness that

comes along with the vision effects a simultaneous gain of what was lost to the

unconscious in the speaker's initial repression of the hill. Freud writes, "A constant

expenditure of energy... is entailed in maintaining a repression, and economically its

abrogation denotes a saving."30 And so both the general idea of souvenirs (which may

trigger the poet's sense of remembrance) and the more specific sense of "economy"

within the scene are related to Hecht's sudden displacement as he shifts his poem to a

scene from childhood. In addition to the activities of the market, the poem's moment of

transition into the vision relies particularly on sensory details over cognitive ones, both

within the present scene and within the landscape of the memory. Hecht describes the

piazza in terms of "colors and noise," the hill in terms of darkness and cold. His faux-

Hecht tells Hoy "There is a clear contrast in the diction of my poems between elaborate and simple speech, between the ornate, the compressed, the densely worked passage and the fluent, colloquial, and straightforward mode of parlance This is conscious and deliberate With regard specifically to 'A Hill,' it was my intention to write about the Roman setting in manifestly metaphoric style, or, more accurately, in a language adorned with metaphor The purpose is ironic The use of such language is often reserved for descriptions of visionary experience and states of transport, while here they are used to describe a real and everyday experience, though, to be sure, a joyful one, but also one that is shortly to be contrasted with a genuine visionary experience, described in the almost unadorned language usually reserved for raw experience, untransfoimed by vision or by art The juxtaposition of these two scenes is an instance of the kind of dialectic that is a normal part of the pattern of my poetry, and represents my rejection of the sort of 'lyric' that aims at a single effect or a single emotion " "Anthony Hecht," 79

Freud, "Repression," in General Selection, 92

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Dantean plunge into unforeseen depths, with the simplicity of its two opposing modes,

resembles the cinematic shock of Dorothy's vision of Oz in Technicolor after the black-

and-white bleakness of her Kansas farm (except in reverse).

But the cognitive connections between the piazza, with its marbled Famese

Palace, and Hecht's hill in Poughkeepsie are there to be found. For one, the Italian scene,

with its "clear fretwork of shadows" and umbrellas and carts, is not entirely different,

physically speaking, from the image of "trees.. .like old ironwork gathered for scrap" in

front of the hill. And the shadows there provide a kind of mental workspace, a "lucent

shallows," in which poetic imaging or object-making is more likely to take place than if

o 1

the Roman scene were entirely composed of solid materials. The "great Farnese Palace

itself is not unlike the mass of the hill, either: similar to the hill, the palace is a large,

heavy structure obstructed by small, thin lines; it both dominates the space it inhabits and

remains distant from its onlookers (Hecht and his companions never enter the palace the

same way the poet, as a child, does not climb the hill). Finally, the idea that Hecht would

conceive a hill, or at the very least a poem about a hill, while in Rome is not entirely

random. Rome is indeed a city founded on a hill, known for its hills, and architecturally

laid out by its hills, in particular the "seven hills of Rome," which comprise the area

within the walls of the ancient city.32 Although Hecht may not have been conscious of

the significance of these hills to the remembrance of his childhood experience, it is likely

31 For an account of the way writers create solid images out of permeable ones, see Scarry, "On Solidity," in Dreaming by the Book, 10-30

32 The seven hills of Rome, still visited because they contain sites of architectural or cultural importance, include the Aventme Hill, the Caelian Hill, the Capitolme Hill, the Esquilme Hill, the Palatine Hill, the Quirmal Hill, and the Vimmal Hill.

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that the presence of so many historic hills, both in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, played a

part in triggering his psycho-poetical event.

The tenuousness of these connections between the piazza and the vision,

connections which are nevertheless tempting to make because they are so readily

available, along with Hecht's subsequent fascination at his own forgetfulness about his

vision's origins for a period often further years, mean that the poem, as a narrative of

displacement, is simultaneously capable of commenting on its own repressions. Hecht's

speaker is painfully aware of the psychological significance of his poetic choices even as

he makes them; the dramatic changes in setting, the detailed description of the objects,

the acknowledgement, in the end, that the mysterious hill is actually an image from

childhood rendered poetical now only because it has been forgotten, all read like a poet's

self-scrutinizing confessions in a post-Freudian world. (Hecht admits in an interview that

this poem was of particular interest to his psychoanalyst.) The poem is in this sense a

meta-poem: because the poet is cognizant of and open about his tendency to forget and

displace, he embraces these psychological defenses as unavoidable poetic strategies. His

vision is "nothing at all like Dante's" for precisely this reason; it is analogous to

unconscious mechanisms rather than more overtly "artful." This defensiveness helps

Hecht develop his momentum during the first few lines: downplaying his vision's

importance and spontaneously denying it soon after—"perhaps [it was] not a vision at

all"—is of course just another way of reinforcing the solemnity of the occasion. Hecht

would know from reading Freud (which he did from an early age) that the very fact of his

remembrance after such a long period of latency would indicate his having assigned

33 Hoy, "Anthony Hecht," 56.

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particular importance to the event: "What someone thinks he remembers from his

childhood is not a matter of indifference; as a rule the residual memories cloak priceless

pieces of evidence about the most important features of his mental development."34

We can see in a typed and hand-corrected draft of "A Hill" how Hecht struggles

with representing, poetically, his own process of displacement. In one of the late versions

of the poem before its publication The New Yorker (in February, 1964), the end of the

poem looks roughly like this:

And tha t was all, except for the cold and silence That promised to last forever, like the hill. -fmae-i-s

pr-i Ce.S -'i^i J u c#/»7e t/iroi/afy) a/7tJ Ci-i/e-» •&, a/id X ujaS

Then I wag oomohow delicately roturnod r-&stor<°J To the sunlight and my friends But for more than a week I was scared by the plain bi t terness of what I had seen All this happened about ten years ago, And it hasn ' t troubled me since, but at last, today, I remembered tha t hill, it lies jus t to the left Of the road nor th of Poughkeepsie, and as a boy

I stood before it for hours m wintert ime

Conveying the very moment of transition from his vision back into reality is troublesome

to Hecht. Initially, he treats his re-entrance into the scene of the piazza in the same off­

handed way he treats his departure: the casual opening phrase "when it happened" from

the beginning is balanced here by the now-crossed-out closing, "Then I was somehow

delicately returned," as though the poet himself has no agency in choosing when to enter

and depart from his visionary mode. But, on second thought, Hecht revises. He decides

to describe, rather than merely to state, the event of his return, specifically in terms of the

"noise" and "colors" that he hears and sees right before his vision starts. Then, in a

second revision, Hecht changes "returned" to "restored," the more nuanced word

34 Fieud, "Leonardo da Vinci," in Selected Writings, 161

35 Anthony Hecht Collection, Manuscript, Archives, and Raie Book Library (MARBL), Emory University, Box SI, Item 1

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suggesting some kind of personal gam in the process Likewise, "noise" and "colors" are

replaced with "prices" and "fingers," indicating a more complete shift back into the

sensory experience of the Roman setting

Hecht's tripping over this moment in the poem, and especially his impulse to

clarify—after initially glossing over—the particulars of slipping into and out of "vision,"

indicates the level of importance he places on his poem's getting the details of its own

processes right This poet not only wants to be honest and specific in his representation of

the minutiae of what the he sees and hears; he is also scrupulously careful in portraying

vividly and accurately the qualitative experience of seeing, hearing, remembering, and

forgetting One of Hecht's main concerns in this poem is figuring out how to write a

poem about the act of forgetting that is able to convey a true sense of the feeling of

forgetting—and eventually remembering. At the same time, he also wants to

acknowledge his own awareness about the psychological importance of these acts

Forgetting the hill, he knows, was the first step in his being able to create the "vision"

without forgetting, the hill's image and the poem centered on it could not exist

Hecht was from an early age interested in the Freudian concepts, including the

theory behind "forgetting," that would influence so much of his poetry throughout his

career Composing a letter to his family as a student at Bard College, Hecht mentions

one of his first encounters with psychoanalytic theory as a way of breaking the ice

[My dear family,] Sigmund Freud has explained "forgetfulness" as the subconscious desire "not to remember something " According to this theory, a slip of the mind is actually determined by the association of particular emotional states to certain words or objects or duties, which

36 His mteiest in, and skepticism of, Freud's ideas would continue throughout his life After serving in World Wai II, Hecht would develop post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition that afflicted him for many years after his service and that led him to seek psychoanalysis as a form of therapy

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causes us to forget them. This may perhaps explain why, in the haste of packing, I forgot to take my letter paper. I would appreciate if you could

"1-7

send it up here.

Hecht is self-deprecatingly psychological here, confessing, even as he asks his parents for

stationery, his ambivalence about writing them letters. It should come as no surprise,

then, to an older Hecht, that he would "choose" to forget the hill, an image that he has

said he was "compelled" to stare at as a child "because no one [came] to take him away

from all [that] barrenness."38 Whether Hecht is being figurative or literal in this

explanation of his boyhood memory, whether the hill itself exists as a real hill or if it is

simply a symbol for some other unmentioned experience of "barrenness," the

significance of Hecht's forgetting as a pathway towards poetic memorialization is crucial

to any interpretation of this poem or another poem like it. The poem is based in

biography, but not necessarily in terms of its content—rather in its form. It is a

representation if memory processes rather than an unmediated reproduction of them; as

such, it is an example of a poet doing something self-consciously (representing mental

acts through the formal elements of a poem) that many of the poets in this study are doing

more instinctively. "A Hill" teaches us that it may not have been possible to configure,

poetically, such an event without dislocating it, since, as Cathy Caruth has written of

traumatic events of all kinds, "the impact of the.. .event lies precisely in its belatedness,

in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of

any single place or time." By removing the hill from consciousness, by forgetting it

3 Anthony Hecht Collection, MARBL, Emory University, Box 1, Item 4.

38 Hoy, "Anthony Hecht," 56. He tells Hoy: "You are perfectly right to see arid and defeated landscapes cropping up in a good number of my poems, as is the case with certain winter scenes of Breughel. They were for me a means to express a desolation of the soul."

39 Caruth, Trauma, 9.

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completely for a number of years both before and after his vision, Hecht's speaker is

imaginatively able to realize the hill fully later on, giving it lasting importance.

While in the case of this poem, Hecht's effort to forget as means of remembrance

may well have been unconscious, he incorporates a similar kind of strategy into his

everyday work habits. "I like best to work in the mornings.. .still close to the comforts

and suggestions of the world of sleep," he says. "I am near enough to unconscious

sources, to essential memories, to feel I can call on buried resources for my poems."

That the waking hours of day closest sleep are ripest for retrieving "essential memories"

suggests two important aspects of Hecht's creative process: that the writing itself—not

just the quality of voice within the poem—may take place in a mental state close to

dreaming or "vision," and also that "unconscious" or "buried resources" are what fuel his

poems more than materials that are not removed (either by dream or repression) from the

poet's everyday reality. As such, the childhood source for the vision in "A Hill" is

importantly separate from the Italian setting—the latter being a place of pleasure and the

former being a scene of fright. The following letter, another written from college to his

parents, describes the psychological impulse that may lie behind this dialectic:

Dear Folks -One might suppose that this sudden burst of epistolary prose on my

part shows an inner dissatisfaction with things where I am, and a consequent desire to associate myself with another locale and a different situation. (You must excuse the analyses which have prefaced these last two letters to you. It is, generally speaking, the fault of my room-mate, who is studying Freud just now. We argue over psychology about every night).41

40 Hoy, "Anthony Hecht," 106.

41 Anthony Hecht Collection, MARBL, Emory University, Box I, Item, 3.

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Hecht acknowledges here not only that it is human nature to try to associate oneself with

"different situations" when one's present "locale" is dissatisfying, but also that writing

itself can be a form of this kind of trans-location. Of course, both the acts of reading and

writing lyric poetry in general adhere to these conditions, insofar as the meditation

required to carry out both acts necessitates a kind of concentration beyond the realm of

physical experience (they happen in mental space). But Hecht is particularly interested in

how this phenomenon can work within poems. "A Hill" is an example of a poem that

effects both "locales"—the place of escape as well as the place that is repressed—at once.

Within the vision itself are traces of repressed meaning that add to the poem's

power simply because they remain outside of the bounds of the speaker's consciousness.

For instance, Hecht writes, "The trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap/Outside

a factory wall." Since we are unaware of any particular factory the poet may have in

mind, the landscape these lines paint is of a more general and more pervasive nature.

That is, the hill, through the poet's eyes, bears the markings of an industrialized, or

possibly post-industrialized, world in which waste and ugliness have come to replace

what might have been a scene of joy for a child (a patch of trees huddled below a snowy

hill). Instead, the trees look like metal, and there is no actual snow—only the "promise"

of it. Similarly, the "ribbon snagged on a hedge" feels symbolic, and yet its actual

meaning eludes us. Is it the torn hair-bow of some previous child-inhabitant, forced to

witness this scene of barrenness before him? Or is it merely a hunter's marking, to help

him find his way back to the road in a storm? The artificiality of the ribbon makes it

ominous in a setting that is otherwise so primitive and natural. That the speaker seems

only to take it as a "sign of life" is a powerful testament to the loneliness of his condition.

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But the most important symbol of the vision is certainly the sound the poem's

speaker hears near its end, a sound he immediately associates with a gunshot (we are later

to infer that it is only a tree breaking under ice):

...And then I heard What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed; At least I was not alone. But just after that Came the soft and papery crash Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.

The sound's initial ambiguity raises the question of which is worse: a gun fired by man

(an immediate threat to the speaker's safety) or a tree's falling of its own accord (the

destruction of nature by nature itself). Neither is good, but the former, as the speaker

suggests, allows for a perverse kind of companionship ("At lease I was not alone") while

the latter simply illustrates further the bleakness of the world around him. What is

perhaps most significant, though, about this speaker's sensory perceptions are their

psychological implications: the "crack of a rifle," the "soft and papery crash," and the

"branch.. .unseen falling" are all highly symbolic images and sounds. Even if they enter

the poem unconsciously, or perhaps because they do, they influence our interpretation of

it as we read. The speaker's associating the noise he hears with a gunshot may well be a

result of the poet's experience in the war—which takes place well after the initial

childhood event with the hill but several years before the poet lived and traveled in Italy,

where the vision occurs. Hecht suffered the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

long after his military service, so it would not have been extraordinary for this poet in

particular to hear a "crack" and think, first, of guns. And yet "the crack of a rifle" may

also be a sexual symbol. The vision, which Peter Sacks calls "an involuntary return to a

42 Hecht won the Prix de Rome in 1951.

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fearful kind of beginning," could indeed be indicative of a kind of latent sexual desire or

threatened masculinity associated with that beginning.43 What complicates and enriches

this interpretation of the gunshot is Hecht's subsequent thought: immediately following

sound of the gun, the poet describes a "papery crash." This odd pairing of sounds,

gunfire and moving paper, implicates both objects, the gun and the paper, as "weapons"

of violence. Hecht may well have felt the threat of "paper" since childhood.

This particular psychoanalytic element of "A Hill" has its precedent in the poet's

letters, which not only reveal him as a poet conscious of the ways a person's "inner life"

can influence his writing but which also in their own language and form show signs of

this influence. Reading back into Hecht's second college letter, we find more evidence of

poet's associating gunshots with paper:

Dear Folks -One might suppose that this sudden burst of epistolary prose on my

part shows an inner dissatisfaction with things where I am, and a consequent desire to associate myself with another locale and a different situation.

Hecht describes the act of letter writing as the "burst of epistolary prose," or, phonetically

the "burst of a pistol"—that violent and instinctual male urge which is associated with

the sexual act. To equate this act, by homonym, to the practice of putting pen to paper is

the same kind of psycho-poetic move as following up the "crack of a rifle" with a "soft

papery crash" at the end of the vision. Hecht's symbolic language performs its own

displacements unnoticed, even as he acknowledges other displacements elsewhere. Just

as Rome catalyzes the poet's ability to see the hill, distant and far beyond it, so Hecht's

43 Peter Sacks, "Anthony Hecht's 'Rites and Ceremonies': Reading The Hard Hours," in The Burdens of Formality: Essays on the Poetry of Anthony Hecht, ed. Sidney Lea (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 68.

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specific choices with regard to language bring far-off meanings to hand. Vision in "A

Hill" is the by-product of a kind of involuntary removal from presence that happens

within the poem itself rather than before it starts. Hecht's ability to say, "And that was

all," after the vision but still as part of the poem shows that his capacity for self-reflection

and distance facilitates his description of the hill in the first place.

7. Elizabeth Bishop

In his 1968 paper "The Mechanisms of Defence," psychoanalyst Roy Schafer describes

the intrapsychic processes of defense in terms of what they allow human beings to deny.

He explains that when we defend against thoughts, memories, people, places, or things,

these original mental or physical phenomena are "displaced to other content, symbolized,

or shifted to higher levels of cognitive, motoric and affective processes and subjective

experience."44 Psychological defense, he implies, helps us and those around us not pay

attention to certain phenomena in order to diminish or disguise their importance. (For

instance: the way the name "Adlestrop" denies, temporarily, the actual place, or the way

Rome and even the dark vision of the hill itself delays the naming and recollection of

"Poughkeepsie," a city whose name foreshadows its capacity for being "kept" in mind.)

Literature, and poetry in particular, can be thought of as one such form of

"displaced.. .content": its metaphors and tropes defend against whatever ideas or objects

it actually represents, and its status as art disavows or at least calls into question that

content's reality in the first place. But then there is what we might call "defensive"

Roy Schafer, "The Mechanisms of Defence," in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49 (1968): 54.

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literature—whose subject matter is disguised or denied by its own wordplay or irony,

whose meaning is subverted by the pleasing, if distracting, acrobatics of its poetic form.

On first glance, Elizabeth Bishop's work might be considered defensive: critics have long

described her as a writer who practices "restraint" (in the sense that her work is

concerned almost as much with what it conceals as it is with what it reveals), and it

certainly is the case that much of her poetry feels distant, emotionally, from the reader's

immediate presence. In what is perhaps a related phenomenon (and as Richard Mullen

has noted), Bishop frequently features poetic subjects that do not or cannot fit in to their

environments in some peculiar way.45 Examples come to mind almost immediately: her

"Man-Moth" who "always seats himself facing the wrong way," her "Roosters," "each

one an active/displacement in perspective," "Manuelzinho," who is "half squatter, half

tenant" and the "world's worst gardener," that stray "Pink Dog" in Brazil who loses all of

her hair to scabies. Other poems describe this feeling of being displaced more directly

and scientifically: "The Map," about borders and representation, "Questions of Travel,"

about physical and cultural alienation and the associated guilt, "The Armadillo," about

non-violent protest and the destruction of natural habitat. All of these poems invoke the

kind of guilt or embarrassment that might serve as an impetus for defense; that is, they

contain the appropriate subject matter for a poetic style that is itself restrained in

important ways (that have already been described by several of Bishop's best scholars).

5 Richard Mullen, "Elizabeth Bishop's Surrealist Inheritance," American Literature 54, no. 1 (1982): 63-80.

46 See Ann Hoff, "Owning Memory Elizabeth Bishop's Authorial Restraint," m Biography 31, no 4 (2008). 58; C.K Doreski, Elizabeth Bishop the Restraints of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); James Longenbach, "Elizabeth Bishop's Social Conscience" in ELH 62, no 2 (Summer 1995): 467-86, Dan Chiasson, One Kind of Everything Poem and Person in Contemporary America (Chicago The University of Chicago Press, 2007); David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001)

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The recent making-public of Bishop's unpublished poems in the collection Edgar

Allen Poe and The Jukebox (as well as in the new Library of America edition of her

complete works) has perhaps reemphasized what is restrained or defensive about

Bishop's poetry, if only by virtue of comparison: we find in her formerly "private"

poems and drafts a very different poetic speaker, a much less private one, than in the

poems we have come to know, and the distinction these poems bring out between the

work Bishop meant for the public and the work she deliberately kept from it certainly

supports the idea that her poetry has as much to hide as it does to tell. 7 But it is also

possible that Bishop has uses for her defensive poetics beyond—or even, perhaps, in

opposition to—serving what many of her readers have considered a personal interest in

privacy or restraint. I will be suggesting in the following pages that Bishop's defensive

poetics (in the poems she published during her lifetime) turn the primary function of

psychological defense on its head; defense, when Bishop uses it poetically, actually

generates a curiosity in her reader about the very objects that she is seeming to disguise

or deny—an aesthetic use that serves an opposite purpose to that of the intrapsychic

process Schafer and others describe.

Bishop's defensive strategy, an aesthetic rather than psychological one, sparks her

reader's imagination not through the overt details she provides about her poetic subjects

but rather in her peculiar way of unveiling them. Her most virtuosic descriptions of

animals and places show subtle signs that the poet is having to strain to see whatever it is

she is describing, as though the world around her is reluctant to be seen or scrutinized.

Her lyric observer's interest is usually piqued, rather than diminished, by this

47 Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). See, for instance, the erotic "Vague Poem."

I l l

reluctance—a phenomenon that applies to the reader reading her poems, too. In

"Sandpiper," for instance, Bishop considers the difficulty of seeing the world from the

perspective of a "finical" bird combing the beach for food:

The world is a mist. And then the world is minute and vast and clear. The tide is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which. His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.

Bishop reminds us here that the sandpiper is not merely observing the beach around him:

he is actively looking for something—looking hard for it through the mist the waves

make as they crash along the shore. What it is he finds we never learn (though we infer

he is searching for insects and algae emerging from the undertow). Instead, we hear only

about the process of looking, which eventually ends in clarity—a world that is "minute

and vast and clear"—but importantly begins in mist. This progression, from "mist" to

"something" within the broader act of "looking," is how many of the images in Bishop's

poems unfold. (Remember, for instance, the house in "Song for the Rainy Season," which

initially appears "hidden/in the high fog" but finally stands exposed at the poem's end.)49

The technique of hiding or shifting the quality of her images before revealing them more

fully is one that Bishop uses often to introduce the people, landscapes, and especially

animals in her work (e.g. "The Moose" emerges in "moonlight and mist" from an

"impenetrable wood" at the very end of that poem).50 When the reader encounters mist,

fog, or clouds in Bishop, he or she should expect the main subject of the poem to be

Elizabeth Bishop, "The Sandpiper," in Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (New York: The Library of America, 2008), 125-26.

49 Bishop, Poems, 81-82.

50 Bishop, Poems, 160, 162.

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standing behind it, as though every really important image must first be obscured,

displaced, or defended against in order to become clear eventually.

For Bishop, a socially reticent person, this interest in putting a temporary remove

between herself and what she sees has analogues in her personal life. She is a poet who

actively displaces herself—from New England to Florida to Brazil and back—and in her

letters, which are the result of such a displacement, she often complains of her own

inability to turn what she sees and remembers into poetry (whether she truly believes in

this inability is less certain). In a letter to Robert Lowell, she compares her own

professed shortcomings to the poems in his book Life Studies:

They all have that sure feeling, as if you'd been in a stretch...when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry—or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited for sunrise. If only one could see everything that way all the time!51

Bishop's letter describes how life, at least as she imagines it appearing to Lowell in "long

shafts," sheds its dark past "like a long-waited for sunrise." She is formulating an idea

here about how the visual accuracy of memory—the clarity of a historical world that she

describes in terms of light—can actually turn life into poetry. "Your poetry," she

continues to Lowell, "is as different from the rest of our contemporaries as say ice from

slush." Her image of Lowell's book, the clear, solid thing amid contemporary tomes of

"slush," is just another version of that clear "something" she persistently looks for in a

world that appears cloudy, unclear, and removed.

51 Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, Selected and Edited (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 350.

52 Bishop, One Art, 364.

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And yet Bishop is rarely considered to be a poet who writes at a distance from her

materials. She is in fact best known and appreciated for her ability to see things as clearly

as possible and to describe them with a particular accuracy and closeness of vision.

Because she writes about the places where she lives and the people and objects she sees,

she can hardly be called a "slushy" poet herself—her work is almost always full of real-

life visual detail. Only a handful of her poems explicitly address any difficulty in seeing

the world, and these poems do so either by complaining about it openly or by refusing her

reader any clarity (thus effecting her own displacement rather than her subject's), or both.

"Some Dreams They Forgot," written in 1933 (at Vassar) but withheld from book

publication until her Collected Poems in 1968, is one such poem, and, unsurprisingly, it is

seldom discussed by critics, probably because they consider it unrepresentative of

Bishop's general style (which is true). The sonnet is uncharacteristically inscrutable:

The dead birds fell, but no one had seen them fly, or could guess from where. They were black, their eyes were shut, and no one knew what kind of birds they were. But all held them and looked up through the new far-funneled sky. Also, dark drops fell. Night-collected on the eaves, or congregated on the ceilings over their beds, they hung, mysterious drop-shapes, all night over their heads, now rolling off their careless fingers quick as dew off leaves. Where had they seen wood-berries perfect black as these, shining just so in early morning? Dark-hearted decoys on upper-bough or below-leaf. Had they thought poison and left? or—remember—eaten them from the loaded trees? What flowers shrink to seeds like these, like columbine? But their dreams are all inscrutable by eight or nine.53

Finishing reading the poem feels a little like waking from a dream. Objects and pictures

stand out, but the connections between them, as well as their details, are blurry. All of

the images either resemble one another or mutate into each other—birds become drops,

Bishop, Poems, 138.

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drops become drop-shapes, which become berries—the way scenes and storylines do in

dreams. The difference here is that the poem is presumably created in a conscious state,

while dreams are always involuntary and unconscious. As a willful creator, rather than a

dreamer, Bishop would certainly have been able to describe this poem's scenario and

images more clearly than she does; so why doesn't she make her poem more accessible

by simply answering some of the basic questions she raises within it?

One reason may be that Bishop wants to represent as accurately as possible the

disconnected memories of the dreamers once they have wakened (since waking is the

state she has access to as a poet) rather than what they experience during sleep. As such,

the poem is interested as much in what has been forgotten or repressed (and,

correspondingly, why) as it is in the small facts that are remembered. We are then to

understand that "what kind of birds they were" is a crucially important fact in part

because we do not know it, and "where.. .they had seen wood-berries perfect as these" is

indeed a place that is essential to the dreamer's experience, which is exactly why it

disappears upon waking. Moreover, Bishop leaves even the most basic circumstances of

her poem ambiguous. For instance, who are the dreamers in this poem, and if there is

more than one, how is it possible that they have dreamed the same thing? Are these

actually waking fantasies or remembrances rather than dreams? Are they the nightmares

of several people, or the creations of one dreamer imagining a crowd of people

witnessing these events? Or, is Bishop in fact relating some of the details of a particular

personal or historical occurrence without wanting to make direct reference to it?

The formal precision of this poem stands in contrast to the imprecision of subject

matter that raises these questions. As far as the dreamed objects are removed from their

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original locations (the birds from the sky, the drops/berries from their branches, the

images themselves from their referents in real life), the lines and words themselves are

perfectly placed and carefully arranged within the poem. Her sonnet is an amalgam of

forms, with Petrarchan rhyming quatrains and a Shakespearian couplet; her line-breaks

and the pacing of the poem are particularly astute. In the first two sentences, Bishop

divides her thoughts into threes and saves her mysteries for last so that the clauses "or

could guess from where" and "no one knew what kind of birds they were" fall to the line

below, as though they are afterthoughts or surprises. Bishop "hangs" her "drops"

especially well, delaying the subject-verb phrase "they hung" for a space of two full lines

that describe but do not actually name the "drop-shapes," so that when she actually writes

words "they hung," the shapes themselves hang above them. Aptly fitting form to

content, she strings along this "hanging" sequence for three more clauses, ending finally

with the drops "rolling off like "dew off leaves." The second part of the poem, what

constitutes its sestet, begins appropriately in line nine, and like many Petrarchan sestets,

this one is composed mostly of rhetorical questions (one might compare it to the end of

Frost's "Design," a poem written only a few years after this one). Bishop's sonnet lives

up to the stringent rules of its form despite her subversive mystification of its subject

matter. The psychological displacements described in the sonnet, and its disorienting and

defensive effects in general, are not flaws in the poem's compositional clarity, but rather

willful components of a carefully orchestrated mood-piece.

As such, the outlook of this poem is grim for both the poet and the reader. Bishop

wants to disorient us the way she is disoriented, the way sleepers are disoriented when

they wake. How much we forget or repress, and why, is the real subject here, and yet

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even this theme is somewhat removed, since it is not actually the poem's speaker who

does the dreaming but an elusive "they." And so the issue of stance is also taken up here;

it comes up more directly in line four, when the dreamers are looking up "through the

new far-funneled sky." To see the sky through a funnel is perhaps another of Bishop's

metaphors for the difficulty of sight—except, as the critic Martin Bidney has asked,

which way does the funnel point?5 Is the sky opening or closing in front of them?55

Bishop herself would be fascinated by such a question, the way she is fascinated by

topography and geography and spatial relations in her other poems ("North's as near as

West," she declares in "The Map").56 More generally, stance represents for Bishop one

of the most crucial elements of poetry-making. Hardly any of her poems fail to elicit the

question, "where does the poet stand in relation to her material," since Bishop herself is

always asking of her subjects, "where do they stand in relation to the world around

them?" She is one of the most self-conscious and self-questioning poets of her era, and

so the implications of her own stance with regard to her subject matter tend to form a

crucial part of her poems' meaning.

Many of the questions subtly suggested by this sonnet's ambiguities are answered

in Bishop's more concrete—and popular—poems. In "Brazil, January 1, 1502," Bishop

uses language relating to spatial and visual orientation as a way of introducing or

"framing" her larger thematic questions having to do with what it means to write about

and belong to a place. She invokes in this poem's opening lines not the real Brazilian

54 Martm Bidney '"Controlled Panic': Mastering the Terrors of Dissolution and Isolation in Elizabeth Bishop's Epiphanies," in Style 34, no 3 (Fall 2000): 496.

55 One remembers here "The Man-Moth," who "thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky " Bishop, Poems, 11

36 Bishop, Poems, 3

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wilderness as she must have observed it when she arrived in that country, but rather what

feels like a distinctly artistic or aesthetic landscape, a displaced surface upon which the

poet can accurately (and, perhaps, safely) piece together an image:

Januaries, Nature greets our eyes exactly as she must have greeted theirs: every square inch filling in with foliage— big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves, blue, blue-green, and olive, with occasional lighter veins and edges, or a satin underleaf turned over; monster ferns in silver-gray relief, and flowers, too, like giant water lilies up in the air—up, rather, in the leaves— purple, yellow, two yellows, pink, rust red and greenish white; solid but airy; fresh as if just finished and taken off the frame.57

Bishop opens by eliding the moment of Brazil's discovery by non-natives, its coming into

being as an image, with her own poetic creation. "Every square inch filling in with

foliage," she explains, mapping out her own two-dimensional screen where she will make

the picture. With the visual immediacy of the world before her, she paints the Brazilian

landscape as aplein air artist might, describing every object in terms of its location on

C O

her grid and in the order in which it is seen within the "frame." This kind of "excursive

sight," as Bonnie Costello has called it, is part of the reason why Nature "greets our eyes/

exactly as she must have greeted" the eyes of the original colonists—the eye itself is

57 Bishop, Poems, 72.

58 See Robert Lowell's poem "To Elizabeth Bishop 4," wherein he compares Bishop's attentiveness and casual immediacy to this school of painters, in Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 595.

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objective, is not influenced by the mind that later processes what it has seen. In this

way, too, the speaker of the poem is not much different from the reader who experiences

the images one by one as the poet lays them out on the page. Bishop is enacting sight in

its simplest form, without cognition. The effect is amplified in a line such as "big leaves,

little leaves, and giant leaves," rather than something more cognitive, like "there were

leaves of all sizes." Her principle of organization remains, in these fourteen lines, purely

spatial, the eye taking precedence over the mind's ability to rate, judge and prioritize.

Only in line fifteen does the speaker step outside of the act of perceiving, declaring the

scene, the painting, "fresh as if just finished/ and taken off the frame."

As such, the verses that begin "Brazil, January 1, 1502" are an exercise in

freshness. Although they no doubt have been worked over, Bishop effects linguistic

indifference; for instance, she writes with ironically accurate inaccuracy in recording the

color of the leaves in line five: "blue, blue-green, and olive." Is it that some leaves are

blue, others green, and others a mix between the two? Or are these the spatially ordered

descriptions of "big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves," respectively? Or perhaps the

poet changes her mind—first believing the color of the leaves to be a shade of indigo,

only to categorize it later among shades of green. Or more still, could the light be

changing just at the moment that the poet observes the leaves, so that at first she sees the

tint of blue in shadow, then blue-green in the half-light, then the full color, olive, in the

sun? The ambiguity comes out of perception so fresh that even the speaker herself is

unable to clarify what the colors are. Her description is acute, but not settled, not

finished. Similarly Bishop offers only the sense of the flowers in lines twelve and

59 Bonnie Costello, Elizabeth Bishop. Questions of Mastery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 127.

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thirteen: "purple, yellow, two yellows, pink,/ rust red and greenish white." We assume

she is looking at several flowers at once, counting them as she sees—a purple one here, a

yellow one there, oh, and two more yellow ones, a pink one, etc. The effect of "yellow,

two yellows," rather than simply "two yellows" or "three yellows" is the difference

between a perceptive act and a cognitive one, the difference between poetic spontaneity

and premeditation. The adjective "greenish white" performs the same function; it is not

that Bishop cannot choose the perfect color word to represent a blend between green and

white ("sea-green" perhaps?); rather, using the perfect word would mean forfeiting

linguistic precision for perceptive precision. She sacrifices the word for the sense of

sight itself—a sense that is not for her inherently linguistic. Bishop further attends to this

sense of freshness by recording her own poetic missteps. The lines, "and flowers, too,

like giant water lilies/ up in the air—up, rather, in the leaves—" give urgency to the

description, as if it were indeed a pressing and present question whether the air holds the

flowers, or whether it is the hanging leaves. The result of this unabashed self-revision is

that the lines, like the flowers, seem "solid but airy." Bishop's words float in the air and

in the leaves: changeable, colorful, immediate. And it is partly this delicacy, this "airy"

quality to her voice as she describes what she sees, that makes her poem feel most

accurate at the very moments when its descriptions falter and her images are as tenuously

placed as hanging flowers in a canopy of trees.

Part of the reason that Bishop is able to allow her perceptions to accrue as they

haphazardly occur is because she has already provided a screen upon which to place

them. In the beginning of the second stanza of "Brazil, January 1, 1502," she reminds us

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that her two-dimensional canvas of images, her displaced surface of words, is in fact only

a reflection of the real scenery of Brazil:

A blue-white sky, a simple web, backing for feathery detail: brief arcs, a pale broken wheel, a few palms, swarthy, squat, but delicate;

The "simple web," itself projected onto the surface of the sky, is a "backing for feathery

detail." Bishop of course is alluding to the birds which transverse the picture, but her

own "detail" encompasses all of the objects she hangs on this webbing—the leaves and

flowers, too. The web, with its "brief arcs" and its "broken wheel" and the "delicate"

leaves of the palm, is also Bishop's surface, a vertical plane on which to map out her

landscape and make it live. Invoking the image of the web facilitates a broader and more

elaborate field of vision for the poet—one that is not only filled with the minutiae that

interest Bishop, but also one that is immense and historical. Once the "backing" is hung,

she is free to develop perceptions that go beyond mere description. She begins to notice

that the birds are "big" and "symbolic," and she introduces the lizards, "five sooty

dragons near some massy rocks," by their archetypal association with "Sin." The web

contains not only the images that Bishop places there, with all their own associative

qualities, but also the scene that the Christian colonists of 1502 saw, complete with their

fantasies of "Indian" women:

Directly after Mass, humming perhaps L 'Homme arme or some such tune, they ripped away into the hanging fabric, each out to catch an Indian for himself— those maddening little women who kept calling, calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?) and retreating, always retreating, behind it.61

Bishop, Poems, 73.

121

These guilty explorers—early versions, Bishop seems to be confessing, of herself—

encounter a world initially clothed in mystery. But the fabric Bishop hangs in front of

her and their scene only briefly conceals it; by the poem's final lines, it has been ripped

away and itself becomes a crucial point of perspective, allowing those "calling"

women—certainly as interesting to the poet as they are to the Christians—to retreat

endlessly as objects of curiosity and desire. The fabric here, another version of the purely

aesthetic and poetically defensive landscape she develops in her poem's opening lines,

becomes a crossroads where poetic present, literary history, and the history of landscape

can all meet. Such a thematic convergence would not have been possible if Bishop had

described the landscape more directly rather than turning it into a fabric (and before that,

a canvas "fresh as if just finished/and taken off the frame").

This portrait of Brazil, obscured by but eventually revealed through its own

canopy, has its counterpart in several of Bishop's other poems. Her aesthetic use of what

initially feels like a psychological defense can be found at the beginning of "At the

Fishhouses," where Bishop channels her own memory through a scene of mixed opacity

and translucence, as though she is only able to see and describe the world through a film

that her poem slowly peels back:

Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished.62

6i Bishop, Poems, 73.

62 Bishop, Poems, 50.

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The fact of the old man netting alerts us to Bishop's own poetic labor here, but what is

most interesting about the nets—both his and hers—is that they are hardly distinguishable

from the world around them. They are "in the gloaming almost invisible" (hers in the

sense that the medium through which she depicts her scene is itself thin and two-

dimensional and his because it is full of holes and stained the same color as the sky).

One of the net's most important properties seems to be that it blends with the very

landscape it is meant to contain. Not only is the world itself a "gloaming" (as it was "a

mist" in "Sandpiper"), but it appears only through our knowledge of a corresponding

surface which is itself floating and in and out of sight—we know that the air is "dark

purple-brown" only because those colors make the net, itself purple-brown, invisible. The

elements of the world that are emerging in the poem are not yet distinct from the poetic

object that facilitates their emergence. In her essay on "Rarity" in Dreaming by the Book,

Elaine Scarry describes the phenomenological process by which an airy surface, such as

the old man's net, as well as the "gloaming," can actually aid in the poet's making of a

more solid and real-seeming world:

...what is solid or substantive is often strangely coupled with what is not—namely, the quality of the imagined image itself, which, filmy and tissue-like, can be physically manipulated, as it were. The process entails a trick of eliding mental image and actual world just enough to borrow from the one on behalf of the other, for which it is a mimesis. 3

Bishop couples the net—itself a representation of the poem—with the actual scene of the

fishhouses, each surface playing off the other in affirmation of its own existence.

Bishop's savvy dependence on the very visual effects that initially seem to separate her

(and her readers) from the world she observes actually makes her images in the first half

63 Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 89.

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of "At the Fishhouses" more believable and enticing. "All is silver," she writes of the sea

and objects scattered in front of it: 4

.. .the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, the masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls. The big fish tubs are completely lined with layers of beautiful herring scales and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered with creamy iridescent coats of mail with small iridescent flies crawling on them. 5

The silver of the sea and twilight's gloaming permeate—and give outline to—all of

Bishop's images. Likewise the "emerald moss" works to solidify the buildings upon

which it grows by giving shape and placement to the walls beneath it. The herring scales

that "line" the fish tubs and wheelbarrows provide their form and cover them as these

same "iridescent coats of mail" covered the organisms to which they originally belonged.

At the end of her opening stanza, Bishop describes the origin of the fish scales that hide

but also give shape to the objects in her memory: they are what is left from the old man's

scraping at the fish, his knife blade "almost worn away." Such "principal beauty"—that

"something" the poet and the sandpiper are always looking for—most often emerges after

being "scraped" over by a surface that is "almost worn away" (the hanging fabric, as it

were). This strategy of developing her subject by obscuring it is Bishop's way of making

the world around the fishhouses seem more, rather than less, present.

Bishop, Poems, 50.

Bishop, Poems, 50-51.

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"At the Fishhouses" itself peels back, like the fish scales and other filmy surfaces

in the poem, to its culminating image. Memory gives way through the gloaming to a new

vision, this one mediated by the sea. Having already alerted us to her trick of depths,

Bishop engages with an image underwater:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals.. .One seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening. He was curious about me. He was interested in music; like me a believer in total immersion, so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.66

The ellipsis in Bishop's description of the water signifies not only her breaking of its

"absolutely clear" surface but also the shift she makes in the poem's tenses: while her

memory of the old man replays itself in present-time, her vision of the seal comprises a

continuum of memories, "evening after evening," which progresses towards her painful

exposure to "knowledge"—itself a kind of memory (since it is "historical")—at the end

of the poem. The two-dimensionality of Bishop's landscape opens to greater depths just

as she switches tenses; "see" becomes "have seen," "is" becomes "was," and the

imperfect form of the verb "sing" appears with the progressive qualifier "used to."

History—that is, life, and not merely the description of it—enters the poem at the very

moment when the silver opacity of the sea vanishes in clearer depths.

Bishop's conversation with the seal is important. Ironically, the animal is, much

more than the old man in the poem, the liaison between her at-first defensive-seeming

voice and her ultimate, almost spiritual undergoing of history. Her speaker's engagement

with the seal and with her own memory develops her own perspective, or stance, within

66 Bishop, Poems, 51.

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the poem; by means of this conversation, she changes from being a mere observer to

being a full participant. The seal is, like herself, "a believer in total immersion." The

pun is multi-layered: not only does it conjure up images of the seal's natural Baptism

(and her own), as well as her new ability to see, and later touch, below the surface of the

water, but it also refers to a kind of poetic immersion, a diving beneath the aesthetic

surface of the words in order to experience and affect the world in the poem.

Bishop creates an envelope structure between her first encounter with the seal and

her changed perspective once he is gone. After describing his emergence and re-

emergence, she closes over the surface of the water again with a reprise of the line

beginning "Cold dark deep...":

Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug as if it were against his better judgment. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray icy water.. .Back, behind us, the dignified tall firs begin.

The danger of such a social interaction is conveyed through the seal's shrug "against his

better judgment." And yet Bishop has constituted him so clearly as to have mastered,

inside and out, the surface through which she sees him. The chiasmic closing description

of the water suggests it can be permeated from both sides—her perspective and his: the

"Cold dark deep" switches to "clear gray icy" in the next line, reversing its order of

sensory descriptions (cold becomes icy and dark becomes gray) around the two "clears,"

as though Bishop and the seal occupy the same field of vision, which has now become

Bishop, Poems, 52.

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"unsealed," as it were. Bishop begins to describe life through what James Longenbach

/TO

calls "unmediated experience" (in his article on Bishop's "social conscience").

Thus the vertical "firs begin," too, "bluish, associating with their shadows," and

the water itself "seems suspended" above the stones. The world has become its own

mediating surface, or, rather, the various surfaces of the poem have transformed into one

three-dimensional reality: the immersion Bishop describes in terms of the seal becomes a

linguistic immersion. Now her memory is both projected onto and contained within the

poem itself. Bishop makes manifest this confrontation between the poem and life by

describing the possibility of interaction with the water in a passage Susan Stewart has

called a "dialectic between the sense and abstraction":69

If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:70

Bishop not only visually pierces the water but also invades it by touch. Her description

of how the water feels warns against immersing oneself in it; and yet we know from the

seal that immersion is inevitable—in fact, as inevitable as knowledge. This interaction

forces Bishop to change the heretofore absent addressee of the poem to a present, second-

person "you": "if you should dip your hand mjyour wrist would begin to ache..." and so

on. Her determinedly social poetic is employed with similar tonality to Keats's "This

68 Longenbach, "Social Conscience," 482.

69 Stewart, Poetry, 141.

Bishop, Poems, 52.

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Living Hand," itself a poem thematizing the invasive possibilities of poetry. Just as

Keats reminds us that his "living hand" in its poetic form is "warm and capable," that it

can "haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights" (my italics), so Bishop's poetic

defenses give way through the plunging of a hand to the cold depths of knowledge.71

When the transgression is complete—that is, when Bishop has realized that engagement

with a historical world is akin to knowledge—the "you" in her poem changes to a "we."

By the closing of "At the Fishhouses," Bishop has used the dissolution of her carefully-

created defensive surfaces to initiate an intensely social poetic: one that invites the reader

into a dialogue about what knowledge is by recapitulating images from her past. The

world for Bishop becomes moveable, "utterly free," and, most important, historically

transgressed; and so, her poem, like knowledge, is "drawn from the cold hard mouth/ of

the world,"—a landscape in which Bishop is necessarily placed (not displaced).72

This kind of aesthetically productive defense, leading to a poetic scene that is

more real-seeming than it would have initially been, is especially pronounced in several

of Bishop's actual landscapes—her many watercolor paintings of the places she visited

and lived in during her lifetime. The paintings show us in a concrete way how she sees

and seems to defend against the world around her, and from what angles and vantage

points she most prefers to depict her subjects. For instance, Bishop's watercolor of

Merida, Mexico (perhaps her most well-known, since it appears on the cover of her

Complete Poems) suggests a lot about her understanding of how to create interest and

reality in a scene as well as her own stance in relation to artistic and poetic subjects:

71 John Keats, "This Living Hand," in John Keats: The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 331.

72 For another reading of Bishop's interest in surfaces and surface effect, see Peggy Samuels, "Elizabeth Bishop and Paul Klee" in Modernism/modernity 14, no. 3 (2007): 543-68.

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Merida from the Roof (watercolor and ink)

Bishop's painting's colorless windmills and faint architectural outlining make it feel like

a half-sketched, half-finished piece. Fill-in color emphasizes the city below the roof

(where the painter is standing), while the mills in the distance rotate in airy suspension

like pinwheels or spider webs. Nothing seems solid or still; the scene flutters, as if in

motion, like the birds soaring through the painting's upper corners. It is fascinating to

see how the poet brings life and movement to her scene in this way, but the particular

interest here is surely the aspect she chooses for taking in the city as a foreign observer.

As with so many of her poetic characters, the eyes behind this painting look outward

from a removed place, a balcony high above the town. The particular position of the

onlooker on the balcony is striking: standing behind the fronds of a giant tree obstructing

a quarter of her view. Why would Bishop paint from a vantage point that hides a

significant proportion of her subject behind the branches of a date palm?

Because this is a painting, and particularly because it is a landscape, the question

of visual obstruction seems more easily answered than if it were a poem: perhaps Bishop

simply includes the palm in order to help the viewer understand the scene's depth. In

73 Image printed in Elizabeth Bishop, Exchanging Hats, ed. with intr. by William Benton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 27.

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fact, there are several trees in the picture, each diminishing in size as a marker of its

growing distance from the balcony. And the fact that Bishop only depicts the fan of

leaves at the tree's top helps indicate the height of the balcony itself—exactly the length

of a date palm's trunk. In such a two-dimensional, visual representation, a fore-grounded

obstruction seems like a useful tool for gaining perspective since we can measure its own

striking detail against the waning detail of objects farther back. But what we know of

Bishop's life and the idiosyncrasies of her poetry (the mists, her withholding clarity in

"Some Dreams They Forgot") should make us think twice about her including such a

frustrating plant in the painting's foreground. Perhaps Bishop, a tourist in Mexico,

purposefully distances herself from a community that feels foreign to her (as she hints in

both "Questions of Travel" and "Brazil"). Or, conversely, perhaps that palm is actually a

nuisance to her—a physical imposition that represents what she considers to be

inaccessible about the culture. If so, this apropos obstruction, a physical manifestation of

what might be thought of as an intrapsychic defense, may in fact help Bishop (and her

painting's viewers) engage with the scene below. Couldn't the flaw in seeing actually

cause her scene to feel more real, more immediate (less "slushy")? Susan Stewart

suggests this possibility when she explains in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses how

visual impediments to painted landscapes can reduce the perceived artifice in a work:

In a painting such as Van Gogh's Enclosed Field in the Rain, in which horizontal slashing lines of blue-green move across the surface of the painting like a screen, or those Japanese wood-cuts in which white dots flood the foreground as images of snow, the natural elements restrict the frame of artifice of the work. Representations of rain and snow erase the fixity of outline: they promote the recession of the integrity of the form as they heighten the effect of the foreground through which seeing is finally noticed as seeing.7

74 Stewart, Poetry, 167-68.

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If rain and snow can "restrict the frame of artifice" in a work by "eras[ing] the fixity of

outline," so can the file-like fronds of the date palm undermine any touristic or artistic

affectation in "Merida." In the same way that slashing lines across a visual landscape can

force an onlooker to prioritize the act of seeing, so Bishop's fan of leaves can necessitate

an intensive kind of looking: a "looking for something" instead of merely looking around.

The following two indoor scenes gesture toward a vaster elsewhere and take a

similar interest towards what lies just beyond or behind them (they may also shed light on

Bishop's description of a "far-funneled sky" in "Some Dreams They Forgot"):

Cabin with Porthole (watercolor and gouache) Interior with Extension Cord (watercolor, gouache, ink)

In the "Cabin" above, the tourist (with several suitcases and an ironically homey plant) is

presumably pleased with her private vantage on the outside world—a tiny porthole with a

picture-frame-sized view of the sea. In the "Interior" on the right, Bishop lets spring into

an otherwise sterile-looking workspace, complete with an over-arching extension cord to

power a lamp that might have simply stood on the bureau across the wall, by opening the

door. In both of these pictures, the world beyond the artist's representation (a simple

Bishop, Exchanging Hats, 45.

7 Bishop, Exchanging Hats, 43.

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room or "stanza," so to speak) is admired but at the same time held at a distance,

reframed according to man-made constraints. By aesthetically defending against the

outside world, Bishop in fact draws her viewers' eyes immediately outdoors: the sea and

the garden are actually the focal points of both rooms. And yet she is sparing in what she

shows; with our small glimpse of the sea's far-off sparkle and the garden's tiny pastoral

charm comes the knowledge these images are neither easy to produce nor entirely natural.

As with any representational images, they come to us through mediated forms: portals, or

"portholes," created by an artist with some degree of struggle.

Bishop's difficulty in seeing and representing the very objects and places in the

world she would seem to know best is captured in the following watercolor of a house on

Charles Street in Greenwich Village, a block away from the small apartment Bishop

rented in the summer of 1934:

41 Charles Street (watercolor, gouache, ink)

Although Bishop is depicting a real place, the house feels reconstituted, as if seen through

a haze. The brick of the house is barely visible beneath a layer of green ivy descending

from the roof. Seven windows gape in uneven squares through the otherwise solid

Bishop, Exchanging Hats, 3.

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curtain of flora, each revealing a set of inner, cloth curtains, which are parted, slightly, to

betray a dark and indistinct interior. What is particularly interesting is the fuzzy quality

of the ivy itself. Although we know it is comprised of distinct leaves and vines, Bishop

blends the vegetation into a brackish blur that floats in front of the house like fog. In

contrast stands the intricate brickwork of the house on the right, its bright white lines and

detail pushing it forward almost in relief compared to its receding neighbor.

And yet the house beneath the ivy is unquestionably the focus of the painting.

Bishop's grid-like mapping of the painting's fore- and backgrounds—the vertical posts of

the fence at the front of the building and the planked structure on its left, the horizontal

edges of the steps, the checkered grating of the windows above and behind the house, and

the lattice of the screens over the neighbors' windows—intensifies the house's solidity

amidst a maze of overlapping lines. Like many of the images in her poems, this painted

house feels hidden and difficult, if not impenetrable. Partly, its lack of clarity forces us to

look at it more carefully; but partly, too, it conveys Bishop's sense of frustration at

looking at a neighbor's house and not knowing what goes on inside. For Bishop, who

lived in many houses throughout her life ("look! my last, or/next-to-last, of three loved

houses went"), the process of creating an artistic representation of a house would likely

have caused her some ambivalence.78 After all, what makes a particular house fit to

paint? And should an artist represent what is real or imagined about a house? These

questions, suggested by the fog in this picture, might well have been in Bishop's mind

when she wrote the final tercet of her "Sestina"—depicting a child performing the very

task she performed on Charles Street in 1934:

78 Bishop, Poems, 167'.

133

Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove

70

and the child draws another inscrutable house.

For this child, a version of Bishop as artist, to make an object "inscrutable"—that is, to

depict a place or a thing in such a way that it cannot fully be seen or investigated or

understood—is not to deny that it is meaningful but rather to reject it outwardly and in

doing so to increase the reader's (or the seer's) interest. Freud described this

phenomenon in relation to dreams: "It is evident that we reject them, for we forget them

quickly and completely."80 He writes similarly about "negation," which is partly what

Bishop is doing when she makes the obviously important subject of her painting

impossible to see. By drawing "another inscrutable house," Bishop seems to deny its

importance, but in doing so, she releases the image to her consciousness. Making the

world inscrutable is a way for her to be able to "see it," poetically speaking.

At the end of "Some Dreams They Forgot," Bishop uses this same word,

"inscrutable," to describe the content of her own poem. What the dreamers have

forgotten, which is what she herself has attempted to describe, is defined by and chosen

for its inscrutability. This early poem enacts directly what many of her more descriptive

and polished poems ("Brazil" and "At the Fishhouses" included) demonstrate through

their technique and through their characters. Bishop conveys in "Some Dreams" what is

ultimately an active, productive defense within her poetry more generally by choosing

subject matter for that poem that is itself inscrutable. Its final couplet contains a telling

simile: "What flowers shrink to seeds like these, like columbine?" Of course Bishop is

79 Bishop, Poems, 121.

Freud, General Selection, 18.

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referring here to the poisonous berries the dreamers only half-remember eating (berries

that appear in the dream merely as "drop-shapes"), and columbine flowers do indeed

"shrink" into follicles filled with poisonous seeds. But the comparison extends further:

the dreams themselves are likened to flowers, and the remnants, "inscrutable" every

morning by "eight or nine," are reduced to poisons. By these comparisons, Bishop

indicts her own poem, which is another form of dreaming, as one of these shrinking

flowers, left to poisonous seed. The inscrutability of this poem, and the seeming-

defenses in her others, are aesthetically crucial: the material she conveys cannot

immediately sting because she partly denies its presence; and yet, as in forgotten dreams

that mutate and recur, this denial gives her subjects extra importance and permanent life.

By separating her poems from reality (as in the opening of "Brazil"), and covering their

scenes and objects up (as in "Fishhouses" and several of her paintings), and forcing

herself and her readers to continue "looking for something" (as in "Sandpiper" and "The

Moose"), Bishop turns the primary psychological aim of defense—to obscure—on its

head, using it to attract, rather than detract, attention to its subjects.

And yet, looking again at Schafer's theory, we can perhaps say something further

about Bishop's poetic analogues. That is, although she develops in her poetry aesthetic

uses for defense that ultimately operate against its most obvious function to deny, it may

also be possible that she takes advantage of a less-noticed, secondary aspect of defense

mechanisms that involves satisfying, by disguise, the instinctual material the defense is

formed against (Schafer describes this phenomenon as a defense's "positive assertion"):

defence mechanisms emerge as agents of gratification, albeit not of the most direct gratification....each defence mechanism simultaneously makes a negative and positive assertion. Its negative assertion—that something is not so—is the one we are accustomed to putting into words. Depending on

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the specific defence, it takes such forms as these: "There is nothing there;" "It's not I;" "I disapprove of it;" "There's no connection;" "I can't feel it;" "It never happened;" and so forth. The positive assertion—that something is so—is the one we ordinarily think of in terms of unconscious wishful fantasy.... [

Schafer explains that every defense actually allows for the satisfaction of what it

originally seems to deny, but in disguised form. We find perhaps the most obvious

example of this kind of secretly-gratifying denial in literature and art's most archetypal

image of defense: the naked person covering his genitals with a fig leaf. On the surface,

this defensive act seems to be a form of modesty. But it enacts modesty in such a way

that any person observing will in fact look harder and more closely at the forbidden area

than if the defense had not occurred at all. The fig leaf—itself not unlike the palm fronds

Bishop strategically paints in front of Merida from her balcony—is in fact all about

temptation and sex, but under the guise of modesty. The defense mechanism of

projection, Schafer explains, works similarly: by displacing shameful wishes or fantasies

onto others, human beings actually explore and experience such fantasies for themselves,

albeit indirectly. Psychological defenses are in this way given to aesthetic pleasure

(insofar as they fantasize wish fulfillment) rather than restraint. They both deny and

assert, obscure and draw attention to, the objects and ideas they initially seem pitted

against. Bishop may have appreciated these complex and dynamic properties of defense;

her poetry, like Thomas's "Adlestrop" and Hecht's "A Hill," certainly takes advantage of

them in its manipulation of defensive phenomena to create aesthetic interest. And so

although it may be the case that all unconscious defensive processes include seemingly-

poetic elements of gratification, we can see that the poet—and Bishop in particular—is

81 Schafer, "The Mechanisms of Defence," 55.

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self-consciously skilled at producing such aesthetic artifices not only voluntarily, but also

cleverly and appealingly.

Chapter Three

DEPARTING WORDS

If language could be trusted to be true, The hardest would be loudest, Softest, soft. But think again: the joke's On you.

—Heather McHugh, "Who Needs It"'

Freud's writing on the nature of "Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious" suggests

that there are intrapsychic mechanisms of defense that directly relate to language and,

specifically, to how we choose our words. This chapter, in turn, investigates such

defensive maneuvers as they appear in poetry as various kinds of surprising and playful

linguistic devices. In his essay, Freud explains, "We have already learnt from the

connection of jokes with caricature that they 'must bring forward something that is

concealed or hidden' (Fischer, 1889, 51)."2 Beyond their simple status as funny notions,

jokes are, Freud tells us, specifically "verbal constructions" that illuminate what has

previously been withheld, denied, or forbidden.3 His understanding of the defensively

adaptive uses of clever and comic language in producing content that would otherwise

remain buried sheds light, too, on certain clever or comic poets' techniques of drawing

out, via unexpected keywords, puns, and etymologies, the "concealed or hidden"

meanings that their poems may initially seem to deny (and, in doing so, allowing those

meanings to displace what had been on the surface before).

' Heather McHugh, Upgraded to Serious (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2009), 77.

2 Sigmund Freud, "Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious," in The Standard Edition, vol. 8, 13-14.

3 Freud, "Jokes," in The Standard Edition, 16.

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In poetry, such moments of untrustworthiness are often difficult to identify and

equally hard to reconcile. Part of our contemporary appreciation of poems rests on

readers' faith that poetry expresses something essential and true about the world, distilled

in words more accurate and penetrating somehow than the language we speak out loud.

But lyric poetry is also expressed through formal techniques of disguise and indirection:

truth in lyric frequently involves the concealment or delaying of truth, in keeping with the

figurativeness inherent in all language. The epigraph from Heather McHugh above

speaks to this subtler, counterintuitive side of poetry's truth telling. How is it possible,

she poses, that "soft" can be the opposite of both "hard" and "loud" without those two

words meaning the same thing? Have we any control over our own language and the

meanings it implies, or, she asks, is the "joke" on us? McHugh, herself a connoisseur of

linguistic tropes, is mistrustful of language—and she is not the first poet to put this

mistrust to use in poems. It is often the case that lyric poets hide or deny what they mean

through words that feel more honest than not. And so one of the pleasures (and

occasionally one of the frustrations) of reading lyric poems is recognizing in them

various forms of defensive wordplay for the hidden meanings they conceal in addition to

what they highlight on the surface. If poetry does indeed express something essential and

true about the world, then it persists also—sometimes best—in its lies and slants.

This chapter explores the specifically verbal mechanisms that four lyric poets use

in their poetry to delay or deny meanings that are nevertheless inherent in their work. My

two previous chapters, with a similar goal, have focused on mechanisms related to voice

and structural technique rather than words; here, I am primarily interested in moments

when a poet's words, through ambiguity, punning, and play, either reveal hidden

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meanings by leading the reader away from their primary sense or context (as is often the

case in Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost) or when they import meanings from

elsewhere—other frames of reference, temporal or spatial—into the poem unexpectedly,

propelling the poem into contexts that might otherwise seem external to it (as is often the

case in James Merrill and Paul Muldoon). One question this line of inquiry raises right

away is how exploring such linguistic strategies differs from exploring poetic tropes more

generally, since lyrics are always comprised of words that are representations rather than

things themselves; or, to phrase the question differently, how are the linguistic removes I

describe—which include Dickinson's strange vocabularies, Frost's unexpected

abstractions, Merrill's puns, and Muldoon's verbal "stunts" (as he calls them)—any

different from the commonly recognized formal devices that denote poems as poems? I

consider myself answered by the particular sensations that such crafted—and crafty—

formal mechanisms as those I describe in this chapter give off. When readers encounter a

certain kind of extreme wordplay or wit, the feeling of encounter can mirror the pleasure

that is felt when hidden or concealed material is unexpectedly brought into light through

the intrapsychic processes that lie behind all unconscious verbal associations. The poems

in this chapter are thus examples of how poets make artful and strategic use of the

everyday defensive maneuvers that illuminate hidden mental content in specifically

verbal ways, including jokes, puns, and "slips of the tongue." Their unusual verbal tropes

go beyond the more general poetic devices of indirection—i.e. simile and metaphor—to

artfully recreate (and thus familiarize) what is constantly occurring unconsciously in the

linguistic elements of our daily lives and nightly dreams.

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Poems that contain such verbal mechanisms are rarely explicit about them (to

draw purposeful attention to instances of elsewhereness would negate their subversive

properties and thus diminish their adaptive function). But there are occasions when poets

write about linguistic phenomena directly; in doing so, they turn a formal strategy into

external subject matter—method into content—as in Natasha Trethewey's poem "Letter":

At the post office, I dash a note to a friend, tell her I've just moved in, gotten settled, that

I'm now rushing off on an errand—except that I write errant, a slip between letters,

each with an upright backbone anchoring it to the page.

Trethewey's first six lines set up a scenario of public writing that is akin to her poetic act.

When she makes her slip, when she writes "errant" instead of "errand," she exposes the

concealed truth that underlies the letter she presented before. The words "I've just moved

in, gotten settled" mean exactly the opposite of "errant"; her Freudian slip of the pen thus

serves as a point of departure into the elsewhere behind her initial act of creation as

constituted by the poem's opening—"I dashed a note." With this seeming "mistake" she

also inserts into her otherwise very contemporary-seeming poem one of poetry's oldest

conventions, making modern the traditional "pun on error" (which perhaps most notably

occurs in Spenser's Fairie Queene, but in Milton and other places, too) that connects the

primary meaning of the word "error" to it secondary meaning tied up in the Latin verb

"erro, errare,"— not just "to err" but also "to wander." Trethewey's poem, erring on

"errand," sets itself up linguistically to wander, to become "errant." Her slip is figured as

a mistake, but in its punning and associations, it is surely calculated. As her poem

4 Natasha Trethewey, "Letter," in Native Guard (Boston: Mariner, 2007), 12.

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"wanders" on, she finally reveals the psychological underpinnings of her speaker's slip:

"the flat line of your death."5 At this point the poem seems to begin again as the speaker

rewrites her lyric according to the new terms set by her key word:

What was I saying? I had to cross the word out, Start again, explain what I know best

Because of the way you left me: how suddenly

A simple errand, a letter—everything—can go wrong.

As the poet concludes, her initial subjects of moving and settling transform into her

actual subjects of errancy and grief. "Crossing the word out" does little to change the

effect "errant" has on Trethewey's poem (though the "friend" who receives the letter may

accept the revision). In these final lines, poetry becomes "a simple errand" in which

unforeseen truths—repressed, denied, withheld—reveal themselves unexpectedly through

wordplay. The "simple" verbal units that transform poems like this one are the linguistic

correlatives of defensive processes that, like the slip on errand (and its further pun on

error), allow for the safe if indirect expression of content that is otherwise denied.

Trethewey's poem is about the nature of unconscious defense as manifest in

linguistic remove; any further key words that remain hidden and that operate in the ways

suggested by her own explication must be discovered by the reader (it seems doubtful

that there are any embedded in this particular poem, but likely in others). Dan Chiasson

performs a similar trick of turning what would be a formal strategy into his poem's

content in his dramatic monologue on the nature of poetry, delivered in the voice of a

circus elephant named "Frederick":

5 "Letter" is situated among several poems at the beginning of Native Guard that deal with the emotional impact of a mother's death.

6 Trethewey, "Letter," in Native Guard, 12.

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And I learned to pity the powerful—

my trainer, forcing me to puff a cigarette, was himself forced, by powers far greater than he, to force me; so I did it, though my lungs hurt, though my lungs felt sandpapered after. I almost wrote "sadpapered" there; isn't it weird The way the mind works, because As I fill this paper up with words

I do feel sad, thinking of him lighting That cigarette, placing it between my lips7

Chiasson demonstrates openly, in his revelation of Frederick's near-slip, "sadpapered,"

the power of the psychic undercurrents affecting all of the words we speak. Making the

sadness explicit within the poem is a conscious confession of what might have

inadvertently and unconsciously occurred if the slip he describes had actually taken

place. Chiasson shows, in his understanding of the passive to active transfer of

aggression that compels the trainer to "force" the elephant to smoke, that he is a poet

particularly attuned to the intrapsychic activity that controls human behavior outside of

conscious awareness. However his own poem is structured in such a way as to control the

slip and keep on the surface the kinds of linguistic removes that, in other poems, remain

hidden and thus correspond more closely to the way such mechanisms work within the

mind. "Sadpapered" is Chiasson's key word or departure point into elsewhere—but he

tells us so. In the sections of this chapter, I am primarily interested in cases where such

wordplay occurs more subtly—through eccentric vocabulary and diction, abstractions,

puns, and complex etymologies—in keeping with the usually unconscious psychic

defenses upon which these formal elements of poems are modeled.

7 Dan Chiasson, "Scared by the Smallest Shriek of a Pig, and When Wounded, Always Give Ground," in Natural History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 59.

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Seamus Heaney alludes to the kinds of verbal veils that frequently underlie the

meanings of poems in the sestet of his sonnet "Scrabble":

Year after year, our game of Scrabble: love Taken for granted like any other word That was chanced on and allowed within the rules. So 'scrabble' let it be. Intransitive. Meaning to scratch or rake at something hard. Which is what he hears. Our scraping, clinking tools.

Heaney understands—and underscores by allowing "love" to hang awkwardly aloft at the

end of the sestet's opening line—the fact that no word is ever really "chanced on" and

that "love" cannot actually exist intransitively the way it comfortably does, without

referent or context, across four tiles on a scrabble board. Poets in particular, Heaney

implies, scratch and rake at words (as the word "scrabble" implies), making every word

impossible to "take for granted." Heaney dedicates this poem (through an epigraph) to

his friend Tom Delaney, an archeologist whose own occupation, like Heaney's, involved

scratching, raking, and scraping for what "is concealed or hidden" beneath surfaces. The

poem itself becomes a conceit for the poet's—and the reader's—necessity in exploring

depths that initially appear flat (the earth, the top of a game board, a poem).

Freud, too, was an explorer of depths; his interest was also in digging below the

surface for concealed and hidden meanings. An avid collector of antiquities, he

considered himself an archeologist of the mind; he enjoyed thinking of ancient objects as

symbolic and concrete counterparts to the mysteries inherent in unconscious life, which

he believed could reveal themselves secretly in language. In one place he writes:

Words are the essential tool of mental treatment. A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by 'mere' words. He will feel that he is being asked to

8 Heaney, "Scrabble," in Opened Ground, 322.

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believe in magic. And he will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.9

As readers of poems, which also contain symbols, indirections, concealments, and in

many cases seemingly "magical" revelations in the form of verbal wit, our own principles

of interpretation can feel similar to his. The phenomenon of lyric elsewhere, which is

related to unconscious mental processes that effect remove in psychological terms, is

determined in poems (as it is in the mind) in shifting ways; that is, elsewhere in poems

exists in relation to points of departure that can be constituted either by a particular voice

or metrical pattern, or a series of images or objects, or, as in the following poems, by

"'mere' words" that on the one hand represent literal meaning but on the other open out

into further contexts previously external to the poem. Dickinson, Frost, Merrill, and

Muldoon invest their words with truths beyond those that their poems initially claim.

What they achieve is a lyric elsewhere that exists within—and is formulated by—

language itself.

8. Emily Dickinson

Several articles and a handful of books about Emily Dickinson's poetry have focused on

the most rudimentary aspect of the author's poems: her words. And why should it be

otherwise? As Donald Thackrey writes, "language and communication exercised an

almost hypnotic fascination over [Dickinson]." Sharon Cameron adds that "words in

9 Freud, "Psychical (or Mental) Treatment," in The Standard Edition, vol. 7, 283. 10 Donald Thackrey, "The Communication of the Word," in Emily Dickinson • A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard B. Sewall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963), 51.

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Dickinson's poems often exist outside of a situation and, more disturbing, seem to shrink

from the necessity of creating one." In a similar vein, E. Miller Budick begins her book

on Dickinson by calling the poet's words "autonomous and freewheeling figures."12

Being so fascinated by words, and often treating their contexts so loosely, Dickinson

takes up the topic herself in a number of poems; for example: "Shall I take thee, the Poet

said/ To the propounded word?";13 "A word is dead/ When it is said,/ Some say";14 "A

Word dropped careless on a Page/May stimulate an eye";15 "A Word made Flesh is

seldom/ And tremblingly partook;"16 and so on. In these poems and others, Dickinson is

fascinated by words' ability to live beyond their saying and—regardless of her plans for

them—to "civilize" the unknown.17 The best scholars of Dickinson's work have thus

taken their cue from the poet, who herself writes about "internal difference/Where the

Meanings, are":18 rather than faulting Dickinson's poems for their inconsistencies in

language or logic, they have good-naturedly plumbed the depths of her work for such

1' Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore. The Johns Hopkins Press, 1979), 14

12 E Miller Budick, Emily Dickinson and the Life of Language A Study in Symbolic Poetics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 1

13 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed Thomas H Johnson (Boston Little Brown and Company, 1960), P 1126. All subsequent quotations of Dickinson's work refer to this edition and its numeration of the poems Citations appear in footnotes by poem number rather than by page number

Dickinson, Complete Poems, P 1212

Dickinson, Complete Poems, P 1261

' Dickinson, Complete Poems, P 1651

17 Cameron, Lyric Time, 9

Dickinson, Complete Poems, P 258

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"internal differences" and "words that refuse to totalize themselves in a context" as a way

of uncovering secondary and even tertiary meanings that are hidden or withheld.19

But Dickinson's constellations of meaning come about not just because of her

words' ability to remain independent from their contexts but also from the paradox of her

presenting them as ultra-specific or pointed even in poems where they are actually

contributing to multiple purposes. Dickinson wields a surprisingly technical vocabulary.

She often uses words that come across as exceedingly directed—as though no other word

could better or more accurately describe whatever she is presenting, as in her startling

sequence of nouns and adjectives in this meditation on a hummingbird:

A Route of Evanescence With a revolving Wheel— A Resonance of Emerald— A Rush of Cochineal— And every Blossom on the Bush Adjusts its tumbled Head— The mail from Tunis, probably, An easy Morning's Ride—20

Many scholars use this poem to demonstrate how Dickinson's words can render a

particular subject matter indeterminate rather than whole or polished.21 But the difficulty

of these lines, and therefore their richness, comes less from the fact that the language is in

certain ways illogical or autonomous and more from the speaker's seeming denial of this

difficulty by offering what sounds like a line up of strong descriptors that should hardly

19 Cameron, Lyric Time, 17.

20 Dickinson, Complete Poems, P 1463.

21 Budick explains that in the language of this poem "there is a hint of frenzy that is intended not simply to replicate the motion of a bird but to warn us that both the bird and the poem are teetering at the edge of confusion and disarray." Budick, Emily Dickinson and the Life of Language, 10. See also Roland Hagenbuchle, "Precision and Indeterminacy in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson" in ESQ A Journal of the American Renaissance 20, no. 1 (1974)' 33-56

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leave the reader at any loss for meaning at all. For instance, how much ambiguity should

we expect from a poem that claims the kind of specificity of "Tunis" (rather than, say,

"Africa") or "emerald" (rather than "green") or "cochineal" (rather than "red")?

The possibility, or removal from context, implied by these words is created in part

by the qualities in Dickinson's writing that seem to deny this freedom in favor of clarity

and precision. Her words point to but then throw a shade over their referents. In so

doing, they offer nuance at the very moments when we most expect fullness. Consider,

for instance, the word "cochineal"—probably describing the "tumbled head[s]" of

blossoms but also perhaps the messy image of the hard-to-see hummingbird itself. Even

thought the scene, with all of its components, is difficult to capture—the route of the bird

is "evanescen[fj," the image fleeting—the word that Dickinson uses to describe the color

of the "rush" is far from unstudied. "Cochineal" is not just red, but the particular shade of

scarlet extracted from an insect that goes by the same name; its precision as a word belies

what must have been a very imprecise sensation (which is one reason why so many

critics feel this poem must not be about a hummingbird at all, but sensation itself).

Dickinson describes the bird as though she had hours to analyze with exactitude its

movements and its color, but the poem's form suggests the opposite: with truncated

phrases and internal as well as end rhymes (in addition to "wheel" and "cochineal," we

hear "evanescence" and "resonance," "bush" and "rush"), the structure of the eight lines

emphasizes the hurry of the bird rather than the rumination of the speaker. "Cochineal"

seems out of place; even if, as William Howard points out, the word would have sounded

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more commonplace to a nineteenth-century audience than it does to us, it still suggests a

gradation of color that the fleeting impression could hardly have produced.

But inconsistency did not matter to Dickinson. The strategy by which she

transforms what was surely a dim perception into a particularized, if abstract, image is a

technique that corresponds to what might have felt to her—and what surely feels to many

of her readers—like a familiar mode of psychological defense. In a similar way to how

people confuse or obfuscate in their language those ideas or subjects they wish to deny,

Dickinson's words rarely clarify as much as they seem to. Her technical words often

make what should be a simple or clear impression difficult to understand. In this way,

her words both conceal her primary subject matter but at the same time reveal its

particular import (as a thing worth denying) and relation to other subjects or contexts.

For instance in the poem above, "Tunis" is both enlightening in terms of its specificity

but also confusing in terms of Dickinson's surface meaning. She uses the place name as a

way of comparing the speed and scope of the hummingbird's flight to the path of the sun

(as in the lines she alludes to in The Tempest), but the word, in effect, moves the poem

away from the image of the bird and instead opens it up to a much broader conceptual

realm.23 "Tunis" no better describes the bird than would "China" or "New York"; the

name removes the poem's subject from its context, placing it instead within the literary

trajectory that connects, at a long distance, Dickinson with Shakespeare. And so words

22 Howard explains "Cochineal (5) occurs as the name of a food coloring in cooking recipes of the early nineteenth century, and in the 1870s it was a common enough word to appear in the lines of a somewhat ribald domestic comedy in which one of the characters uses a fictitious board meeting of "the Compressed Cochineal Company" as an excuse to his wife for an evening out " William Howard, "Emily Dickinson's Poetic Vocabulary," in PMLA 72, no 1 (March 1957), 231

23 In The Tempest, Shakespeare wntes of the Queen of Tunis "She that dwells/Ten leagues beyond man's life, she that fiom Naples/Can have no note—unless the sun were post " William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed Stephen Greenblatt, (New York- W W Norton and Company, 1997), 3076, Act 2, Scene 1,11 241-43

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. like "cochineal" and "Tunis" operate like poetic red herrings: they claim, in their

specificity, a closeness of description when in reality they are departure points to an

elsewhere made of meanings previously concealed. (And, like most defensive

obfuscations, they are more confusing than the objects they claim to describe.)

The crystalline adjective "emerald" is also unexpected here (and defensively

unhelpful, if one thinks too literally about how a green rock—still and silent—can modify

an aural and physical sensation like "resonance"). But such an impossible descriptor is

not unprecedented within Dickinson's work. She uses a similar strategy in poem 318:

I'll tell you how the Sun rose— A Ribbon at a time— The Steeples swam in Amethyst— The news, like Squirrels, ran—24

Here the horizon takes on the "particular" shade of purple reflected by a crystal that can

actually manifest in several gradients of color. An "amethyst" sky, as precise as that

word may seem, could actually appear as pale as violet or as dark as purple-black—or

any shade in between. By choosing a word that sounds precise—and what could be more

precise than a crystal with its exact proportions and sharp edges—Dickinson seems to

offer more clarity than she is able or wishes to. Her word, when pushed beyond its initial

implications, explodes rather than sharpen her meaning. For instance, is it also possible

that "amethyst" is a homophonic pun on "Amherst," where the steeples of Dickinson's

poem probably did exist; reading the word as a pun in this way changes the feeling of the

poem: in this case it takes on an individualized context (perhaps a little more like

Wordsworth's solitary meditation in the early morning on Westminster Bridge).

Dickinson, Complete Poems, P 318.

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The following lines from poem 245 also use "amethyst," but they do so literally

(at least on the surface) and so produce a seemingly clearer effect:

I held a Jewel in my fingers— And went to sleep— The day was warm, and winds were prosy— I said, '"Twill keep"—

I woke—and chid my honest fingers, The Gem was gone— And now, an Amethyst remembrance Is all I own—

Dickinson may be referring to a poem (or the germ of one), or the sun, or even possibly a

real gem in her first stanza; it hardly matters by the time we reach the phrase "Amethyst

remembrance" in the penultimate line, for this pairing overshadows the rest of the poem

and brings to the fore the subtle idea she introduces in line three about the winds. By

describing them as "prosy"—dull, lackluster, normal, tedious, safe—Dickinson

transforms her poem into the particular exemplar of un-prosy-ness. The jewel of poetry

is linked to its unpredictability: it never "keeps." Her "Amethyst remembrance" suggests

such an idea and at the same time defies it. Of course we understand her to mean,

literally, that all she has left upon waking is the recollection of an amethyst that she was

presumably holding in line one (she no longer possesses the actual stone); but the word,

in the poet's able and always-flexible syntax, turns adjectival: Amethyst remembrance, as

opposed to some other kind. Such a surprising word pair is common among Dickinson's

poems; think of "polar expiation,"26 a phrase that Archibald MacLeish compares to

Dickinson, Complete Poems, P 245.

Dickinson, Complete Poems, P 532.

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"Amethyst remembrance," complaining that "neither of these exits upon the retina."

And so although the name of the gemstone is generally a noun, Dickinson's reader cannot

help but imagine that word to be describing some clear, pure, or crystal act of

remembering—an idea that is suggestive but not precise (and anything but "prosy"). The

poem hinges on a word that denies its own common usage.

In the following poem, another about a sunset, the phrase "Amber Revelation"

operates similarly, except here the word "Amber" is first an adjective, then a noun (i.e. its

grammar moves in the opposite direction of the grammar in "Amethyst remembrance"):

An ignorance a Sunset Confer upon the Eye— Of Territory—Color— Circumference—Decay—

Its Amber Revelation Exhilarate—Debase— Omnipotence' inspection Of Our inferior face—

And when the solemn features Confirm—in Victory— We start—as if detected In Immortality—28

Like "A Route of Evanescence," these lines describe with false or feigned accuracy an

event that is nearly impossible for the poet to perceive visually. Dickinson uses words

like "Circumference" (another of her favorite technical words which both implies

Archibald MacLeish, "The Private World Poems of Emily Dickinson," in Emily Dickinson A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard B Sewall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963), 152 Paul Muldoon writes a whole essay attending to this phrase ("polar expiation"), revealing its underpinnings in a homophomc pun on "polar expedition" and giving an account of Dickinson's particular interest the expedition of Sir John Franklin, which led to the discovery of the Northwest Passage—a name Dickinson had affectionately given to a particular hallway in her family's homestead Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem (New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 116-39. See the section on James Merrill's puns, later in this chapter, for a discussion of how this kind of verbal logic, from "expedition" to "expiation," provides yet another departure point into elsewhere, beyond the feigned precision of the unexpected word pairing

28 Dickinson, Complete Poems, P 552

152

precision and at the same time confuses rather than clarifies her subject matter), "color,"

and "decay" to describe what the "Eye" sees; but none of these words quite captures the

sight of a sunset. And how could they, since such an image, by its very nature, defies

"inspection" (to use Dickinson's own word from stanza two)? Instead of showing us the

sunset with words, Dickinson gives us ideas about it. "Amber" suggests the color of the

scene, but we sense that "Amber Revelation" may mean more than simply that the sky

looked orange or burnt sienna. The adjective word derives from the hardened organic

material it describes; like "amethyst" and "emerald," "amber" is a departure point to

meanings beyond those initally at hand. Amber, the substance, is sticky, permanent; it

preserves and magnifies and hardens what it folds around. Perhaps an "Amber

Revelation" is one that encapsulates its object; perhaps—to invoke the poem's final

word—it is the kind of revelation that bestows "Immortality" on whatever (or whomever)

it reveals. The numerous possibilities implied by the phrase demonstrate how, in spite of

her affect of specificity, Dickinson's words leave their pretense of precision behind them.

"Amber," the most visual word in the poem, is also the one that opens it up to its

enriching multiplicity of meanings rather than an isolated point.

The wealth of names for stones and gems is an ironic source of descriptive

vocabulary for Dickinson since she often uses these terms as a means of abstracting away

from her primary subject matter despite the fact that they describe material that is

concrete (she makes abstractions concrete and vice versa). Perhaps the best example of

this kind of paradox appears in the following much-admired lines about pain:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes— The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs— The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

153

The Feet, mechanical, go round— Of Ground, or Air, or Ought— A Wooden way Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone—

This is the Hour of Lead— Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow— First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—29

Dickinson's critics have creatively theorized many times over about the meaning and

sense of "Quartz contentment," and several have pointed out that "contentment" here

refers not to happiness or satisfaction but simply the lack of an ability or inclination to

respond. Helen Vendler suggests that

Quartz, a vitreous crystal, is the birthstone, so to speak, of this poem— once a glassy fluid, it too has suffered rigor mortis. Insofar as the "formal feeling" can be described, it is like a stone in its immobility; but it is not amorphous: it is tensely rigid with its own self-interlocking crystal-lattice that cannot be rearranged.30

This kind of associative reading of Dickinson's adjectives (especially her mineral and

crystal ones), while gratifying and suggestive, can also force clarity into lines that

themselves seem to resist it. Even though quartz is a lucid stone, "Quartz contentment"

is not clear. At the beginning of the poem it may seem as though Dickinson sets out to

portray this "formal feeling" as accurately as possible, but throughout, and particularly in

the second stanza, she masks the fluidity of her sense of what this "formal feeling" feels

like by using overly-specific, yet indeterminate, words in describing it. To further

Dickinson, Complete Poems, P 341.

30 Helen Vendler, Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75.

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complicate her description, she follows "Quartz" with "lead" in the very next line—two

different stones that, on the face of it, look like opposites. Certainly in terms of visual

properties these substances have little in common: one is clear, light, and sparkles; the

other is thick, heavy, and dull. Yet conceptually, as poetic descriptors, they are more

similar: neither means what it represents outside of its context within the poem, and

readers will bring to their interpretation no more of a preconceived notion of how

"quartz" describes "contentment" than they will of how an "hour" can be made of "lead."

And so although the properties of the stones themselves are quite different, the words

Dickinson uses to signify them are equally opaque.

Other critics—indeed most critics of Dickinson's poetry—have pointed out these

kinds of opacities and abstractions in various ways; and most, if not all, would agree that

exploring the particularities of Dickinson's language leads the reader into to multiple, and

often mutually exclusive, interpretations of the poems. Alice Fulton perhaps

demonstrates this fate of Dickinson's reader best in her analysis of Poem 430 ("It would

never be Common—more—I said"). In discussing the many possibilities embedded in the

poem's first word, "It," Fulton celebrates "the manyness rather than the singleness of [the

poet's] imagery" and marks it out as a particular strength by pointing out, as I have here,

that such multiplicity of meaning may pique the reader's interest even more than if the

language was easier to pin down.31 "Rather than creating an annoying vagueness, as

might be expected, Dickinson's unspecified catalysts allow for a greater degree of reader

engagement."32 In addition, Fulton introduces the idea of purposeful obfuscation by

31 Alice Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1999), 137.

32 Fulton, "Feeling as a Foreign Language," 150.

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calling the poet's ubiquitous dashes "a linguistic analogue to probability waves."

Instead of thinking of them as an alternate form of punctuation, Fulton reads these tiny

symbols as poet's will not to make her images clear, a strategy to "have many cakes and

eat them all."34 To Fulton's analysis of Dickinson's tendency towards multiplicity and

abstraction I add the seemingly contradictory notion of specificity or precision, which

Dickinson effects through her idiosyncratic vocabulary. Fulton focuses on the ways in

which pronouns and dashes—which are themselves blanks—create both difficulty and

richness within the poems; but the words, even the very specific and formulated ones, do

the same kind of hedging.35 This strategy functions as in psychological defense and in

therapeutics: as psychoanalyst Warren Poland suggests, "even within an analysis, the

words that clarify by identifying simultaneously betray by abstracting."36

The pretense of precision in Dickinson's words is part of what makes her poetry

so appealing. As readers we recognize an impulse that is nearly universal; we understand

and sympathize with the poet's wish to illuminate what is dark, to order and structure

what is necessarily boundless. Dickinson deals with such an idea openly in Poem 581:

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—

33 Fulton, "Feeling as a Foreign Language," 152.

34 Fulton, "Feeling as a Foreign Language," 152-53.

35 Hagenbuchle makes an argument similar to Fulton's, explaining that the "indeterminacy" in Dickinson's poems, which comes alongside "the greatest precision in presentation," is as important—perhaps more important—than what the poet makes clear. Hagenbuchle, "Precision and Indeterminacy," 33

36 Warren Poland, "The Analyst's Words," in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 55 (1986) 246

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Or Noon—in Mazarin?

Even as Dickinson confesses her inability to find the perfect word (a challenge she

compares to that of an artist trying to draw the world and, implicitly, human beings trying

to understand the ways of god), she still attempts to account for this lack through the

words she chooses for her poem. "Blaze," "Cochineal," and "Mazarin" are all words that

claim close representation but in actuality send the reader elsewhere, beyond the poem's

subject matter, which is already quite abstract, and into a world where words hang only

loosely on the objects they describe and where association and creativity reign over

reason. Dickinson's poems, at the very moments when they sound most rooted, remove

themselves from materiality and occupy an elsewhere that offers brighter and more

permanent sensations than the world the poet claims to describe. Why should it matter

what the poet sees? The words themselves write a place more worth knowing (Dickinson

seems to imply) than the one to which the poet—and we—belong.

9. Robert Frost

Like psychological defenses, the abstract words in Dickinson's poetry operate adaptively,

opening up for the reader vistas of meaning previously concealed (and reminding him or

her what it feels like to confuse in a purposeful way, to refuse clarity defensively in other

contexts). Frost's poetry turns toward abstractions, too, but such points of departure into

elsewhere occur more subtly in his poems than they do in hers. Whereas Dickinson's

abstractions, once recognized through their veil of feigned specificity, can seem almost

37 Dickinson, Complete Poems, P 581.

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excessive, Frost's are few and far between. He slips abstract words into his poems almost

invisibly, seemingly to let them go unnoticed, as in his early poem "Mowing":

There was never a sound beside the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound— And that was why it whispered and did not speak. It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.38

Here, as in many of Frost's poems about life on the farm, the poet's literary and

occupational pursuits appear to unite into a single purpose. The oddly-rhymed

hendecasyllabic sonnet harmonizes the sound of a scythe cutting grass with the song of

the poet himself. This confluence of lyric song and manual labor is one of Frost's

repeated themes: wherever labor occurs in the poems, it is usually some kind of figure for

the poet's own work. And yet there are peculiarities in "Mowing" that call into question

the poet's seeming claim that labor is his most sincere metaphor for poetry-writing. For

instance, the speaker performs very little actual mowing within the lines, despite his

celebration of this labor (we hear of only a sweep or two of the scythe at the poem's

beginning and end). He organizes his poem around the central question of what the

scythe whispers while it works—a question that reveals divided attentions: he is as

Frost, Collected Poems, 26.

39 Richard Poirier has called "Mowing" one of Frost's "best" early poems precisely because it attends to the compatibility of the poet's two lifelong labors—farming and writing poetry—without oversimplifying "the essential mystery of the relationship... between men and scythes, landscape and poet." Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: the Work of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 288.

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interested in the "song" that accompanies his work as he is in the work itself (and, as if in

response to his instrument, he alters his own poetic meter each time he mentions the

scythe or its sound, a technique that allows the scythe to whisper through him).4 And,

perhaps most important, a barely noticeable but crucial verbal sleight of hand occurs in

line ten, undermining the significance of labor altogether:

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows

What is "love" doing in this poem, which claims to be about agricultural and poetic

work? Why does the speaker, a laborer in the midst of guessing at his scythe's song,

attribute the act of laying swale to the "earnest love" rather than to his own hard work

(i.e. an "earnest lad') or at least to the labor of his tool (perhaps an "earnest hand")?

When we encounter "love," our initial response as readers might simply be to

gloss over it (after all, it melodically alliterates with "laid" and "swale") and replace it,

mentally, with "lad" or "hand" or "work" or "labor" or some other noun that more

concretely describes the agent of the act of laying swales.41 And yet Frost is a canny,

deliberate writer, as careful with his words as any other poet trained in Classical

languages and meters. The abstract word "love" makes a subtle entrance, but it is as

integral here as it is to the end of the poem "Two Tramps in Mud Time," where Frost

uses it to describe his feelings for farming after being challenged by two laborers who

40 The two anapests of "there was NE-ver a SOUND..." in the opening line, the dactyl of "WHlS-per-mg" in the line below it, and the trochee of "WHiS-pered" in the last line, punctuate the hendecasyllables formed by Frost's own speech. The poet revels in his speaker's attempts to decipher his tool's message in part because he knows the guessing will yield no results: no matter what the speaker proposes—either something literal like "the heat of the sun" or the "lack of sound," or something inventive and mythical like "the gift of idle hours" or "gold at the hand of fay or elf—the meaning of the whisper, like the meaning of the poem, remains elusive.

In this way the speaker of "Mowing," who is guessing at the whisper, and the reader, who is guessing at the poem, are engaged in the same interpretive act

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offer to take over his work. Because "Mowing" proposes in its closing lines (for the first

time in Frost's oeuvre) farm labor as a figure for the poet's own process of "making," his

subtle divergence from that metaphor in line ten is particularly powerful. By allowing

"love" to invade a poem ostensibly about work, by suddenly abstracting away from his

own preferred metaphor for poetry-writing, Frost quietly calls this metaphor into

question. The turn may serve in the manner of a defensive function: his unexpected

insertion, seemingly by accident, of a secondary and perhaps more conflictual subject

matter (love) into what is a simpler and more explicit theme (poetry's relation to work)

occurs poetically under the guise of a slip. As Freud notes regarding such phenomena,

they "can be traced back to incompletely suppressed psychical material, which, although

pushed away by consciousness, has nevertheless not been robbed of all capacity for

expressing itself." 2 But Frost's slip, though it vanishes almost imperceptibly like any

common slip of the tongue, hardly feels accidental; rather, it is an artful substitution

modeled after the psychological kind—a way of partially keeping concealed, while still

expressing, a truth about his poetry which may have been troubling.43 (Love is certainly

a more private conceit for poetry than labor is, and thus harder to specify—for any poet

or lyric persona—without feelings of vulnerability or discomfort.) Frost inverts the usual

mechanism of "slipping" into a more purposeful one: that is, he consciously "slips" the

word into his poem so as to make it appear less important than it is.

Freud, The Standard Edition, vol. 6, 279.

43 While I do not wish to conjecture here about Frost's own personal attitude towards love (or indeed love poetry), his biographers have frequently pointed out the ways m which the poet's relations with his wife and children were troubled See Jay Panm, Robert Frost A Life (London- William Hememann, 1998) and Lawrence Thompson, Robert Frost, three vols (New York' Holt, Rmehart and Winston, 1966)

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The idea that Frost's poetry might be in some way more secretive than it initially

seems is of course not new, Lionel Trilling pointed out as much at the poet's eighty-fifth

birthday party when he gave a speech calling him "a terrifying poet "44 Trilling's

comment, and the strand of 1950's Frost criticism that it belongs to, has been liberating

for all of Frost's subsequent critics, who can now more readily place his poems alongside

the works of other, seemingly more "difficult" Modern poets like Eliot and Stevens and

Pound 5 But the "easy," pastoral Frost who writes about his daily labors and likens his

poetry-wntmg to them is not simply a mistaken public construct but rather a persona that

Frost invented, having taken up farming relatively late m his life and by choice rather

than out of necessity He often uses poetic material from his farming life as a way of

concealing, even if partially revealing through sudden abstractions, subjects (like love)

that he keeps further removed Similar to slips of the tongue—a term whose very name is

an instantiation of defensive wordplay in which the ingenuous claim of mistake or

accident ("slip") is further misattnbuted to a body part (the tongue) devoid of

mtentionality—Frost's strategy of slipping unexpected words (and with them, subjects)

into poems without preparation or further explanation is an artfully disguised confession

of what may in fact be the truth

44 Stanley Burnshaw, Robert Frost Himself (New York G Braziller, 1986), 103-05 For a longer description of Trilling's talk and Frost's response to it (in a letter to the critic after the event, the poet writes "You made my birthday party a surprise party"), see Panm, Robert Frost, 408-11

45 See Randall Jarrell, "The Other Frost," Poetry and the Age (Gainesville University of Florida Press, 2001), 28-36

46 Unlike most farmer poets, Frost was born and raised in the West (California), in a city (San Francisco), and by educated parents who encouraged him to go to school It was only after attending Harvard and Dartmouth and holding several teaching positions that Frost moved to Deny, New Hampshire to run a poultry farm left to him by his grandfather During the ten years he spent there before moving to England with his family to pursue poetry full time, Frost wrote poems about fanning that would appear m his books for up to twenty years afterwards Living on the farm in Deny was conducive to his primary vocation, which even then was to write verse

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Frost turns to this strategy in "Putting in the Seed," which openly suggests an

analogy between the farmer's labor of planting and the human act of sex, when he slips

an unexpected word—again, "Love"—into line ten as a way of describing the poetic act:

You come to fetch me from my work tonight When supper's on the table, and we'll see If I can leave off burying the white Soft petals fallen from the apple tree (Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite, Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;) And go along with you ere you lose sight Of what you came for and become like me, Slave to a springtime passion for the earth. How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed On through the watching for that early birth When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed, The sturdy seedling with arched body comes Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.47

The speaker flirts with his beloved by instructing her to join him in the field. Frost sets

up a scenario that pits human passion against "a springtime passion for the earth": if the

man goes inside with the woman before she gives in to the earthly passion of seed-

planting, human love wins. If she "loses sight" first and becomes a "slave" like him, then

they both fall prey to the "springtime passion" instead. Of course the irony of Frost's

final image—a seedling germinating out of the earth like a child "shouldering" its way

with "arched body" out of the womb—is that human and springtime passions are actually

more alike than not. The man's interest in outdoor fertilization is itself a sexualized

interest, psychologically connected to the indoor act of making love.

But, as in "Mowing," "Love" enters this poem unexpectedly—at the exact moment

when the description of manual labor changes to a description of biological female labor

by means of the seedling's "early birth." Frost's initial interest farming suddenly gives

Frost, Collected Poems, 120.

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way to aesthetic and figurative reverie; the word "Love" arrives not only as the more

truthful representation of the planter's work (as it does in "Mowing"), but also as the

igniting source behind the poem. Why else would the words "Putting in the Seed" be

capitalized within the sonnet itself (not just in the title), if not because the act of putting

in the seed has become the poem "Putting in the Seed"—a poem whose literal and

metaphoric subjects (manual labor and birth, respectively) both depend on some form of

"Love" burning through them?

Frost was actually fascinated by the possibilities of love as an abstract concept

although he is rarely explicit about it. His prose, like his poetry, reveals a special

attentiveness to the word; he occasionally "slips" it into his essays, changing or

complicating their meaning, as in this passage from "The Constant Symbol":

[The poet's] intention is of course a particular mood that won't be satisfied with anything less than its own fulfillment. But it is not yet a thought concerned with what becomes it. One thing to know it by: it shrinks shyly from anticipatory expression. Tell love beforehand and, as Blake says, it loses flow without filling the mould; the cast will be a reject.

Of all the symbols he could have chosen for demonstrating the tendency for poems not to

reveal themselves too quickly, Frost picks "love." "Tell love beforehand" and it will

disappear, just as saying too much too early in a poem will wreck its balance, ending it

before it starts. Frost cuts off his "love" metaphor here as abruptly as he does in the

poems: as soon as the word is written, he moves on to the second metaphor, from Blake.

The effect is that love's importance as an example is amplified, partly because in Frost's

abandoning the metaphor, he leaves us to think about the act of "telling love" on our own,

and partly because the figure of Blake's rejected cast illuminates both concepts now: the

poem revealed too soon, and love too quickly told. In another essay, "The Figure a Poem

48 Frost, Collected Poems, 788

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Makes," Frost again turns up the word "love" as a figure for poetry even though it is (a

little like poetry) an abstraction in and of itself:

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—49

The poet's description of how he writes poetry reads a little bit like a poem. Frost paints

the poetic act in broad strokes that complicate rather than simplify its meaning:

"pleasure," "delight," "wisdom." When finally alighting on "love" as an appropriate

metaphor, he does so despite the fact that the word "love" is even less concrete than the

word he means to explicate. As a result, what follows the comparison seems equally

descriptive of both "figures": neither poetry nor love can "stand still in one place," both

"begin in delight" and "incline to the impulse," and each ends in its own "clarification of

life." We learn as much here about what love means for Frost as we do about his poetry.

He repeats the analogy one last time as he brings his essay to a close:

.. .the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love.5

Saying—or slipping—"love" in his essay twice simply re-confirms Frost's belief that the

metaphorical nature of a poem requires that its description also be made into metaphor.

Abstraction leads to abstraction.

Rethinking Frost's "figure" for poetry and considering "love" to be one of the

poet's main, if buried, subjects, changes how we encounter one of Frost's earliest poems.

49 Frost, Collected Poems, 111.

50 Frost, Collected Poems, 778.

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He chose two short stanzas about farm labor to serve as a prologue for his poetry's

collected editions (they initially belonged to his second book, North of Boston), and these

lines have traditionally been read as an invitation to the reader to join the poet in

participating in the day-to-day jobs associated with rural life. However "The Pasture"

contains romantic undertones that seem to introduce his body of work differently:

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring; I'll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I sha'n't be gone long. —You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf That's standing by the mother. It's so young, It totters when she licks it with her tongue. I sha'n't be gone long. —You come too.51

In these lines, the poet-as-laborer announces his intentions to perform the diurnal tasks

associated with running a farm only to alter and diminish the agricultural nature of these

activities moments later by casually inviting somebody else along: "You come too."

(Frost uses the same flirtatious words here as his speaker in "Putting in the Seed," which

begins "You come to fetch me...".) That the summons in "The Pasture" takes the shape of

an afterthought (and emphatically so, since both solicitations occur after a dash) indicates

what is already made clear by the poem's second and third lines: that this laborer is

particularly susceptible to distraction. Poetical, romantic, and aesthetic concerns tempt

him especially: he is pleased by the visual metaphor of watching the water clear and

Frost, Collected Poems, 13.

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entertained by the cinematic drama of a tottering calf Surely the speaker's anticipation

of these delights is what moves him to invite a companion to join him and not the work-

a-day chores he mentions in the first place

It is in light of these distractions that I propose two things about this poem first,

that this particular laborer, like so many others m Frost, is more interested in pleasure

than he is in labor (we find other distracted and whimsical farmers in poems like "After

Apple Picking," "Mending Wall," and "A Star in a Stone Boat"), and second, that this

poem, while seemingly belonging to that kind of poetry typically referred to as

"pastoral," is at least equally at home in the courtly genre of invitation poetry To read

this poem essentially as an invitation to the beloved is to depart from the most common

interpretation of it, which takes the "pasture" as a figure for Frost's poetry and the "you"

to represent the reader just opening up the book Such a Classical-mmded reading can

certainly be made—and it is even probable that when Frost chose "The Pasture" as the

swinging door into his collected work, he anticipated it would be read that way And yet

the poem's language, with its subtle masculinity ("you come too," rather than "will you

come1?"), its sexual undertones, its antiquated diction ("I sha'n't be long"), and the almost

Of these lines Daniel Smythe in 1940 records Frost saying "I never had a greater pleasure than on coming on a neglected spring in a pasture in the woods We clean out the leaves, then wait by to watch the uncloudmess displace the cloudiness That is always a pleasure to me, it might be taken as a figure of speech It is my place to see clarity come out of talk and confusion " Quoted in Jeffrey Cramer, Robert Frost Among his Poems a Literary Companion to the Poet s Own Biographical Contexts and Associations (Jefferson, NC McFarland and Company, Inc , Publishers, 1996), 10

53 See Poirier, Robert Frost 16, Mark Richardson, The Ordeal of Robert Frost (Chicago University of Illinois Press, 1997), 27, Helen Bacon, "Frost and the Ancient Muses," in The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2001), 76, Robert Faggen, "Robert Frost and the Questions of Pastoral," The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2001), 51, and Judith Oster, "Frost's Poetry of Metaphor," The Cambridge Companion to Robert Fi ost (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2001), 164 Ruben Brower comes closest to calling "The Pasture" a love poem by acknowledging its multiple layers "Through the concealing art of this and other lines he aptly doubles his meanings, extending an invitation to seeing and doing country things while inviting his companion and the reader to a kind of poetry and to love " Ruben Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost Constellations of Intention (Oxford Oxford University Press, 1963), 11

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self-conscious hesitance implied by the two dashes, comes across more like a flirtation—

a pastoral in the mode of Raleigh rather than in the mode of Virgil. Frost was aware of

these subtleties; in an interview, he calls "The Pasture" "a poem about love that's new in

treatment and effect. You won't find anything in the whole range of English poetry just

like that."54 To read the poem only as a prologue—with a literal field that stands in for a

linguistic one and a laborer who pre-figures the poet—is to over-emphasize Frost's

comparison of manual labor to the poetic act. It is just as likely that Frost is posturing

here, hiding or concealing one subject within another the way he does in so many other

places in his work.

Frost's use of the term "ulteriority" in his essay "The Constant Symbol" may

explain the virtue of incorporating such defensive postures into his verbal techniques:

[poetry]...is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority.55

The poet reminds us that his poems both contain figures but also are figures; as such,

they need not always mean what they say. Later in the essay, Frost makes a related

argument: that poems rarely go in the direction towards which they were originally

intended. The uncharted course of their making inevitably involves unexpected changes

in image, sound, tone, or meaning. "Every poem is an epitome of the great predicament,"

Frost writes, "a figure of the will braving alien entanglements."5 What kind of alien

entanglements represent this "ulteriority" in Frost? Marie Borroff in her essay "Another

Look at Frost's Birches" describes two examples; first, the way Frost's story-telling and

54 Cramer, Frost Among His Poems, 10.

55 Frost, Collected Poems, 787.

56 Frost, Collected Poems, 787.

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charm can be so interesting that they actually divert attention from the poem's real

meaning, and second, the way Frost makes his literary allusions implicit rather then

explicit, so that unless the reader can recall the prior text, its message remains secret57

To these I add a third, Frost's way of "slipping" unexpected words into his text, where a

particularly weighty or abstract key word (a little like Dickinson's names for gemstones)

enters the poem without warning as both a confession of truth and a verbal substitute for

T O

what is expected Frost's "For Once, Then, Something" demonstrates this technique

most obviously when it literally slips "Truth" into its last line

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven godlike Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths—and then I lost it Water came to rebuke the too clear water One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at the bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out What was that whiteness9

Truth9 A pebble of quartz9 For once, then, something

The poem's overall reflexivity is what makes it particularly appealing a poem about the

difficulty of looking through surfaces that is itself opaque (Frost is offering his critics a

figure for how to understand his own elusiveness) He wrote the poem as an exercise in

Mane Bonoff, "Another Look at Frost's Birches" m Literary Imagination 1, no 1 (2005) 69-80

58 John Shoptaw's description of what he calls "crypt words" in the poetry of John Ashbery demonstrates a related, if somewhat different, phenomenon "Crypt words" are words and phrases that appear in the poem-m-draft but are later "displaced by, but still recoverable in, the final poetic text" and thus, according to Shoptaw, "suggest both a puzzle, something encoded, and a burial plot, something hidden, forgotten, or simply covered over " On the Outside Looking Out John Ashbery s Poetry (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1994), 6

59 Frost, Collected Poems, 208

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hendecasyllables and endowed it confidently with both mythological and self-reference.

As is fitting for a poem about one's own poetry, Frost is both self-mocking and also firm

in his conviction that ulteriority should at best remain a glimmer beneath brilliant

"surface" effect. Clarity is impossible for the well-searcher, and likewise absent in the

poem: three "somethings," one "whatever," and a "whiteness" in just fifteen lines. The

aim of course is never to reveal fully what lies underneath the poem's surface but always

to keep his reader searching for it (like Bishop's "sandpiper," also looking for

"something"). In the "The Constant Symbol," Frost asks, "How can the world know

anything so intimate as what we were intending to do?" 1 And yet later he acknowledges

that meaning in poetry can lie beyond the poet's jurisdiction, as something of a social or

public right. "The ultimate commitment is giving in to it that an outsider may see what

we were up to sooner and better than we ourselves." Why else, at the end of a poem so

carefully dedicated to its own metaphor of opacity and meaninglessness, would the poet

go so far as to spell out what might really be there underneath the surface, "truth"?

Frost's substitution of the weighty word "truth" for a word more in keeping with

the poem's own reticence—something literal like "a dime," or even "a fish"—reveals the

poet in another one of his rare moments of candor, when he lets what is concealed or

"ulterior" in him slip out. Immediately after, Frost reins his meaning back in, offering

more concretely "a pebble of quartz," and then worse, "something." But the "truth" is

The connection to Narcissus is explicit in Frost's looking down at his reflection. Cramer also suggests a possible nod towards Moby Dick (Ch. 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale") in the phrase "what is that whiteness?" Cramer, Among His Poems, 79.

61 Frost, Collected Poems, 786-87.

2 Frost, Collected Poems, 787.

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out; reading backwards from that word, we can see that the narrator never really

embraces total opacity in poetry; "the pleasure of ulteriority" is key.

A few of Frost's poems discuss this technique of slipping, or disguised revelation,

openly. Such a poem from Frost's first book uses "Revelation" for a title:

We make ourselves a place apart Behind light words that tease and flout,

But oh, the agitated heart Till someone really find us out.

'Tis pity if the case require (Or so we say) that in the end

We speak the literal to inspire The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play At hide-and-seek to God afar,

So all who hide too well away Must speak and tell us where they are.

Here man's necessity to be heard and understood, to confess, takes priority over his

desire to hide. Frost describes in personal terms his own propensity to make "a place

apart" at the same time as he attributes the trait to mankind as a whole. To "speak the

literal" in order to provide "understanding" is a "must" here, even as the poet concedes

that to do so '"Tis a pity." In "The Most of It" (and its companion poem "Two Look at

Two") the poet offers "the literal" by visual rather than vocal means. When that poem's

subject, who represents Frost's reader seeking meaning as much as he represents the poet

seeking understanding, waits by a lake for some kind of "original response" to his call, no

words come, but rather that "great buck":

As a great buck it powerfully appeared, Pushing the crumpled water up ahead And landed pouring like a waterfall,

Frost, Collected Poems, 27-28.

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And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, And forced the underbrush—and that was all. 4

The delayed response, and then its surprising arrival not in the expected form but as

something else entirely, and finally its fast exit giving way to silence (as dramatized by

the dash before "and that was all") enact a kind of visual slip akin to the slipping in of

"truth" in "For Once, Then, Something" and "love" in "Mowing" and elsewhere. Poems

like these illustrate how subtle and surprising verbal techniques can correspond to

intrapsychic defenses, in that they allow for small but sufficient gratification of forbidden

or defended-against desires; in doing so they both momentarily break the defense but also

allow it to be lasting, adaptive, and—most important for the poet—artful.

This artfulness of defense is nowhere more apparent or appreciated than in the

well-loved poem "Birches," whose slip arrives near the end (line 52 out of 59), somewhat

out of context, and as is often the case in Frost, involving "love." It is a moment of truth-

telling in otherwise guarded verse:

I'd like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better. I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good, both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.65

Frost, Collected Poems, 307.

Frost, Collected Poems, 118,11. 48-59.

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These closing lines are conveniently malleable to the poem's constellation of ulterior

meanings; such meanings include, but are not limited to, the joys of risk-taking, the

occasional desire for death coupled with the fear of it, the wish for extravagance, the

pleasure of losing oneself in poetry and then returning to real life. So with all of these

ulteriorities at hand, why is "Earth the right place for love"? Few critics ever mention the

line except to emphasize in it the word "earth"; and yet it seems to me that Frost's

inclusion of "love" at this point in the poem makes a strong case for it, too, to be

represented by (or in) the trees. The swinging of birches can easily be read as a metaphor

for love, just as it can be read as a metaphor for poetry or growing old. Love does, after

all, have its ups and downs, and it is risky, and it usually involves moments of

extraordinary pleasure followed by moments of involuntary descent. Noticing Frost's

substitution of "love" for what surely should be either "poetry" or "me" (Earth's the right

place for poetry; Earth's the right place for me) makes it hard to read the final metaphor

of "Birches" in any other way.

But Frost is not certain about love the way he is certain about pastoral life or

poetry, which is why the poet takes the latter two themes for the exterior subjects of

"Birches" and the former for its revelatory "ulterior" one. Like any good defense, the

trees, the verses, of "Birches" bend to show us the truth for a second (in line 52), but a

moment later, spring back again. Such is the form of this poem, with its accidental-

seeming, but almost surely purposeful, slip, as well as so many of Frost's other poems

that contain language (often around the subject farming) that is in many ways just an

appealing disguise—and an appropriate one, since Frost does indeed consider farming to

66 Frost says of picking the birch as his favorite tree. " if I must defend my choice, I will say I took it for its vocahty and its ulteriority." Collected Poems, 731

172

be a love of his (rather than a chore). Of course, the metaphors run deep here; we might

also recognize "love" in this poem to be a cleaned up, defensive figure for sex, as

illustrated by the bending and then erect trees, the ecstasy and the return. There is a

defensive element to almost all mind products, and similarly to all "figures." These

nested metaphors demonstrate poetry's necessary depth as well as its possibility for

occasional—and artful—confession. Frost ultimately prefers to keep his meanings

ulterior, and yet, like the mower in "Mowing," he recognizes that "anything but the truth

would have seemed too weak." His poems slip their abstractions, their "truths," amidst

fields, pastures, and woods that are all lovely, but also dark and deep.

10. James Merrill

Merrill met Frost as a student and later instructor at Amherst, where he studied poetry

with the Frost-influenced Ruben Brower. But formalisms of the two poets are very

different: whereas Frost's forays into traditional poetic forms might be characterized as

Classical and restrained, Merrill's—many of them—are decidedly decorative and given

to play. Some critics admire Merrill chiefly for this playfulness—his stylized cleverness,

willful poeticisms, and unselfconscious use of verbal gimmicks that other poets

scrupulously avoid. Others are drawn to his work primarily for what they find beneath

these lyrical ornaments—cultural commentary, eroticism, politics, spirituality,

autobiographical confession. Several of Merrill's recent critics, Reena Sastri, Mutlu

Biasing, and Stephen Burt among them, have found ways of addressing both of these

modes, the playful and the serious, the stylized and the fundamental, either by

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juxtaposing them or by setting them in relation within his work. In the following pages, I

pursue the latter of these critical strains, paying particular attention to Merrill's complex

and important way of using of puns; Merrill incorporates this linguistic device, which

Freud has called "the lowest form of verbal joke" and "the cheapest" (because it "can be

made with the least trouble"), into his work not just as a way of lightening it up but, more

crucially, in order to depart from his poems' normal bounds to reach elsewheres that are

in fact secretly inhabited by the poem already. Far from being extraneous, Merrill's

puns enhance his seriousness as a poet, not by deflection but by giving his work access to

unseen and unexpected contexts previously concealed within the lines.

The poet writes explicitly about his interest in puns in his essay "Object Lessons"

on the writer Francis Ponge:

A pity about that lowest form of humor. It is suffered, by and large, with groans of aversion, as though no one had done an unseemly thing in adult society, like slipping a hand up the hostess's dress. Indeed, the punster has touched, and knows it if only for being so promptly shamed, upon a secret, fecund place in language herself. The pun's objet trouve aspect cheapens it further—why? A Freudian slip is taken seriously: it betrays the maker's hidden wish. The pun (or the rhyme, for that matter) "merely" betrays the hidden wish of words.68

Merrill's sense that puns are "unseemly" is particularly important because it comments

on the fact that they, as one type of the "jokes" Freud mentions in his essay, tend to

uncover "secret" or personal matters. To "slip a hand up the hostess's dress" is to reach

for some forbidden place—somewhere purposefully concealed or disguised, and, as

Merrill says, "fecund." That the wish they reveal is "merely" a wish of language reflects

Merrill's own sense of the correlation between unconscious mental phenomena (which

Freud, "Jokes," in The Standard Edition, vol. 8, 45.

68 James Merrill, Recitative: Prose by James Merrill, ed. by J. D. McClatchy (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 111.

174

might include the uncomfortable or "unseemly" desires that often result in defensive

processes) and linguistic or verbal devices; and yet of course it is the poet who chooses

the words, the poet who, in a sense, consciously "slips" a hand up the hostess's dress

much in the same way that we saw Frost unexpectedly slipping those abstract, if

"fecund," words into his poems before.

Merrill touches upon that "secret, fecund place in language" through the rather

silly-seeming pun that occurs at the end of his autobiographical sonnet sequence "The

Broken Home." Merrill begins the fourth sonnet with an image of his childhood dog

leading him to his mother's bedroom—

One afternoon, red, satyr-thighed Michael, the Irish setter, head Passionately lowered, led The child I was to a shut door.. ,69

—and ends the sequence with another sonnet that refers twice more (first directly, then

obliquely) to the dog:

A child, a red dog roam the corridors, Still, of the broken home.

The real house became a boarding school. Under the ballroom ceiling's allegory Someone at last may actually be allowed To learn something; or, from my window, cool With the unstiflement of the entire story,

70

Watch a red setter stretch and sink in cloud.

The "red dog" functions as both a relief from and an essential part of Merrill's broken

home (broken most obviously because of his parents' divorce), having become, through

his repeated appearance, a character in the myth, a spiritual companion (as his name, 69 Merrill, "The Broken Home," in Collected Poems, 198,11. 1-4.

70 Merrill, "The Broken Home," in Collected Poems, 199-200,11. 1-2, 9-14.

175

Michael, suggests) accompanying the poet as he searches his memory for scenes to make

up the poem. But the last phrase, with its pun—"Watch a red setter stretch and sink in

cloud"—complicates this notion, comically recasting the setting sun as the dog, its "red"

hues matching, as they descend in the sky, the deep red color of Michael's hair. Is it

really better to end this long poem with a pun, a poetic flourish, than to offer the reader

some more profound sense of what has been gained or learned by the poem's writing (as

indeed the poem's speaker suggests in the two lines above)? And yet, Merrill's pun does

not spring from nowhere—and it is not alone in the poem. Each rereading of this

sequence offers Merrill's reader more and more puns: in the first sonnet, the word

"sunless" (describing the poet's room but surely also the gay poet in relation to "the

parents and the child" he sees through the window);71 in the second, his former-pilot

father's "invest[ing] his life/In cloud banks" (besides flying in World War II, Charles

Merrill was a founder of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch);72 and culminating perhaps—

except for that final "red setter"—in the seventh sonnet's "with the unstiflement of the

entire story," referring simultaneously to the building's upper floor of aired-out rooms

and to the poetic confession the poet presently concludes. What we find is that puns are

an integral part of this poem's texture: not only do they help Merrill establish his tone,

but they are also a means for his development of conflictual subject matter without his

having to state the obvious or resort to melodrama. What happens in these puns is a kind

of deepening of the poem's primary, narrative scene via the secondary, lyric elsewheres

they open out to: the under-song created by the puns of "The Broken Home" strengthens

71 Merrill, "The Broken Home," in Collected Poems, 197.

72 Merrill, "The Broken Home," in Collected Poems, 197.

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its over-song. Michael, the passionate and reverent "angel" in sonnet four, who leads the

child to his mother, eventually leaves the poet (as all angels presumably do), via that final

pun. Merrill is not just creating a cross-reference between his two verses (sonnets four

and seven); he means to deepen Michael (if not the sun, too) by the comparison: all

companions, he seems to say, are sinking or declining "setters" in the end. Additionally,

the "sunless" poet of the first sonnet, never quite able to make an un-broken home of his

own, obeys his parents, he writes in sonnet six, "at least inversely"73 (Sastri hears in this

word a pun suggesting both "in verse"—in poetry—as well as "invert"—living the life of

a gay man)74 by unstifling the "story." These pun-narratives, even more personal, in

some ways, than the exterior plot of the poem, complement the silences (or as Robert von

Hallberg puts it, the "calculated reticence") of the poetry Merrill writes around them.75

One way we can tell Merrill's puns are working towards a greater theme or

themes is to observe how they relate to one another not just within one poem (as in this

series in "The Broken Home") but across all of his poems. Merrill's puns tend to recur

around specific words or images; he particularly likes to pun on "sun" (he favors "sun-

puns," as it were). "Sunless" and "red setter" are good examples in "The Broken Home"

because they allow Merrill to take one word in two different directions; in doing so, he

connects disparate "elsewheres"—his experience as a gay man and his ultimate sense of

loss—from the poem's sub-narrative. We hear a slightly different cadence in Merrill's

"Merrill, Collected Poems, 199.

Reena Sastri, James Merrill: Knowing Innocence (New York: Routledge, 2007), 30. Sastri also hears a pun in "gilt" (i.e. guilt) later in the same sonnet.

73 Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture 1945-1980 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 93.

177

sun-pun in the third stanza of "18 West 11 Street," a poem that describes the poet's old

home in Greenwich Village, destroyed by a bomb several years after he lived there:

Now look who's here. Our prodigal Sunset. Just passing through from Isfahan. Filled by him the glass

Disorients....

The sun here is a biblical son, not the poet (though the reader might hear a tinge of guilt

in the phrase) and warns of ill events to come. Merrill's prodigal sun, a traveler, too,

represents both departure and return and takes the poem's reader momentarily away from

Greenwich Village, into the archetypal landscape where destruction (of a house, say) is

not arbitrary—where it may, in fact, symbolize a kind of restitution. ("Disorients" in the

next line is also probably a pun, since it comes so quickly after "Isfahan," relating the

sun's path from the Orient to its ability to distort light across a glass window.) In "To

the Reader," Merrill inverts the sun-pun of "18 West 11th Street," using, this time, "son"

rather than "sun" in the poem's opening line:

Each day, hot off the press from Moon & Son, "Knowing of your continued interest,"

77

Here's a new book—

This poem, in suggesting that poems are like days and days are like poems, turns the sun

(and the moon) into a version of his own publisher—the source of his daily work. Of

course, Merrill is partly telling the truth here; what gives rise to his books if not his daily

"Moon" and "Sun," his nights and days of work? But he gestures, too, towards

something more autobiographical—the fact that his own first volume was published

76 Merrill, Collected Poems, 314.

Merrill, Collected Poems, 616.

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privately by his father when he was just sixteen (i.e. by the "man" and his "son"). In this

way, "son" and "sun" reconnect multiple times across the poetry, each pun deepening and

changing the associations of the last. But perhaps the most powerful use of this word-

pair occurs in the poem "Scenes of Childhood," where Merrill's pun on the words "sun

and air" becomes the subject of his poem's final lines. The poem begins by describing the

speaker and his mother watching home movies of him, her, and the poet's father—

"scenes from childhood"—projected onto a screen. When the film suddenly catches fire,

he and his mother are forced to go off to bed. Blending present sensation with pure

remembrance, the poet concludes:

Each morning, back of us, Fields wail and shimmer. To go out is to fall Under fresh spells, cool web And stinging song new-hatched Each day, all summer.

A minute galaxy About my head will easily Needle me back. The day's Inaugural Damn Spoken, I start to run, Inane, like them, but breathing In and out the sun And air I am.

The son and heir! In the dark It makes me catch my breath And hear, from upstairs, hers— That faintest hiss And slither, as of life Escaping into space, Having led its characters To the abyss

Of night.78

Merrill, Collected Poems, 144.

179

Merrill presumably describes the sensation of walking out to an atmosphere of gnats ("a

minute galaxy") circling round his head, which awakens him to the world (or, as he

7Q

writes earlier in the poem, to "real noon"). But at the same time, his words "sun/And

air I am" are the door to a different world altogether—one that facilitates his final lyric

exclamation: "The son and heir! In the dark/It makes me catch my breath...." Merrill

actually shows us in these lines the way most of his buried puns work by allowing the

lyric elsewhere opened by the pun to enter the poem's primary scene.80 The lines

"life/Escaping into space,/Having led its characters/To the abyss..." figure this

transformation. The speaker of the poem never returns from this journey; rather, he enters

a realm of lyric utterance where death, suggested by the word "heir," is the inevitable

outcome. The "sun and air," via their pun, are what open the poem up to this eventuality.

Thinking less of this poem than of Merrill's general ability to launch, with a

simple phrase like "sun and air," into a deeper, more symbolic realm of lyric, David

Kalstone writes that [Merrill's puns] open alternative perspectives against which to read the time-bound and random incidents of daily life. In Braving the Elements (1972) and Divine Comedies (1976), he has become a master of this idiosyncratic method, something one might call—with apologies— symbolic autobiography, Merrill's way of making apparently ordinary detail transparent to deeper configurations.81

Merrill, Collected Poems, 141.

80 Sastri hears in these lines a "resonance" with cantos eight and nine of Wallace Steven's "Auroras of Autumn" and writes that "The re-entrapment enacted through punning from "sun and air" to "son and heir" is only the most dramatic of a series of such re-inscriptions" in the poem. Sastri, Knowing Innocence, 23.

1 David Kalstone, "Transparent Things," in James Merrill, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985), 62.

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Kalstone's phrase, "making ordinary detail transparent to deeper configurations" reveals

his own experience of the poetic shifts that occur when Merrill puns. He describes his

reading experience in terms of transparency: the pun, he suggests, suddenly clears up, or

clears the way, into a purer and deeper sense of the world already present in the poem.

But I am suggesting here a slightly different process, by which the pun acts like a sudden,

secret, or even "trap" door—akin to what J.K. Rowling terms a "portkey" in the Harry

Potter series (that is, an ordinary object that, when handled, instantly transports its

handler to another destination where that object still functions, but perhaps in a different

89

capacity). Merrill's puns relocate the poem to a distinctly lyric or aesthetic realm.

They are like double-acts—words that fit in one narrative but that can send the reader,

unexpectedly, to another. (In this sense the puns are also like the pieces of the jigsaw

puzzle that Merrill describes in the poem "Lost in Translation": they fit together to tell a

story—the picture on the front—but they have individual shapes that can be scrutinized

independently when "put aside, made stories of")

Freud is perhaps the best-known theorist to have explored this particular feature

of puns, and he does so by describing the way that they, as unconscious facilitators of

psychic defense, perform this sort of transport almost nightly in human dreams. The

dreamer, Freud suggests in The Interpretation of Dreams, can pursue a wish or thought

forbidden in waking life by revealing and exploring it, via a pun, within a dream. In

"Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious," he explains that We have already learnt from the connection of jokes with caricature that [puns] 'must bring forward something that is concealed or hidden'

82 J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (New York: Scholastic Inc., 2000), 70.

83 Merrill, Collected Poems, 363.

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(Fischer, 1889, 51). I lay stress on this determinant once more, because it too has more to do with the nature of jokes than with their being part of the comic.

Further defending the pun's importance in The Interpretation of Dreams, he writes,

referring to an interpretation that hinges on the pun of a woman's name (Flora), that:

I am prepared to find this explanation attacked on the ground of its being arbitrary or artificial. What, it may be asked, would have happened if Professor Gartner and his wife with her blooming looks had not come up to us or if the patient we were talking about had been called Anna instead of Flora? The answer is simple. If these chains of thought had been absent others would no doubt have been selected. It is easy enough to construct such chains, as is shown by the puns and riddles that people make every

o r

day for their entertainment. The realm of jokes knows no boundaries.

The premise underlying Freud's argument, that a pun, in its unconscious, defensive, and

linguistic sense, is a form of joke that has some use, is particularly relevant to Merrill's

poetics. Merrill's puns are not simply flourishes but portals strategically planted by him

in order to give his poetry transport. Unlike the dreamer, who uses puns unconsciously

as a form of wish-fulfillment, Merrill uses puns aesthetically—to get his reader

elsewhere, not as a form of resistance or denial, but in the name of lyric transformation.

To quote Stephen Yenser (who writes of "buried meanings" more generally): "Without

something like them, one ends up writing light verse about love affairs."

Merrill's aesthetic use of what is, according to Freud, at its origin a psychic

defense, appears most elaborately in the poem "McKane's Falls," where a river that had

once been the site of a goldrush is now used to produce electricity. The puns begin early

Freud, "Jokes," in The Standard Edition, 13-14.

Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition, vol. 4, 176.

86 Stephen Yenser, The Consuming Myth: the Work of James Merrill (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 95.

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and end late, contributing in a formal sense to the poem's primary narrative about a

river's changing uses, its own transformations:

His 12 oz. rainbow sizzled in their pan; Next morning the first nugget. The creek, a crystal tendon strained,

Tossed on its couch, no longer freely associating Hawk with trout, or cloud with pebble white as cloud.87

Merrill describes here those initial panners in the Rush, looking for gold at the end of the

"rainbow"—mining first for fish, then for gold, "nuggets"—and then the river's pain as

they "strain" its "crystal tendons" for their loot. These puns (six by my count: rainbow,

pan, nugget, strained, couch, and freely associating) take the reader elsewhere almost

immediately; before we even know of its pain (of which it tells us directly in the next

section), we are picturing the river's strained tendon "tossed on its couch." Although the

river is "no longer freely associating/hawk with trout," it is, like the poet, freely

associating. River is poet; poet is river.

The puns that follow these in the poem belong to the category of the "red setter"

in "The Broken Home": they are overt and even at times silly. But taken together they

capture, better than if the poem stayed "serious," the river's fate of being doomed for

use—its ripeness for panning, which is, Merrill suggests, just another form of "punning."

The river's song begins:

Since being gelded of my gold, Grey moods, black moods come over me. Where's my old sparkle? Of late I've felt so rushed, so cold.

Am I riding for another fall?88

Merrill, Collected Poems, 368.

88 Merrill, Collected Poems, 368-69.

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Perhaps the trio of "sparkle," "rushed," and "fall" feels overdone, and yet this effect

mirrors the plight of the river itself. Its old and new history, as a source for both gems

and power, is reflected in these linguistic doors into and out of its varied planes of

existence. The poem too, Merrill seems to say, is a source for both gems and power: the

former in terms of style, the latter in terms of depth of subject matter. But they rise from

the same source. And so later, when the waterfall explains that "Moments of truth are

moments only," and that "The golden voice turns gravelly and hoarse," it is easy to hear

Merrill there, claiming for poetry only that it comes and goes and that its forms are of

some use. The final pun—both saddest and funniest—is self-reflexive in the best way:

"Now you've seen through me, sang the cataract.. ,."89 This plaintive cry from the rapids

is a commentary on poetic vision. The door opened, the portkey touched on the word

"cataract," we as readers are transported to the removed space of lyric itself, which

speaks now of its own effectualness (or ineffectualness depending on how you read "see

through me"). Old age—that time of life given to hearing aids and cataracts—enters here

too, reminding us there is a shared history between an ancient river of diverse uses and a

poet who, panning his own past for whatever gold it keeps in store, undergoes changes as

well—a poet whose own aging (though not yet old) voice may indeed sometimes, or

sometime soon, run "hoarse."

In addition to these internal puns, Merrill occasionally reserves a pun for his

poem's title, as in "Koi,"90 a late poem about a fishpond and his dog, which is tonally

Merrill, Collected Poems, 370.

Merrill, Collected Poems, 867.

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"coy" itself, and "Domino,"91 a dramatic monologue spoken by the sugar, with a logic

that moves it from teacup to cane field to "infested hut" and back, and whose first and

last stanzas do not resist internal puns on "refined" and "bitterness," and finally the poem

"Clearing the Title,"92 which begins with "My poem (what to call it though?) is finished"

but then immediately turns its attention to a different kind of "title": the official document

that secures Merrill's and David Jackson's ownership of their new house in Key West.

As Biasing says about Merrill's puns and about puns in general: "A pun may even

function as the 'center' a poem revolves around precisely by resisting centering and

refusing to yield an unequivocal sense."93 Whether central to the poem (as I believe many

of the examples I have cited thus far are) or just pockets within a broader lyric frame,

there are probably several dozen—even a hundred—more puns scattered through the

Collected Poems. A few additional noteworthy examples include: the word "Art" in "Tell

me something, Art," spoken to a drycleaner named "Arturo," in the poem "Dreams About

Clothes"; the word "worn" in "a face no longer/sought in dreams but worn as my own,"

about the poet's father, in the poem "Arabian Night";95 the phrase "Capital punishment"

in the poem "Losing the Marbles" (whose title is also a pun comparing the aging poet's

mind to Greece's loss of the Elgin Marbles);96 the word "crewelwork" in the poem

91 Merrill, Collected Poems, 419.

92 Merrill, Collected Poems, 406.

3 Mutlu Biasing, Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O'Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 173.

94 Merrill, Collected Poems, 346.

95 Merrill, Collected Poems, 504.

96 Merrill, Collected Poems, 572.

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"Mornings in a New House", the line "Sparkling comes easy to the Gemini" in the

poem "In Nine Sleep Valley",98 and the extended pun on the word "crane" in the poem

"An Urban Convalescence "99 The poem "Syrinx," too, may be considered a kind of

showcase of puns, with its incorporation of the musical scale ("d—/ O ramify sole

antidote") and its playful transmutation of a map's cardinal points ("Nought, Eased,

Sought, Waste"), though other linguistic factors (language's inability to communicate, or

last) may be at work here too 10°

Beyond these localized moments in the shorter poems, Merrill's longest, most

"epic" work, The Changing Light at Sandover, not only contains numerous puns

connecting the world of the poet to an "Other World" inhabited by spirits of the dead but

also suggests, in its narrative's reliance on the Ouija board, that words themselves, right

down to the letter, are the surest portals into it The poem, published as a trilogy in three

book-length installments, begins when Merrill and his partner David Jackson contact,

through their Ouija board, a "Greek Jew" born in "AD 8" named Ephraim who, like

Merrill, "issued from a broken home" and who tells them of the ways that human lives

are transformed and reincarnated after death 101 Through portkeys like this pun on

"broken home," which connects the poet's own life—and particularly his life as he

portrays it in poetry—to the world of spirits, Merrill lays the groundwork for Sandover's

97 Merrill, Collected Poems, 261

98 Merrill, Collected Poems, 323

99 Merrill, Collected Poems, 121 Biasing's commentary on this poem and its relation to Robert Graves's crane m The White Goddess is particularly fruitful in terms of its reading of puns and their import Politics and Form, 162

100 Merrill, Collected Poems, 355-56

James Meinll, The Book of Ephraim, in 'A," in The Changing Light at Sandover (New York Atheneum, 1982), 8

186

broader argument towards an ultimate elsewhere that all the time resides in and around

the self and is accessed via language. In the same way that, within the poem, spirits act

as guides and patrons for the living (as Hans Lodeizen does for Merrill, sometimes even

ghostwriting his poems) and the living can act as "representatives" for the dead (as,

Ephraim explains, Merrill does for the long-dead editor of Alexander Pope), and in the

same way that words on the Ouija board can symbolize contact with characters otherwise

forbidden to the living, the poem's own puns transpose images from the poet's life into

objects, people, and scenes elsewhere. For instance, Merrill's Ouija board pun on

"POUND" in the following passage not only describes a process of give-and-take between

living and dead writers but also mimics how this sort of transfer works linguistically:

NO MAN CAN REACH US DIRECTLY TSE HAD

A NUMBER FROM OUR ORDERS AR HAD THAT SAME NUMBER

POINT ONE THUS YEATS & DJ TSE DOWN ON CERTAIN

SUPERSTITIOUS SCRIBES WE HAD TO APPOINT RIMBAUD HE WROTE

THE WASTE LAND WE FED IT INTO THE LIKE-CLONED ELIOT

And Uncle Ezra? AS IN SHAKESPEARE WE LET THE CASE REST ON A POUND OF FLESH103

In describing, via the spirit world, the process by which the dead inform the living—

Rimbaud "WROTE" The Waste Land—Merrill inserts his pun on Ezra "POUND," the living

writer who, by his editing, in some ways wrote Eliot's poem, too. (His allusion to

Shylock's demand of a "pound of flesh" in The Merchant of Venice may also be a subtle

indirect reference to Pound's anti-Semitism.) The pun here symbolizes the kind of

unconscious or—if conscious—disguised connections that guide the making of all art,

sometimes outside of the poet's own awareness. Merrill complains a few lines down,

102 Merrill, Mirabel!'s Books of Number, in "Book 6," in Sandover, 221.

103 Merrill, Mirabel!, in "Book 6," in Sandover, 219.

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"Still, Eliot thought he thought his poem up," comparing his own Sandover (an epic

written, as it were, in letters given by the dead) to The Waste Land, which at least claims

for its poet a kind of authentic authorship.104 Merrill seems to be suggesting by his pun

that the verbal devices embedded in poems act out what Sandover suggests

thematically—that language from periods and places elsewhere is always interwoven in

the texts of here and now.

The puns of Sandover thread the trilogy together and not only connect Merrill and

Jackson to a world beyond them but also connect the poems and volumes within it to

each other, adding depth to each. For instance, at the end of Ephraim, "JM" and "DJ" are

waiting inside their cold home in Stonington, Connecticut "for someone to fix the

furnace," an old relic that the poet refers to as a "period machine."1 5 In certain ways he

and Jackson are working on their own "period machine" as they wait—the Ouija board

both an object of kitsch in their own "period" and also a time-traveler allowing them to

pass between "periods" of human civilization. Eventually "Bob the furnace man" calls,

and with this real-life invasion—a human visitor rather than a spirit one—the first

installment of Sandover comes to a close. Merrill seems to be questioning whether or not

his own epic machinery has failed him, whether his own "period machine" of a poem has

reached its final end. With the opening of Mirabell, we get the answer—in the form of

new spirits that continue to guide and feed the poet's work and reveal themselves to JM

and DJ as "fallen angels" who go by the name "BEZELBOB."106 SO the human Bob returns

here in this way, via pun, symbolizing his own success in fixing the "period machine."

104 Merrill, Mirabell, in "Book 6," in Sandover, 219.

105 Merrill, Ephraim, in "Z," in Sandover, 90, 91.

106 Merrill, Mirabell, in "Book 1," in Sandover, 114, 115.

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Later in Mirabell, the spirit of W. H. Auden makes this pun more explicit by calling the

spirits "THE BOBS THE FURNACE MEN" and saying "THEY GLOW LIKE FRANKLIN

STOVES."107 In the same way that these new "BOBS" both signify and add import to the to

the original "Bob" in Ephraim, their "DARK SHAPE," which they compare to that of the

"bats" and "gargoyle faces" in poet's carpet and wallpaper, mystifies and deepens the

actual world Merrill inhabits, "DO YOU IMAGINE YOU CHOSE THAT CARPET THAT

WALLPAPER" the spirits ask the poet.108 They remind him, as they remind his reader, that

the aesthetic choices that make up poems are often silently and secretly mirrored in a

psychic elsewhere that is ever present but remains out of sight.

Despite their seeming silliness, Merrill was undoubtedly proud of these puns in

Sandover and in the shorter poems. (We can glean as much from Stephen Yenser's

inscription to him in the poet's gift copy of Jonathan Culler's anthology On Puns: "To

James, Rajah of the Punjab, Stephen.")109 Merrill's poem "Processional," a sonnet about

the way words themselves mutate, change, and distance themselves from their original

forms, may be a kind of legend or key to the way the poet himself thinks of his puns as

swinging or trap doors. The final couplet is about word games, and one in particular,

called "word golf:

Think what the demotic droplet felt, Translated by a polar wand to keen Six-pointed Mandarin— All singularity, its Welt-Anschauung of a hitherto untold Flakmess, gemlike, nevermore to melt!

107 Merrill, Mirabell, in "Book 2," in Sandover, 131

108 Merrill, Mirabell, in "Book 1," m Sandover, 116

109 Quoted from memory after a visit to the poet's personal library in Stomngton, CT.

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But melt it would, and—look—become Now birdglance, now the gingko leafs fanlight, To that same tune whereby immensely old Slabs of dogma and opprobrium, Exchanging ions under pressure, bred A spar of burnt-black anchorite,

Or in three lucky strokes of word golf LEAD

Once again turns (LOAD, GOAD) to GOLD.110

To figuratively turn lead to gold is the wish of any poet: start with something heavy,

common (a memory, a prayer, an object) and transform it, via language, into something

rare and bright. And it is a particular wish of Merrill, who, as we saw in "McKane's

Falls," is thinking of "panning" for gold in poetical terms. But there is even more at

stake in this particular kind of "processional." The poem, though referring to alchemical

process, speaks more to slow, deliberate change—change that leaves the residue of what

was there before. Merrill mentions in his essay on Ponge, in the parapgraph following the

one on puns, the "gold standard," referring to the way in which writers, through "the

lightweight crackle of wordplay" keep the "treasure" of Greek and Latin and Anglo-

Saxon alive.111 In what is perhaps not an unrelated kind of derivation in "Processional,"

we can still hear the word "LEAD" in "GOLD"; the final word is not exactly changed but

rather grown or derived from the original. It has been led elsewhere (to make obvious

Merrill's more subtle pun) from somewhere else, the way the "droplet" has been led

when it turns to flake, and then again when it melts. Merrill is devising here a process by

which A leads to B without ruining or fully losing A. Rhymes work this way (as we see

in the poem's sound scheme), but so do meanings. What means one thing in the poem's

Merrill, Collected Poems, 583.

1 ' ' Merrill, Recitative, 112.

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primary narrative—for instance, "lead" the noun—changes into something else when

poem puns into its secret sub-narrative: "lead" becomes a verb, "leading" us to "gold." It

may seem as though such in-depth analysis of how puns work is focusing too much on

the "technique" of a linguistic act that presumably happens naturally, without much

thought. And yet, as Freud says and Merrill writes in The Changing Light at Sandover:

"NO ACCIDENT."112 Merrill's puns are not merely instinctual since they are part of a

poetic world that is deliberately and artistically made. Once chosen for the poem, they

constitute an aesthetic rather than an unconscious formulation on his part. He is

interested (as Frost was) in the secret revelations and confessions of poetry. His poems

are of the world he lived in, but they contain within them, by means of puns, doors to

other worlds that can be occupied by poetry alone.

In the house Merrill shared with Jackson on Water Street in Stonington, CT, the

door to the poet's study—the room where he presumably wrote and read so much

poetry—is hidden behind a bookshelf, invisible to the eye. When the door is closed, it

vanishes and the room behind it disappears. But if someone touches the bookshelf, it

swivels open, revealing a further room with more cases of books and a writing desk

inside. This secret door into a poet's own literal elsewhere is emblematic of what Merrill

so adeptly performs when he surprises and transports his reader via puns. The poet's

childhood dog Michael—"red, satyr-thighed/Michael," or "red, setter-thighed/Michael"

(RED SATYR, RED SETTER, in just a few strokes of word golf), who becomes one with the

112 Merrill, Mirabell, in "Book 5," in Sandover, 196.

113 At one point in The Changing Light at Sandover, DJ says to JM about the Ouija board: "Each day it grows more fascinating, more.../I don't know. Isn't it like a door/Shutting us off from the living?....Will that door readmit/Us to the world?" Mirabell, in "Book 6," in Sandover, 218.

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sunset, "a red setter"—eventually evolves, through this complex web of puns, into the

Archangel Michael who appears to JM at the end of Mirabell in Sandover:

WE HAVE IN THIS MEETING FOUND YOU INTELLIGENT & YOUR

SERIOUS NATURES AT ONE WITH US.

TWO HOURS BEFORE THE SETTING SUN, IN THE FULL DAYCYCLE

BEFORE THE FULL OF THE MOON, WE WILL MEET AGAIN.

I AM MICHAEL

I HAVE ESTABLISHED YOUR ACQUAINTANCE & ACCEPT YOU. COME

NEXT TIME IN YOUR OWN MANNER. SERVANTS WE ARE NOT.

I LEAVE NOW AS THE LIGHT LEAVES AND WIND MY PATH OVER ITS

TRACK ON EARTH I AM A GUARDIAN OF THE LIGHT

LEAVE THIS FIRST OF THE FIRST TWO MEETINGS IN A CYCLE OF

TWINNED MEETINGS IN A CYCLE OF TWELVE MOONS

LOOK! LOOK INTO THE RED EYE OF YOUR GOD! ' 1 4

The canine red setter's transformation into this Michael, the poet's kind-hearted guide

into the ultimate elsewhere at the end of life (as seconded by Sandover's Other World), is

a processional that begins with a seemingly small, comic moment in "The Broken

Home." Vestiges of the first Michael remain in this "TWINNED MEETING" and bring

authenticity and pathos to the angel spirit who once again becomes one with the sun, the

"RED EYE" of the poet's god. Michael leads the poet of Mirabell to a different, more

figurative kind of door than in "The Broken Home," but both journeys end in sunset and

self revelation. So many of Merrill's subjects and characters achieve this kind of

transport and "SERIOUS NATURE" not in spite of the puns but because of them.

11. Paul Muldoon

Somewhere near the equator, among the vast expanses of the earth's oceans, lie the

"horse latitudes," the too calm regions of sea where sailors have been known to throw

Merrill, Mirabell, in "Book 9," in Sandover, 276.

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their horses over in hopes of catching wind again. So too within Muldoon's vast and

ever-evolving oeuvre: quietly lodged between the self-parody of Moy Sand and Gravel

(2002) and the long, colorful sequences of Maggot (2010) lies Horse Latitudes (2006),

his saddest and perhaps most accomplished collection, the book by an already daring sort

of poet that takes the most chances, the volume that, a little more than the others, is

willing to go overboard in both subject matter and form—and because of this, rarely

does. Likewise, deep within this tenth full-length collection, placed softly between an

outlandish sestina for "Chris" and a long, elegiac strand of terza rima for the late rock

singer Warren Zevon, is "Hedge School," a slow, deliberate, and weighty sonnet that

links, through eclectic rhymes, complex etymologies, and puns, the make-shift classroom

of the poet's devout Catholic great-great-grandmother to the scattering and invasive

cancer cells that killed his sister Maureen.

This poem is not unusual for technique, within Muldoon's body of work: he has

been both celebrated and criticized—as Merrill was—for the kinds of wordplay and

verbal "stunts" found in "Hedge School" and most of his other work.115 Helen Vendler

once famously accused Muldoon's poems of having a "hole in the middle where the

feeling should be" because of these stunts,116 and although most critics now consider her

criticism to be overly censorious of Muldoon's penchant for play (Vendler herself has

written kinder reviews of the poet's work since then),117 readers will still find "something

113 Muldoon coins the phrases "stunt writing" and "stunt reading" in his lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. See Muldoon, The End of the Poem, 195, 207, 218-20, 366-67.

1 '6 Helen Vendler, "Anglo-Celtic Attitudes," in New York Review of Books 44, no. 17 (November 6, 1997). 58

117 Vendler writes in her long review of Horse Latitudes: "Paul Muldoon seems to me a more convincing poet now than he was ten or fifteen years ago " Helen Vendler, "Fancmess and Fatality," in The New Republic 235 (2006) 26-33.

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elusive about some of his work—all the playfulness, the fireworks, the layers of allusion

1 1 R

keeping the poet just out of sight, as if he didn't want to be pinned down." It is in this

particular aspect of Muldoon's poetry that "Hedge School" most closely resembles the

work of the other poets in this chapter. As allusive and verbally intricate as the poem is,

it becomes mostly serious in the end—not in any direct sense, but because its playful

components so openly mirror the mechanisms of defense associated with grief that the

reader can feel grief through them. That is, although the words do not actually describe

the griever's feelings, the language behaves in a "feeling" and psychological way—

denying, revoking, defending against the very subject matter that surely matters most.

Here is the poem:

Not only those rainy mornings our great-great-grandmother was posted at a gate with a rush mat over her shoulders, a mat that flashed Papish like a heliograph, but those rainy mornings when my daughter and the rest of her all-American Latin class may yet be forced to conjugate Guantanamo, amas, amat and learn with Luciana how "headstrong liberty is lash'd with woe" — all past and future mornings were impressed

on me just now, dear sis, as I sheltered in a doorway on Church Street in St. Andrews (where, in 673, another Maelduin was bishop),

and tried to come up with a ruse for unsealing the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary back in that corner shop and tracing the root of metastasis.n

It is a poem that hinges on a single word, metastasis, that does not appear until the very

end. Instead of exploring the autobiographical context that has led to his using this term

118 Charles McGrath, "Word Freak," in New York Times Magazine (November 19, 2006): 60.

119 Paul Muldoon, "Hedge School," in Horse Latitudes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 94.

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(the fact his sister's uterine cancer—the same cancer that killed their mother—has spread

to other organs), Muldoon, who has been fondly accused of being "addicted to puns,"

approaches the word etymologically, allowing it, when he finally writes it down, to

i 20

signify nearly everything in the poem except what it essentially means. By treating the

word intellectually and considering it first and foremost as a word rather than an emotive

signifier of something serious in life, Muldoon denies the very subject matter his poem

claims to be about; in doing so, he also gives that subject extra potency.

The sonnet consists of one long sentence—recalling Frost most recently, but

certainly Shakespeare and others, too. Because of this structure, we expect the poem, as

varied as its subjects seem to be, to follow a connected series of thoughts that end in

some form of resolution (as any sonnet should). Accordingly the poet takes us on a

journey through a sequence of ancestral events—both "past and future," he explains—in

the lives of the Muldoons on his way to acknowledging, albeit through a kind of

intellectualization, his present grief about his sister. The "hedge school" of their great-

great-grandmother, a place where children go secretly to learn, transforms, for the poet's

daughter, into a Latin class where students discover the secret sources of their (and the

poet's) language; likewise the poet enters his own schoolroom in the last stanza—the

final "room" of the poem—in the form of a bookstore that contains the New Shorter

Oxford English Dictionary, itself sealed off as though its words are meant to remain a

secret. Knowledge in all three scenarios of this poem is both worth seeking out at all cost

but also dangerous and illicit.

120 Langdon Hammer, "Gamesmanship," in New York Times Book Review (February 18, 2007): 24.

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In this sequence of schoolrooms, Muldoon also seems to be sketching out a broad

argument regarding change and immutability. Love, death, the pursuit of liberty, woe,

human curiosity, and perhaps most important although never mentioned, cancer, remain

unchanging across generations even as the language changes around them—and not just

Latin words ("love") but proper names, too, like Muldoon, from "Maelduin." Yet even as

the poet acknowledges language's volatility, we can also detect his ultimate respect of its

permanence, as exemplified by his quotation from Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors

and his underlying message that the human quest for knowledge shows a certain

continuity that neither time nor disease can change. (It simply manifests itself in different

places: Catholic hedge schools, American high schools, Scottish bookstores, etc.) Rather

than disappearing, words simply move—metastasize themselves, as his final line implies.

The fact that the dictionary is the "new shorter" version of itself suggests this kind of

inevitable movement and furthermore marks it out as a decline (specifically a decline in

the knowledge of language, or, the poet's art). This idea is suggested, too, by the

daughter's "all-American" class conjugating a Latin word that is not actually a word but a

political reference, "Guantanamo," a fact that both scares and liberates the poet who is

himself sensitive to the possibility of his own lack of knowledge about changing or

metastasizing forms.

These kinds of associations—among schoolrooms, between languages, across

cultures—are tenuous within the poem, but they allow Muldoon to move among concepts

without ever dwelling too long on the elephant in the room (cancer). In fact, the

movements within the poem itself represent another manifestation of that word that

seems to signify here everything but the death it actually causes. "Metastasis," as a

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concept, as a word transported from another language, symbolizes a form of continuity

that is crucial to the poet, whose own subject matter and words are constantly in "rapid

transition from one point or type of figure to another," to borrow the definition from the

older, longer Oxford English Dictionary that Muldoon surely would have preferred using

to the shorter one he found in the Scottish store.121

As a signifier suggesting transport or mutation, then (rather than a purely elegiac

or emotive word), "metastasis" is everywhere in this poem, including the title. The

meaning of "Hedge School," a phrase referring an open-air school for Catholic children

where conditions for learning could hardly have been ideal, is lifted away from its Irish

Catholic symbolism and reused here to mean not just that "Papish" but any kind of

school that teaches what is otherwise forbidden. The sealed shrink wrap on Muldoon's

dictionary turns the St. Andrews doorway into a kind of modern-day hedge school: the

book withholds its knowledge and requires a "ruse" on the poet's part in order to open

up. In this way, and similar to the title, the images in the poem metastasize from one

stanza to the next: great-great-grandmother's "gate" becomes a "doorway,"

"Guantanamo," a corrupted form of the word love, becomes "metastasis," and the two

actual schools in the poem (both described as "rainy") transpose into a bookstore chosen

for shelter, not only from the rain, but also presumably as an emotional safe-haven—the

place to which a poet retreats upon hearing bad news. Additionally, the concept of

121 Definition of "metastasis," Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition. Jefferson Holdridge argues that the poem makes a statement here about art more generally, explaining that, "In a poem like 'Hedge School,' Muldoon is seen at last tracing the root of metastasis, to see that this spreading of cancer comes from a Latin rhetorical figure (meaning: "rapid transition from one point or type of figure to another"), which only secures his conviction that art, like disease, depends upon cruel and rapid change." The Poetry of Paul Muldoon (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2008), 188. For another short reading of this poem see Vendler, "Fanciness and Fatality."

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"metastasis" signals expatriation here, too. As much as this poem is an elegy about

cancer, disease, and loss, it is also a poem about the poet's guilt over displacement to

America, as shown in his admission that his daughter's Latin class is "All-American,"

following the more sentimental remembrance of his great-great-grandmother's allegiance

to her own country (and religion) even when she was persecuted for it. Yet he points out,

in a parenthetical that feels like a defensive expression of this discomfort, that "Muldoon"

may actually be a Scottish name: the "Maelduins" lived in St. Andrews, not Ireland, we

find out. This poem's collapsing of place and time, from Scotland and Ireland to

America, from 673 to 2006, is merely another representation of the transplantation, the

metastasizing into elsewhere, that the making of the lyric poem provides for the poet.

More than or as much as cancer, Muldoon's own cultural and socioeconomic transport is

defined by the actual root of "metastasis."

On a formal level, Muldoon's unusual rhymes—Sven Birkerts has affectionately

called them "outlandish matings"—contribute to this second, but here primary, sense of

metastasis as well.122 The poet organizes the physical layout of his rhymes so as to allow

the reader only to recall, rather than actually to hear, the original word. The lines of the

sonnet vary in length to such a degree that their final words do not fall on natural beats,

meaning that although words do rhyme at the ends of the lines, they rarely chime or click

into place, so to speak. (For instance, the first line of the poem is nearly four times as

long as the second.) Additionally, rather than using a traditional Shakespearean (ABAB

BCBC) or Petrarchan (ABBA ABBA) pattern for the octave rhymes, Muldoon chooses

the anomalous ABCD ABCD, meaning that his rhyming pairs are neither close enough in

122 Sven Birkerts, "About Paul Muldoon," in Ploughshares 26, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 202-08.

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proximity nor regular enough in their meter for us to hear them very easily without seeing

them on the page The result is that his rhymes, like his subjects in those first two

quatrains, behave like symbolic remembrances or derivations as much as true rhymes

Taking an even closer look at the rhyme words also reveals each of them to be not

exactly rhymed but rather "rooted" within the original word, which is then repeated either

in homonym or clipped form via its "mate." Thus gate simply repeats itself in conjugate,

mat in amat; similarly, all but the initial "f' sound of flashed appears in lash 'd and,

likewise, the totality of line four's rest can be heard in line eight's impressed. The same

pattern holds true in the sestet: Sis m metastasis, Andrews into ruse, and bishop into

shop.1 These are the kind of "[brilliant] .. .verbal transformations"124 and instances of

"formal inventiveness" that have made Muldoon famous.125 More than simply rhyming,

his words here repeat themselves in a changed context, living up to the meaning of that

powerful last word that governs the entire poem in hindsight The rhyme words literally

"metastasize" in subsequent lines; like cancer cells, they split off from their source and

replant themselves elsewhere. The concept is the same in the structure of the poem as it

is in the poet's historic language as well as in his sister's disease.

The verbal metastasis represented in Muldoon's rhymes is a kind of formal play

that allows the poem itself to go elsewhere in the same manner as the human mind often

does when experiencing grief Just as human beings will deny material that is conflictual

123 McGrath has called this kind of rhyming m other of Muldoon's poems "embedded" and cited "mote/remote," "portrait/trait," and "carbuncle/uncle" as examples "Word Freak," 660 While these rhymes are impressive no matter which poem they appear in, it seems to me that their power is stiongest and most strategic m a poem like "Hedge School," which deals thematically with the kinds of bieakmgs off and transplantations that they are effecting on a formal level

124 James Fenton, "A poke in the eye with a poem," in The Guardian (October 21, 2006)

Jason B Jones, "Horse Latitudes and The End of the Poem," in Bookslut (January 2007)

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in some way, this poem explores etymology and history, lntellectuahzing rather than

directly confronting the real "root" of Maureen's metastasis "Tracing the root of

metastasis" would in reality be a medical game aimed at "rooting out" the originary site

of her tumor, Muldoon's punning the phrase into an etymological exercise across the

fours stanzas of a poem is a poetic act mirroring the common human defense of

lntellectuahzing grief (as observed most often m people exhibiting signs of obsessional

neurosis) 126 By turning this mechanism into a poetic one, Muldoon both displaces his

grief withm the poem and also emphasizes its reality by creating a linguistic version of it

that behaves in a way that will be familiar to most readers 127 Critics have pointed out

before the ways in which Muldoon's poetry tends to avoid its author's emotional core

(for instance Richard York has written that "Muldoon's whole method of writing through

perceived objects is a process of displacement, a standing aside from the heart and its

emotions"), but it seems to me that the "heart and its emotions" are very much central to

this poem and are indeed brought to the fore by a kind of lyric displacement that allows

the poem's own formal strategies—rather than the author's psychological ones—to

behave in ways akin to those mechanisms of defense that in reality make feelings of

1 9X

extreme grief (and joy) accessible to all people

See Anna Freud, "Obsessional Neurosis A Summary of Psycho-Analytic Views as Presented at the Congress," in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 47 (1966) 116-22

127 Vendler makes this point slightly differently "In this [poem's] accurate inventory of the compulsions (autobiographical, etymological, historical) that possess him even in a moment of horror, Muldoon pitilessly clones in verse his disconcerting self" Vendler, "Fancmess and Fatality "

12 Richard York, '"Between Longing and Loss' The Self and the Other in Paul Muldoon," in Paul Muldoon Poetry Prose Drama A Collection of Critical Essays ed Elmer Kennedy Andrews (Genards Cross, Buckinghamshire Colin Smythe Limited, 2006), 44 Foi more on the psychological aspects of Muldoon's poetry, see Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (London Bloodaxe Books, 1999)

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The formal play in Muldoon's "Hedge School" is a portal into an elsewhere that

both compensates for and facilitates the experience of grief. The various settings

embedded in this poem (Ireland, Scotland, America), the various characters who appear

within it (great-great-grandmother, the poet's daughter, the poet himself, and Sis), and the

rhymes that transform themselves into "the other" while retaining the vestigial core of

what they originally were, occupy a poetic space founded on etymologies and wordplay

rather than the difficult reality upon which the poem is likely conceived. Curiosity, wit,

learning, and play are all substitutes for grief that allow for its safe expression.

"Metastasis" both means and symbolizes this kind of substitution; the poet's

appropriation of it as a verbal strategy turns the passive experience of emotion into the

active expression of creativity—a move that, far from diminishing the grief it displaces,

both confirms and memorializes the feeling in a form that will remain long after the

feeling itself has subsided.

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Chapter Four

OCCUPYING OTHER WORLDS

The three previous chapters have explored different kinds of poetic remove as they

correspond to mechanisms of defense that arise, usually unconsciously, in order to assist

the psyche in avoiding displeasing thoughts and escaping conflictual circumstances. In

lyric poems, these devices manifest themselves as formal strategies of displacement that

heighten the poem's feeling of authenticity and lead it, temporarily, to a realm that can

seem outside of its own bounds. But there are also lyric removes whose effect is to

render the entire poem a kind of elsewhere space composed by language—an "other"

world of lyric text that the poet seems to prioritize over the actuality of experience. Such

instances of elsewhere-as-poem are the subject of this final chapter.

Poets have long been interested in the possibilities poetry offers for escaping their

world and creating others. Stevens refers to a "world of words" and claims "The poem is

a nature created by the poet."1 To indulge in poetic language is automatically to leave the

circumstance of the poet in favor of exploring and inhabiting a figure; but for a poem to

capture the essence of an other reality that is also separate from its own speaker's world,

the poet must devise a strategy for dwelling in a lyric space beyond his poem's primary

situation or the scene on the page. The urge to create such elsewheres, which involves

the ability to get beyond common or known experience, is often thematized in poems

about travel, removal, or transport. Philip Larkin's "The Importance of Elsewhere" is an

example of a poem about this urge (though not an "elsewhere" in itself):

1 Stevens, "Adagia," in Collected Poetry and Prose, 909, 905.

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Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home, Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech, Insisting so on difference, made me welcome: Once that was recognised, we were in touch.

Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable, The herring-hawker's cry, dwindling, went To prove me separate, not unworkable.

Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments It would be much more serious to refuse. Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.2

In Ireland, Larkin's speaker appreciates the benefits of his own "strangeness," touting it

as the reason for his being welcome there. But the poem's overall tone is negative:

counter-intuitively, his English home offers "no such excuse" for welcome. The third

stanza's conclusion that to be separate is to have an excuse for intimacy implies that the

best and perhaps only way for him to be "in touch" relies on "difference" rather than

fitting in. Strangeness (as defined perhaps by the impulse to "refuse" society's "customs

and establishments") is Larkin's self-conception whether at home or abroad. "Lonely in

Ireland"—rather, only in Ireland, is this foregone strangeness a boon rather than a curse.

An Irish, rather than English, poet with an opposite poetic disposition writes a

poem similarly concerned with the experience of travel. But the opening lines of

Heaney's "Night Drive" deem ordinariness, rather than strangeness, the most salient

feature of his encounter with "otherness":

The smells of ordinariness Were new on the night drive through France: Rain and hay and woods on the air Made warm draughts in the open car.

2 Philip Larkin, "The Importance of Elsewhere," in Philip Larkin: Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 104.

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Heaney's poem, like Larkin's, approaches foreign soil via the senses. Both poets are

interested in the "smells" of other lands (Larkin smells "dockland," Heaney smells "rain

and hay and woods") and both experience "draughts." But for Heaney, such phenomena

are noteworthy because of the newness of their sameness rather than for their difference

(or his own difference among them). He is interested in the ordinariness of sensations

within the context of a French landscape that, for him, is not ordinary. Drives like the

one described above are common in Heaney's work and facilitate in several poems his

encounter with and desire for elsewhere on both the physical and "the spirit level."4 The

very act of driving becomes a figure for the capabilities of lyric in this regard, as the final

poem of the 1996 collection published by that name suggests:

POSTSCRIPT

And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans, Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white, Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads Tucked or cresting or busy underwater. Useless to think you'll park and capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.5

3 Heaney, "Night Drive," in Opened Ground, 27.

Heaney, The Spirit Level, in Opened Ground, 369.

Heaney, "Postscript," in Opened Ground, 411.

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The nature of this poem as a "postscript" beyond the volume it concludes supports its

underlying celebration of elsewhere. As a lyric, it exists outside of its collection—an

after-writing. And beginning with "And," it feels as though Heaney has in fact been

conversing with us all book. His call to the reader, "to make the time to drive out west,"

is a call for extra-sensory experience as it occurs elsewhere (in this case, along the Flaggy

shore); but the implication is that the poetry of such an experience offers this kind of

transport, too, albeit mediated by language. Driving is thus a particularly relevant figure:

it represents a sensory way of moving through the world that is mediated, still, by the

windshield and the vehicle (figures for language and the poem, respectively).

The elsewhere Heaney speaks of in his long opening sentence is both literal and

conceptual. The "wind/and the light," the ocean "wild/with foam and glitter," and the

"flock of swans,/their feathers roughed and ruffling" are all, taken together, somewhat

otherworldly; but there are purely poetic components of elsewhere, too. Heaney

performs a kind of auditory landscaping in his succession of "r" sounds ("Clare,"

"Shore," "September," "other," "glitter," "underwater") that mimic perhaps the wind

folding and curling across the sea. The three seemingly incongruous long "a" sounds of

the "slate-grey lake" in line seven in fact isolate the lake in aural terms—as nature

isolates it "inland"—between the gutteral "ur" sounds of the word "surface," which

occurs just before it, and the word "earthed," which occurs just after it. In a different,

still conceptual kind of elsewhere, Heaney nods toward his precursor Yeats—his County

Clare swans not only recalling Yeats's wild swans at Coole but also the swan that Yeats

pictured descending on Leda, figured here in Heaney's most powerful and lasting image,

"earthed lightning."

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Heaney has created a string of binaries: between the frightening visionary quality

of Leda and the sweet nostalgia of the swans at Coole, the vertical scope of "lightning"

and the fact that it is "earthed," the invisible wind of line three and the visible light of line

four, the "wild" ocean on one side of the car and the tamer surface of a lake on the other.

These opposing forces correspond to Heaney's underlying debate between the necessity

of felt experience—the drive—and the pleasures of mediation—the car—or, in poetical

terms, the language of experience rather than experience itself. The drive of the poem, its

literal journey into elsewhere, ends with the end of the opening sentence, with the swans

tucking their necks and bodies underwater. Heaney's closing lines register some regret

over the temporariness of the sensation: "useless to think you'll park and capture it/ More

thoroughly." The divide between direct experience of elsewhere and mediation as

elsewhere culminates in what the poet deems "a hurry through which known and strange

things pass." The "hurry" testifies both to the power of the natural world and the power

of poetry, which, by the end of this poem stakes the same kind of claim for its own

"hurried" sensations, elsewhereness, and ability to make known things strange and

strange things known. The "big soft buffetings" Heaney describes as coming "at the car

sideways" are on one level the effects of wind; but the poem operates sidelong as well, its

own indirections and tropes catching the reader equally "off guard."

"Postscript," then, is both a poem about the desire for elsewhere and a treatise on

poetry's own capabilities in this regard. And its nature as a poem about going elsewhere,

and as an "after-writing" to the volume to which it belongs, runs even deeper than the

title initially claims: for it is also a rewriting or a revision of one of Heaney's much

earlier poems about driving called "The Peninsula":

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When you have nothing more to say, just drive For a day all round the peninsula. The sky is tall as over a runway,

The land without marks, so you will not arrive

But pass through.. .6

This earlier, quieter poem sets up the scenario of the Flaggy Shore—the postscript that

always comes after "you have nothing more to say." Heaney is interested here, as he is in

the later poem, in experience as felt by movement rather than stasis—the rush rather than

the reflection. Arriving, parking, and staying amount to less than the process itself,

depicted here as "passing through" and later as the "hurry through which known and

strange things pass." Lyric process, too, is palpable in these descriptions and represents

in both poems the aesthetic counterpart to Heaney's literal vehicles of transport.

The intrapsychic analogues to this sort of lyric quest for elsewhere occur in a wide

constellation of defensive maneuvers predicated on the wish to deny some piece of reality

in order to gain partial access to the secret or forbidden desire associated with it. The

fantasies inherent in dreams as well as the acts Freud calls "phantasying" are certainly

relevant to lyric process in so far as they allow the psyche to experience, albeit indirectly,

the very content they seem to deny in the same way that poems of elsewhere both chart

out the desired otherness and also create a separate space, mediated through language (i.e.

the windshield), that constitutes a lyric elsewhere. D. W. Winnicott's ideas about

transitional objects and spaces also apply here and could be related to the in-between-

ness suggested by Heaney's experience "hurrying" and "passing through." These

psychoanalytic concepts will be explored more thoroughly in the readings that follow,

6 Heaney, "The Peninsula," in Opened Ground, 22.

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and especially in the pages on Clare, who was for Heaney a powerful precursor and

whose poems about farming and nature have had a large influence on Heaney's own.

In the poems above, Heaney's speakers convey their desire for and experience of

elsewhere using concrete examples of foreign or strange lands. The other worlds in these

poems exist as actual places—France, County Clare, the peninsula—to which the poet

can escape and from which he can write into a space beyond. The poets whose work I

explore in the following pages—John Keats, John Clare, and Yusef Komunyakaa—create

and then inhabit elsewheres that poetry alone offers them. Keats achieves it in some

remarkable late poems through his conditional and subjunctive grammar, which imbues

the poem-as-elsewhere with a sense of possibility that is otherwise inaccessible. For

Clare, elsewhere means a place between his psyche and the natural world. His poems

inhabit and enact the transition between the two. Komunyakaa creates a world of

reflection—not just mental reflection but literal reflection: mirrored image bouncing off

of shiny stone. His elsewhere is entered through the capacity poetry has for reinventing

the imagination, which is already a figure for the world. Together these poets allow their

poems to break beyond their own bounds, to become lyric worlds all their own.

12. John Keats

In the following lines—some of the last he wrote before dying of tuberculosis in

February, 1821—John Keats turns the benign word "hand" into a haunting visual effect:

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

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That thou would 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 T hold it towards you—7

Like so many of Keats's poems, this fragment supports multiple readings: "This living

hand" certainly refers to the fleshy, physical part, but it also calls to mind the pattern of

ink laid out on a page—the idiosyncratic script of the poet. "This living hand" is also a

marriage proposal, a dark offering of the poet's hand to Fanny Brawne,8 who would have

seemed to Keats, by the end of 1819 when he wrote this poem, nearly out of reach (he

was too impoverished and physically wasted to marry her even though they were

technically engaged). Perhaps more frightening, "This living hand" represents the poem

itself: the immortal limb of the author reaching out to a far-off reader. Posthumously

published nearly 80 years after the poet's death, the poem feels like a hand from the

tomb.10 Finally, Keats's image gestures toward a different kind of hand: that of a clock.

Starting out in the present—"this living hand, now warm and capable"—the poem

suddenly shifts forward to a world beyond the speaker's death and even beyond the

reader's, only to turn back again at the end: "here it is/I hold it towards you—."]

7 John Keats, "This Living Hand," in John Keats The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 331.

For the possible reasons behind Keats's reprimand, "and thou be conscience-calm'd," see the poet's letters to Fanny Brawne written between March and August of 1820 (particularly the letter composed on the 5th of July). The Major Works, 526-34.

9 See Robert Gittmgs, John Keats The Living Year (London: Hememann, 1954), 196-97, and Aileen Ward, John Keats The Making of a Poet (New York: The Viking Press, 1963), 332-41.

I On Keats's interest in describing deteriorating bodies as well as the possibility of "after-fame" and his anticipation of it, see Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 139-57

II See Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 11-14, and Brooke Hopkins, "Keats and the Uncanny: 'This Living Hand,"' in The Kenyon Review 11, no 4(1989) 28-40

209

But let me point out, as others have, that this poem never actually shifts temporal

planes.1 Rather, Keats writes most of the lines in the subjunctive mood ("would...

were... might"), merely suggesting the possibility of his speaker's death, not its

actuality.13 The hand that reaches out in the eighth and last line is not, in fact, the dead

hand conjured up by the subjunctive second through seventh lines, but the living hand of

the first. And so Keats's strange fragment, at least on one level, conforms to what Jack

Stillinger has called the "typical" structure of the English Romantic lyric: it "begins in the

real world, takes off in a mental flight to visit the ideal, and then—for a variety of

reasons...—returns home to the real."14 According to this trajectory, Keats's indicative

first and last lines represent reality, while his subjunctive middle lines represent the ideal.

And yet the "icy silence of the tomb" hardly constitutes an "ideal" world. On the

contrary, the "earnest grasping" of the living hand as well as its reaching outward at the

poem's end seem to be what the poet idealizes; the possible death of the speaker, though

written only conditionally, feels more like grim reality.

Using subjunctive verbs, Keats inverts in this and other late poems the basic

relation between reality and poetic reverie that so much of his earlier work develops; the

power of what is not real in "This Living Hand" stems not from fantasy or idealization

12 For further discussion of this poem, see, in addition to Bennett and Hopkins, Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 153-54, Lawrence Lipkmg, The Life of the Poet Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 180-84, Timothy Bahti, "Ambiguity and Indeterminacy: The Juncture," m Comparative Literature 38 (1986) 218-23, and Richard Macksey, "Keats and the Poetics of Extremity," in MZ7V99(1984): 853-54

13 Perhaps foi this reason, Susan Wolfson calls the poem a "surrealism " The Questioning Presence Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1986), 368

'4 Jack Stillmgei, The Hoodwinking of Madeline (Chicago The University of Illinois Press, 1971), 101-02 See also Jack Stillinger, Romantic Complexity (Chicago The University of Illinois Press, 2006), 153.

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(as in early Keats) but from its technical source, its grammar of potentiality As such,

what is most threatening about the dead hand in lines two through seven, and what gives

it a vividness so palpable that we can mistakenly imagine that it is the poem's final,

outstretched hand rather than the living one, is the fact that it is a mere possibility (as

opposed to an actual presence) If the hand were dead, we would wish to die so that it

might live again—a proposition more frightening than if the hand were dead from the

start For a reader who recalls Keats's assertion of the power of "negative capability" (of

"being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts"), the threat of what might be, but isn't yet, and

indeed might never be, is more powerful than the knowledge of what is 15

General criticism about Keats has neglected to equate "This Living Hand'"s

subjunctive reality (which is, in fact, a vivid un-rea\\ty) to the reveries and fantasies of

the poet's earlier works, perhaps because in these works Keats usually achieves poetic

reverie, or escape, through myth, fantasy, and dream, rather than through a grammatical

flourish (Some of these settings of reverie include the scene of "I stood tip-toe upon a

little hill", the dream in Endymion and arguably the entire poem, the fantasy that occurs

at the end of "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer", the romance and intertextuality

of "Isabella", the dreams of "The Eve of St Agnes" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci",

and others ) And yet "This Living Hand"—along with many of Keats's other late poems,

including "The Fall of Hyperion" and the odes and sonnets to Fanny Brawne—retains in

its subjunctive grammar a spark of that early-Keatsian impulse towards reverie that has

been explored, and occasionally attacked, by so many critics (most of whom are

15 Keats writes in a letter to his brothers George and Tom Keats on the 21s ' of December, 1817 " at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—1 mean Negative Capability, this is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any nntable leaching after fact & reason— " The Major Works, 370

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attempting to distinguish the writing of Keats's annus mirabihs16 from what came

before) 17 But in spite of the late poetry's particular (and self-conscious) interest in the

actuality of experience, the subjunctive verb forms prevalent in these poems—wherein

Keats depicts the world as it "would" or "might" be—are in fact related to what Marjone

1 &

Levinson calls the "swooning" voice of early "Johnny Keats " The change we observe

in Keats's poetry from 1816 to 1819, after which he becomes too ill to write, is a change

in both subject matter and style, which have inversely-related "reality trajectories" (as the

poet's subject approaches reality, his grammar slips into reverie).1 The subjunctive mood

provides Keats with a new form of escape at a time in his life when he is most acutely

aware of the suffering reality has to offer (Keats himself articulates this idea best in his

"Ode on a Grecian Urn," whose characters, despite their seeming happiness, thrive on

their perpetual state of promise alone) When Keats leaves behind a poetics of romance

and dream to write about experiential life, his escapist impulse does not simply disappear

Rather, it seeks a subtler path to elsewhere—and finds one in the laws of grammar

This development in Keats's work, from a poetry of reverie and escape to a poetry

that is concerned with the potentiality of experience, has fluid boundaries and regressions

along the way Various critics have located the change as late as when Keats abandons

16 Spring through Autumn of 1819

17 See Marjone Levinson, Keats s Life of Allegory The Origins of a Style (Oxford Basil Blackwell, 1988), 227-254, Bennett, Keats Narrative and Audience, 61-81, Moms Dickstem, "The World of the Early Poems," in John Keats Modern Critical Views, ed Harold Bloom (New York Chelsea House Publishers, 1985), 49-66, Harold Bloom, "Keats Romance Revised," John Keats Modern Critical Views, ed Harold Bloom (New York Chelsea House Publishers, 1985), 105-26, and Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2007), 202-12

18 Levinson, Keats s Life of Allegory, 195

19 For the most comprehensive study of Keats's style fiom the beginning to the end of his career, see Walter Jackson Bate, The Stylistic Development of Keats (New York The Humanities Press, 1962) However, Bate's exploration does not address Keats's late tendency to write in the subjunctive mood

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the Hyperion poems (he stops composing the Fall during the autumn of 1819) and as

early as just after the completion of Endymion at the beginning of 1818 (thus placing

"Isabella" and the following romances into his new, more experiential category of

poems). But regardless of when or where this shift occurs, it may be important to

remember that the change is not a critical construct but an actual proposition made by the

poet himself. Keats describes his own desire for a poetic transformation near the end of

his poem "To J. H. Reynolds Esq." in the spring of 1818:

O that our dreamings all of sleep or wake Would all their colours from the sunset take: From something of material sublime, Rather than shadow our own Soul's daytime In the dark void of Night.20

Keats calls for a poetry that can distill reality in all of its sensuousness and not displace

the love of earth into fantasies of the spirit or afterlife; in claiming the sunset's colors for

poetry, he envisions a kind of hybrid composition that is made of both the poetic

imagination and natural impressions.21 Achieving this "material sublime" will be Keats's

particular aim in the poems that follow this one—among them, his romances.22 "Isabella"

20 Keats, "To J.H Reynolds Esq ," in The Major Works, 184,11 67-71

21 For a longer discussion of the particular changes Keats calls for m this poem, see Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 97.

22 Whether or not Keats's most mature poems of the following year revise the proposition he puts forth here is disputable—the end of "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To Autumn" seem to banish dreaming altogether, but the scenario of "Ode to Psyche" arguably adheres to a kind of material sublime. Harold Bloom perhaps puts it most succinctly "The 'Ode to Psyche' still glanced, with high good humor, at the haunted rituals of the already-written poems of heaven, the 'Ode to a Nightingale' turns, almost casually, to the unwritten great poem of earth " Harold Bloom, "Introduction," in John Keats, Modern Critical Views, ed Harold Bloom (New York Chelsea House Publishers, 1985), 6 Walter Jackson Bate describes Keats's thinking beyond Romance as the power of the imagination as it is affected by natural impressions—an idea, Bate suggests, Keats likely took from Hazhtt, who during the first months of 1819 was giving his Lectures on the English Poets, nearly all of which Keats attended Bate, The Stylistic Development, 25-28

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will be next, and he concludes his "Reynolds" poem by announcing this new project,

designed to distract him from his own "horrid moods":23

Do get you health—and Tom the same—I'll dance, And from detested moods in new Romance Take refuge—Of bad lines a Centaine dose Is sure enough—and so 'here follows prose.'24

These "new Romances," of which there are at least two ("Isabella" and "The Eve of St.

Agnes") and possibly three ("Lamia"), represent an important step away from Keats's

early modes of reverie—his prior strategy for turning towards elsewhere—even if they do

not fully engage with "reality," as such. The odes, followed by The Fall of Hyperion,

constitute the final break, leaving reverie behind and making room for subtler,

subjunctive forms of escape.

But what does early Keatsian reverie look like? The poet himself describes it

following a long, swan-inspired heroic simile in the poem "To Charles Cowden Clarke":

Just like that bird am I in loss of time, Whene'er I venture on the stream of rhyme; With shatter'd boat, oar snapped, and canvass rent, I slowly sail, scarce knowing my intent; Still scooping up the water with my fingers, In which a trembling diamond never lingers.25

Most important in these lines are Keats's sense of a "loss of time" and a lapse in "intent";

poetry, he tells his friend, takes place in a world devoid of time as well as purpose

(meaning it is purely aesthetic). Hard to capture, poetry, or "the stream of rhyme," never

lingers: like water, it is forever escaping the poet's grasp (we recall the "earnest

23 Keats, "To J.H. Reynolds Esq.," in The Major Works, 185,1. 105.

24 Keats, "To J.H. Reynolds Esq.," in The Major Works, 185,11. 110-13.

25 Keats, "To Charles Cowden Clarke," in The Major Works, 29,11. 15-20.

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grasping" of Keats's living hand) An example of such a timeless world of pleasure can

be found in the early poem "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill"

There was wide wand'rmg for the greediest eye, To peer about upon variety, Far round the horizon's crystal air to skim, And trace the dwindled edgings of its brim, To picture out the quaint, and curious bending Of a fresh woodland alley, never ending, Or by the bowery clefts, and leafy shelves, Guess where the jaunty streams refresh themselves 26

Keats's heroic couplets describe a purely poetic world wherein the "eye" is importantly

capable of seeing beyond the human realm The poet here is especially interested in

determining the boundaries of natural perception—so that he may break them He sees

"far round" the horizon, tracing "its brim," and he is able to "picture out" a "woodland

alley" that would normally be impossible to perceive because it is "never ending "27 But

what is especially interesting about Keats's poetic fantasy, particularly with regard to his

later turn to the subjunctive mood, is its surprising interest in "guess[mg]," or surmise—a

quality Keats doubtless learns from Milton, who is its chief proponent in English poetry

And yet where the Milton of "Lycidas" immediately confesses to the purpose of his

"false surmise"—that is, "to interpose a little ease" upon his mourning by "strew[ing] the

Laureate Hearse" and imagining that his dead friend is looking "homeward" rather than

lost somewhere at sea—Keats admits to no such intention (though we might assume,

Keats, "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," in The Major Works, 46,11 15-22

27 For a gentle discussion (and reproach) of Keats's early escapism, see Dickstem, "The World of the Early Poems," in John Keats Modern Critical Views, 49-66 Dickstem writes "No part of Keats'work is more vulnerable to the charge of escapism than the early poems Dr Leavis summed up his case against Shelley by attacking his 'weak grasp upon the actual,' but in so much of the 1817 Poems and Endymion Keats like Shelley is in explicit flight from the actual He seeks out 'places of nestling green for poets made,' womblike enclosures 'sequestered, wild, lomantic,' far away from the world and all its troubles " Dickstem, "The World," 49

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despite his unflagging aestheticism, a similar wish to ward off thoughts of death).

Guessing is Keats's preferred mode, even within his early fantasies and romances. It is

for this reason that he weaves episodes of sleep and dreaming into poems that are figures

for elsewhere in and of themselves (because they derive from myth, romance, or both).

His guessing allows him to demonstrate how possible, or potential, poetic strength can

give the impression of even greater strength; and he implies as much in these well-known

lines from "Sleep and Poetry":

A drainless shower Of light is poesy; 'tis the supreme of power; 'Tis might half slumb'ring on its own right arm.30

Poetry is figured not as some imposing natural or divine force—perhaps a mountain, or a

god—but as drowsy "might" taking a power nap. No other poet would as unflinchingly

reduce his art to such a state of unconscious vulnerability; and yet Keats believes that it is

poetry's very vulnerability that makes it "the supreme of power," because its ability to

dream allows it to be, or at least sympathize with, something other than what it is—to

gesture toward what it might be (Keats may or may not have intended the pun). And so

even in their clumsiest moments, Keats's early reveries develop what will eventually

become a long-standing preoccupation about how to represent glimpsed possibility.

Several of his later works touch on this idea in their subject matter,31 and many of his last

and greatest poems, as I will presently show, weave it into the grammar of their forms.

28 John Milton, "Lycidas," in Complete Poems and Major Prose, 124, 11. 151-63.

29 Keats's most obvious poem of this kind is Endymion, its narrative inlaid with dream. But other examples include "The Eve St. Agnes" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci."

30 Keats, "Sleep and Poetry," in The Major Works, 39,11. 235-37.

31 To name a few: "When I have fears," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on Melancholy," and others.

216

Consider, for instance, the middle stanza of "To Autumn," Keats's last, best-

loved, and seemingly most "material" ode:

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Keats describes autumn more delicately, perhaps, than any other poet by revealing it in

terms of its "store" rather than its self. (In doing so, he asks us to compare the season to

the poet, who, according to his letters, should similarly be capable of "filling some other

Body.")33 Here autumn is simply a series of its own effects—a phantom presence. And

yet there is an even further remove: for autumn's effects do not actually take place in this

poem. The subtle subjunctive phrasing of the stanza's second line removes any presence

32 Keats, "To Autumn," in The Major Works, 325,11 12-22

33 Keats, "Letter to Richard Woodhouse," in The Major Works, 418-19 The famous passage from the 27' of October 1818 reads-

As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, 1 am a Member, that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade, it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, right or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosoper, delights the camehon Poet It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea, and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none, no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all of God's Creatuies [sic]

In an earlier, but related letter to J H Reynolds on the 3r of February, 1818, Keats writes' "Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and not startle or amaze it with itself but its subject." Keats, "Letter to J H Reynolds," in The Major Works, 111

111

of the actual season. "Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find/thee...," Keats writes;

he means: "it is possible that a person might sometimes find traces of you in the following

autumnal effects—." Such a grammatical inversion not only plays down the speaker's

impressions (he never mentions "I"—only "whoever"), it also transforms the season into

a kind of poetic supposition. Of course we know that Keats experiences actual autumn—

his letter to J. H. Reynolds on the 21st of September, 1819, describing the occasion of his

writing "To Autumn," makes that clear enough—but his poetic autumn vacillates

between possibility and truth.3 The "flowers" and "oozings" of Keats's second stanza

occupy a purely aesthetic, potential realm—different from the "bowery clefts" and "leafy

shelves" of Keats's early reveries because autumn's effects are imagined as part of a

human rather than poetic world, but similar in their ultimate separateness from it.

"To Autumn" 's middle stanza presents possibility in its simplest form. "May

find" is a "potential subjunctive" verb, introducing a viable scenario that lacks certainty.

The verb that opens "Bright Star" is also subjunctive, but it operates differently:

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art— Not in lone splendor 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 stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death—35

While the second stanza is subjunctive, the first and third stanzas remain present indicative.

Keats, "Bright Star," in The Major Works, 325.

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Although nearly forgotten by the poem's end, the grammar of Keats's first line dominates

the poem's mood. The "optative subjunctive" phrase "Would I were stedfast as thou art"

(optative because it represents action that exists only as a wish or a prayer) places the

poem's final quatrain and couplet in an alternate reality. Those final six lines invoke a

wished-for, rather than plausible, world, in which the speaker of the poem is blessed with

the lifespan of a star. (He would, he claims, spend the entirety of his years in such a

world doting on his lady's breasts). But what is particularly unusual about the poem

(since its content is the standard fare of a well-executed love sonnet) is its syntactical

construction. Its initial subjunctive seems as though it is setting up an "if/then" structure

that never materializes. We expect, after "would I were," a series of "then I would"

phrases: for instance, "then I would be able to live with my beloved forever"; or, "then I

would be able to write more poems"; or, "then I would be able to travel the world";

etcetera. But Keats instead proceeds negatively ("Not in lone splendor hung aloft the

night..."), denying in lines two through eight all that stars actually do in an attempt to

emphasize the devotion he would show by his own choice. He would, were he so

"stedfast," focus on his girl alone. The failure of the poem's syntax to follow through on

its initial promise constitutes a technical flirtation, a grammatical tease. It matches the

twist that Keats works into his second line, wherein the phrase "hung aloft the night"

confirms the surprising fact that his speaker uses the words "bright star" literally (to refer

to an actual celestial body) rather than as a metaphor for the lady, who might have

supposed, upon reading the poem's first line, that she was the one being called "star."

36 Christopher Ricks calls the poem's treatment of Fanny's breasts its single flaw; he argues that Keats, usually so adept at demonstrating embanassment poetically, should have shown more embarrassment here. Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 112.

219

Keats's subjunctive in "Bright Star" thus proceeds idiosyncratically; it is an

unconventional verb form used unconventionally (optative subjunctives in English are

rare even in early nineteenth-century writing). Rather than finally finishing off the

"would I were'V'then I would" pattern, the final lines of the poem merely extend the

fantasized supposition Keats starts in the first. They pick up, after a seven-line hiatus of

little import to the poem's overall plot, right where the first phrase left off: "yet still

stedfast" (as though the initial phrase were itself so stedfast that it could not move on).

The grammar here is tenuous at best. Keats advances almost paratactically at the end,

even though his punctuation and formality of speech suggest something more strategic.

And yet this kind of violation of grammar, within an already-sophisticated grammatical

mode, is characteristic of Keats in particular. No other Romantic poet risks his grammar

in such a way; even Shelley, the most imaginative of Keats's contemporaries, is strict in

his usage. Keats's technical violations—exemplified here by the subjunctive skip that

occurs between lines one and nine—allow him to pursue pointless or experimental

Two of Keats's more conventional uses of the optative subjunctive appear in the odes. "That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,/And with thee fade" ("Ode to a Nightingale," in The Major Works, 286, my italics) and "O, for an age so shelter'd from annoy,/ That I may never know how change the moons,/ Or hear the voice of busy common-sense'" ("Ode on Indolence," m The Major Works, 284, my italics)

3 An important exception can be found in the ninth section of Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode"

. not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest— Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering m his breast —

Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise,

But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishmgs

Wordsworth's uncharacteristic grammatical ellipses here are similar to Keats's, it is likely that the youngei poet admired this passage in particular "Immortality Ode," in The Major Works, 301,11 137-46

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sympathies that were more obvious in the early poems. Now lapses in grammar, rather

than excursions into dream or reverie, represent escape; what occurs within the "skip,"

Keats seems to suggest, is primarily aesthetic—it is poetry meant purely for pleasure.

(Perhaps this is the reason why his skips so often occur around sexual moments in his

poems: for him, nothing else could be more pointless—or pleasurable.) The late sonnet,

"The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone," operates similarly; beginning, like "Bright

Star," with an independent clause, its dependent second through ninth lines skip,

proceeding by delay:

The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone! Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast,

Warm breath, light whisper, tender semitone, Bright eyes, accomplish'd shape, and lang'rous waist!

Faded the flower and all its budded charms, Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,

Faded the shape of beauty from my arms, Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise,

Vanish'd unseasonably at shut of eve, When the dusk Holiday—or Holinight—

Of fragrant curtain'd Love begins to weave The woof of darkness thick, for his delight;

But, as I've read Love's Missal through to-day, He'll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.39

The second line of this sonnet introduces a series of "vanishings"40 that offer only a

pretense of grammatical order. Lines two, three, and four are not really complete

thoughts or phrases (since they lack verbs) but rather a list of images—poetic materials

for thought that Keats leaves suspended in a state of possibility. It is significant that this

list ("lips," "hand," "breast," "breath," and so on) is, like the appositional phrases at the

end of "Bright Star," sexual; by setting these impressions off at a grammatical distance,

Keats, "The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!," in The Major Works, 327.

See note on Wordsworth, above.

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Keats leaves them "poetical," reserving them for pleasure rather than for thought. The

lines that follow these three do so mischievously: "Faded... Faded... Faded... Vanish'd,"

each of them begins, breaking the iambic pentameter by starting out with two

introductory trochees. (In the "Vanish'd" line, Keats appropriately omits an accent.) We

know Keats is writing about the disappearance of the day's "sweets," but he avoids using

verbs, leaving his syntax somewhat ambiguous. Does he simply mean "Faded [is] the

flower.../ Faded [is] the sight.../ Faded [is] the shape/ Faded [is] the voice"? If so,

where is the noun that should precede "Vanish'd"? —Or is it implied, too? (As in: "[All

these things] Vanish'd unseasonably at shut of eve....") Alternately, we might read:

"[So] Faded the flower.. ./[So] Faded the sight.. ./[So] Faded the shape.. ./[So] Faded the

voice...." And yet, taking the syntax this second way, lines ten through twelve would

appear to be written in the wrong tense—they should say, in that case, "When the dusk

Holiday.. ./of fragrant curtain'd Love began to weave...," rather than "begins." Neither

syntax works fully. And yet Keats conscientiously maintains the poem's rhyme scheme

and meter; it is certainly a finished piece.

I am picking at the grammar here neither to suggest any failings in Keats's sonnet

nor to imply that disambiguating his syntax would be important to our understanding of

his meaning (the gist is clear enough). I mean, rather, to point out the very opposite: that

Keats banishes in this poem (as in "Bright Star" and another late sonnet, "I cry your

mercy—pity—love!—aye, love") his poet's concern over grammar so that he can dip, by

means of technique, into the pleasure-world that his earlier work occupies in its content

alone. We might compare Keats's impulse here (and perhaps in the early poems, too,

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different as they are) to what Freud, in his "Formulations on the Two Principles of

Mental Functioning," describes as "phantasying":

With the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was split off; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone. This activity is phantasying, which begins already in children's play, and later, continued as day­dreaming, abandons dependence on real objects.41

In explaining the developmental shift from the pleasure principle to the reality principle

(the former being driven by impulse or desire, and therefore knowing no bounds; the

latter being reined in by thought or reason), Freud describes the possibility of "phantasy"

as a means of satisfying a desire for pleasure that cannot be satisfied by reality alone.

Keats's late subjunctives invite "phantasy" into an otherwise reality-driven poetic world,

and his subjunctive and grammatical "skips" allow him a moment to revel in pointless

pleasures even as he acknowledges the very real prospect of human suffering (the specter

of death hangs over both of these sonnets, as it does nearly all of the late work).42

But not all of Keats's late subjunctives are so grammatically complex. In addition

to his "potential" and "optative" forms, Keats also uses "jussive subjunctives" that

suggest possibility more plainly. Consider these jussives at the end of "To Fanny":

Ah! if you prize my subdued soul above The poor, the fading, brief, pride of an hour:

Let none profane my Holy See of Love, Or with a rude hand break The sacramental cake:

Let none else touch the just new-budded flower; If not—may my eyes close Love on their last repose!43

1 Sigmund Freud, "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning," in The Standard Edition, vol. 12, 222.

42 We might relate his slips into pointless pleasure to his renunciation of poetic "intent" in "Charles Cowden Clark."

Keats, "To Fanny," in The Major Works, 331.

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Arranged like a prayer, Keats's "Let..." clauses construct a potential world of happiness

with Fanny Brawne out of what appears to be a fear of her indifference.44 "If you love

me," Keats implies, "let no one else have or even touch you." By writing it subjunctively

rather than in the present imperative (i.e. "please love me" and "do not allow somebody

else to have or even touch you"), Keats creates a separate realm of experience—an

elsewhere that is poetic rather than actual—from a mere possibility. He uses the same

subjunctive form at the end of the poem "What can I do to drive away" (sometimes called

"Ode to Fanny"), except that he writes in the first rather than in the third person (meaning

his verbs are "hortatory" jussives):

O, let me once more rest My soul upon that dazzling breast! Let once again these aching arms be placed, The tender gaolers of thy waist! And let me feel that warm breath here and there To spread a rapture in my very hair,— O, the sweetness of the pain! Give me those lips again! Enough! Enough! it is enough for me To dream of thee!45

Keats's imaginative capacity for pleasure in these lines approaches the reveries he creates

by the grammatical skips of his late sonnets. And yet in this poem, he is more explicit

about his fantasy's potentiality, much in the same way that he is explicit in his early

poems about his idealization of poetic escape. By continually using the words "once

See Keats's letter of admonishment to her on the 5 of July, 1820 In it he writes: "You may have altered—if you have not—if you still behave in dancing rooms and other societies as I have seen you—I do not want to live—if you have done so I wish this coming night to be my last. I cannot live without you, and not only you but chaste you; virtuous you The Sun rises and sets, the day passes, and you follow the bent of your inclination to a certain extent—you have no conception of the quantity of miserable feeling that passes through me in a day.—Be serious' Love is not a plaything—and again do not write unless you can do it with a crystal conscience " Keats, "To Fanny Brawne," in The Major Works, 533

45 Keats, "What can I do to drive away," in The Major Works, 329

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more" and "once again," Keats reminds his reader (and himself) that what he is writing is

not actuality but a mixture of memory and fantasy. Interestingly, he returns here to the

heroic couplet, the form so many of his earlier poems use to describe alternate or

mythopoetic worlds. The world of this poem is not mythopoetic, but it is alternate: as he

admits in the poem's last line, the experience described by the preceding lines is nothing

but a "dream." Paul de Man uses this poem to describe what he considers to be Keats's

preference for imagined or future action over present and past experience:

The prospective character of Keats's poetry...stands out here in its full meaning. The superiority of the future over the past expresses, in fact, a rejection of the experience of actuality. Memory, being founded on actual sensations, is for Keats the enemy of poetic language, which thrives instead on dreams of pure potentiality. In the last stanzas, the poem turns from past to future, with all the ardor of the sensuous desire that tormented Keats at the time, and with an immediacy that produces the kind of language that already proved so cumbersome in the erotic passages of Endymion.... Contradicting the prayer for her return, the poem concludes by stating a preference for imaginary passion over actual presence: "Enough! Enough! it is enough for me/To dream of thee!"

De Man understands Keats's obsession with potentiality, even comparing the "ardor" and

"immediacy" of this poem's last lines to what had seemed so "cumbersome" about

Endymion (and presumably the other early work as well). But what he underemphasizes

is how Keats has already reinvented that early "ardor of.. .sensuous desire" through his

subjunctive posturing (which places his vision of Fanny in a kind of imaginary realm).

Rather than "contradicting the prayer for her return," Keats's final lines actually confirm

such a prayer, in its poetic potentiality, as being pleasure's only possible source.

Paul de Man, "The Negative Road," in John Keats, Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985), 43-44. Reprinted from de Man's introduction to the Selected Poetry of John Keats (New York: New American Library, 1966).

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Although Keats's jussive and hortatory forms of the subjunctive are less subtle in

their forays into the world of imagined possibility than potential and optative forms

(which merely set up longer passages of writing that often appear to be present

indicative—and therefore actual—even when they are not), they are importantly related

grammatically to what Keats considers one of poetry's primary tasks—to instruct (not

morally, but in matters of sympathy and the imagination). Nowhere in Keats is this task

better prescribed than in The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, although it is not Keats, but his

interlocutor Moneta, who does the prescribing.47 The Fall's opening lines express Keats's

longstanding belief in poetry's capacity for going elsewhere via potential realities:

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave A paradise for a sect; the savage too From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep Guesses at heaven: pity these have not Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf The shadows of melodious utterance. For poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment.48

Keats seems to be comparing his late poetic project—to "save/Imagination from the sable

charm/and dumb enchantment"—to the dreams of fanatics and the guesses of savages.

And yet according to these introductory lines (whose blank verse Keats associates with

Milton's in the opening to Paradise Lost), what separates poetry from fantasy or guessing

is not in fact its content but its capacity for favorable expression: among the poet, the

fanatic, and the savage, only the poet is able to turn his dreams into aesthetically-pleasing

language. The idea harks back to Keats's early poetics; indeed, he goes on to write,

Keats eventually abandons this unfinished poem, right about the time that he composes "To Autumn" in September of 1819.

48 Keats, "The Fall of Hyperion," in The Major Works, 291,11. 1:1-11.

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"Who alive can say 'Thou art no Poet, may'st not tell thy dreams'7" And yet whatever

Keats suggests in these lines about the merits of escapist poetry is revised later by his

pronouncement of poetry's ultimate import and purpose, which comes in the form of

Moneta's harsh reproof against him and the rest of the "dreamer tribe" 49

Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself—think of the Earth, What bliss even in hope is there for thee1?50

To which the poet replies, still with some hope

sure not all Those melodies sung into the world's ear Are useless sure a poet is a sage, A humanist, Physician to all Men 51

Moneta's response to him in the following lines is the dictum that guides all of Keats's

work after Endymion

—Art thou not of the dreamer tribe7

The poet and the dreamer are distinct, Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes The one pours out a balm upon the world, The other vexes it52

Whether Keats himself is a poet or dreamer (he is of course also a "Physician" by

training) becomes the complex question surrounding this work, the title of which claims

that the poem itself is a dream and thus the product of a dreamer Moneta, who ministers

over the dead Saturn and in doing so becomes a figure for poetry's ultimate altruism,

49 Keats, "The Fall of Hyperion," in The Major Works, 296,1 198 See Bloom's The Visionary Company, wherein he calls these lines, and what follows them, "the finest moment in Keats's poetry" and the "culmination of Keats's work " Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company revised and enlarged edition (Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1971), 426-27 First published as The Visionary Company (London Faber and Faber, 1961)

50 Keats, "The Fall of Hyperion," in The Major Works, 295,1 1 168-70

51 Keats, "The Fall of Hyperion," in The Major Works, 295,1 1 187-90

52 Keats, "The Fall of Hyperion," in The Major Works, 296,1 1 198-202

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reminds Keats of the poet's power to heal—if he would only, to use a phrase of Bate's,

"confine his imagination to the concrete and living world."53 Her name, which derives

from the feminine fourth principle part of the Latin verb moneo, monere, meaning "to

warn; to foretell; to instruct," suggests her role in the poem: to instruct the poet of his

sympathetic duty to compose poetry that can be a balm to the world, rather than an

escape from it (which would constitute a balm for the poet alone).

But Keats is ambivalent about Moneta's admonishment (and perhaps this

ambivalence is one reason why the poem remains unfinished). Reading the Fall as a kind

of commentary on the ideas set forth here, we might expect that most, if not all, of the

poet's subsequent work (which includes "To Autumn" and all of the poems to Fanny)

would be firmly rooted in reality, with no traces of his earlier poetics of escape. But

Keats only partially heeds Moneta's call, emphasizing in his last poems poetry's capacity

for dwelling in possible realities that are neither completely lodged in the actual nor too

far from what might be real. Keats's choice to abandon idle dreaming, only to replace it

with a new and more subtle form of dreaming, demonstrates his unresolved ambivalence

about what it is that gives poetry its might, despite what he writes in the Fall. This

ambivalence with respect to Moneta's message—that poetry is more powerful than

dreaming—reflects Keats's earlier ideas about the strength in negative capability. The

fact that Keats is content with his own uncertainty about the source of poetry's power is a

manifestation of the capability of the poet that Keats valorizes in his letters. He is able to

maintain this uncertainty by his attraction to the subjunctive mood, which allows him to

53 Bate, The Stylistic Development of Keats, 173 See also Geoffrey Hartman, "Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats's Hyperion," in The Fate of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 60-61. Hartman consideis Moneta to be a kind of instructive authorial figure who is like Keats's "poetical character" in its capacity to assume other forms.

228

retain his desire for elsewhere in spite of his late call to reality (where Moneta firmly

places him). His solution is to stick to the world around him, but in terms of its potential,

thus replacing the "vex" of escapism with the might of possibility.

Poetry's ability to instruct becomes its lasting power for Keats. This idea can be

found in his early poetry, but the windows into potential worlds are much more obvious

there. In the late poems, Keats achieves the transition to elsewhere almost invisibly

(perhaps because by this time potential reality is so seated in his idea of what poetry is).

From Keats's early to his late poems, reality changes from being limiting to containing

and potentiating the imagination in all its power. Moneta is the figure who returns him to

this task, and he undertakes it in nearly all of his last poems via their subjunctives, which

have the special capacity to transform actuality into glimpsed possibility.

13. John Clare

If Keats is a poet who engages with the world around him by imagining its potential

rather than exploring its actuality, John Clare (who shared a publisher with Keats)

performs a similar feat by removing himself, poetically, from the scenes and objects he

describes.54 Clare, a farmer and famous describer of English landscapes and the animals

that inhabit them, is usually thought of as a "nature" poet. But contrary to much of what

is written about them, Clare's best poems—his hundreds of short pieces about birds and

other farm-side animals and their habitats—often leave the reader questioning how this

poet actually relates to the objects he describes. Rather than seeking communion with the

34 In addition to Clare's books, John Taylor, with the firm Taylor and Hessey, published Keats's Endymion (1818) andLamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820).

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natural word (as Wordsworth does, for instance, in his account of climbing Snowdon at

the end of The Prelude), Clare tends to maintain a distance between himself and nature,

usually by imbuing his natural descriptions with a sense of wonder rather than claiming

any intimate or specialized knowledge of them.

For instance, in the following poem about sheep in wintertime, Clare separates

himself from the scene despite his seeming closeness to it:

The sheep get up and make their many tracks & bear a load of snow upon their backs & gnaw the frozen turnip to the ground With sharp quick bite & then go noising round The boy that pecks the turnips all the day & knocks his hands to keep the cold away & laps his legs in straw to keep them warm & hides behind the hedges from the storm The sheep as tame as dogs go where he goes & try to shake their fleeces from the snows Then leave their frozen meal and wander round The stubble stack that stands behind the ground & lye all night and face the drizzling storm & shun the hovel where they might be warm56

In his attentiveness to the actions, the hunger, and the cold of the sheep, Clare shifts the

perspective of his poem away from the speaker and towards the animals themselves.

Many of the verbs he uses to describe the flock's movements are strong and

memorable—"bear," "gnaw," "bite" "noise," "face," and "shun"—and these words focus

the poem on the sheep rather than on the speaker, who is notably absent unless we read

"the boy" as a version of him. The double use of the rhymed pairs "ground/round" and

55 There is an obvious element of defense (and false modesty) in this poet's taking such a removed posture towards the natural world. Of all the Romantics who write about nature, Clare was perhaps in the best position to claim a certain depth of knowledge about nature: his livelihood, as a farmer, depended on it.

,6 John Clare, Northborough Sonnets, ed Eric Robinson et al. (Northumberland Carcanet Press, 1995), 58

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"warm/storm," with their chiastic word order (Clare reverses the rhymes in their second

appearance), helps reinforce the perpetuity of the cold. In a clever enjambment that

subjugates the turnip boy into the grammatical object of the preposition "round" rather

than as a subject of his own verb, Clare makes sure to bury his four lines about the human

experience of cold in the middle of a landscape (and a sonnet) composed primarily of

sheep. They "go noising round/ The boy," he writes, developing an undercurrent of

sheep-song ("noising") from what was presumably a visual cue (the image of sheep

"nosing" through a field)—and the sheep's song muffles his own. The human element is

even further removed by the sheep's strange and unexplained resistance to shelter in the

sonnet's closing lines. Do the animals simply prefer a natural landscape to the man-made

hovel? Or do they have a masochistic longing to suffer with the cold earth? Or, rather, is

Clare suggesting by the conditionality of the phrase "where they might be warm" an

irony inherent to nature sensibility itself—that is, that the projection of human reasoning

onto natural objects can lead to a misrepresentation of those objects? After all, maybe the

sheep are already warm.

One of the strengths of this poem is Clare's ability to describe nature without

projecting himself onto it. This distinction, between poetry whose substance is the very

stuff of nature and poetry that imposes the self onto nature, is of course not new.

Friedrich Schiller describes these poetic categories as "the naive" and the "sentimental,"

respectively, in an essay that begins by asserting that the human "satisfaction in nature is

en

not aesthetic but moral." One of Clare's most recent critics and biographers, Jonathan

57 Friedrich Schiller, "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry," trans. Julius A Elias, in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, ed. H B Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 181

231

Bate, has adopted the terms of Schiller's "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry" as a tool for

comparing Clare to his near contemporary Wordsworth:

Clare merely describes nature, critics are always complaining, whereas Wordsworth reflects self-consciously on the relationship between mind and nature. Wordsworth is regarded as modern because he is, in Schiller's sense, sentimental; Clare is regarded as primitive because he is a kind of Ab-original, because he is, in Schiller's sense, naive.

But the distinction does not hold so simply. The moment Clare writes his poems he ceases to be naive, he separates himself from the land.... Once fixed in print and disseminated beyond the place of their origin, the words of the poet are always Schillerianly sentimental.58

Bate considers Clare a kind of intermediary between the natural world and that which is

poetic. In the very written-ness of his lyric form, Bate implies, and through his

descriptive celebration of place and of the genius loci, Clare achieves what Wordsworth

pursues: a sentimental communion with nature.59 Such a conclusion on Bate's part

suggests a place for Clare among the major Romantics, who, according to him, share a

common "ecopoetic," apoiesis (Greek for "making") of the oikos (Greek for "home" or

"dwelling-place"). ° But Clare's nature sensibility—or, to use Bate's term,

"ecopoetic"—does not entirely fit the Wordsworthian model insofar as we can generalize

about Wordsworth's poetics. Clare's most mature poems, begun in the mid-1830s and

many of which are now collected in Northborough Sonnets, even if not "naive," do try

very hard to preserve the "otherness" of the natural world; they keep the individual as

speaker of the poem and the images that appear within the verse separate—a separation

that Wordsworth tends to avoid, especially in The Prelude and in his later work.

58 Jonathan Bate, Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000), 166-67.

59 By these terms, and as Schiller himself suggests, almost no poet is truly naive, since nature itself cannot . be reproduced.

60 Bate, Song, 245.

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There are instances in Wordsworth's earlier poems where even he can seem

"naive" in the Schillerian sense (in these moments his poetics feel closest to Clare's). For

instance, in "Expostulation and Reply," he theorizes about a "passive" approach to nature

not entirely unlike Clare's way of describing sheep above. Wordsworth's poem explains

how nature can "impress" itself on the human mind without its getting impressed upon:

The eye it cannot chuse but see, We cannot bid the ear be still; Our bodies feel, where'er they be, Against or with our will.

Nor less I deem that there are powers, Which of themselves our minds impress, That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness.61

Here, and in the poem that follows this one in Lyrical Ballads ("The Tables Turned"),

Wordsworth's aims seem similar to Clare's: in allowing for a certain passivity of

experience—"the eye cannot chuse but see" and the ear will hear no matter whether we

try to listen or not—Wordsworth suggests a possibility for representation that neither

denies nor promotes nature's communion with man, but rather appreciates, at a distance,

the world's features as they exist apart from human reflection. Wordsworth famously

writes near the end of "The Tables Turned,"

Sweet is the lore which nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things; —We murder to dissect.62

In this ppem and in "Expostulation and Reply," Wordsworth promotes what he seems to

consider a crucial separation between the human observer and the subject he observes,

61 Wordsworth, The Major Works, 130.

62 Wordsworth, The Major Works, 131.

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calling the "meddling intellect" a corruptive and even "murderous" element to the

experience of nature And yet while it appears that Wordsworth's instincts are similar to

Clare's in these poems, even here, where Wordsworth is most careful to celebrate

nature's independence, we can detect slight differences The distinction shows itself

most clearly at the end of "The Tables Turned"

Enough of science and of art, Close up these barren leaves, Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives 63

In these lines, Wordsworth invites his interlocutor (his "good friend Matthew") to join

him in admiring the natural world free of books or any other kind of "meddling intellect "

And yet the two actions the "heart" performs here, "watching" and "receiving," complete

a transaction between man and nature that would give Clare pause "Watching" is part of

Clare's modus operandi, but while Clare does "receive" nature to some extent—it would

be impossible for him to make poems if he did not—his work minimizes this exchange to

preserve a sense of nature's otherness, while Wordsworth's poems seem to promote it

The stanzas from "Expostulation and Reply" highlight the place where Wordsworth's

belief in maintaining passivity towards nature departs from Clare's Clare's is not a

"wise" but rather a "pure passiveness," because it seeks innocence rather than wisdom

Wordsworth, The Major Works 131

64 Wordsworth's "Lines written a few miles above Tmtern Abbey," the final poem in Lyrical Ballads, describes more clearly than any other of his poems his progression from "wise passivity" to the more sentimental approach to nature that we find in his later verse especially In that poem, he explains how, as a boy nature was to him "all in all," but now, he has "learned/ To look on nature not as in the hour/ Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes/ The still, sad music of humanity " He continues by asserting that "memory be as a dwelling-place"—allowing for the possibility that the mind itself could hold natuie withm it rather than simply behold it The Major Works, 133-35

234

By differentiating Clare from Wordsworth in this way (and, in doing so, changing

the parameters of Bate's comparison), I do not mean to suggest that Clare is not also a

"nature poet" whose interest lies, ultimately, in the earth. It is true that Clare, like many

other poets of his time, is, in the most literal sense, an "eco-poet": any reader of his

hundreds of poems describing birds' nests and other similar animal and human abodes

can see that he is indeed a "maker of dwelling places." But to consider Clare more

generally a poet of "dwelling" in the Heideggerian sense (that is, dwelling as a way of

being that results in thinking) is to mistake the poet's content for his poetic form.65 The

sonnets written in Northborough, many of which have been overlooked by critics, include

formal qualities and perceptual strategies that minimize the act of dwelling in nature

(even as they describe actual dwelling places such as "the hovel"). Clare's way of seeing

objects and scenes around him is characterized by quick, unsteady perceptions rather than

long, pensive gazes (his cataloguing of sheep activities in the poem above is one of many

examples). And although there is a certain measure of sensibility in Clare's way of

recording everything he sees, the poems themselves tend to undermine the closeness of

the poet to his material by means of their broad aesthetic focus and their unusual tone of

objectivity, unusual especially for sonnets (a verse form traditionally inhabited by more

subjective "lyric selves").

A passage from one of Clare's autobiographical prose pieces offers an

enlightening description of some of his own qualities in this regard via his observation of

another writer, Henry Cary, whom he meets at a London party:

See Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

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there sits Cary, the translator of Dante, one of the most quiet, amiable and unassuming of men. He will look round the table in a peaceful silence on all the merry faces in all the vacant (unconsciousness) imaginable, and then he will brighten up and look smilingly on you and me and our next-hand neighbour as if he knew not which to address first—and then perhaps he drops a few words like a chorus that serve all together. His eyes are not long on a face. He looks you into a sort of expectation of discoursing and starts your tongue on tiptoe to be ready in answering what he may have to start upon, when suddenly he turns from you to throw the same good-natured cheat of a look on others.

Clare's exposition of Cary reads like a two-pronged study of his own poetic style. Not

only does his response to this translator of Dante arrive to us in the same manner as his

poetic verses—in short bursts of detailed sensory perceptions that "show" more than they

"tell" about the man—but his very description of Cary's mode of social address is

strikingly similar to Clare's own way of addressing nature in his poems. Clare treats

Cary with the same distant and objective eye that he uses for his nature descriptions,

aiming to gather many disparate elements into a whole characterization by means of

flooding the reader with a several kinds observations at once. And although he clearly

identifies with Cary, who "looks round the table in peaceful silence at all the merry

faces" in the same manner that he, as a poet, surveys a landscape for its multiple

particulars, and whose "eyes are not long on a face" in just the same way that he, as a

poet, is reluctant to fix his gaze on any one object, Clare neither judges Cary nor

acknowledges any real sympathy towards him. Rather, he leaves his seemingly innocent,

and yet suggestive, portrait to do that work itself. He narrowly avoids the more intimate

practice of seeing through the man by enforcing his own "good-natured cheat of a look."

John Clare, Sketches in the Life of John Clare, ed. Edmund Blunden (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1931), 113.

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This kind of "cheating," or identification by means of separation, is evocatively

described by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott in his 1953 paper on "Transitional

Objects and Transitional Phenomena." There is, Winnicott suggests, a "perpetual human

Cn

task of keeping inner reality and outer reality separate yet interrelated," and "relief

from this task "is provided by an intermediate area of experience" that includes both the

subjective and objectively perceived observations. The sense of "nature" that we find in

Clare's poetry is, like this intermediate area, neither entirely subjective nor objective,

because it neither comes from without nor from within. We can think of it, rather, as

analogous to the experiences, most often occurring during infancy and childhood, that

Winnicott refers to as "transitional phenomena," because they occur in the "potential

space" that exists somewhere between inner and outer reality: Transitional objects and transitional phenomena belong to the realm of illusion which is at the basis of initiation of experience. This early stage of development is made possible by the mother's special capacity for making adaptation to the needs of her infant, thus allowing the infant the illusion that what the infant creates really exists.

This intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect of its belonging to inner and external (shared) reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant's experience, and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living...70

Here Winnicott suggests that the arts, including poetry, are a form of transitional

phenomena that occur throughout life. To what extent it was so for the adult Clare would

require knowing his immediate experience while writing. Nevertheless, Winnicott's

D. W. Winnicott, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—A Study of the First Not-Me Possession," in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 90.

68 Winnicott, "Transitional Objects," 96

69 D W. Winnicott, "The Place where we Live," in Playing and Reality (London. Tavistock Publications Ltd, 1971), 3.

70 Winnicott, "Transitional Objects," 97.

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ideas provide a conceptual anchor: they describe the "interplay between separateness and

union" that we find so often in Clare's work.71 Just as "cultural experience" and

"creativity" reside in the potential space between the "me" and the "not-me" according to

Winnicott, so Clare's descriptions of nature seem to be located in an "elsewhere" directly

between the human eye and what it sees.

Seamus Heaney praises this very quality of Clare's verse when he talks about its

"perceptive being," noting that "the eye of the writing is concentrated utterly on what is

before it...." The following lines of poetry illustrate Clare's attentiveness in this way;

they are marked both by visual inclusivity as well as by some indecision about which

perceived thing to address first:

The wild duck startles like a sudden thought & heron slow as if it might be caught The flopping crows on weary wing go bye & grey beard jackdaws noising as they flye The crowds of starnels wiz & hurry bye & darken like a cloud the evening sky The larks like thunder rise & suthy round Then drop & and nestle in the stubble ground The wild swan hurrys high & noises loud With white necks peering to the evening cloud The weary rooks to distant woods are gone With length of tail the magpie winnows on To neighbouring tree and leaves the distant crow While small birds nestle in the hedge below73

Clare introduces ten different species of birds in this sonnet, occasionally letting the

description of a single bird spill over to the next line, as in the beautiful couplet "crowds

of starnels wiz & hurry bye/ & darken like a cloud the evening sky," but most often

71 Winnicott, "Transitional Objects," 99.

72 Seamus Heaney, "John Clare: a bi-centenary lecture," in John Clare in Context, ed. Hugh Haughton et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 134.

Clare, Northborough Sonnets, 69.

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clipping each image by formulating a new one in the adjacent clause. One effect of this

additive, often paratactic, syntax is that the poem gives the impression that it is

descriptively comprehensive even when it is not. Clare offers us more birds in one

sonnet than perhaps any other writer would, but there is still no guarantee that we are

actually seeing everything—and indeed Clare's frenzied way of cataloguing the minutest

images ("the distant crow" in line thirteen could hardly be a major feature of this

landscape) even implies the opposite: there is too much to see, too much to describe.

But something unique happens at the beginning of this sonnet that sheds particular

light on Clare's poetics. The first analogy of the poem is unusual for Clare: "The wild

duck startles like a sudden thought" is written beyond the realm of "perceptive being"

where Clare generally situates himself as writer. The simile is unexpected not because

Clare is unwilling to use comparison to bring an image into vividness (later in the poem

we also see starnels like clouds and larks like thunder), but rather because he compares

the action of the duck to such an immaterial, and poetic, entity: a sudden thought. This

particular pairing would be a bold choice for any poet, since the motion involved in the

duck's startle brings so much sensory information to an essentially senseless moment of

mental creativity. (We hardly notice when a thought comes into consciousness, and yet

Clare suggests it is noisy, with a splash of water, clumsy wet wings, and flailing feet.)

Ironically, the order of the simile implies that the comparison should go backwards; that

is, the "sudden thought" is information provided in order to help us mentally configure

the image of a duck startling, when of course, by the sheer power of the first image

compared to the second, it must go the other way around. But for this particular poet, the

overt simile between duck and thought, whichever way they compare, is rare; Clare is,

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among all his contemporaries, most reluctant to use the natural world to describe his own

mind. This is not to say that critics, especially those interested in Clare's madness and

institutionalization, could not or have not devoted much attention to the similarities

between Clare and the animals he describes (birds secretly nesting, or forced from their

natural habitats), but such gestures of comparison are rarely made by the poet himself.

What is perhaps most telling about Clare's manifest thought is how quickly it

dissipates—as fast as a duck settling in water. Almost as soon as the thought appears, the

poet replaces it with the heron, whose "slow" wariness, "as if it might be caught," hints at

Clare's own understanding of the danger of being recognized in the very act of

sensibility—a recognition that would lay bare, for a brief moment, his own subjectivity.

Freud, in his essay on "Negation," describes this tension between conscious and

repressed thoughts in a more purposeful way than Clare's poem (whose simile is more

suggestive than elucidative). Freud exposes the nature of a mental process, "negation,"

by which certain dangerous or conflictual "sudden" thoughts come into consciousness by

claiming the opposite of what they actually mean:

The content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated. Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed it is already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed. We can see how in this the intellectual function is separated from the affective process. With the help of negation only one consequence of the process of repression is undone—the fact, namely, of the ideational content of what is repressed not reaching consciousness. The outcome of this is a kind of intellectual acceptance of the repressed, while at the same time what is essential to the repression persists.

Sigmund Freud, "Negation," in The Standard Edition, vol. 19, 235-36.

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Freud explains that negation refers to a person's conscious judgment about a certain idea

(or subject) that nevertheless manages to keep the conflictual feelings associated with that

idea out of awareness by means of defense (saying that it is not true, rather than that it is).

By means of negation, a person both undoes a repression and yet still defends against the

unwanted affect. Although Clare does not usually "negate" within his poems (his poems

rarely contain judgments at all), the conceptual move Freud describes in this essay is

analogous to the phenomena I have been detailing in the poems, wherein the poet seems

both to identify with and separate himself from his subject simultaneously. Negation, like

this characteristic of Clare's poetics, is an instance of a compromised use of intellectual

choice in order both to affiliate with a subject (here, nature) and, at the same time, avoid

total commitment to it. Through a poetical-perceptive act akin to negation, Clare can

produce certain subject matter in his poems without addressing it fully or acting upon it

(i.e. without "accepting what is repressed").

Freud's definition of "judgment" as a perceptive act later in his essay is also

useful to our reading; it helps clarify the specific way in which the erratic, "Cary-like"

motions of Clare's eye, which are defensive in a way that is similar to negation, make it

possible for the poet to produce description without subjectivity, or sensibility that

remains distinct from consciousness:

Judging is the intellectual action which decides the choice of motor action, which puts an end to the postponement due to thought and which leads over from thinking to acting. This postponement due to thought.. .is to be regarded as an experimental action, a motor palpating, with small expenditure of discharge. Let us consider where the ego has used a similar kind of palpating before, at what place it learnt the technique which it now applies in its process of thought. It happened at the sensory end of the mental apparatus, in connection with sense perceptions. For, on our hypothesis, perception is not a purely passive process. The ego periodically sends out small amounts of cathexis into the perceptual

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system, by means of which it samples the external stimuli, and then after every such tentative advance it draws it back again.75

Freud compares a "motor palpating" to "judgment," or the tenuous process of deciding

when to turn a thought into an action. He suggests that when a person hesitates to act, it

is because he is thinking, and when he finally does decide to act, the decision arrives via

a sequence of small expenditures of energy that finally come to fruition. The perceptions

Clare accrues within a poem are similar to these palpations or "experimental actions"; we

might think of them as images that exist in a perpetual state of formulation, unable to

move fully, or be fully explored within limits of the poem. Clare himself admits in a

letter to his publisher John Taylor in 1829 that he does not often let "action" enter his

poems, leaving his tiny observations in a state akin to what Freud calls "postponement."

Clare remarks that "many of the [poems] of the day that introduce action do it at the

expense of nature for they are often like puppets pulled into motion by strings.. ,."76

Action, in this sense then, means full consciousness—a subjective rather than merely

descriptive expression of perception. Clare is suggesting that nature is best expressed

when the poet does not act upon it or subject it to that more pensive gaze, which is for

Wordsworth and others the "inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude."77

If Clare believes that poems of action are too often written "at the expense" of

nature, then is his own resistance to action, played out by these perpetually postponing

perceptions, somehow truer to the landscapes he describes? It is clear, at least, that

Clare's poems tend to develop out of the multiplicity of images rather than.their depth.

75 Freud, "Negation," in 77ze Standard Edition, 238.

76 John Clare, The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 137.

77 Wordsworth, The Major Works, 304.

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(His cataloguing does not preclude visual attentiveness, rather, the eye's motion is simply

different: Clare sees across the landscape in order to notice things rather than spending a

no

long time over the details of any one object.) John Barrell explains that Clare may have

learned the technique from Cowper, whose "way of dealing with the particularity of a

thing is to heap it with detail." Rather than pausing for moments of close-analysis

(moments which might end in self-consciousness or reflection), Clare catalogues all the

objects and motions in any given view and reorients them in relation to each other.

James McKusick describes this method as a presentation ...of details in a rambling, anecdotal fashion that undercuts the expectation of narrative development, effacing indications of chronology or causality in favor of a synchronic moment that reflects the daily and seasonal patterns of agricultural activity and biological existence.80

For McKusick, Clare's faithfulness towards nature, another kind of ecopoetic, comes

from his doing away with narrative. The poet's catalogues, heedless of "chronology or

causality," reflect the patterns of everyday life and suggest the "interdependence of all

living things."81

But such ecocritical accounts of Clare's work fail to note that the poet's way of

organizing a landscape can also be so alienating to the human observer that it can seem as

though the landscape itself, more than the poem's speaker, is seeing the scene and taking

part in its own description. This sense is corroborated by the orientation of images within

78 For a longer discussion of this attentiveness, See Peter Levi, John Clare and Thomas Hardy (London: University of London, The Athlone Press, 1975), which focuses on the accuracy of Clare's descriptions and juxtaposes him with Hardy, another great descnber of landscapes.

John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1740-1830 An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 151.

80 James McKusick, Green Writing Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 81.

81 McKusick, Green Writing, 82

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several of the sonnets, which are arranged around several vantage points rather than just

one (as would be expected if the seeing were performed solely by the speaker's eye).

Although the scope is usually small—the setting of most of the sonnets is a tiny spot of

land within a hedge or in a wood—the distance between objects figures highly in the

thematic content and grammatical structure of the lines. In the following poem, we can

map out Clare's attempts to connect his multiple perceptions across spatial planes:

The old pond full of flags and fenced around With trees and bushes trailing to the ground The water weeds are all around the brink And one clear place where cattle go to drink From year to year the schoolboy thither steals And muddys round the place to catch the eels The cowboy often hiding from the flies Lies there and plaits the rushcap as he lies The hissing owl sits moping all the day And hears his song and never flies away The pink nest hangs upon the branch so thin The young ones caw and seem as tumbling in While round them thrums the purple dragon fiye And great white butter fiye goes dancing bye

Clare's ability to orient, disorient, and reorient his reader is striking. We feel the pond's

gravity keeping the poet's perceptions confined to a certain space, and yet we also feel its

insufficiency at holding them in: all of the images seem on the verge of breaking free of

the pond's borders. The people and the animals are part of the space's somewhat

Orientation is a crucial subject for Clare, whose own sense of place was constantly changing, first because of the enclosure movements of the early nineteenth century and later because of his institutionalization into asylums in Eppmg and Northampton The town of Helpston, where Clare was raised and where he lived the beginning of his adult life, was fully enclosed by 1820, although changes to the road systems as well as to the landscape of the fields (which had previously been laid out on a circular grid) began several years earlier An 1809 Act of Parliament originally called for Helpston's enclosure, and so the earliest construction works and planning began shortly thereafter For more information about the enclosure of Helpston and its relationship to Clare's poetry, see Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, and Johanne Clare, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Kingston McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987)

Clare, Northborough Sonnets, 40

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unstable geometry; they behave like vectors that originate in the center of the pond and

use the rhythm of the poem and the movements of the poet's eye to shoot outward

towards its edges, until they practically break free of the poem itself. Clare has us

imagine, for instance, the circumference of the pond as a thin circular line whose "brink"

itself is "fenced" by another concentric circle: "trees and bushes trailing to the ground."

Water weeds, too, are "all around the brink," reconfirming its circularity and thus its

ability to hold things in. But then he has us imagine an opening in the brink, described in

line four as the "one clear place where cattle go to drink." Now the circle looks like a

"Q"—one line extending out from the enclosed center. Now imagine the schoolboy,

"stealing" hither and thither as he "muddys the place," blurring the line. The cowboy

adds another dimension to the circular plane by "plaiting" the "rushcap" (the specific

version of the earlier "water weeds"), destroying yet another part of the pond's contained-

ness. Now the singularity of that vertical line (the rush) has been multiplied in three, and

its direction has changed—the cowboy bends and weaves the once-straight stem of the

plant with the stems adjacent to it in an action that mirrors the poet's weaving his own

poetic observations in lines that go through and around each other.84 At the moment of

perceiving the interleaving rushcaps, the very wovenness of the poem becomes clearer.

In the poem's final lines, Clare attempts to solidify the unsettled images of the

scene by observing it all from behind the wings of a dragonfly. The translucent wings

thrum across the poet's own line of sight, their frame and their movement holding

together, for a moment, the unstable images behind them. It is as if Clare has a final

impulse to tie it all together, his earlier descriptions having revealed some prior

84 We might also note the fact that the woven material is a reed, the instrument through which the pastoral "lyric" was originated (the shepherds played on reed pipes).

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indecision about whether the pond draws animals in or ejects them out. We have already

become aware of several breaks in the pond's brink—the owl sits moping there, the

pink's nest "hangs" with its baby birds "tumbling in," and there is the spot cleared by the

cattle, too. The thrumming of the dragonfly "round them" not only encloses the scene

but actualizes it as a scene—a singular, unified sight—by comparing it to a flimsy,

vibrating image hanging in front. And yet this kind of mobility, the flicker of the wings

and the thrum, eventually dominates the poem. The closing line introduces the uneven

path of the "great white butterfly" that sees it all yet "goes dancing bye." Clare's

ambivalence about dwelling in the scene manifests itself in the erratic movements of

these tiny fliers. And though perceptions gather around the pond (which we already

suspect is a version of the poem), they are constantly changing direction and orientation,

creating the possibility for several lines of sight, including, but not limited to, the

perspective of the human eye. Objects gaze back and forth at each other—and

occasionally look back at him.

Such unstable geometry decentralizes the gaze in the poem, denying priority to

any one spot or image. Clare has drawn so many lines across and around the scene that

the pond (the poem) is no longer capable of containing the perceptions it fostered; they

travel away from it and toward each other. The result is that the spatial positioning of the

observer is subordinated: each spot in the complex web of images is as central, or un-

centered, as the next. We can map the same kind of geometry in first eight lines of

Clare's slightly earlier poem called "Emmonsails Heath in Winter":

I love to see the old heaths withered break Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling While the old heron from the lonely lake Starts low and flaps his melancholy wing

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And oddling crow in idle motion swing On the half rotten ash trees topmost twig Beside whose trunk the gipsey makes his bed Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig85

Clare begins by asserting, "I love to see," and yet the images that follow are so varied and

so spatially distinct that one wonders exactly how Clare could possibly see so much at

once. Barrell has commented that the simultaneity of the perceptions in this poem

ensures that no one natural object seems subordinate to the next. He explains that in

order to reconcile the dependent clauses we find in many of the lines (introduced by the

word "while"), we should understand that the leaves moving in the ferns and the heron

and the crow are all seen at the same time: "not just this and that, but this while that."86

As in the "Old Pond" poem, Clare's vantage points seem incompatible—the "withered

break" and "leaves" orient the eye towards the ground, the "old heron" lifting off the lake

requires and upward look, and the "bouncing woodcock" in line eight occupies yet a third

level. We realize that while the poet's own eye is rigorous, it is less significant to the

scene than he would have us believe in line one. Clare uses his ability to see, but he also

de-prioritizes it, allowing the images to share a series of interconnected vantage points

that seem to have eyes of their own.

Such a de-personalization of sight—so much so that the seer/speaker of the poem

seems less important to the verse than the objects described within it—is quite different

from the self-reflexive landscapes we find in the work of other Romantic poets

(Coleridge's poetry comes to mind, in particular). If anything, these vantage points with

John Clare, "I Am" the Selected Poems of John Clare, ed. Jonathan Bate (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 136.

Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 157.

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eyes suggest Ralph Waldo Emerson's "transparent eyeball" in "Nature," an essay written

within only a few years of Clare's Northborough sonnets:

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. 7

Clare, like Emerson, gives up agency as he observes the natural world: "all mean egotism

vanishes." And yet for Emerson, the experience is transcendental because, through an

increasingly pensive gaze, the "Universal Being" enters him (in a way that is similar to

how Wordsworth watches, but also receives, in "The Tables Turned"). The Emersonian

mode of sight, in its invocation of a "god"—be it a Universal Being or even a genius

loci—ends in theoretical musing not altogether dissimilar from the sentimentalism

described by Schiller and others (we might recall Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight," in

which the speaker begins by looking at the sleeping "babe" but eventually turns to

"abstruser musings").88 Clare is much less prone to musing: perception of one image

simply leads to perception of another.

And yet Clare does not free himself of thought altogether. His poems contain

"sudden thoughts," but even more than that, his poetry displays a kind of curiosity about

nature that belies his formal and linguistic estrangement from it. Self-knowledge as

attained by the poet's union with nature is not the object, but Clare does imbue his

descriptions of the natural world with a certain degree of wonder that perhaps stops just

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," in Nature and Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 2003), 39.

88 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 87.

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short of knowledge or "wisdom" in the Wordsworthian sense. These lines about finding

a squirrel's nest figure the speaker in a state of thought:

I wondered strangley what the nest could be And thought besure it was some foreign bird So up I scrambled in the highest glee And my heart jumped at every thing that stirred Twas oval shaped strange wonder filled my breast I hoped to catch the old one on the nest When something bolted out I turned to see And a brown squirrel puttered up the tree

The anticipation the speaker has in learning what might live in the nest permeates the

poem, and, for once, Clare seems to focus his attention on one object rather than many.

The "wonder" of the speaker drives the poem forward, and it is significant that Clare

wonders "strangley" (as if he understands that to wonder, rather than to know, is as close

as he will be able to come to any real act of consciousness). It comes as no surprise, then,

that in the following lines, wherein Clare admits to having "strange wonder" in his breast

(the chiastic pairing "wondered strangley" and "strange wonder" further emphasizes how

the emotion seizes him), he also admits to having great fear. The line "my heart jumped

at every thing that stirred" indicates not only his excitement at the prospect of finding out

who owns the nest, but also his anxiety over the trespass that knowing might create—a

trespass that not only encompasses peering into the forbidden nest but also the poetic

exposure of his own wonder. The run-on parataxis of the line "Twas oval shaped strange

wonder filled my breast" feels rushed, as though the speaker wants to spend as little time

dwelling on his own wonder as possible. And by making wonder a noun rather than a

verb in its second instance, Clare is able to catalogue his own wonder with his other

perceptions, as if it were as natural a part of the scene as the nest or the squirrel itself.

Clare, Northborough Sonnets, 84.

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Another poem about wonder filters his curiosity through a separate character,

referred to in the third person:

The passing traveler with wonder sees A deep ancient stone pit full of trees So deep and very deep the place has been The church might stand within and not be seen The passing stranger oft with wonder stops And thinks he een could walk upon their tops9

Clare's "Passing traveler" takes a moment to wonder over an old "stone pit" that, like the

squirrel's nest in the poem above, stirs the curiosity of the human because its contents are

unknown. "Deep" is perhaps the poem's most crucial word, since it describes both the

pit and the poet's thinking about the pit. By using "deep" repeatedly, Clare gives the

illusion that his very writing of the verse is somehow an act of observation—that making

the depth a poetic depth as well as a spatial one is related to the process of going into the

pit itself to find out its contents. As he does at the end of his poem about sheep in winter,

Clare uses verbs in the conditional mood in order to distinguish what is real about nature

from what he subjectively projects on to it (which is always very little). For instance, he

exclaims that the pit is so deep that "The church might stand within and not be seen." We

presume Clare's surprise at this notion stems from the fact that churches, as perhaps the

most common man-made features of an English landscape, are usually such an easy tool

for spatial orientation. His guesswork is both full of sensibility and also distant. He

implies that we ought to imagine what might be in the pit, and even imagine being inside

of it, but we sense that knowing for sure its hidden secrets would mean searching too

deep. Rather than trying to know, Clare, via his "passing stranger," remains merely

90 Clare, Northborough Sonnets, 98.

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observant (that the stranger is "passing" is important, even when he briefly "stops" in line

five). His thinking about the pit never moves beyond his initial "wonder," so that what

the poet sees and what he wonders are nearly indistinguishable.

Wonder, then, signifies for Clare the perceptive act that supersedes thought—a

key difference between him and other Romantics for whom perception is a step toward

knowledge. To wonder is to see with curiosity, rather than to think or muse or come to

know. Aristotle in his Metaphysics compares the act of wondering to the act of knowing:

A man who is puzzled, and wonders, thinks himself ignorant, whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders...all men begin, as we said, by wondering that the matter is so...it seems wonderful to all men who have not yet perceived the explanation that there is a thing which cannot be measured, even by the smallest unit.91

For Aristotle, wonder is an initial step in the process of getting to "know" that "there is a

thing which cannot be measured." Like the palpations that postpone action in Freud's

definition of "judgment" in "Negation," wonder is what men do when they "begin,"

before they seek (and are humbled by) knowledge. But for Clare, wondering is not what

men do only at the beginning of cognition: rather, it is a perceptive act, not a cognitive

one. Paul Chirico has suggested that one of the reasons Clare hesitates to "know" what he

sees is his "troubled and unresolved relationship between precise, yet diverse and

constantly changing, natural observations and their fixed and limited representation in

Q9

poetry and memory." He cites remove in the poems as evidence that when the poet's

eye seems to fail him, he relies on what he already knows about nature to inform his 91 Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 982b 17-19: 983a 12-17.

92 Paul Chirico, "Writing Misreadings: Clare and the Real World," in The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition, ed. John Goodridge (Helpston, England: John Clare Soc. & Margaret Grainger Memorial Trust, 1994), 126.

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descriptions. But though Clare could agree that the quality of any given perception

might be incommensurate with his ability to represent it, he is fearful, especially in these

poems about wonder, of the depths that his perceptions can achieve. When Clare merely

"wonders" at a scene, his eye does not fail him as Chirico suggests; in fact, the opposite

occurs: he prevents the poetry from penetrating as far as it might, for fear of exposing his

own consciousness as well as exploiting or fictionalizing the natural world. This

wonder allows Clare to occupy not the natural world but an elsewhere akin to the

"potential space" that Winnicott identifies "between the individual and the environment"

without endangering his object or himself in the process.95 There is an intermediate

action, Winnicott suggests, between a person's identification with an object and his use

of that object (in the case of Clare's poetics, between internalizing nature and removing it

so far that it becomes a mere tool), and this action involves "placing the object outside

the area of the subject's omnipotent control" and "[perceiving it] as an external

phenomenon, not as a projective entity... ,"96 Wonder represents, for Clare, a compromise

between knowing and total separation. In Winnicott's more clinical examples, it would

Chirico, "Writing Misreadmgs," 127

94 Timothy Morton takes an opposite view in his article "John Clare's Dark Ecology," suggesting that Clare's very sense of wonder is what confirms his subjectivity in relation to nature and proves his connection with it' "Even here," Morton writes, "even at the limits of subjectivity, we find closeness to the earth It is quite the opposite of what we might expect: that environment as theory, as wonder, as doubt, does not achieve escape velocity from the earth, but, m fact, is a sinking down into it further than any wishful thinking, any naive concept of mterconnectedness could push us " Yet Morton is thinking specifically of Clare's poems that most resemble "Romantic" encounters with nature rather than the poems of his middle period "John Clare's Dark Ecology," in Studies in Romanticism 47, no 2(2008) 193

D W Winnicott, "The Location of Cultural Experience," in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 48(1967) 371

9 D W Winnicott, "The Use of an Object," in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 50 (1969) 713

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exist somewhere between the infant and the mother, the "me" and the "not-me"—in the

space reserved for transitional phenomena.

And so Clare's wondering becomes his way of feeling the world around him

without projecting feelings onto it. It is part of that sensibility of his that hovers at a

remove from nature and is in this sense not ecopoetical, since it prioritizes the experience

within poem over the experience of the natural world. A poem about the month of

"November" illustrates this point:

The shepherds almost wonder where they dwell & the old dog for his night journey stares The path leads somewhere but they cannot tell & neighbour meets with neighbour unawares The maiden passes close beside her cow & wonders on & think her far away The ploughman goes unseen behind his plough & seems to loose his horses half the day The lazy mist creeps on in journey slow The maidens shout and wonder where they go So dull and dark are the november days The lazy mist high up the evening curled & now the morn quite hides in smokey haze The place we occupy seems all the world

Clare surprises his reader in the first line by allowing the word "wonder" to operate under

two meanings: "wonder" and "wander." (This exchange is similar to how the word

"noising" also means "nosing" in the first poem about sheep). We might have expected

the latter meaning, "wander," rather than the former, since shepherds do naturally wander

as part of their work, making it much easier to visualize a wandering shepherd than it is

to visualize a wondering one. Later, in line six, the maiden clearly wanders, not

"wonders," near her cow. And yet it would be a mistake simply to assume the poet has

gotten the spelling wrong here, as we might be inclined to do with Clare, who so often

Clare, Northborough Sonnets, 67.

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spells words phonetically or according to their vernacular usage. After all, the word

"wonder"—to think or be curious—is common in Clare's work; he understands the

difference in spelling elsewhere. Likewise, there are several instances of "wander"

go

spelled with an "a" in other poems of the same period. Even in this poem, in line ten,

"wonder" is almost certainly used in the usual sense—the maidens return, and, confused,

"wonder" where they go. Surely here the act is one of wonderment, not wandering.

I am picking at this word "wonder" not to prove the un-provable intent of Clare in

misspelling it (or not, as the case may be) but rather to suggest the similarity, even the

deliberateness, of the two definitions, particularly for a poet whose very sense of seeing is

defined by the wonderment of that act. We know also that Clare, a primarily visual poet

who usually keeps subjectivity out of his poems, relies on his wandering eye to describe

and reorient nature. In order to wonder, Clare must wander (and vice versa). The very

disorder of the images in this poem proves the instability of the perceiver—Clare

haphazardly directs his eyes now at the shepherd, now at the maid, now at the dog, now

at the maid again, and so forth.1 The poem displays a strong sense of pathlessness even

in its progression of lines: the speaker surely wonders where to wander linguistically, just

as the characters do spatially. Like the path leading "somewhere but [we] cannot tell,"

the poem describes a failure both in location and in knowing. How, then, should we

98 Clare uses "wander," for instance, in "The Squnrel's Nest" and "Quail's Nest," both poems written around the same time as "November."

There are obvious exceptions, including the well-known poem "I Am," in which the poet's feelings are projected onto nature almost to the exclusion of any "natural" account of it

100 Mary Jacobus writes in Psychoanalysis and The Scene of Reading that "looking at landscape involves ideas about absence and distance, and can even imply looking away." Her book's second chapter, "A Whole World in Your Head," from which this quote is taken, sheds light on the ways that artistic landscapes can relate to inner realities (though the perspective she invokes is that of the reader/audience rather than that of the writer). Psychoanalysis, 54

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account for the poem's startling last line, which defies all pathlessness in its one final

assertion of dwelling ("the place we occupy is all the world")? It would hardly do justice

to the searching melancholy of this poem if "the world" in this line simply refers to

nature itself. Rather, "the world" must be one in which nature has been wondered at,

wandered through, reoriented, replaced. Clare locates his own experience and the

experience of his shepherd within a lyric elsewhere: the poem, rather than nature, is the

place we occupy—it becomes the world.

In claiming that Clare's poem becomes its own kind of world to occupy, I do not

mean to deny that Clare's poems are intimately woven with the natural patterns and

characters of his local environment; however, I do want to posit the notion of poem-as-

elsewhere as a viable way to read many of Clare's poems about nature in spite of his

attention to its actuality. Green studies of Romanticism and ecocritical accounts of Clare

in particular have generally praised this poet for his earth-friendly vision of how art and

nature interrelate and have often used this perceived quality in his work to liken him to

other Romantics (who have enjoyed a greater share of fame). But in many cases, these

critics have not looked closely enough at Clare's habit of describing nature in hyper-

detail—in a manner that precludes the kind of knowledge of and communion with nature

that other poets openly seek. Instead of overtly celebrating man's relation to the earth,

Clare, in many of his poems, creates a kind of "textual" heterocosm (to invoke a word

used by M. H. Abrams) that can seem at odds with what is ecopoetical about the

101 Winnicott's view that cultural experience occurs in the "inventive" space between subject and object is relevant here (see Winnicott, "The Location of Cultural Experience" and "The Place where we Live").

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Romantic naturalists 102 James McKusick has probably come closest to pinpointing

Clare's divergence from his contemporaries in this regard, by noticing that more than

Wordsworth, it was the eighteenth-century poets of "Sensibility" who influenced Clare,

"because for him they constituted an alternative poetic tradition, one that exalted the rural

landscape and the rural sense of community over the anomie of urban existence " And

yet even McKusick does not point out what the critics—especially the "green" ones—

resist saying about this seemingly ecologically-mmded English naturalist poet that even

the extreme sensibility we find in many of Clare's poems is tempered by a fear of self-

exposure and a reticence about participating in the world around him Clare's solution is

to destabilize what he sees—to extract certain qualities of nature to put into his writing

for purely poetical (rather than ecopoetical) purposes

The reason for taking this view of Clare is not to diminish his status as a nature

poet, nor to deny the fact that his poetry reinvents certain elements of "pastoral" first

developed by Theocritus and Virgil and later imitated later by Thompson, Cowper,

Collins and other eighteenth-century "Sentimentalists " But readers of Clare should take

care not to isolate and intensify his "pastoral mode," either Many of Clare's poems are

indeed written withm that long tradition (especially if we include "georgic" verse as part

of that broad rubric), but as many others can be considered "pastoral" only insofar as the

See M H Abrams, The Mirror and The Lamp Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York Oxford University Press, 1953), 272-85

103 James McKusick, "Beyond the Visionary Company John Clare's Resistance to Romanticism," in John Clare in Context, ed Hugh Haughton et al (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1994), 224 For an account of the relation between Clare's poetry and the literary and cultural scene of Britain during his lifetime, see Mma Gorji, John Clare and the Place of Poetry (Chicago The University of Chicago Press, 2009)

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word means what Paul de Man suggests in a passage from Blindness and Insight about

how poetry reflects the "natural" world:

...a reflection is not an identification, and the simple correspondence of the mind with the natural, far from being appeasing, turns troublesome. The mind recovers its balance only in the domination over that which is its complete other... .What is the pastoral convention, then, if not the eternal separation between the mind that distinguishes, negates, legislates, and the originary simplicity of the natural.104

By his own ingenious formulation, de Man asserts that indeed all poetry is pastoral

poetry, for all poems have, in the roots of their making, that "eternal separation" between

"the mind that distinguishes" and "originary" nature. However Clare's "pastorals"

represent neither a separation from the world nor a reflection upon it. (We have seen in

the "November" poem how deeply Clare feels the detachment between himself and his

surroundings but also how personal his subject matter is). His ability to turn the poem

into a "place" of wonder that exists elsewhere, between his mind and the objects he sees,

allows him to keep nature natural and poetry poetic within the poems themselves.

But how far should we go in trying to understand the reasons behind this apparent

insensibility on the part of one of England's most beloved champions of poetic

naturalism? Geoffrey Hartman has gestured toward the motivations behind insensibility

in his chapter on "The Sympathy Paradox" in The Fateful Question of Culture:

The paradox of the sympathetic imagination is that the more successful an expanding sensibility becomes, the more evidence we find of actual insensibility. Must we, then, consider human beings callous by nature? What we do know suggests rather the economy of moral sentiments: emotional defenses and self-protective doctrines come into play to limit an intolerable burden on feeling. (Psychoanalysis might talk here of countertransference, or the negative aspect of empathy.)

Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2" Edition, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 239.

105 Geoffrey Hartman, The Fateful Question of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 144.

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Hartman discovers that an expanding sensibility is always kept in check by "protective

doctrines" that inhibit total communion with the object of one's sympathy. The

psychoanalytic perspective on clinical empathy and its complications might be pertinent

here. Ralph Greenson defines empathy as '"emotional knowing,' the experiencing of

another's feelings," and we can analogize such "knowing" on the part of the analyst to

what we have found in Clare—that is, the crucial difference between the poet's

"wondering about" and "knowing" his subject.1 Just as analysts struggle to know their

patients, so poets often try to know the objects they represent (Greenson points out how

the "primitivization and progression of the ego [in analytic work] ... bears a marked

resemblance to the creative experience of the artist").107 Greenson explains:

The inhibited empathizer is afraid to get involved with the patient. He is unconsciously unwilling to leave the isolation of the position of the uninvolved observer. He is able to think, remember, observe, but he is afraid to feel the affects, impulses, or sensations of the patient...}

The "feel[ing of] affects"—the opening up of one's own consciousness to the object of

empathy—is what Clare avoids even in his most ecologically sound visions. Greenson

describes the "optimum capacity for empathy" as one where the empathizer "is able to

become both detached and involved—the observer and the participant—objective and

subjective."109 For Clare, who defensively prefers alterity to identification, Hartman's

sympathy paradox is in full effect: most of his poems, for all of their concrete description

106 Ralph R. Greenson, "Empathy and Its Vicissitudes: 'The pathology of empathy,'" in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 41 (1960): 417.

107 Greenson, "Empathy," 422.

108 Greenson, "Empathy," 419.

109 Greenson, "Empathy," 419.

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and attentive vernacular wordplay, lack the amount of identification that would allow

empathy, and therefore, knowing, to occur.

Such a lack of sensibility (in the form of knowing) is not felt as a deficiency in

Clare's work. Rather, Clare's keeping knowledge at bay is what makes the worlds he

creates so distinct and moving. Clare's lyric elsewheres are stark, scattered, disoriented,

and "wonderful" in the most literal sense of that word. The characters that occupy them

always wonder, but never know. Despite all of the critical literature extolling Clare for

his eco-poetical celebration of England's countryside, Clare's more meaningful

achievement is his singular way of bringing natural detail and liveliness to poetry while

still preserving the "otherness" of nature in relation to it. Clare develops a poetics out of

using the objects and scenes he admires in order to separate from them (rather than

establish himself among them). His unusual method for describing nature means that we,

as critics, ecological or otherwise, should resist the temptation simply to categorize him

with other Romantic poets with whom he has less in common than the shared subject

matter of their verse might make it seem. Rather, we should look instead to Clare's

extraordinary way of avoiding both sentimentalism and stark objectivity by developing

an intermediate mode of seeing that is unencumbered by mere knowledge, and yet still

close to its subject, with eyes that wonder and wander in the same blink.

14. Yusef Komunyakaa

For John Keats, who knew from the moment his younger brother Tom succumbed to

tuberculosis that his own living days were limited, the appeal of an aesthetic elsewhere

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based on the potential of things rather than their actuality must have felt very natural to

him. John Clare's poetic worlds are transitional safe havens; they represent a way of

interacting with the natural world that leaves both the observer and the observed separate

and intact. Keats and Clare made lyric versions of the potential and transitional spaces

that most people create psychologically when they encounter discomfort or conflict at an

unconscious level. "Phantasy" and the "transitional object" have their counterparts in the

formal strategies of poems; both Keats and Clare create aesthetic equivalents to the

mind's frequent urge for remove—for dwelling, periodically and adaptively, in a world

outside of itself.

Among contemporary poets, Yusef Komunyakaa has been praised for these

particular abilities, as a poet who deals in "parallel realities" and whose work figures

"worlds [that] drift through and interfere with each other."11 Like both Keats and Clare,

Komunyakaa writes verbally rich and visually descriptive poetry about people, places,

and things, but in such a way as to depart from—or keep a place apart from—many of

these subjects, too. His elsewheres are not entered via grammatical strategies like

Keats's or by the poet's formal distancing of himself from the objects he describes in the

manner of Clare (who orients his lyric "I"—or "eye"—so that it rarely engages directly

with the material it sees); rather, the much more modern and surrealist-influenced

Komunyakaa, an African American Vietnam War veteran raised in Bogalusa, Louisiana

(who later received his MFA in poetry at the University of Colorado), accesses elsewhere

Michael Collins, "Komunyakaa's Pictures of Choice: An Introduction" Callaloo 28, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 469.

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rapidly and without warning, sending his poetic speaker into and out of other selves and

spaces as seamlessly as if his poems were made of interlocking dreams.

But the selves and spaces that Komunyakaa writes into and through are not

usually dreamed or imagined, but rather real "others": his father, specific Vietnamese

women, wounded soldiers, Vietnam, Louisiana, etc. Race, a symbol of otherness in and

of itself, figures prominently in the lives of these people and in these other worlds; it

provides the poetry with a thematic backdrop of cultural elsewhere in addition to the

poems' more local moments of departure. (In this way, race in Komunyakaa serves a

similar purpose to the afterlife in James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover: it is

the quintessential other world that underlies all of the poetry's formal devices of remove.)

Dwelling in a particularized racial identity that has historically constituted "otherness" on

a social level almost always happens secondarily to Komunyakaa's artful aesthetic

removals in his poems. He handles larger, cultural elsewheres—the Vietnam War and

the everyday experience of black Americans—via poetic devices that reflect the

unconscious psychological processes that he—and his readers—develop in response to

them. This kind of formally sensitive and psychologically adept way of treating

"otherness" as it appears socially and politically occurs most skillfully in Komuyakaa's

thirty-one line poem "Facing It," about a Vietnam War veteran visiting the memorial in

Washington D.C. The poem is arranged around a series of virtuosic descriptions of the

black granite wall, which at first seems to resemble the man who stares at it, but

eventually comes to represent the poem itself—an aesthetic portal into elsewhere.

"Facing It" is the last poem in the volume Dien Cai Dau, a title that means "crazy in the

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head" in Vietnamese. Komunyakaa claims that the composition of it "came quite

easy"111 and that the poem "just ended itself:112

My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't, dammit: No tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way—the stone lets me go. I turn that way—I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman's trying to erase names: No, she's brushing a boy's hair.113

The poem's matter-of-fact narrative reflects Komunyakaa's casually autobiographical

style, which rarely hints at the varied and often unexpected poetic traditions from which

Interview with David Houghtaling (1989), reprinted in Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa, ed. Shirley A. James Hanshaw (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010), 17.

112 Interview with William Baer (1998), reprinted in Conversations, 71.

113 Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).

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he is constantly drawing inspiration. As one critic has noted, Komunyakaa's work almost

always "involves the integration and aesthetic instillation.. .of cultural material from both

his African American and his European American sources."114 The poet Natasha

Trethewey has called Komunyakaa's work "intellectually demanding" for this reason; it

requires "that readers be willing to attend to its cultural, literary, and historical

references" that can be hard to place immediately or that are working in contrast with or

opposition to the tradition with which the poetry might most easily identify (for instance,

the Black Arts Movement).115

The first two lines of "Facing It" work in and against tradition in this way: "My

black face fades/hiding inside the black granite" introduces the topic of race immediately,

as though race, or at least the speaker's blackness as it relates to the black wall, will be a

major theme. In fact, Komunyakaa's poem is much more all-encompassing in its

exploration of the relation between self and other, gesturing not just toward the relation

between black and white, but also the relation between man and woman, adult and child,

war and peace, living and dead. This poem feeds off of these dialectics but always keeps

them in the background to its own formal elements: it is not a racial poem, though race

shines through in certain lines ("My black face fades" "A white vet's image floats") and

provides a backdrop for thinking about the more general possibility of stepping outside of

boundaries that initially seem or feel unbreakable (which is the main theme of the poem).

Angela Salas suggests that the subtle way that Komunyakaa handles his own blackness in

this and other poems in Dien Cai Dau reflects his attempt to "build a bridge for his

114 Alvm Aubert, "Yuself Komunyakaa: The Unified Vision—Canonization and Humanity," in African American Review 27', no. 1 (Spring 1993): 119.

115Natasha D Trethewey, "On Close Reading Yusef Komunyakaa's 'White Lady'" in Callaloo 28, no 3 (Summer 2005): 776-77.

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readers, showing how racial inequalities underscore our common humanity " The very

fact that the skm color of the two vets is mentioned but never explored or prioritized is

part of what makes the lines realistic in their depiction of how racial elements influence

daily life They color everything, but this coloring tends to happen beneath the

surface 11?

Much more than race or race relations, surrealism guides this poem, influencing

its formal principles and providing the poet with a strategy for depicting both Washington

D C and Vietnam, present and past, external and internal perceptions, at once The poem

begins by moving fluidly between the images that are reflected off of the wall and the

actual image of the wall itself First, "black face" becomes "black granite," but soon,

"stone" becomes "flesh" again, "depending on the light " As the poem progresses, this

duality gives way to sheer reflection the stone itself dissolves and the back-and-forth

happens between literal reflections—"a woman's blouse," "a plane in the sky"—and

figurative reflections—"a booby trap's white flash"—about the veteran's experience in

the war Komunyakaa has described this kind of switch-back rhythm as central to his

process "I'm not really reaching for a linear narrative I prefer the lyrical narrative where

there are certain leaps in the poems "118 For Komunyakaa, this kind of movement in and

out of the present world of the speaker is what distinguishes it as lyric—"I prefer the

lyrical narrative," he explains, as opposed to a journalistic or novehstic one (or perhaps

116 Angela M Salas, Flashback Through the Heart The Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa (Selmsgrove University of Susquehanna Press, 2004), 69

117 For more on Komunyakaa's way of incorporating his own experience with "invasive societal partitions," see Michael C Dowdy, "Working m the Space of Disaster Yusef Komunyakaa's Dialogues with America," in Callaloo 28, no 3(2005) 812

118 Interview with Kristin Naca (1996), reprinted in Conversations, 26

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some other kind).119 These "leaps" in his narrative are part of his debt to surrealism:120

"In my poetry, surrealism has led me to create a montage. Distinct pictures blend into

each other to make one: a super-reality. This has influenced my writing. My real world is

1 0 1

attached to a private dreamscape." This "dreamscape" is a kind of elsewhere that

enters the poetry in the same way that images come into and out of the mind: quickly,

without warning, and because of triggers that the reflective mind can do little to control—

"I'm a window," says the poem's speaker near the end, referring to a kind of

unpredictable transparency of thought in which images and scenes are layered on top of

one another.122 Komunyakaa claims the same uncontrolled lucidity in his process of

writing the poem that his speaker feels in relation to the changing reflections on the wall.

"It was a real surprise," the poet says of the poem itself, which was the second one he

wrote for Dien Cai Dau—as though the conscious mind has as little to do with forming

the language it speaks as the speaker of this poem has in reflecting upon the images

before him.

In the same way that the speaker's perceptions leap from one to the other,

drastically changing the poem's scenery in the course of a single line, Komunyakaa's

words cross pollinate each other in subtle ways that help emphasize the poem's overall 119 Komunyakaa worked as a military journalist during the Vietnam War, so he was particularly familiar with the process of drawing up "narratives" about his and other soldiers' experiences there

120 For more on Komunyakaa's surrealism, see Edward M. Pavlic, "Open the Unusual Door: Visions from the Dark Window in Yusef Komunyakaa's Early Poems" in Callaloo 28, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 780-96.

121 Interview with David R. Richards (1996), reprinted in Conversations, 35.

122 About the poet's calling himself a "window," Pavlic notes: "the artist becomes the pane through which others look." Pavlic, "Open the Unusual Door," 795 George Herbert made the same assertion through his poem of that name.

123 Interview with William Baer (1998), reprinted in Conversations, 71

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strategy of transport. For instance, although the lines are not overly stylized or "formal"

in any sense, the poem does have sparse, quiet rhymes that guide it gently along without

revealing themselves fully; for instance, "granite" rhymes with "dammit," "night" rhymes

with "light," "sky" with "eyes," "stare" with "hair," and so on. These pairings underscore

for the reader what is happening on a broader and more psychological level in terms of

mirroring and "reflection." The poem's double entendre in lines seven and eight works

similarly: the words "prey" and "morning," referring to how the speaker "eyes" himself

in stone, also sound out the words for "praying" and "mourning"—two acts that are

simultaneously being performed as he reflects on his life and the memorial around him.

These homonyms enact the way that reflection and reality work side by side in each line.

Word doublings operate in tandem with these rhymes and puns, mimicking even

more closely the way in which the speaker's mind enters and exits different worlds within

the poem. The language is layered to let the reader in and out of the poem's various

removes in the same manner as the wall, which uses angles and light. Beginning with the

repetition of "black," the poem trains the reader to follow its doublings: "black face"

becomes "black granite," a repetition that both foreshadows the poem's constant leaping

and also suggests the psychological underpinnings of one of Komunyakaa's central

meanings: that war can turn a man's soft flesh into hard stone. (He complicates and

arguably undoes this idea a few lines down by exclaiming, in the reverse order, "I'm

stone. I'm flesh.") Several lines later, "flesh" becomes "flash" through a kind of sonic

logic. The poet's subsequent repetition of "flash" (first pairing the word with "booby-

trap" and then with "brushstrokes") is another example of how he uses verbal doubling to

lead his poem elsewhere into a different place and time. The first "flash" already operates

266

in a world outside of the war memorial—in far-off Vietnam—but the second "flash" is

even further removed, existing only in the figurative world of lyric. "Brushstrokes flash"

is simply a metaphor for the "red bird's wings," which are themselves only an image

reflected in the stone. Repeating the word "flash" is Komunyakaa's way of

demonstrating the phenomenon he has already described: he is "depending on the light/

to make a difference." These two bright lights or "flashes"—one a part of his memory

and the other a figurative expression for what he sees in present time—transport us to and

from the different worlds he inhabits within the poem. What complicates this transport is

the poet's continuing interest in removing us—and his speaker—farther and farther from

each of the images he presents, so that they constantly drift out of reach. The bird, which

was previously a brushstroke, which was previously a booby-trap's flash, is really just "a

plane in the sky." And the bird itself is only the double of an image from the very

beginning of poem—the literal manifestation of the poet's own eye, which surveyed him

as would a "bird of prey."

Other verbal doublings are only implied, perhaps because they occurred

unconsciously to the poet as he wrote. For instance, the phrase "letters like smoke"

prepares us for and incorporates the smoke that must have been involved in the "booby-

trap's white flash" that appears two lines below it. One smoke symbolically drifts into the

other—or rather, the smokiness of the names etched into the wall dissolves the world of

the memorial around the speaker and releases him to Vietnam once again. In addition, the

"booby" of line eighteen perversely morphs into the "woman's blouse" which appears in

the line directly below it, as though the hidden trap of war turns into a much sweeter,

though perhaps equally tempting, enticement. These disguised doublings are the

267

linguistic equivalents of the wall's (and the poem's) reflective surface, which offers

opportunities for escape, literal and thematic, in nearly every line.

The so-called "leaps" into lyric elsewhere that are enacted by the behavior of

these rhyming, punning, and doubled words signify for the critic Edward Pavlic

Komunyakaa's "shifting currents of a deeper sense of self in which the poet is

constantly trying to get at an "other" which exists simultaneously inside and out of

him.124 However, it is not exactly the "I" of the poet here (nor his speaker) that is seeking

an "other" but rather the poem itself, which behaves in a similar manner to a mind

defensively repositioning itself in relation to an environment with which it finds itself at

odds. That is, it is not that the poet himself leaves his body or his mind in favor of an

"other," but rather, the poet creates an object that is able to demonstrate in formal and

structural terms the kind of leaps he performs psychically. The poem itself has a "layered

core" that reacts in an analogous way to the layered core of the psyche that lies behind

it.125 This lyric-psychic congruence also plays out in the child-like literalness of the

speaker's tone, which conveys the images in the wall as though seeing is only way of

believing or knowing. For instance, "He's lost his right arm/ inside the stone" is the

speaker's somewhat unaffected way of expressing what it means to be maimed by war.

Although he can see the loss, the terror, the horror of Vietnam in the stone, he does not

express the feeling of it. His mediated, expressionless way of depicting the war comes

across as an isolation of affect, wherein the conflictual material is expressed in words

Pavlic, "Open the Unusual Door," 785.

Pavlic, "Open the Unusual Door," 785.

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1 7 ft

stripped of their feeling. "I said I wouldn't/ dammit," writes Komunyakaa. "No tears."

Here the poet gives us Vietnam in images that are disconnected from the reactions and

emotions they provoke. We get war mediated by stone and a face hardened in and by

granite. The poet's final observation of a woman "erasing names"—which symbolically

frees those names, those men and women, from death—is immediately revoked by the

literal: "she's brushing a boy's hair."

"Facing It" offers both the poem's speaker and its reader a kind of transport via

reflection. (As Vince Gotera writes, it is "a reflection about reflections.")127 The poem

defensively avoids expressing the feeling of war by depicting images in layers that are

always mediated by angles and light; we see objects and faces only in mirrored doubles,

never in actuality. The wall is a physical manifestation of the psychological distancing

that takes place around subject matter that is too painful to encounter directly. And since

the poem also operates by reflective apparatus—through rhyme, double entendre, and

repetition—the lines on the page themselves correspond to the intrapsychic mechanisms

that more commonly guide our human response to war.

Other poems in Dien Cai Dau approach the elsewhere of war, its "otherness" in

relation to the poet, more directly. The poem "You and I are Disappearing" inhabits the

death of a woman by napalm from the perspective of a witness to the atrocity. The poem

"Re-creating the Scene" imagines the rape of a Vietnamese woman by American

servicemen nearly from her perspective. (Komunyakaa did not actually witness the

For a psychoanalytic definition of this term and other related defenses, see Jerome S. Blackman, 707 Defenses: How the Mind Shields Itself (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004), 13, 45, 47.

127 Quoted in Salas, Flashback Through the Heart, 85.

269

1 7R

event, but rather was "assigned to cover the woman's case.") "Facing It" is a different

and more complicated exercise in shifting perspective, wherein the speaker both turns

away from the self (he eyes only his reflection) and yet also avoids inhabiting or

exploring fully the "other."

This study began with an exploration of poems featuring displacements of

perspective in terms of voice. Frank Bidart, for instance, takes on the other by assuming

his or her manner of speaking. In Hecht and Bishop, the displacements of perspective

involve changing or reorienting the poem's setting in order to inhabit different locations

at different times within the verse. In Komunyakaa's poem, the lyric itself acts as the

vessel or canvas for displacement. The poem is like the "frame" upon which Bishop

chooses to situate her Brazil. The speaker of "Facing It" never becomes or inhabits the

other—he cannot assume the bodies or the voices of the names on the wall—but he can

remove himself into a kind of transitional space that is both thematized by the poem (in

the image of the wall) and enacted by it (the poem itself becomes the reflective surface).

The black granite described in the poem, etched with white letters, is like a photographic

negative of the poem itself, with black letters printed on white and containing images that

cannot quite correspond fully to the poet or the veterans and civilians he aims to describe.

The poem occupies an aesthetic space between the real and the representational; it opens

up an elsewhere made of formal counterparts to psychological displacements, which both

allow for the public expression of war's horrors but also keep them safely removed.

For a short treatment of this poem, see Salas, Flashback Through the Heart, 79.

270

Coda

RETURNING FROM ELSEWHERE

Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf. —Wallace Stevens, "Arrival at the Waldorf"

Because lyric poems are constituted by the voice or voices of a single psyche—either the

poet's own, or some other, created by him—it is frequently the case that their modes of

expression are governed by the same psychological processes that govern all human

expressions. Through their aesthetic choices, poets often transform such processes into

formal and rhetorical elements that intensify their poetry's communicative appeal. I have

emphasized in the previous chapters the manner in which lyric poets give vent to

compelling and difficult human experiences by means of displacing or removing voice,

setting, meaning, and perspective in ways that are both personally characteristic and also

familiar to their readers. I have proposed that the specific strategies whereby poets

address, describe, or attempt to solve, a human challenge—loss, mourning, shame, anger,

loneliness, faltering faith, death—have their counterparts in unconscious defenses that are

an analogous effort at intrapsychic problem solving.

Defenses, as Schafer notes in "The Mechanisms of Defence," always involve

unconscious nay-saying—"I disapprove of it," "I will not touch it," "I cannot feel it," "It

never happened," etc—and yet in certain ways they retain, in their newly constructed

n

scenarios, the very content they were formed to repudiate. Such is also the case in

1 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 219.

2 Schafer, "The Mechanisms of Defence," 54.

271

poems that feature removes: their difficult or disturbing content is merely transformed,

relocated, (not erased) for the purposes of comfort and/or the more authentic expression

of the psyche's own transformations. In Hardy's "The Voice," for instance, the beloved's

"calling," which becomes a part of the material of the poem itself, is both a

transformation of the poet's mourning and also a reminder of it (in a more pleasing form).

Likewise, in Thomas's "Adlestrop," the very place that the poet denies is contained and

celebrated within his new poetic space, which ultimately shares its name. These poems,

by virtue of the artful construction of a lyric elsewhere, are particularly good at

portraying a mind coming to grips with the difficulties in what it means to be human.

As many of the poems in this study demonstrate, poets often ultimately return

removed content to their lyric speakers, who seem to claim, by the end of the poem,

increased capacity for containing and mastering the parts formerly housed elsewhere

within the poem's bound universe. This kind of return is most obvious at the end of a

poem like "A Hill," which acknowledges its progress openly: "today,/ I remembered that

hill; it lies just to the left/Of the road north of Poughkeepsie...." But we see it in several

of the poems discussed here: in Bidart's allowing his own lyric persona to speak his

elegy's last lines; in Bishop's ultimate confession of her inscrutability in "Some Dreams

They Forgot"; in Muldoon's final willingness to say the word "metastasis"; even in

Clare's admission that poetry encompasses a world of its own at the end of the sonnet

"November." Lyric poems, like the dynamic constellations described by Schafer and

others, reflect even the most difficult aspects of a psyche in conflict by means of their

own displacements of perspective.

272

It follows that this kind of poem's appeal—its pleasure quotient—for the reader

(and perhaps for the poet too) resides, at least partly, in the following three qualities: the

familiarity of its conflict and means of remove; the imaginative presentation of such a

conflict; and its potential for resolution. The poetic speaker's return from elsewhere at

the conclusion of several of the poems I have discussed signals the kind of adaptive

success that underlies many intrapsychic defensive maneuvers, even if the poem itself

does not rely on such success for its own quality of expression (it is, after all, only a

representation). In keeping with the analogy, a poet may even communicate wisdom

about the psychological mastery that corresponds to his poem's return. (Here, one thinks

particularly of Frost's endings; for example, his palliative line, "We love the things we

love for what they are" to conclude "Hyla Brook," a poem that is ultimately about

deterioration—of the body, of the mind, of human relationships—that disguises its

conflict by means of its central conceit, a stream that has run out of water.")3 The

removes and returns I have described thus have a further developmental counterpart in

what Wilfred Bion calls the "container-contained" dynamic in mother-infant

development (and also in successful therapeutics). This process entails the child's

transferring his unmanageable psychological content—perhaps a worry or a fantasy—to a

more capable self (his mother), where it can be "metabolized" and then restored to its

originating source, now more capable of coping with its inherent challenges.4 The lyric

poet's portrayal of this process when it is satisfactorily accomplished can give the poem

an extra-finished quality that may increase its evocativeness for the reader. But unlike

Frost, "Hyla Brook," in Collected Poems, 116.

Wilfred Bion, Learning from Experience (London: Tavistock, 1962), 1-116.

273

psyches, poems do not necessarily seek or require resolution—their defensive properties

do not have to result in adaptive success in order to feel complete. Rather, poems' formal

displacements that correspond to intrapsychic maneuvers—whether adaptive or

dysfunctional in the behaviors of the actual human psyche—give them aesthetic appeal

because they feel genuine, regardless of whether or not they serve a psychological

function for the poet.

My close readings of poems by Herbert, Hardy, Hecht, Bishop, Merrill, Muldoon,

Keats, Clare, and others have highlighted specific strategies of remove that characterize

given poets' work. It is likely that these poets' stylistic choices, in favoring one kind of

remove over another, constitute a conscious decision about poetic craft—however

embedded it may be in autobiographical determinants. Lyric removes, like the defenses

they are modeled after, involve deception and disguise—the creation of as-if moments

suspended between reality and fantasy. My intent, in exploring various types of remove,

has been to expose an aspect of how poets go about representing human conflict and to

describe the resulting poetic phenomenon I call lyric elsewhere. This study's shining a

light on the everyday creativity of unconscious mental life does little to answer larger

questions about the origins of poetic creativity, but I hope that it exposes at least one of

the tools for its accomplishment.

274

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