The speaker can no longer pretend to be her mother:
I summoned the streets the places the people
That had been witnesses of your face
In hopes they would call you in hopes they would unravel
The fabric that death was weaving in you
We normally think of witnesses as people, but here the streets and places are also invoked to try to prevent the inevitable. It’s as if the people and places the dying mother has cared about can somehow keep her attached to the earth. But the enemy is now weaving a fabric that can never be unraveled. It is not so much that the mother is putting on a shroud but, much more painful, that the shroud is being woven into her very body.
As it progresses, “The Small Square” reveals itself, reluctantly, as an elegy. The poem recalls how hard the poet tried to prevent her mother’s death. But by the time she had come to write this poem—and by the time we are reading it—it was already too late.
Wisława Szymborska
* * *
“Under One Small Star”
(1972)
Wisława Szymborska was a canny ironist and rapturous skeptic, a philosophically oriented writer who raised universal questions nonchalantly, with an offhanded charm. She looked at the world with the eye of a disabused lover, and her poems—wise, funny, personal—carry the sting of long experience. Like her Polish contemporaries Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Różewicz, she mounted a sly defense of individual subjectivity against collectivist thinking, and her poems, like theirs, are subversive in the way they force us to reconsider received opinions. The rejection of dogma constituted the basis of her personal ethics.
Here is the concluding poem of her seventh book, Could Have (1972):
Under One Small Star
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.
Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.
I know I won’t be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
(Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak)
I too am sorry—if I don’t do justice to a poem of such rueful self-awareness. I don’t want to sound too certain about a poem about uncertainty. In her Nobel Prize lecture, Szymborska confessed that she especially valued the little statement “I don’t know.” She said, “Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating ‘I don’t know.’” This sentence was her mantra. Interrogation was her method. She liked to take inventory and explore all the ramifications of an idea to see what it would yield.
“Under One Small Star” is just such a catalog. The poem sets its course and establishes its tone right from the beginning. In this syntactically repetitive work, almost every line forms a complete sentence. The sentences line up and accumulate meaning as the poem progresses. It is also a litany, a form that operates through a series of parallel structures. “Litany” has its etymological roots in French and Latin words related to prayer or supplication. What’s unusual about Szymborska’s litany of apologies is who is addressed in it.
We think of apologizing to people, not to concepts, and so it’s odd and funny to witness an apology to the philosophical idea of indeterminism or probability—“chance”—for “calling it necessity.” The speaker is sorry that what was random or accidental appeared to be inevitable. But then in the second line she immediately retracts that assertion: “My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.” So, which is it? She doesn’t pretend to know. These questions matter: Did the universe come into being by accident or design? Are the things that happen random or somehow determined? But neither scientists nor philosophers can agree on the right answer, if there is one.
Szymborska’s speaker then proceeds to apologize to different categorical entities such as happiness, her dead, and time. There is something impossible about apologizing to abstractions that do not have the human capacity to forgive. Happiness can’t get angry, the dead are presumably never impatient, and time doesn’t notice what is being overlooked as it is passing. But the speaker knows what she takes for granted, how much she is forgetting about the people who have passed away, and just how much of the world she is constantly missing. Her guilt is remorseless.
The speaker of this poem is filled with a wry sense of inadequacy as she begs forgiveness from everything she can think of—from inanimate objects as well as from emotions and concepts, from places as well as from groups of people, anthropomorphizing everything. She repeatedly apologizes for her limitations—a fading memory, a desire for small pleasures, a “record of minuets.” There is genuine suffering in the world, and she finds herself continually overlooking it, hence this line about refugees: “I apologize to those who wait in railroad stations for being asleep today at five a.m.” The center of the poem is her apology to the falcon; it judges her with an unswerving gaze that cannot change—because the bird turns out to be dead.
For all the humor in this poem, there’s a slightly bitter taste to the idea that humans need to apologize to everything, and that nothing can be held in place for long. The speaker finds herself narrowing the world to make it manageable, thereby trivializing it, and feels unequal to the world’s constant sufferings and travails. She keeps giving small answers to large questions. Most of her limitations simply reflect the nature of being alive. What is true for her turns out to be true for everyone. We cannot fathom the full mystery of existence. We cannot live fully soulful lives. All viewpoints are incomplete, all efforts inadequate: “My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once. / My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.” Each of us stands in our own way. Empathy matters but it has limits. It is ultimately impossible to transcend our individuality. There is no one to forgive us for our separateness.
Szymborska takes these limitations personally and uses them to define her attitude toward poetry. The conclusion to this mini-epic of apologies stands as an ars poetica: “Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words, / then labor heavily so that they may seem light.”
Richard Hugo
* * *
“Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg”
(1973)
Richard Hugo said that “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” was the poem he had been trying to write for twenty years. He wrote it in four hours after one visit to a Montana mining town. It’s par
tially an ethnographic description of the town, but, more accurately, it’s a projection of his own feelings onto it. Hugo was a poet of place and Philipsburg served as one of what he termed “triggering towns,” places that activated his imagination, his feelings and thoughts. “The poem is always in your hometown,” he explained, “but you have a better chance of finding it in another.” He also recognized that not just any whistle-stop would do: “Though you’ve never seen it before, it must be a town you’ve lived in all your life.” Philipsburg seemed to fit the bill. Hugo took emotional possession of it, and his poem is a clear-eyed portrait of a Western mining town in the late stages of collapse. But it’s even more a portrait of Richard Hugo coming to terms with himself; his style as well as his perspective was colored by a strong sense of masculinity. He was also a Western poet of remorseless self-scrutiny.
“Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” is the last poem in Hugo’s finest collection, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1973). Notice how the phonic blend of gr sounds in the title binds the words together: “Degrees of Gray.” It is as if the poet is gauging the amount or level of the color gray in Philipsburg. Gray is a neutral color, literally a color “without color,” the hue of the cloud-covered or ashen sky that hovers over this Montana town. It has overtones of gloom.
Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.
* * *
The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs—
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.
* * *
Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?
* * *
Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.
“Degrees of Gray” consists of forty-two lines divided into four irregular stanzas, which operate like paragraphs. It begins emphatically, provisionally: “You might come here Sunday on a whim.” The sentence and the line coincide. The tone is informal, conversational—the rhythm has a strong iambic base—and the speaker is talking directly to “you,” though we still don’t know who that “you” is. He could be addressing any visitor, any reader who might whimsically decide to drive over to Philipsburg, Montana, for the day. The language is offhand and plainspoken. He could also be speaking to himself.
The next sentence changes things dramatically: “Say your life broke down.” That’s a hypothetical of an entirely different magnitude because it is so acutely sad. The sentence is a supposition—a vision: “Let’s say, for example . . .” Like a car, your life has now broken down.
The third sentence, which is carefully enjambed for effect, turns the poem into an indirect confession: “The last good kiss / you had was years ago.” That initial phrase, which James Crumley borrowed for his hard-boiled detective novel The Last Good Kiss, sets the almost noirish tone. The supposition is a confession: the speaker’s life has already broken down.
The rest of the stanza—and much of the rest of the poem—gives us the portrait of a town on its last legs. The streets were laid out by “the insane,” which suggests they don’t have any rhyme or reason, and the hotels couldn’t make it because there weren’t enough visitors.
The businesses are failing or failed. The only institutions still going are the churches and bars and, it turns out, the churches are all empty. So too the jail is out of date, and the lone prisoner has been there so long that he doesn’t remember what he might have done.
You might come here on a whim, but when you get here you discover that the town you are visiting is all too grimly real. It externalizes what you are feeling. Hugo had a keen sense for the vernacular, a gift for portraying Montana towns in collapse. As a free-verse poet, he was especially good at balancing the sentence and the line. When you reread the second stanza, notice the extra pause at the end of each line, as if you are hesitating on the edge of a cliff and then go tumbling over. Every enjambment provides a new punch, a new meaning, to the sentence.
The first sentence sets the tone. The line break coils a surprise. The reader expects to hear the name of an actual business but instead gets an out-of-control feeling:
The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs—
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.
This stanza encapsulates a short history of the boom-and-bust cycle of a typical Montana town. The second line clarifies the meaning of the title: “Hatred of the various grays / the mountain sends . . .” The grays are gradations of fog, but they also take on an emotional hue. Hugo captures something of the fury of people left behind. There is a reference to the Sherman Silver Purchase, which was repealed in 1893 and drastically lowered the price of silver. “The Silver Bill Repeal” and “the best liked girls” are placed on the same line, which suggests that it’s because of the repeal that those girls leave for the big city. The single decent restaurant and—the speaker bites down on the letter b—“bars can’t wipe the boredom out.” Freud taught us that boredom is the flip side of rage. There’s a reference to the boom in 1907 and then the bust that inevitably followed. Notice how the repeated alliterative use of the letter f in the last line—“for fifty years that won’t fall finally down”—threads four words together. It repeatedly makes your upper front teeth lightly touch your bottom inside lip and then pushes the air through your mouth.
So, what’s left of this gutted town with only a few men left in it? The line “all memory resolves itself in gaze” is a good contemporary description of what used to be called topographical poetry,
which Samuel Johnson defined as “local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape . . . with the addition . . . of historical retrospection, or incidental meditation.” John Denham inaugurated the genre with his poem “Cooper’s Hill” (1642), but he couldn’t have envisioned a late-twentieth-century topographical poem of grazing cattle and two dead kilns, an enormous mill that has been collapsing for half a century but never entirely falls. That’s more in the line of William Blake.
The third stanza consists entirely of questions. Talking to himself, and also to us—“Isn’t this your life?”—the speaker is wondering about the exactitude of his projection. His own loneliness and defeat seem accurately embodied in the day of rest in an empty town, Sunday in Philipsburg. But then he enlarges the question:
Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?
He has identified so completely with Philipsburg that he wonders if it’s representative of what life itself has become—for him, for Montana, for civilization itself.
The final stanza gives a determined answer to the questions he has just posed: “Say no to yourself.” The poem pivots and takes on a sort of Yeatsian gaiety and resolve. It moves into the present tense. The speaker is now explicitly talking to himself but also to the old man who can still laugh, to the good folks of Montana, to all of us. The poet Joanna Klink argues that here “Hugo offers us a city-map straight into, through and—in a very fleeting, tenuous way—out of despair.”
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 21
