In an essay about “Night Song,” called “The Dreamer and the Watcher,” Glück suggests that for her the sleeping lover is a figure of Eros, the ravishing god of love, whereas the watcher is a version of Psyche, the mortal woman who, at whatever cost, insists on knowledge. Glück’s observer doesn’t long for the lightness of the body; rather, she valorizes the presence of the watcher, an acute artistic consciousness. The theme of the watcher and the sleeper is part of a larger argument about the integrity of the human self. She poses the existential longing for solitude against the lover’s longing for dissolution.
The lovers exist in a liminal space. They are left with only an old-fashioned lantern burning in the night. Outside, the world has been stripped down to essentials: the beach still, the sea cleansed of anything superfluous. Seabirds, which seem to have regressed to vegetal life, sleep on a narrow structure at the edge of the coastline. The speaker calls the terns “assassins.” Why? Perhaps because they are harbingers of oblivion. The word seems to bring her up short and she breaks off this train of thought: “You’re tired; I can see that. / We’re both tired, we have acted a great drama.”
These lines put me in mind of Galway Kinnell’s “Wait” (1980), a poem that stands against suicide and states outright:
Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Glück’s lovers are naked; they have acted their parts in a passion play. A little while ago the heat between them was so great that their hands were like kindling wood. The flames might have burned their clothes and reduced them to ashes. Now everything has gone cold. The speaker too was one of the dreamers, but now she desperately needs to tell her lover what she has discovered, the wisdom she has come to. The lover is close by but also somehow out of reach:
I have to tell you what I’ve learned, that I know now
what happens to the dreamers.
They don’t feel it when they change. One day
they wake, they dress, they are old.
* * *
Tonight I’m not afraid
to feel the revolutions. How can you want sleep
when passion gives you that peace?
You’re like me tonight, one of the lucky ones.
You’ll get what you want. You’ll get your oblivion.
Glück’s speaker has come back with the news that lovers are always lost in a dream, that dreamers don’t feel the textured passage of time. They are unaware of what is happening to them. One day they wake up, get dressed again, and discover they are old. It has all passed in a dream. But she believes in consciousness rather than peace. The line break at the end of the first line of the last stanza emphasizes her attitude toward time passing: “I’m not afraid / to feel the revolutions.”
By the end of this dramatic monologue, the speaker’s possibly unconscious impatience and near-anger with her lover for sleeping so peacefully (“How can you want sleep / when passion gives you that peace?”) peaks and coalesces in a muted accusation and judgment delivered as two declarative sentences pressed into one line: “You’ll get what you want. You’ll get your oblivion.” She doesn’t say, “We’ll get what we want. We’ll get our oblivion.”
In conclusion, Glück’s speaker realizes, and argues with a kind of vengeance, that both the watcher and the dreamer are alike: they are both “lucky” because they will get release, freedom from the burdens of selfhood. They will be fulfilled. In the end, the human stand-ins for Eros and Psyche will both find oblivion, the end of life itself, negation and nonbeing. Consciousness is what we have until then.
Sharon Olds
* * *
“The Race”
(1983)
Sharon Olds wrote “The Race” in the days or weeks after her father died in the early autumn of 1983. He was seventy years old. It was intended to be a freestanding individual poem, though it eventually founds its place at the heart of her thematically linked collection The Father (1992).
The Race
When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,
bought a ticket, ten minutes later
they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors
had said my father would not live through the night
and the flight was cancelled. A young man
with a dark brown moustache told me
another airline had a non-stop
leaving in seven minutes. See that
elevator over there, well go
down to the first floor, make a right, you’ll
see a yellow bus, get off at the
Pan Am terminal, I
ran, I who have no sense of direction
raced exactly where he’d told me, a fish
slipping upstream deftly against
the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those
bags I had thrown everything into
in five minutes and ran, the bags
wagged me from side to side as if
to prove I was under the claims of the material,
I ran up to a man with a white flower in his breast,
I who always go to the end of the line, I said
Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said
Make a left and then a right, go up to the moving stairs and then
run. I lumbered up the moving stairs,
at the top I saw the corridor,
and then I took a deep breath, I said
Goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the
bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed
in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of
women running, their belongings tied
in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my
long legs he gave me, my strong
heart I abandoned to its own purpose,
I ran to Gate 17 and they were
just lifting the thick white
lozenge of the door to fit into
the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not
too rich, I turned sideways and
slipped through the needle’s eye, and then
I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet
was full, and people’s hair was shining, they were
smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a
mist of gold endorphin light,
I wept as people weep when they enter heaven,
in massive relief. We lifted up
gently from one tip of the continent
and did not stop until we set down lightly on the
other edge. I walked into his room
and watched his chest rise slowly
and sink again, all night
I watched him breathe.
“The Race” has a desperate emotional urgency. The action is so immediate that it takes a moment to register that it takes place in the past tense. It’s a flash of memory that unfolds across one long stanza of fifty-six lines. The plot is deftly established in the first five lines. The father won’t make it through the night, the doctors have said, and the daughter needs to get to him before he dies. Flying is the only option, but “the flight was cancelled,” a point reiterated for emphasis. The rest of the poem builds momentum and carefully re-creates a woman’s wild rush through the airport. We know what’s at stake in “the race.”
Olds has an intuitive feeling for velocity in a poem. Here her run-on sentences and tense enjambments work perfectly to dramatize the experience. We feel the gap between the urgency of the situation and the utter anonymity of the airport, a neutral public space. The poem moves rapidly, but the speaker takes time to observe everything carefully; for example, she notes that a “young man” has “a dark brown moustache.” She fluently embeds his exact speech into her sentence:
See that
&nbs
p; elevator over there, well go
down to the first floor, make a right, you’ll
see a yellow bus, get off at the
Pan Am terminal, I
ran . . .
That yellow bus inevitably evokes a school bus. One of the striking things here is the dramatic calm that overcomes the speaker—“I who have no sense of direction / raced exactly where he’d told me”—and how she compares herself to “a fish / slipping upstream deftly against / the flow of the river.” A. R. Ammons said that a poem is a walk, but this one is much faster than that—it’s a race to the finish.
Linger for a moment over the simile of the suitcases wagging the woman from side to side “as if / to prove I was under the claims of the material.” The suggestion is not just that the bags are controlling her, like a dog, but that “the material,” the trip, the outer physical world, is placing its claim on her. So too the white flower in the man’s breast seems like a hopeful sign. All this is embedded in a run-on sentence that ends with a plea whose poignancy outstrips its occasion, a simple airport request: “Help me.”
The poem then pauses for another set of directions. Notice the long, slow line that ends curtly after the first word of the next line: “Make a left and then a right, go up to the moving stairs and then / run.” Soon the pace picks up again:
I said
Goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life.
The poem moves fluently between the mundane details of the airport run and statements of the largest emotional import. Now the woman in the poem compares herself to photographs she has seen of other women running, as if in wartime; now she links herself to her father and claims her separation from him too: “I blessed my / long legs he gave me, my strong / heart I abandoned to its own purpose.”
Olds takes the time to invert one of Jesus’s sayings—“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25)—as she describes the fortunate physical entry into the plane itself: “Like the one who is not / too rich, I turned sideways and / slipped through the needle’s eye.” Note the next displacement. The speaker doesn’t say that she heads toward her seat, but rather “I walked down the aisle toward my father.” This has the magical feeling of a wedding. Or, as Olds has put it, “A very small girl in 1945 might have at some point assumed, without knowing she was assuming, that when she grew up she too might take her turn at marrying her father.”
What follows is an amazing description of the interior of a plane in a “gold endorphin light”—which brings a fairy tale element to the feeling created by hormones. The endorphins released during a long, hard sprint are projected onto the light itself, completing the analogy: “I wept as people weep when they enter heaven, / in massive relief.” There is a pun on the word “relief,” which first of all suggests a great release from anxiety. The word also has a geographical meaning and refers to the highest and lowest elevation points in an area. That’s a view one might get when one “enters heaven.”
The poem lifts, like the plane itself, and concludes with one sentence that tumbles forward:
We lifted up
gently from one tip of the continent
and did not stop until we set down lightly on the
other edge. I walked into his room
and watched his chest rise slowly
and sink again, all night
I watched him breathe.
The words “gently” and “lightly” suggest the way that a daughter might touch her dying father. There is a feeling of utter calm as the speaker sits back and flies across the country, which she characterizes in just three and a half lines. She elides the flight; she doesn’t bother with the arrival at the other airport, the drive across the city. Instead, she cuts ahead and enters the room where her father is still alive. The race has been worth it. She has made it in time.
“The Race” is a determined, single-minded poem. Olds doesn’t show any of the ambivalence toward the father that is evident in many of her other poems. She succeeds in reaching him. She also succeeds in capturing the feeling of a woman in the middle of life, running and flying to catch her father before he dies, racing to watch him breathe for the last time.
Donald Justice
* * *
“In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn”
(1984)
Donald Justice was a scrupulous tactician of melancholy and loss who approached his subjects with “a love that masquerades as pure technique” (“Nostalgia of the Lakefronts”). His dark, exacting villanelle for a lost friend, “In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn,” appeared in his fifth collection, The Sunset Maker (1987).
In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn
But the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
T. S. Eliot
It was his story. It would always be his story.
It followed him; it overtook him finally—
The boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
* * *
Probably at the end he was not yet sorry,
Even as the boots were brutalizing him in the alley.
It was his story. It would always be his story,
* * *
Blown on a blue horn, full of sound and fury,
And signifying, O signifying magnificently
The boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
* * *
I picture the snow as falling without hurry
To cover the cobbles and the toppled ashcans completely.
It was his story. It would always be his story.
* * *
Lately he had wandered between St. Mark’s Place and the Bowery,
Already half a spirit, mumbling and muttering sadly.
O the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
* * *
All done now. But I remember the fiery
Hypnotic eye and the raised voice blazing with poetry.
It was his story. It would always be his story—
The boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
Here Justice makes excellent use of the villanelle form, which has its roots in Italian folk song. It entered English poetry in the nineteenth century as a type of light verse, but took on a more majestic life in the twentieth century. You can see that it consists of nineteen lines divided into six stanzas—five tercets and one quatrain. The first and third lines become the refrain lines of alternate stanzas and the final two lines of the poem. These lines rhyme throughout, as do the middle lines of each stanza. Thus the entire poem builds upon two repeated lines and turns on two rhymes. That’s why it’s a form of compulsive returns. Justice recognized that the villanelle’s insistent repetitions are well suited to a poetry of loss. Here he transforms it into an elegy.
Robert Boardman Vaughn was an old friend of Justice’s from his Miami days. Laurence Donovan, who knew Vaughn from their time in high school, described him as a “gaunt, wild-eyed apparitional figure,” a dreamer and adventurer who “haunted the fishing piers of St. Croix and St. Thomas and the bars of Coconut Grove and New York City with the frenzied and compelling talk that was enlivened by the alcohol that finally destroyed him.” Vaughn had a tragic fate; he was beaten to death in the streets of Manhattan.
Vaughn was a poet manqué. In a book-length interview with Philip Hoy, Justice noted that his view of Vaughn’s poetry would always be colored by his memory of him as a friend. “He led too ragged and dangerous a life to settle down and concentrate on writing poems. In a way, the life he chose to live became his most fully realized art.” Justice also recalls him in the poem “Portrait with One Eye”:
You have identified yourself
To the police as quote
Lyric poet. What else?—
With fractured jaw. Orpheus,
* * *
Imperishable liar!
Your life’s a poem still,
Broken iambs and all.
Jazz, jails—the complete works.
Justice’s villanelle has a compressed plot—a narrative can be inferred from it. In this sense, it is a story-poem. The opening line—“It was his story. It would always be his story”—suggests that what happened to Vaughn was somehow fated, ordained. It followed and overtook him. This line keeps returning as we discover the sordid details of Vaughn’s deterioration and death. But this story is counterpointed by the sustaining grandeur and larger perspective, what lies underneath the beauty and the ugliness, “the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.”
Justice lifted a phrase from a passage in T. S. Eliot’s essay “The Use of Poetry” (1933) and uses it as a recurring line. He picks up the second part of Eliot’s thought here:
It is an advantage to mankind in general to live in a beautiful world; that no one can doubt. But for the poet is it so important? We mean all sorts of things, I know, by Beauty. But the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
Justice heard the rhythmic lyricism in Eliot’s aesthetic declaration. It was a brilliant creative stroke to take the last part of Eliot’s sentence and apply it to the life of Robert Boardman Vaughn.
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 28
