by C K Williams
Lowell’s commitment to his poetry was undeniable—so was his moral seriousness and his erudition and intellectual range. I think it can be asked, though, whether during those years he became too avid to experience again the pleasures—the ecstasies—of composition and so became impatient with his craft. When I read Notebook and its successors, it doesn’t bother me that the work presumes a preexisting interest in both the poet and his poems: I remain committed to both Lowell and his music, and I never cease to be astonished by the spectacle of his being able to create such engrossing poems out of the most incidental experiences and the most glancing historical perceptions.
And yet, mightn’t Lowell’s potential ambitions for his poetry have been slighted by his grasshoppering, as it were, over his keyboard? Though “The Dolphin” is a moving sequence, with many Lowellian delights in it, it still seems slight when compared to the marvelous family poems of Life Studies. And there’s certainly nothing in Notebook that has the conceptual scope and the musical audacity of “The Quaker Graveyard,” nor was there anything like the emotional complexity and depth there is in the Life Studies poems, nor poems that so powerfully fuse the private and the public, the meditative and polemical as “For the Union Dead” or “Waking Early Sunday Morning.” Considered as a whole, many of the poems in the sequences seem to be offshoots, somehow, of a poet living a life of poetry, rather than individual performances that could result in poems equal to Lowell’s best work.
When Lowell finally stops writing the sonnets and turns to the poems in Day by Day, things pick up again, notably. In his last book, Lowell devised a new kind of poetic reflection, with an intellectual weight and a fusing of abstraction and concrete detail that’s completely unique, and it resulted in a poetry of sheer density unrivaled, I think, by anyone’s since Donne. Although there are still a number of poems that share the limitations of the sonnet sequences—a certain, yes, day by dayness, and, in truth, much of what Richards characterized as the “It’s enough if I say it” syndrome—there’s a startling enrichment of Lowell’s diction, which was certainly rich enough to begin with. The book has a number of poems unlike anything else, anywhere. “Ulysses and Circe” is one of his great triumphs, a powerful evocative uniting of the mythical and personal, so compressed that in its few pages the poem enacts a drama of remarkable narrative and lyric scale. It ends with a description of Ulysses’s return to Penelope, which has become one of my favorite passages in all poetry. The voice crackles here with an utterly original, unfamiliar music, pared down, terse, abrupt, almost curt, a music that can embody the most unlikely chords of anachronistic figuration.
Volte-face—
he circles as a shark circles
visibly behind the window—
flesh-proud, sore-eyed, scar-proud,
a vocational killer
in the machismo of senility,
foretasting the apogee of mayhem—
breaking water to destroy his wake.
He is oversize. To her suitors,
he is Tom, Dick, or Harry—
his gills are pleated and aligned—
unnatural ventilation-vents
closed by a single lever
like cells in a jail—
ten years fro and ten years to.
(I find that phrase “a vocational killer/in the machismo of senility, foretasting the apogee of mayhem” so efficient, so charged with implication, that each word does the work whole phrases would in most poems.)
Lowell never stopped being a great poet, but one can admit to some small regret that during those long sonnet years he didn’t put himself to the more difficult task of writing more ambitious individual poems. With all the admiration I have for his work, I feel something like a bit of longing, a sad nostalgia, for those great poems he didn’t permit himself. No one in the last half century, with the exception perhaps of Bishop, has written as many, but along with our gratitude for so much given, we can end up with a twinge of disappointment, similar to what we feel about Mozart’s early death or that of Keats, wondering how many more great pieces there still might have been.
Odd Endings
How poems end, and why they end the way they do, “closure,” has become a subject of much discussion over recent generations of literary criticism. Some of this speculation has led to fruitful insights about literature and our responses to it, but for the practicing poet, the issues involved in endings often seem to be of another dimension entirely. For poets, the basic, forthright, and unavoidable question about endings is whether or not they work and, if not, why not. A poem can come to its end in a flash of inspiration and excitement, or it can finish in ways that are disappointing, may be confusing, and appear to be simply wrong, although, interestingly, sometimes the essential worthiness of poems afflicted this way can still not be called into question. I’d like to discuss examples of both sorts: first, poems whose endings leave me uncertain, even irritated, then two others whose endings continually, faithfully startle and please me.
Poets sometimes speak of poems they’ve written as being like their children, meaning that if anything like a flaw should be perceived in a poem, it’s incidental to the affection the poet feels towards it. I’ve never used that analogy about my own work, but I do feel that way about certain poems written by other poets, poems I consider indubitably great, major, essential—whatever my adjective of the day is. Those poems are indeed metaphorically like my own offspring, in that I still find them essential to my poetic life, even if I might notice elements in them I find lacking and decisions they enact with which I might disagree. I feel a similar intimate connection to certain poets themselves, they’re so close to me, my being in the world, that if they may have poems I don’t cherish as much as I might, I’m not troubled: they, like my own children and grandchildren, are beyond reproach.
Perhaps recognizing this has allowed me to admit to myself that some inestimable poems in fact do have not defects but, say, blemishes, and I’ve noticed that often these blemishes occur at or near the ends of poems. Still, because of the attachment I otherwise feel to them, I’ve chosen to speak of their endings as odd, not bad or mistaken and certainly not unforgivable—just “odd.”
One of these poems, Wordsworth’s “Michael,” seems out of balance in the way its narrative climax is structured. Another, Robert Frost’s “Out, Out—” ends in, to me, a wildly inappropriate tone that seems plainly, inexplicably wrong. I’ll consider two other poems that are absolutely basic to my very definition of poetry but that seem to falter in their spiritual, philosophical conclusions—in a sense they fail to deliver what they’ve promised, or not in the way they’ve promised it: Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Eliot’s Four Quartets. And finally, I’ll look at two poems, one by Rilke, one by James Wright, whose endings are wholly unexpected and mysterious and entirely gratifying and influential beyond what their dimensions would seem to indicate.
I should probably concede in advance that there’s a strong possibility I might be simply wrong in some or all of my carpings and quibbles about the poems whose endings disappoint me. It may be that I just haven’t fully understood these poems, or not yet, and that wiser students of their strategies might be able to set me straight. So in a sense this is a tentative venture, subject to correction or retraction, even disavowal. But so be it.
Worthsworth’s “Michael” is rightly considered to be a key work in the development of both the poetical and social outlooks of the early Romantic movement. In its depiction of the lives of a family near the economic bottom of English life, it is one of the first of what might be called socially analytical works that attempt to bring the actual lives of the lower classes into serious literature. The poem is about a shepherd and his wife and son, but, although Wordsworth does use the term once, nothing about them and the way they live has much to do with the ancient tradition of “pastoral” poetry, those recountings of the leisurely doings of mythical sophisticated rustics entertaining each other with lyrical celebrations of the purity of t
heir elemental but not elementary vocation.
Michael, Worthsworth’s shepherd, is depicted as confronting the realities of his very difficult vocation and the scant security it affords him. The poem’s catalog of the hardships of rural life is rich in particulars and in atmosphere. There are many passages about the great labor such a life entails, the more or less constant expenditure of energy, and the solitude of the shepherd’s calling. Michael’s precarious financial situation is treated at length in the poem; we learn that he inherited his small parcel of land with a mortgage on it that took years to redeem, and a key element in the plot concerns a guarantee he gave long ago for a business affair of a prosperous nephew, whose fortunes have declined, so that now Michael may have to sacrifice “half his substance” to make good on his pledge.
Wordsworth’s portrait of the shepherd and his family and their life is positive and admiring. Although he doesn’t scant the difficulties with which they’re confronted, the mood of the poem is mostly positive, almost exultant. The characters are stoic and patient and, essential for Wordsworth, for the most part they glory in being so deeply embedded in a life nourished and ennobled by their closeness to nature. The solitude Michael experiences in tending his flocks is tempered by his time with his devoted wife Isabel, and then by the son who comes to the couple almost biblically late in their lives. Much of the poem is given over to the upbringing and moral education of this much doted on son, Luke. The early life and formation of the boy are almost idealized: it would be difficult to imagine a more thoughtful and considerate upbringing than that to which Michael and his wife devote so much of themselves.
The poem ends in disaster: the boy grows up, and when the family is faced with their financial crisis, he is sent to the city to be brought along there by another relative in order for him to be able to earn enough to help prevent a portion of the family’s land from being sold off, their only other recourse. There’s a long passage of farewell, in which Michael lays a cornerstone of a sheepfold with his son, which he proclaims will be a “covenant” between them. There he makes a plea—moving in the light of subsequent events—that if, while the son is away, he is tempted by “evil men,” he should think of their labor together, and “God will strengthen” him.
“Amid all fear
And all temptation, Luke, I pray that thou
May’st bear in mind the life thy Fathers lived,
Who, being innocent, did for that cause
Bestir them in good deeds.”
The son leaves, and after a promising beginning in the city, he goes bad, takes to evil habits, vanishes into urban anonymity, and finally flees “to seek a hiding place beyond the seas.”
The amount of space I’ve used here to recount what would seem to be a key element in the plotting of the poem probably seems a conventional compression of complex events. The odd thing though is that this isn’t a compression at all; I’ve used only slightly fewer words to describe the fate of the shepherd’s son than Wordsworth does in the poem. The events that in ordinary narrative would seem to be the tragic turning point in the destinies of the poem’s characters are encapsulated in the following several of the almost five-hundred lines of the whole:
Meantime Luke began
To slacken in his duty; and, at length,
He in the dissolute city gave himself
To evil courses: ignominy and shame
Fell on him, so that he was driven at last
To seek a hiding-place beyond the seas.
That’s all. Luke’s entire destiny is brought down to these five and a half pentameter lines. It’s worth noting that earlier in the poem thirteen entire lines are dedicated to the description of Michael’s household’s lamp. In the structuring of the poem, there seems nothing untoward in this: an evocation of a revered household object, it serves to reinforce the mood of reassuring domestic stability. It begins:
Down from the ceiling, by the chimney’s edge,
that in our ancient uncouth country style
With huge and black projection overbrowed
Large space beneath, as duly as the light
Of day grew dim the Housewife hung a lamp;
An aged utensil, which had performed
Service beyond all others of its kind.
In the poem’s allotment of human drama, there seems something seriously awry in the space devoted to the lamp and to Luke’s fate. And again, before the youth leaves home, when Michael reveals to his wife his intention to send their son to the city, Isabel is naturally upset, but she comforts herself with an extended memory, a fantasy really, about a poor “parish-boy” from their neighborhood, who has gone off to London to become “wondrous rich.” Her reflections about this other youth, whose story is at best oblique to the plot, continues for fifteen lines.
Yet the undoing of Luke’s life, which is absolutely central to the narrative takes up only those few lines, and we never hear another word about him again. Though the poem goes on to recount albeit sketchily the ultimate fate of the parents, the thrust of the destiny of the characters for all intents and purposes seems to come to a stop right there. The first time I read the poem, I remember I checked to see whether there might not have been a misprint in the edition I was reading, that some, or many, lines might have been omitted by a sleepy type-setter.
As we know, Wordsworth, especially in his early work, was a consummate craftsman, one of the greatest in English poetry, and there’s surely a way to read the poem to account for the poem’s structure. It may be that Wordsworth felt his deeper purposes were already accomplished by what he’d given of his narrative, which would have had to do with the way his old shepherd’s spiritual consciousness is sustained by his closeness to the greater rhythms of the natural world, and his stoic dedication: he goes on for the seven years remaining of his life continuing to work on the sheepfold he’d begun with his son, though it’s never finished. Or perhaps Wordsworth conceived of Luke’s denouement as something like the off-stage deaths of characters in Greek tragedy. But even in tragedy there’s always a messenger who elaborates at length on the awful out-of-sight goings-on. Still, no matter how I try to justify the poet’s greater purposes, I find poor Luke’s fate abrupt, amputated.
(There’s another odd moment in the poem. Near the end, the narrator tells of speaking with people who had known Michael, and “what he was // Years after he had heard this heavy news.” The text says then, “His bodily frame had been from youth to age // Of an unusual strength.” The strange thing is that Wordsworth had used precisely these same words to describe the shepherd near the beginning of the poem. I can’t think any other major poem, or any poem at all, which contains the same exact sentence twice.)
Another poem with a rural setting, Robert Frost’s “Out, Out—” is a much more abrupt narrative, with an ending as strange and dismaying, but even more unexpected and shocking. The poem again concerns a young man, presumably another farmer’s son, whose destiny is also sad, in fact grim, and though the poem is apparently less fraught with ethical implications than is “Michael,” its moral tone is layered at the end with what seems to me an inappropriate resonance.
The frame of the poem is the unremarkable rural life of a family. A young man is performing an ordinary farm chore, the cutting of firewood with some sort of power saw. Frost has an uncanny ability to create atmosphere and character in a very few words, and near the beginning of the poem he uses a telling bit of description, some ominous personification of a machine, and a sudden shift of scale of vision to reinforce both the richness and apparent lack of irrelevant complication of at least the idea of life on a farm:
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
The poem cont
inues in this mood of what might be called kinetic serenity for some lines, but then there’s an accident: the youth’s hand is caught in the teeth of the saw. Frost intensifies the event with an unusually vivid metaphor that at the same time adds a philosophical, even cosmological edge to the event:
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them “Supper.” At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting.
We are in a metaphoric universe here in which objects may have minds, in which the dire arbitrariness of cause and effect imply a dimension that, though not inherently good or evil in a moral sense, still has ferocities, systems by which the youth, and all of us, are subject to a violence that seems to have a larger, terribly malignant meaning.
The poem ends:
But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
There’s such an unusual tone here. That “So,” to begin with. What does Frost mean by using such a dry term in the midst of such dramatic, not to say tragic, happenings? I really don’t know. Seamus Heaney employs the word, which he says is an ancient sort of “Well,” to begin his translation of Beowulf, but there’s no evidence that Frost had anything like this in mind. Although the writing of the poem is admirable, incorporating Frost’s formidable precision and figurative force—“the watcher at his pulse took fright” is an example of Frost’s often understated metaphoric ingenuity—I just don’t understand what he’s up to in terms of the tone of the poem.
