by C K Williams
Those last two lines, “No more to build on there.” And then that “they”: there are no characters specified in the poem beside the brother and sister and doctor until “No one believed. They listened.” There’s a family implied by those plurals, but it’s a family with startlingly detached responses and, then, a horrifyingly cold one.
I really can’t speculate as to what Frost meant the dramatic function of those last lines to be. Are we simply to disregard what would have to be the grief of the sister, and the others in any normal family, and even the doctor? Is the implication that mere observers can never appreciate the anguish of the participants in such small tragedies? But the characters who would be present wouldn’t be mere observers—family never is. What possibly could be the “affairs” to which “they” turn, in the face of such intimate horror? Are they some madly fanatic descendants of the ancient Stoics, for whom the death of a loved one was at least theoretically of no greater moment than anything else?
And what of the title? The association must be to Macbeth’s “out, out, brief candle!” in the famous “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” passage. Or perhaps the “out” from “out, vile jelly” when Gloucester’s eyes are plucked out in Lear. But in both cases, Shakespeare’s dark vision is tempered by their being so poetically luminous. Might Frost be experimenting with a similar almost nihilistic reflection? Might he be hinting that the implications of the tragic accident he recounts are simply overwhelming, beyond reflection, and that the only appropriate response is to look away from the whole bleak reality in which such things are fated to occur? This is surely the most tolerable possibility. Otherwise, the ending seems merely callous, cruel, even nasty. If there were an aspect of Frost’s character anything like this (which his most treacherous biographer suggests), he managed to conceal it impeccably in the rest of his work.
I really don’t know the solution to this conundrum, though perhaps there’s some clue in the fact that Frost modeled “Out, Out—” not on personal experience but on an article he had come across in a newspaper. But I don’t believe that really explains anything either: much literature concerns matters with which the author has no real first-hand experience. And though there is in the abruptness of the tone at the end something akin to the turning of the page of a newspaper or the moving of the eyes from one column of print to another, if that was Frost’s purpose, he probably would have let us know about it in the poem itself. As I say, perhaps there’s just something about the poem I haven’t understood, but it remains for me a kind of shadow on the sensitive and generous person Frost presents in the rest of his work.
Rilke and Eliot now, the oddness of the endings that I want to examine is of a much different order. Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which many readers, myself among them, consider the greatest single poem of the twentieth century, has a vast range of theme and an equally broad consideration of humanity’s enduring dilemmas and their possible resolutions. From its beginning, that rapturous evocation of spiritual desolation, “Who if I cried out?” the poem moves in wider and wider circles, encompassing everything from religious impulse to love and sexuality, to a child’s love for and from a mother, and then a father; to a mythical aggrandizement of the overwhelming confusions of young love, to the profound connections between art and life, to the spiritual links poetry can find in nature, and more.
Thematically the poem is simply gigantic: inexhaustible. At its deepest level, it is concerned with what can be expressed intellectually about human life and what in our existence can be transformed to language and poetry, then transfigured finally to what Rilke calls invisibility, by which he means a realm of existence grounded in ours but utterly different in the way it unites the mundane and the metaphysical. “Superabundant being” is what the poem finally proposes and, in many ways, accomplishes. Its primary method is a kind of transcendent metaphor: the bringing together of the most seemingly disparate phenomena, and even categories of being, in order to illuminate reality, but to create new modes of perception ordinarily unavailable to us.
And along with all of this the poem is emotionally terribly moving. I remember many years ago my huge surprise when tears came to my eyes as I read aloud the beginning of the eighth elegy to a friend—it was the first time that had ever happened to me. I still find the passage embodies a profoundly unique way of experiencing nonhuman reality.
With all its eyes the natural world looks out
into the Open. Only our eyes are turned
backward, and surround plant, animal, child
like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.
(Translation by Stephen Mitchell)
There are so many more passages of stunning poetic force: the beginning of the third elegy, about young love and the existential gravities of desire; the fifth, based on Picasso’s painting “Les Saltimbanques,” which is an extended meditation on art, using the street performers in the painting as the vehicles for a dazzling series of symbolic transfigurations that both exalt the figures in the painting and profoundly elucidate how we are ennobled by art.
In some sense then, when I speak of the ending of the Duino Elegies as being odd, as having possible shortcomings, I might appear to be ungrateful, but the sense of disappointment with the poem’s ending I felt the first times I read it, which at first I chalked up to my own lack of interpretative skill, has stayed with me and in some ways intensified over the decades I’ve been studying it.
The last, tenth, elegy looks back to the first; like the first, it gets underway with an evocation of angels and continues in a large, exultant tone of poetic triumph.
Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish.
The poem goes on into a sentiment on the praise of human misery that only Rilke could get away with: it regrets “how we squander our hours of pain.” Rilke considered that his project of transformation would be incomplete if the constant human phenomena of grief and anguish couldn’t be a part of it, and going along with him takes some getting used to.
In the section that follows, the poem recounts the devices human beings have generated to inure ourselves to our inevitable sorrows, a brilliant passage in which Rilke posits an angel who “would stamp out” our illusory comforts and goes on to create a scene that embodies the contempt he felt for the deceptive trivialities by which we distort our lives to distract ourselves from our true obligations. The poem refers to a . . .
city of grief,
where, in the false silence formed of continual uproar,
the figure cast from the mold of emptiness stoutly
swaggers: the gilded noise, the bursting memorial.
Oh how completely an angel would stamp out their market of solace,
bounded by the church with its ready-made consolations:
clean and disenchanted and shut as a post-office on Sunday.
(Familiars of Rilke’s biography will catch the poignancy here of a man who lived his most intimate life writing and receiving letters, for whom a closed post office was a serious matter.)
Next a passage that encapsulates with wild inventiveness the way our material productions distract us from our more difficult aspirations:
Farther out, though, the city’s edges are curling with carnival.
Swings of freedom! Divers and jugglers of zeal!
And the shooting-gallery’s targets of prettified happiness,
which jump and kick back with a tinny sound
when hit by some better marksman. From cheers to chance
he goes staggering on, as booths with all sorts of attractions
are
wooing, drumming, and bawling.
Then one of my favorite moments in Rilke’s work, perhaps because it’s so un-Rilkean in how it brings into conjunction the crassest of our false consolations, money and sexuality:
For adults only
there is something special to see: how money multiplies, naked,
right there on stage, money’s genitals, nothing concealed,
the whole action—, educational and guaranteed
to increase your potency.
There follows an excoriation of the illusions of inebriation, and the poem returns to the “real,” where children are visible and where lovers and even dogs are screwing.
But now, problems. The entity previously called “the figure cast from the mold of emptiness” becomes “the young man,” although there’s been no indication that there’s a young man here at all. Then a little farther on, again with no warning, we discover that the young man is dead and is all at once being “drawn on, farther; perhaps he is in love with a young Lament.”
The whole elegy now swings into an evocation of this “Lament,” who perhaps “is of noble descent” but who the young man will abandon, because
Only those who died young, in their first condition
of timeless equanimity, while they are being weaned,
follow her lovingly.
“Being weaned?” This is where my sympathies begin to waver. The Young Lament befriends young girls now, and “Shows them, gently, what she is wearing. Pearls of grief and the fine-spun veils of patience.”
I don’t really wish to diminish Rilke’s astounding accomplishment, but I, for one, just can’t account for the sheer mawkishness of what comes next. Briefly, the young man finds an “elder Lament” who recounts the history of the Laments, who were once a “powerful race” and who “used to be rich” (as Rilke’s many patronesses still were). Then the young man is guided through the landscape of Lament with its ruined temples and castles and “fields of blossoming grief,” which the living think are bushes. There are herds and birds and graves of elders, and even the Sphinx, and the whole thing begins to sound like a nineteenth-century fantasy novel, populated by beings who have the anemic ephemerality of figures in bad pre-Raphaelite paintings.
It’s only now that we realize the young man is recently dead and, therefore, is too “dizzy” for his sight “to grasp it,” presumably the Sphinx. Now there’s an owl that brushes his cheek, “the one with the fuller curve,” then “the new stars of the land of grief”—a list of constellations, all, again, the most diluted late Romantic glyphs: the Rider, the Staff, the Garland of Fruit . . . Cradle, Path, etc. And last, and surely least, “the clear sparking M that stands for Mothers.” The weird story goes on a bit more, until the dead youth, alone now, “climbs on, up the mountains of primal grief. And not once do his footsteps echo from the soundless path.”
The first time I taught Rilke, in an undergraduate comparative literature class, I arrived at an extreme though fortunately passing dislike of both him and his poetry: all these delectations of early death, of dead young girls particularly, even if they do ultimately come to be vibrant symbols in the Sonnets to Orpheus. And this hapless dead youth wandering through his utterly unreasonable Lament world didn’t help.
The elegy, and the poem, end in a passage for which the word “anticlimax” seems to have been invented. After all the splendors of the poem, its absolutely unforgettable beginning, its rich elaborations of so much profound human experience, both ordinary and exalted, I always feel a shock of disappointment when I come to it:
But if the endlessly dead awakened a symbol in us,
perhaps they would point to the catkins hanging from the bare
branches of the hazel trees, or
would evoke the raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in springtime—
And we, who have always thought
of happiness as rising, would feel
the emotion that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happy thing falls.
Is that all? That’s all: no elaboration of the conceit that might better explain what in heaven’s name the poet means, none of the metaphorical transcendence in which Rilke was unequaled. Just that. Finally, the last elegy, to put it mildly, I find to be a muddle, poetically, philosophically, morally. Not only does the ending not deliver what the rest of the poem promises, if you’re not attentive, or perhaps I should say tolerant, it can seem to contaminate and dilute the undeniable greatness of basically everything else in this infinitely compelling work. In the end, though, it doesn’t because a poem isn’t a philosophical system, it doesn’t have to possess a systematic consistency from beginning to end. I’ve even sometimes wondered if in some ways I might love the poem more because of its frailties and the implication that the mind and imagination at work in it is merely human.
Another work of great ambition that’s been crucially important to me, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, shares Rilke’s poem’s largeness of purpose and even, in fact, its basic thrust. In another context, I’ve referred to them both as “inner epics,” and that’s as good a way as I have to describe how both of them enact a sustained reflection on critical issues of life and the spirit, as experienced by a single adventurous poetic imagination. Eliot’s poem also shares with the Elegies a rather anticlimactic ending, a resolution that doesn’t seem to me to come close to fulfilling the intentions the poem has posited.
The beginnings of the poems, however, couldn’t be more different. Rilke’s starts with a cry to an angel, a proclamation, in a way, of the poem’s spiritual purposes. There’s also, of course, an implication of religion in the figure of the angel, although there has never been a religion quite like the one Rilke evokes. The Quartets, in contrast, begins famously in a tone of philosophical, metaphysical meditation:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
The poem will move, even more than Rilke’s and in a more definite way, into the realm of the religious, but for now the establishment of the poetic tone of Eliot’s writing is more speculative than spiritual, with only that term “unredeemable” to give a clue to how the poem will elaborate its religious concerns later on. One critic characterizes the philosophical-spiritual purpose of the poem as a working out in poetic terms of “the immanence theory of time.” Surely this is a very partial description of the poem’s ambitions, but it does sound as though something like this is taking place, and the poem does concern itself with the function of time in speculative reflection and with elaborations of sense and memory that partake of and exalt the immanent.
One of the central methods of Eliot’s poem, like Rilke’s, is to be radically inclusive, to touch on a great number of the themes and strivings of a soul that is poetically conscious of itself, of its potential both for fulfillment and for spiritual distraction. The matter that Eliot selects to embody his processes is quite different from Rilke’s, as is his method in doing so. His poem is much more committed to quotidian details as ways of opening access to larger questions. The earthly places the poem refers to are much more definite and singular than Rilke’s for the most part generalized settings. If Rilke uses a fig tree almost mythical in its unspecificity to speak of the way the soul can hesitate within itself before the project of illumination, Eliot uses details of contemporary England to concretize his spiritual quest.
The wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate.
From Ludgate, the poem broods:
Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that
which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense.
It might be interesting to contrast the long metaphoric passage I quoted from the Elegies about the crassness of the material world with lines that have a similar purpose in the Quartets, the famous “dark dark dark” passage.
They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark.
The lyric strategies of the poems couldn’t be more different though. In detail and in large, Rilke seeks, in his poems, to distill articulated meanings from his meditations; although the Elegies are charged with images that are constantly heightened to the status of symbols, those symbols are always a portion of a poetic that, at least until the last elegy, moves toward a kind of experience both spiritually numinous and intellectually accessible. The symbols the poem generates are not poetic ends in themselves; they are always moving towards a more direct intuition that incorporates them as a part of the act of meditation.
Eliot’s lyric passages, conversely, are less specifically determined: their meanings—that doesn’t seem the proper word here—are embodied, or embedded, in what Eliot himself defined as “objective correlatives.” The images, and the passages of pure lyricism, might be described as exciting meaning, hovering above meaning, participating in a much more oblique though just as essential way in the larger purposes of the poem. We never find in the Elegies the many passages of pure, apparently nonsymbolic lyrical evocation like the one that begins the last quartet, “Little Gidding.”
