by C K Williams
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s beat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
Although there are hints here, especially in that “windless cold” of some of the symbolic energies with which Eliot charges the poem, there is still a sense of deflection from its direct purposes. It is an elaboration whose method is primarily a reinforcement of atmosphere, of mood.
The poems differ radically in their relation to religion, as well. As I’ve noted, Rilke’s spiritual nomenclatures in the Elegies bear little relation to that of any established religion. He may select various symbols, particularly the angel and the saint, from religious iconography (and from his own early poetry), but beyond that they’re more indications of an elemental aspiration for larger meaning. Eliot, however, uses the lexicons of traditional religious speculation, mostly Christian but also Buddhist and also indirectly various Indian religions, to reinforce his larger purposes. The following passage relies as much on reverberations from Eastern religions as on any of conventional Christianity.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving.
The amalgamation of different religion experiences allows Eliot to set up resonances between seemingly contradictory conceptions of spiritual consciousness, to fuse these visions with his imagistic clarity, and, crucially, to unite them with the music, the cadences of meditation of which he was such a master. The obsessive rhythms of prayerful chanting infuse the poem with a sense of metaphysical urgency beyond any meanings it might evoke.
Rilke’s and Eliot’s poems are also alike in that both deal with the psychic risk inherent in their very serious undertakings; they both insist on the potential desolation of such high spiritual ambitions. Again, though, they differ formidably in their articulation of this despair. Rilke’s “nights of anguish” are the shucked out midnights of failed poetic inspiration, while Eliot’s unattained ecstasies are the exertions of a hypothetical mystic, even of a saint. Eliot’s poem can be seen in some ways almost as a handbook of Christian mysticism, and there is always the implication in it that various kinds of anguishing ascetic renunciations will be required for the visionary progress the poem postulates. Even here, though, the poems differ in both the articulation of this spiritual anguish and its grounding. Rilke’s poem is always moving forward with a kind of hopefulness; it continually posits a naïve, almost childlike consciousness that is approaching the possibility of illumination for the first time. The past of the poem exists mostly as a repository of moments that are potential epiphanies, that have been waiting to be brought back in a context that will allow them to blossom into their real richness.
In Eliot, though, there’s the sense that what is being attempted is the recuperation of other instances of the same project, of efforts wasted and energy having been uselessly expended, and there are many references to futile past ventures, which must be effected again because there is no other choice. Compared to the Elegies, there’s a sense of weariness, of near exhaustion through much of the poem.
This pattern of negation and renewed striving is in fact one of the Four Quartet’s recurring devices. There are many examples in the poem of paradoxes that are both grounds for despair yet that are needed to illuminate—the notorious “Our only health is the disease,” for example. There is an underlying dialectic, a tug of war between the desire for action and the sense of action’s ultimate futility, a way of looking at acts that are obviated even as they’re undertaken. Always the negation that inspires to greater striving, and always the undercurrent of a conclusion that implies that self, mere self, even the luminous poet-self, is insufficient for the higher ends the poem proposes.
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
All of this is a sketchy description of what Eliot is about in his magnificent work. Although at one point in the poem Eliot says, “The poetry does not matter” (and of course the poem reflects at great length on poetry itself, and its own poetic methods, in particular), the poem’s greatness resides just in the fact that it is neither ultimately a religious tract or a series of sermons nor, as I have said, a handbook of mysticism but a poem, rich, complex, both thematically and musically various. And it is just this that leads me to describe the resolution of the poem, its ending, as another oddity.
Perhaps I should repeat again that I believe the Four Quartets, like the Duino Elegies, is a great poem; my admiration for both of them remains unqualified: they have been inspirations and examples to me since I first came to them at the beginning of my writing life. If I’m offering what seem like criticisms of the way they conclude, this doesn’t affect my ultimate esteem for them. But I think that both poems at their very outsets establish spiritual, philosophical, nonpoetical tasks or challenges that they don’t, and possibly can’t, resolve. Rilke, from early in his poetic career, had a notion of spirituality that was grounded in something like monastic ecstasy: The Book of Hours, one of his earliest books, is a dramatizations of the devotions of a humble monk, a monk, though, who lived in an imaginary vision of medieval Russia. But the moment of history the poet actually lived in was painfully mundane: the years the Duino Elegies took to write bracketed the cosmic horrors of World War I, and though Rilke’s participation in and attention to that war was scant, its larger implications on history and culture would have been impossible to disregard. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising then that the ending of the Elegies abruptly abandons anything like a Christian iconography, even the single angel who sets the poem in motion, and moves instead into something like an Egyptian or Grecian cult of the dead.
The problems with Eliot’s poem in some ways are very similar to this, and profoundly different in others. Four Quartets was written before and during World War II, and if that war is barely referred to in the poem itself, its historical and social reverberations were clearly vivid in the consciousness of the poet: in his prose Eliot shows himself acutely aware of the implications of both conflicts. At the same time, in terms of the philosophical-religious undertakings of the poem, Eliot’s trajectory is almost precisely the opposite of Rilke’s. The Quartets begins, as I’ve said, with what sounds like a philosophical meditation, but by the end it has moved into a resolution that in its terminology depends almost completely on religious symbol.
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Now, scholars of the poem can no doubt describe its structure in a way to justify how it arrives at this strangely thin lyrical murmur, with its unconvincing echo of Dante, but for me, in terms of the poem as poem, I feel a serious letdown with this conclusion. Have all those intricate and weighty investigations of spiritual and secular consciousness arrived here, in this rather truncated bit of Christian symbolism? Even musically, the end of the poem is irresolute. Thi
s last passage seems to be sung by the voice of a single muted violin, isolated from the highly magnificently chromatic chordal structure of the rest of the poem. There’s certainly nothing wrong with this in principle, but the music is perfunctory, plaintive. Rhythmically, the last two lines are slack: there are fifteen syllables in the two lines, of which six are definite stresses, while in the first two lines of the poem—
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
—nine of the sixteen syllables are stressed. Stress in verse is energy; energy is not at all what defines good poetry, but there’s a kind of hesitation in these lines, almost a diffidence, that make them seem inadequate musically as well as contextually to the largeness of the rest of the poem. I’ll repeat: thematically and poetically the poem, like the Duino Elegies is vast, and vastly satisfying, thrilling. Perhaps Eliot’s ambitions, like Rilke’s, were simply too large to be accomplished, or perhaps they were attempted at an inauspicious historical moment for such encompassing aspirations. Perhaps in a century that had become so secularized, and at moments of history so fraught with violence and terror, attempting to fuse so many historical and metaphysical yearnings would necessitate a spiritual consciousness with a coherence that is simply no longer available. Might Rilke’s poem, composed, after all, less than twenty years before Eliot’s, have suffered from the same finally irresolvable tensions?
I have a friend, a master carpenter, who while we were working together once on a simple renovation project that had gone irritatingly awry, offered me a bit of wisdom I find often comes to mind: “Nothing’s easy.” It might not be quite true that nothing is easy, but a lot of things aren’t, among which surely is ending poems. Naturally the majority of successful poems have endings that fit their aesthetic and spiritual promises, and there are some that exceed them, two of which I’d like to look at now, another poem by Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” and James Wright’s “A Blessing.”
Both poems, I might remark, were terrifically important to me and to most of the poets I knew when they first came to our attention in the early nineteen-sixties. I’m not the first to remark that “A Blessing” was one of the most influential poems for the generation that begin writing when I did, and the Rilke poem, which arrived in America in J. B. Leishman’s translation a little later (though it had been published a good while before in the United Kingdom), was as much so. Here is the Wright poem:
A BLESSING
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
And here is Rilke’s, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation (Leishman’s seems irredeemably awkward now):
ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like opening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the place hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
I won’t go into an analysis of the two poems here, though it’s certainly worth noting how similar their means are: though Rilke’s is an ephrastic meditation, and Wright’s a brief narrative, both are illuminated by a series of ingenious, unlikely metaphors, and through the force of their figures, both become infused with an atmosphere of transformation and potential transfiguration that imply genres of mystery, and modes of attention and focus ordinarily unavailable to us. Rilke effects a powerful metaphoric mutation through which qualities of the sculpture’s absent head are infused into the surviving torso, the ostensible subject of the poem, and then the gaze of that absent head is transformed into a lamp dimly “suffusing with brilliance” the torso. And the poem continues in an almost metaphysical rapture through churning figurations.
The Wright poem’s metaphoric work is less metaphysically (in the special sense of English Renaissance poetry) overt; its images are strikingly vivid, but its metaphors gentler, informed with emotional rather than purely imaginative force. The ponies’ eyes “darken with kindness,” they come “gladly out of the willows . . . they can hardly contain their happiness.” A series of personifications, then a shift of intensity: “They bow shyly as wet swans.” And an emotional elaboration: “There is no loneliness like theirs.” There is much more factual description in the poem—its tremulous movement doesn’t work through figurative alchemizations as does Rilke’s: the poet is much more present, much more a receptor of perceptions than a generator of them.
A thorough analysis of the two poems would be worthy of an essay in itself, but it’s their endings that concern me here. Both endings are abrupt, they nearly truncate their poems, both are unpredictable, audacious, in some essential way uncalled for, unreasonable: both leap in their separate ways out of the world of ordinary concatenation and logic. Rilke offers a preliminary closing: “for here, there is no place // that does not see you.” Unreasonable in its own right, the conceit then becomes a command, a cry of warning, or a plea: “You must change your life.” It is an imperative that seems to go back and set the whole poem shimmering with overtones of meaning for which even the blazing virtuosity of its figurative work couldn’t have prepared us.
Wright’s ending is in some ways very similar to Rilke’s, but also essentially differs. It, too, seems to come from nowhere: rather than the purely metaphoric permutations through which the Rilke works, it implements its images and metaphors to gradually heighten the rapturous mood of the poem. Everything in it is tender, vulnerable; there is the sense that the world being described is being generated even as we experience it and that world is being contemplated with newborn eyes. One of the two ponies takes on the qualities of a human woman, and the poet is drawn ever more closely to her, finally moved to caress her, not by the force of his own poetic transformations, or his own will, but by the “light breeze.” It is reality itself that is conspiring in the poem’s transfigurations, a reality that has begun to glow with mysterious potentialities. And, again, that ending:
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
Those final three lines for we poets who were first reading it were a sort of proclamation of a new ars poetica. The Latin American surrealist poets, who were just then arriving into the American tradition and who had begun to inform American poetry with unfamiliar
ways of objectifying reality through figuration and through the logic of the unconscious and dream, were all at once there for us. Wright, who along with Robert Bly, was one of their first translators, had shown how they could move audaciously into our own canon.
Rilke had plunged into the stone mass of a statue; Wright in “A Blessing” devised a ladder of image and figure to elate consciousness out of its fleshy necessities. The two poems were like two aspects of a single act of liberation. The poetry that I, and many of my contemporaries, had been writing—fact-ridden, history-ridden, intellectually pretentious, emotionally deflected—was all at once offered a dimension that had previously been forbidden to it, although we hadn’t until then suspected our quandary.
And the two poems continue to offer their particular luminosities: their “odd” endings still shock and still exalt.
Some Reflections on Tragedy
In the course of working on my translations, I’ve had the occasion to read a great number of theories about tragedy.1 With all I’ve read, though, I’ve been left, in my own reflections on the subject, with an essential puzzle to which I’ve never found a satisfactory answer. The puzzle consists of the simple question of why we inflict tragedy on ourselves, why we allow ourselves to be put into an aesthetic situation in which, at the very least, we will be in proximity to terrible anguish and suffering, and why, when we are in this proximity, when we are so close to these obsessions and slaughters, these insane vengeances and self-devouring families, do we feel that something worthwhile is happening to us?
Aristotle has given us the concept of catharsis, the idea that by beholding the tragic activity, by submitting ourselves to the pity and the terror it entails, we’re mysteriously psychologically and spiritually purified, taken out of ourselves and cleansed. But when I consider what actually happens to me when I read or see tragedy on the stage, this isn’t a very accurate description of my responses or my thoughts about those responses. All these unlikely goings on, these obsessions and slaughters, these insane vengeances, these self-devouring families: to have pity be such a large factor in describing our response to tragedy seems to me not enough. The Greeks, as we’re well aware, knew these myths and stories by heart. Educated people even today are presumed to have at their command at least a cursory knowledge of those tales and myths that play such a large part in our cultural heritage. But even if we didn’t, we would still quickly realize that the force of the tragic doesn’t lie in the surprise or the suspense it offers us; our most effecting, poignant, readings of tragedy are never the first: as with lyric poetry, our responses are instead intensified by our second or fifth or tenth reading.
