All the same, the tone is not familiar or insinuatingly personal. There is a curious sensation of being kept at a remove while still being close enough to feel the excitement of impulses translating themselves into phrases. The mode pretends to dramatic personal utterance – Lowell talking to his wife, best friends, his son, himself – yet it keeps breaking into a note which is random, impersonal and oracular; ‘things thrown in air’, as one poem says, ‘alive in flight’, things resembling the scrapings that fly when ‘the immortal is scraped unconsenting from the mortal.’
Lowell always had an inclination to launch such single lines and phrases across the sky of the poem and indeed, in the blank sonnets had so tried to make poems blaze line by line that the reader could feel at times he was out bareheaded in a meteor shower. Those poems were not so much loaded with ore as packed with gold fillings, grinding in order to gleam. In Day by Day, however, his ferocity has been calmed and replaced by a temperate waft of either image or generalization. ‘The elder flower is champagne’, says one line which sails above the discourse of ‘Milgate’. ‘A false calm is the best calm’, says an orphaned line in ‘Suburban Surf’. And so on: ‘If you keep cutting your losses, / you have no loss to cut’ (‘In the Ward’). ‘If they have you by the neck, a rope will be found’ (‘Domesday Book’).
We have come far indeed from the kind of command this poet sought and exercised in the early work, when the work was piledriven by metre and condensed allusions. Now the command is achieved by the oddly tilted wisdom of the propositions, their oblique clarity and applicability, their wistful strangeness. The tone is not forced or forcing, the voice of the poem does not come down upon you but rises towards its own surface. There is an aqueous rather than an igneous quality now to the poem’s beginnings and emergence, nowhere more so than in the opening poem of the volume, called ‘Ulysses and Circe’, especially in Section V. This is my favourite moment in the book. In the opening lines, Lowell retains an old bravura and at the end touches a muted Homeric note of landfall. What happens in between is kaleidoscopic, a progress of gnomic stanzas, little poems fragments in themselves, held together by the memory and voice of Ulysses.
This Ulysses comes on as a man on the verge of being posthumous to himself, ventriloquizing (through the autobiographical voice of Robert Lowell) about his interlude with Circe, his sensual self-knowledge and his appeased curiosities. Ulysses begins the poem as a drowsy voluptuary and will end it as a killer about to strike, thus acting as a kind of correlative for the poet caught between his marriages and his manias. The poem is spoken in a middle voice, neither dramatic monologue exactly nor confessional lyric: enclosed in quotation marks, it rides an eddying course between the near shore of autobiography and the farther shore of myth:
‘Long awash and often touching bottom
by the sea’s great green go-light
I found my exhaustion
the light of the world.
Earth isn’t earth
if my eyes are on the moon,
her likeness caught
in the split-second of vacancy –
duplicitous,
open to all men, unfaithful.
After so many millennia,
Circe,
are you tired
of turning swine to swine?
How can I please you,
if I am not a man?
I have grown bleak-boned with survival –
I who hoped to leave the earth
younger than I came.
Age is the bilge
we cannot shake from the mop.
Age walks on our faces –
at the tunnel’s end,
if faith can be believed,
our flesh will grow lighter.’
This poem does have its openness, yet at its core there is an intransigently charmless streak, and it is the combination of neuter stillness at the centre with something more tolerant and glamorous on the surface which makes it continuous with one of the loveliest and strangest moments in Lowell’s early work. I am thinking of the Walsingham section of ‘The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket’, where the locus of stillness was in the face of the statue of the Virgin which, ‘expressionless, expresses God’. Around this pivot of the unlovely, the oceanic symphonies swayed and thundered, and they depended upon the statue’s quietude more than upon the massed instruments of the vocabulary for their ultimate effects of turbulence and tragedy. The face was like a star whose light was forever at the moment of arrival, an energy source. Why this figure of the Virgin should enter the poem could be explained intellectually by contrasting her with the predatory, Calvinist, blood-spilling whalers; poetically speaking, however, we sense its rightness as a matter of emotional effect, a result of its timing and placing. What it supplies is what T. S. Eliot was wanting to supply in ‘Little Gidding’ when he wrote to John Hayward: ‘The defect of the whole poem, I feel, is the lack of some acute personal reminiscence (never to be explicated, of course, but to give power from well below the surface).’ It is just this sensation of power coming from below the surface, without any need for its explication, which the reader finds in the Walsingham section of ‘The Quaker Graveyard’.
I have digressed because I want to suggest that the virtue of the best poems in Day by Day derives from their being similarly sustained by the up-draft of energy from ‘acute personal reminiscence’. Yet the reminiscence is itself unmysterious, coming from a recent past or a just-sped present: what is uncanny is the feeling of being at the eye of an agitation, in an emotional calm that is completely impersonal, a condition evenly distanced from the infinite indifference on the minus side of the graph and the infinite serenity at the other extreme. At his best, Lowell can find the coordinates for this point and beam in on a state that is neither stasis nor crisis, more dynamic than the former, less precarious than the latter. At less inspired moments, this genuine impassiveness is simulated: we encounter in its place an unremitting verbal determination to secure our dazed attention – something which happens often enough in the books of blank sonnets to make the experience of reading them disorienting.
Nothing disorienting about the poetry we have just read, however, qua poetry, no matter how disconcerting the things it has to say about ageing and ending: ‘Age is the bilge / we cannot shake from the mop.’ Repudiation, ripeness, greyness, aggravation – it’s all there, in the very mouthing of the syllables, from the fruity corruption of ‘age is the bilge’, with its custardy vowels and gelatinate consonants, to the shudder and ineffectual vigour of ‘we cannot shake from the mop’. This is heady and disintoxicating all at once, exactly the kind of wisdom to vindicate the earlier claim to preternatural clarity: ‘I found my exhaustion / the light of the world.’ This poem manages to begin and carry on from the point where Samson Agonistes ended in ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’. It is the poetic anti-world to the world of Sam Goldwyn’s apocalyptic beginnings. Unlike the post-modern voice that speaks in Derek Mahon’s ‘Lives’ and ‘knows too much to know anything any more’, Lowell’s Ulysses retains a kind of ultimate heuristic joy. Even though the single-mindedness of Dante’s Ulysses would seem to him simple-minded, and the rhetoric of Tennyson’s incredible, the omniscient tone of this veteran sexual campaigner does not preclude the possibility of further excitements. If the cadences do not move with any great long-swelled promise, neither have they cancelled all expectation of a renewed shock from experience.
It all represents the reappearance, fully developed, of a style that had sweetened sour subjects a decade and a half earlier in For the Union Dead. There, in poems of ‘acute personal reminiscence’, such as ‘Water’ and ‘The Old Flame’, and in that seemingly casual gloss called ‘Middle Age’, Lowell relaxed the method of decisive confrontation which he had pursued in Life Studies. The readiness for combat which characterized much of the earlier work was replaced by a mood still vigilant and nervy, but not as feral or intensely directed.
This ‘relaxed’ poetry in For the Union Dead pre
figures the achievement of the best work in Day by Day. It wakens rather than fixes. A few strokes, a notation, a bestirring and a saluting, such casual means are typical of writing which is not in itself just casual notation: little riddling units are lifted up into the condition of poetry. These poems are pre-eminently events rather than the record of events – as that wonderfully chaste and bare-handed poem ‘Fall 1961’ demonstrates:
All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
I swim like a minnow
behind my studio window.
Our end drifts nearer,
the moon lifts,
radiant with terror.
The state
is a diver under a glass bell.
A father’s no shield
for his child.
We are like a lot of wild
spiders crying together,
but without tears.
At such a moment, Lowell’s poetry is beautifully equal to its occasion. It does not flex its literary muscle. Its tone is unemphatic yet it derives from a kind of wisdom which knows itself to be indispensable even as it takes itself for granted. I suggest that Lowell’s command finally came to reside in this self-denial, this readiness not to commandeer the poetic event but to let his insights speak their own riddling truths:
Past fifty, we learn with surprise and a sense
of suicidal absolution
that what we intended and failed
could never have happened –
and must be done better.
T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures (iii), University of Kent, 1986
from The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath
The great appeal of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and its constellated lyrics is the feeling of irresistible given-ness. There inheres in this poetry a sense of surprised arrival, of astonished being. The poems were written quickly and they transmit to the reader something of the unexpectedness of their own becoming. There is the pressure of absolute fiat behind them: a set of images springs into presence and into motion as at a whimsical but unignorable command. They represent the extreme extension of the imagist mode, which Pound characterized as expressing an emotional and intellectual complex in a moment of time. Their metamorphic speed and metaphoric eagerness are boosted by the logic of their own associative power, and they rush towards whatever conclusions are inherent in their elements. These poems are the vehicles of their own impulses, and it was entirely right that the title which gathered them together should not only recall Shakespeare’s pure spirit but also the headlong gallop of a runaway horse. They are full of exhilaration in themselves, the exhilaration of a mind that creates in some sort of mocking spirit, outstripping the person who has suffered. They move without hesitation and assume the right to be heard; they, the poems, are what we attend to, not the poet. They are, in Lowell’s words, events rather than the records of events, and as such represent the triumph of Sylvia Plath’s romantic ambition to bring expressive power and fully achieved selfhood into congruence. The tongue proceeds headily into its role as governor; it has located the source where the fixed stars are reflected and from which they transmit their spontaneous and weirdly trustworthy signals.
But before all this could occur, Plath’s tongue was itself governed by the disciplines of metre, rhyme, etymology, assonance, enjambment. Even if her husband had not given us an image of her as the obedient neophyte, we could have deduced it from the procedures of her early verse. ‘She wrote her early poems very slowly,’ Ted Hughes tells us, ‘thesaurus open on her knee, in her large, strange handwriting, like a mosaic, where every letter stands separate within the work, a hieroglyph to itself … Every poem grew complete from its own root, in that laborious inching way, as if she were working out a mathematical problem, chewing her lips, putting a thick dark ring of ink around each word that stirred her on the page of the thesaurus.’ That would have been in the late 1950s, when Sylvia Plath was preparing the volume which would be published in 1960 in England as The Colossus, in the course of which she gradually focused her poetic attention inward and found a characteristic method of self-exploration.
This was sometimes based on the allegorization of personal experience into an emblem or icon, sometimes on the confounding of the autobiographical and the mythological. ‘Full Fathom Five’ and ‘Lorelei’, two poems based on her reading of Jacques Cousteau, are typical examples of this latter procedure. The autobiographical matter they draw upon includes the death of her father when she was a child of eight and the family’s subsequent move inland from the sea, after which, as Plath wrote in ‘Ocean 1212-W, ‘those first nine years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle – beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.’ The autobiographical element also includes a recognition of her suicide attempt in August 1953, and obviously takes some cognizance of the psychiatric treatment which ensued, with its conscious attempts at self-comprehension and self-renewal. But all this is secluded behind the literary and mythological aspects of the poems themselves, which are the products of a ripening skill …
*
I find in her poetic journey three stages which seem to exemplify three degrees of poetic achievement, and since I have always found it instructive to read a famous passage of Wordsworth as a parable of these three stages, I shall do so here in particular relation to Sylvia Plath’s career. The passage in question is the one where Wordsworth writes about his young self whistling through his fingers to arouse the owls so that they would then call back to him; but it also memorably evokes certain moments when he would be imposed upon by the power of the whole natural universe:
There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander! – many a time,
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him. – And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call, – with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
The first task of the poet – if I may proceed with my allegorization of this memorable passage – is to learn how to entwine his or her hands so that the whistle comes out right. This may seem a minimal achievement, yet those of you who have a memory of attempting to get it right will also remember the satisfaction and justification implicit in that primary act of sounding forth. People who learned to whistle on their thumbs, to trumpet and tu-whit, tu-whoo in the back seats of classrooms and the back seats of buses, would then be happy to perform this feat for its own sake, repeatedly, self-forgetfully and tirelessly. It was an original act of making, the equivalent in the oral/aural sphere of mud-pies in the tactile/plastic sphere and, as has been well observed, one of the chief pleasures of life is when I show you the mud-pies I have made and you show me the mud-pies you have made. In this trope, the little magazine can be understood as an echo-chamber of owl whistles or a gallery of mud-pie life, and many a poeti
c career begins and ends with poems which do no more than cry out in innocent primary glee, ‘Listen, I can do it! Look how well it turned out! And I can do it again! See?’
Sylvia Plath’s first book contains several poems of this kind, beautifully tuned, half-rhymed and assonantal. In them, her craft-conscious fingers are twined and lifted at a careful angle, and her poetic breath is evenly, deliberately exhaled. Of course, it is not the only kind of work in The Colossus but it is what is most immediately in evidence; on every page, a poet is serving notice that she has earned her credentials and knows her trade. Relish it along with me, she insinuates; isn’t this well done? And it is indeed a pleasure to savour the dull, sea-clap music of a poem like ‘Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour’:
I came before the water-
Colourists came to get the
Good of the Cape light that scours
Sand grit to sided crystal
And buffs and sleeks the blunt hulls
Of the three fishing smacks beached
Finders Keepers Page 25
