Collected Earlier Poems

by Anthony Hecht

  for Hays Rockwell

  Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us

  see if the vine flourish, whether the tender

  grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth:

  there will I give thee my loves.

  See, see upon a field of royal blue,

  Scaling the steep escarpments of the sky

  With gold-leafed curlicue,

  Sepals and plumula and filigree,

  This vast, untrellised vine

  Of scroll- and fretwork, a Jesse’s family tree

  Or ivy whose thick clamberings entwine

  Heaven and earth and the viewer’s raddling eye.

  This mealed and sprinkled glittering, this park

  Of ‘flowres delice’ and Gobelin millefleurs

  Coiling upon the dark

  In wild tourbillions, gerbs and golden falls

  Is a mere lace or grille

  Before which Jesus works his miracles

  Of love, feeding the poor, curing the ill,

  Here in the Duc de Berry’s Très Riches Heures;

  And is itself the visible counterpart

  Of fugal consort, branched polyphony,

  That dense, embroidered art

  Of interleaved and deftly braided song

  In which each separate voice

  Seems to discover where it should belong

  Among its kind, and, fated by its choice,

  Pursues a purpose at once fixed and free;

  And every cantus, firm in its own pursuits,

  Fluent and yet cast, as it were, in bronze,

  Exchanges brief salutes

  And bows of courtesy at every turn

  With every neighboring friend,

  Bends to oblige each one with quick concern

  And join them at a predetermined end

  Of cordial and confirming antiphons.

  Such music in its turn becomes the trope

  Or figure of that holy amity

  Which is our only hope,

  Enjoined upon us from two mountain heights:

  On Tables of The Law

  Given at Sinai, and the Nazarite’s

  Luminous sermon that reduced to awe

  And silence a vast crowd near Galilee.

  Who could have known this better than St. George,

  The Poet, in whose work these things are woven

  Or wrought as at a forge

  Of disappointed hopes, of triumphs won

  Through strains of sound and soul

  In that small country church at Bemerton?

  This was the man who styled his ghostly role,

  “Domestic servant to the King of Heaven.”

  If then, as in the counterpoises of

  Music, the laity may bless the priest

  In an exchange of love,

  Riposta for Proposta, all we inherit

  Returned and newly named

  In the established words, “and with thy spirit,”

  Be it with such clear grace as his who claimed,

  Of all God’s mercies, he was less than least.

  POEM UPON THE LISBON DISASTER

  Or, An Inquiry Into The Adage, “All Is For The Best.”

  Woeful mankind, born to a woeful earth!

  Feeble humanity, whole hosts from birth

  Eternally, purposelessly distressed!

  Those savants erred who claim, “All’s for the best.”

  Approach and view this carnage, broken stone,

  Rags, rubble, chips of shattered wood and bone,

  Women and children pinioned under beams,

  Crushed under stones, piled under severed limbs;

  These hundred thousands whom the earth devours,

  Cut down to bleed away their final hours.

  In answer to the frail, half-uttered cry,

  The smoking ashes, will you make reply,

  “God, in His bounty, urged by a just cause,

  Herein exhibits His eternal laws”?

  Seeing these stacks of victims, will you state,

  “Vengence is God’s; they have deserved their fate”?

  What crimes were done, what evils manifest,

  By babes who died while feeding at the breast?

  Did wiped-out Lisbon’s sins so much outweigh

  Paris and London’s, who keep holiday?

  Lisbon is gone, yet Paris drinks champagne.

  O tranquil minds who contemplate the pain

  And shipwreck of your brothers’ battered forms,

  And, housed in peace, debate the cause of storms,

  When once you feel Fate’s catalogue of woe,

  Tears and humanity will start and show.

  When earth gapes for me while I’m sound and whole

  My cries will issue from the very soul.

  Hemmed in by Fate’s grotesque brutalities,

  Wrath of the wicked, death-traps and disease,

  Tried by the warring elements, we have borne

  Suffering enough to sorrow and to mourn.

  You claim it’s pride, the first sin of the race,

  That human beings, having fallen from grace,

  Dream of evading Justice’s decree

  By means of Man’s Perfectibility.

  Go ask the Tagus river banks, go pry

  Among the smouldering alleyways where lie

  The slowly perishing, and inquire today

  Whether it’s simply pride that makes them pray,

  “O heaven save me, heaven pity me.”

  “All’s Good,” you claim, “and all’s Necessity.”

  Without this gulf, would the whole universe,

  Still stained with Lisbon, be that much the worse?

  And has the Great Creative Power no way

  To teach us but by violence and decay?

  Would you thus limit God? Or claim His powers

  Do not extend to these concerns of ours?

  I beg our Maker, humbly, from the heart,

  That this brimstone catastrophe depart,

  Spend its fierce heat in some far desert place.

  God I respect; poor mortals I embrace.

  When, scourged like this, men venture to complain,

  It is not pride that speaks, it is felt pain.

  Would it console those sufferers galore,

  Tormented natives of that desolate shore,

  If someone said, “Drop dead with peace of mind;

  Your homes were smashed for the good of humankind;

  And they shall be rebuilt by others’ craft,

  Who shall inhabit where once you lived and laughed.

  The North shall profit by your vast demise,

  And by astute investment realize

  Your momentary loss and fatal pain

  Conduced, through general laws, to ultimate gain.

  To the far eye of God you are as base

  As worms that dine and crawl upon your face”?

  This were to heap some last, insulting stones

  Of language on that monument of groans.

  Do not presume to soothe such misery

  With the fixed laws of calm necessity,

  With The Great Chain of Being, hymned by Pope.

  O dream of sages! O phantasmal hope!

  That chain depends from God, Who is unchained;

  By His beneficent will all is ordained;

  He is unshackled, tractable, and just.

  How comes He, then, to violate our trust?

  There’s the strange knot that needs to be untied!

  Anguish cannot be cured by being denied.

  All men, in fear of God, have sought the root

  Of evil, whose mere existence you dispute.

  If He, Whose hands all motions can contain,

  Can launch a landslide with a hurricane

  And split great oaks with lightning at a glance,

  They harbor no regrets at the mischance;

  But I, who live and feel in wracked dismay,

  Yearn for His aid Wh
o made me out of clay.

  Children of the Almighty, born to grief,

  Beseech their common Father for relief.

  The potter is not questioned by the pot:

  “Why is my substance dull, why frail my lot?”

  It lacks capacity for speech and thought.

  And yet this pot, fractured when newly wrought,

  Was not, we know, provided with a heart

  To wish for good or feel misfortune’s smart.

  “Our woe,” you say, “is someone else’s weal.”

  My body must supply the maggot’s meal.

  O the sweet solace of my heaped-up woes:

  To be the nest of worms in my repose!

  O bitter calculus of averaged grief

  That adds to sorrow, offers no relief.

  This is the impotent effort of the proud:

  To posit joys that they are not allowed.

  I’m but a small part of the Master Plan,

  True, but all beings sentenced to life’s span,

  All sentient creatures, as the statute saith,

  Must ache through life, and end, like me, in death.

  The bloody-taloned vulture in his day

  Devours with joy the dead meat of his prey,

  And all seems well with him; but soon he must

  Bow to the eagle’s beak, and bite the dust.

  Man wings the haughty eagle with a shot;

  And when at length it comes Man’s turn to rot

  Upon a battlefield, he becomes the swill

  On which the birds, triumphant, eat their fill.

  Thus are all creatures brother unto brother,

  The heirs of pain, the death of one another.

  And you would cull, in such chaos as this,

  From individual miseries, general bliss.

  What bliss! Yet weak and troubled you declare,

  “All’s for the best,” in accents of despair;

  The universe refutes you, and your pulse

  Inwardly knows the argument is false.

  Men, beasts, and atoms, all is war and strife;

  Here upon earth, be it granted, evil’s rife,

  Its origin beyond our powers to guess.

  Could it proceed from God’s high blessedness?

  Or does Greek Typhon, Persian Ahriman

  Condemn to woes the ground we tread upon?

  I reject such brute embodiments of fear,

  Those deities of a craven yesteryear.

  But how conceive the Essence of all Good,

  Source of all Joys and Love, pure Fatherhood,

  Swamping His little ones in storms of ill?

  How could we plumb the depth of such a Will?

  From Flawless Love ills can have no descent;

  Nor from elsewhere, since God’s omnipotent;

  Yet they exist. Such paradox has checked

  And baffled the weak human intellect.

  A God once came to assuage our suffering,

  Visited earth, but didn’t change a thing!

  One sophist claims He couldn’t; in reply

  Another says He could but didn’t try,

  Yet, someday, shall—and while they ergotize

  Earth splits apart and all of Lisbon dies,

  And thirty cities are levelled and laid plane

  From the Tagus to the southern tip of Spain.

  Either God chastens Man, instinct with sin,

  Or else this Lord of Space and Suserain

  Of Being, indifferent, tranquil, pitiless,

  Drowns us in oecumenical distress.

  Either crude matter, counter to God’s laws,

  Bears in itself its necessary flaws,

  Or else God tests and troubles us that we

  May pass these straits into eternity.

  We cancel here our fleeting host of woes:

  Death is their end, our good, and our repose.

  But though we end the trials we have been given

  Who can lay claim upon the joys of heaven?

  Whatever ground one takes is insecure:

  There’s nothing we may not fear, or know for sure.

  Put to the rack, Nature is stubbornly mute,

  And in men’s language God will not dispute.

  It behooves Him nothing to explain His ways,

  Console the feeble, or instruct the wise.

  Yet without God, a prey to trick and doubt,

  Man grasps at broken reeds to help him out.

  Leibnitz cannot explain what bonds coerce,

  In this best-possible-ordered universe,

  Mixtures of chaos ever to destroy

  With thorns of pain our insubstantial joy;

  Nor why both wicked men and innocent

  Sustain alike a destined punishment.

  How shall this best of orders come to be?

  I am all ignorance, like a Ph.D.

  Plato declares that mankind once had wings,

  And flesh invulnerable to mortal stings.

  No grief, no death accomplished his dismay.

  How fallen from that state is his today!

  He cringes, suffers, dies, like all things born;

  Wherever Nature rules, her subjects mourn.

  A thin pastiche of nerves and ligaments

  Can’t rise above the warring elements;

  This recipe of dust, bones, spirits and blood,

  No sooner mixed, dissolves itself for good.

  Those nerves respond especially to gloom,

  Sorrow and dark, harbingers of the tomb.

  There speaks the voice of Nature, and negates

  Plato’s and Epicurus’ postulates.

  Pierre Bayle knew more than both: I’ll seek him out.

  With scales in hand, under the flag of Doubt,

  Rejecting all closed systems by sheer strength

  Of mind and command of stature, Bayle at length

  Has overthrown all systems, overthrown

  Even those bleak constructions of his own;

  Like that blind hero, powerful in his chains,

  Self-immolated with the Philistines.

  What may the most exalted spirit do?

  Nothing. The Book of Fate is closed to view.

  Man, self-estranged, is enemy to man,

  Knows not his origin, his place or plan,

  Is a tormented atom, which at last

  Must condescend to be the earth’s repast;

  Yes, but a thinking particle, whose eyes

  Have measured the whole circuit of the skies.

  We launch ourselves, like missiles, at the unknown,

  Unknowing as we are, even of our own.

  This theater-world of error, pride and stealth,

  Is filled with invalids who discourse on health.

  Seeking their good, men groan, complain and mourn,

  Afraid of death, averse to being reborn.

  Sometimes a glint of happiness appears

  Among the shadows of this vale of tears,

  But it takes wing, being itself a shade;

  It is of loss and grief our lives are made.

  The past is but a memory of despair,

  The present ghastly if it points nowhere,

  If the grave enfolds our spirit with our dust.

  “Some day things will be well,” there lies our trust.

  “All’s well today,” is but the Seconal

  Of the deluded; God alone knows all.

  With humble sighs, resigned to pain, I raise

  No shout or arrogant challenge to God’s ways.

  I struck a less lugubrious note when young;

  Seductive pleasures rolled upon my tongue.

  But styles change with the times; taught by old age,

  Sharing the sickly human heritage,

  In the soul’s midnight, searching for one poor spark,

  I’ve learned to suffer, silent, in the dark.

  A caliph once prayed in his last disease,

  “I bring you, Lord, some curiosities

/>   From our exotic regions here below:

  Regrets and errors, ignorance and woe,

  Unknown to the vast place where You exist.”

  He might have added hope to his grim list.

  from the French of VOLTAIRE

  FIFTH AVENUE PARADE

  Vitrines of pearly gowns, bright porcelains,

  Gilded dalmatics, the stone balconies

  Of eminence, past all of these and past

  The ghostly conquerors in swirls of bronze,

  The children’s pond, the Rospigliosi Cup,

  Prinked with the glitter of day, the chrome batons

  Of six high-stepping, slick drum-majorettes,

  A local high school band in Robin’s Egg Blue,

  Envied by doormen, strippers, pianists,

  Frogged with emblazonments, all smiles, advance

  With victorious booms and fifings through a crowd

  Flecked with balloons and flags and popsicles

  Toward some weak, outnumbered, cowering North

  That will lay down its arms at Eighty-sixth.

  THE LULL

  for Allen Tate

  Through a loose camouflage

  Of maples bowing gravely to everyone

  In the neighborhood, and the soft, remote barrage

  Of waterfalls or whispers, a stippled sun

  Staggers about our garden, high

  On the clear morning wines of mid-July.

  Caught on a lifting tide

  Above a spill of doubloons that drift together

  Through the lawn’s shoals and shadows, branches ride

  The sways of lime and gold, or dip and feather

  The millrace waterways to soar

  Over a tiled and tessellated floor.

  A casual, leafy sprawl

  Of floated lights, of waverings, these are

  Swags of mimosan gentleness, and all

  The quiet, bourgeois riches of Bonnard.

  Or were, until just now the air

  Came to a sudden hush, and everywhere

  Things harden to an etched

  And iron immobility, as day

  Fades from a scurry of color to cross-hatched,

  Sullen industrial tones of snapshot gray.

  Instinctively the mind withdraws

  To airports, depots, the long, plotless pause

  Between the acts of a play,

  Those neuter, intermediary states

  Of vacancy and tedium and delay

  When it must wait and wait, as now it waits

  For a Wagnerian storm to roll

  Thunder along the street and drench the soul.