by Harold Bloom
And thus, I saw myself.
—And this alone?
—And this alone awaits you, when you dare
To that sheer verge where horror hangs, and tremble
Against the falling rock; and, looking down,
Search the dark kingdom. It is to self you come,—
And that is God. It is the seed of seeds:
Seeds for disastrous and immortal worlds.
It is the answer that no question asked.
How much of ancient Gnosticism Aiken knew is unclear to me. Victor Hugo was versed in esoteric traditions, and I suspect Aiken was also. In the Valentinian Speculation, the seed of seeds is both self and God. Ghosts of change haunt Aiken and constitute his wavering self. In prelude XXXIII, the poet again goes to the verge:
Then came I to the shoreless shore of silence,
Where never summer was nor shade of tree,
Nor sound of water, nor sweet light of sun,
But only nothing and the shore of nothing,
Above, below, around, and in my heart:
Where day was not, not night, nor space, nor time,
Where no bird sang, save him of memory,
Nor footstep marked upon the marl, to guide
My halting footstep; and I turned for terror,
Seeking in vain the Pole Star of my thought;
Where it was blown among the shapeless clouds,
And gone as soon as seen, and scarce recalled,
Its image lost and I directionless;
Alone upon the brown sad edge of chaos,
In the wan evening that was evening always;
Then closed my eyes upon the sea of nothing
While memory brought back a sea more bright,
With long, long waves of light, and the swift sun,
And the good trees that bowed upon the wind;
And stood until grown dizzy with that dream…
Silence and nothingness are the burden of this negative epiphany. A vertigo possesses Aiken when he realizes the arbitrariness of: “Calendars torn, appointments made and kept, / or made and broken…” Approaching the conclusion of a hopeless quest, this version of Browning’s “Childe Roland” subsides in a throwaway eloquence:
Thus systole addressed diastole,—
The heart contracting, with its grief of burden,
To the lax heart, with grief of burden gone.
Thus star to dead leaf speaks; thus cliff to sea;
And thus the spider, on a summer’s day,
To the bright thistledown, trapped in the web.
No language leaps this chasm like a lightning:
Here is no message of assuagement, blown
From Ecuador to Greenland; here is only
A trumpet blast, that calls dead men to arms;
The granite’s pity for the cloud; the whisper
Of time to space.
The Shelleyan trumpet of a prophecy echoed by Childe Roland—“Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set / And blew”—now calls dead men to arms, recalling Browning’s vision of the band of failed questers and poets who stand around Roland in a sheet of flame. Aiken does not name his precursors, perhaps because they were so many: Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Whitman, and Browning, among others. Associative rhetoric was both Aiken’s mode and, sadly, his weakness. He did not try to make it new but to augment the foundations by relying upon the major poets of the Romantic tradition. Here is a vital instance of his mingled grandeur and limitation:
It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
I arise, I face the sunrise,
And do the things my fathers learned to do.
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.
Vine leaves tap my window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.
It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And tie my tie once more.
While waves far off in a pale rose twilight
Crash on a coral shore.
I stand by a mirror and comb my hair:
How small and white my face!—
The green earth tilts through a sphere of air
And bathes in a flame of space.
There are houses hanging above the stars
And stars hung under a sea.
And a sun far off in a shell of silence
Dapples my walls for me.
It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
Should I not pause in the light to remember God?
Upright and firm I stand on a star unstable,
He is immense and lonely as a cloud.
I will dedicate this moment before my mirror
To him alone, and for him I will comb my hair.
Accept these humble offerings, cloud of silence!
I will think of you as I descend the stair.
Vine leaves tap my window,
The snail-track shines on the stones,
Dew-drops flash from the chinaberry tree
Repeating two clear tones.
It is morning, I awake from a bed of silence,
Shining I rise from the starless waters of sleep.
The walls are about me still as in the evening,
I am the same, and the same name still I keep.
The earth revolves with me, yet makes no motion,
The stars pale silently in a coral sky.
In a whistling void I stand before my mirror,
Unconcerned, and tie my tie.
There are horses neighing on far-off hills
Tossing their long white manes,
And mountains flash in the rose-white dusk,
Their shoulders black with rains.
It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And surprise my soul once more;
The blue air rushes above my ceiling,
There are suns beneath my floor.
…It is morning, Senlin says, I ascend from darkness
And depart on the winds of space for I know not where,
My watch is wound, a key is in my pocket,
And the sky is darkened as I descend the stair.
There are shadows across the windows, clouds in heaven,
And a god among the stars; and I will go
Thinking of him as I might think of daybreak
And humming a tune I know.
Vine leaves tap at the window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.
This is the “Morning Song of Senlin” in the long sequence “Senlin: A Biography.” Senlin is Aiken’s alter ego, as Robinson was Weldon Kees’s, but though Senlin’s destiny is cloudy he is a far gentler daemon. His morning song haunts my current hard dawns as I study my countenance in the mirror, small and white, approaching eighty-eight. I cannot say that I pause in the dawn light to remember God, though uneasily mortality hovers.
Aiken never quite got over Edgar Allan Poe, whose cadences obtrude when I chant Senlin’s morning song. Except at his very best, Aiken can be a kind of echo chamber. As his partisan, I turn to his grandeur in the five-part poem “Tetélestai,” whose title refers to the final words of Jesus from the Cross: “It is finished.” “Tetélestai” contrasts to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, also composed
by 1922:
I
How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?
Is there a horn we should not blow as proudly
For the meanest of us all, who creeps his days,
Guarding his heart from blows, to die obscurely?
I am no king, have laid no kingdoms waste,
Taken no princes captive, led no triumphs
Of weeping women through long walls of trumpets;
Say rather, I am no one, or an atom;
Say rather, two great gods, in a vault of starlight,
Play ponderingly at chess, and at the game’s end
One of the pieces, shaken, falls to the floor
And runs to the darkest corner; and that piece
Forgotten there, left motionless, is I…
Say that I have no name, no gifts, no power,
Am only one of millions, mostly silent;
One who came with eyes and hands and a heart,
Looked on beauty, and loved it, and then left it.
Say that the fates of time and space obscured me,
Led me a thousand ways to pain, bemused me,
Wrapped me in ugliness; and like great spiders
Dispatched me at their leisure…Well, what then?
Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,
The horns of glory blowing above my burial?
All of us confronting finality desire somehow trumpets of glory sounding above our funerals. Poets in particular want to be remembered by devoted readers. All his long career, Aiken labored vainly to find more than a small audience. At dinner he said to me, “They think I am already dead.” He was seventy-four and died a decade later in relative obscurity. Eliot said that The Waste Land was a personal lament taken up by others as a vision of cultural decline. Powerful as its negations were and are, I long for the accent of the High Sublime, as here, in the second section of “Tetélestai”:
II
Morning and evening opened and closed above me:
Houses were built above me; trees let fall
Yellowing leaves upon me, hands of ghosts;
Rain has showered its arrows of silver upon me
Seeking my heart; winds have roared and tossed me;
Music in long blue waves of sound has borne me
A helpless weed to shores of unthought silence;
Time, above me, within me, crashed its gongs
Of terrible warning, sifting the dust of death;
And here I lie. Blow now your horns of glory
Harshly over my flesh, you trees, you waters!
You stars and suns, Canopus, Deneb, Rigel,
Let me, as I lie down, here in this dust,
Hear, far off, your whispered salutation!
Roar now above my decaying flesh, you winds,
Whirl out your earth-scents over this body, tell me
Of ferns and stagnant pools, wild roses, hillsides!
Anoint me, rain, let crash your silver arrows
On this hard flesh! I am the one who named you,
I lived in you, and now I die in you.
I your son, your daughter, treader of music,
Lie broken, conquered…Let me not fall in silence.
Aiken remembers Robert Browning’s salute to Shelley as the Sun-treader in Pauline:
Sun-treader—life and light be thine for ever;
Thou art gone from us….
As another treader of music, Aiken scarcely hopes that life and light will be his forever, but however harsh the horns of glory blow over his flesh, he yearns at least for a whispered salutation. I myself have never written a poem, yet as an exegete I would hesitate to implore: Let me not fall in silence. The dark secret of self, which is universal, gives impetus to the third section:
III
I, the restless one; the circler of circles;
Herdsman and roper of stars, who could not capture
The secret of self; I who was tyrant to weaklings,
Striker of children; destroyer of women; corrupter
Of innocent dreamers, and laugher at beauty; I,
Too easily brought to tears and weakness by music,
Baffled and broken by love, the helpless beholder
Of the war in my heart of desire with desire, the struggle
Of hatred with love, terror with hunger; I
Who laughed without knowing the cause of my laughter, who grew
Without wishing to grow, a servant to my own body;
Loved without reason the laughter and flesh of a woman,
Enduring such torments to find her! I who at last
Grow weaker, struggle more feebly, relent in my purpose,
Choose for my triumph an easier end, look backward
At earlier conquests; or, caught in the web, cry out
In a sudden and empty despair, “Tetélestai!”
Pity me, now! I, who was arrogant, beg you!
Tell me, as I lie down, that I was courageous.
Blow horns of victory now, as I reel and am vanquished.
Shatter the sky with trumpets above my grave.
The trumpet of a prophecy cannot be sounded by Aiken. He is more in the mode of Walt Whitman in “Elemental Drifts”:
From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell;
Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil;
Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown;
A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at random;
Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature;
Just as much, whence we come, that blare of the cloud-trumpets…
To shatter the sky with trumpets is Shelleyan and Whitmanian but hardly within the compass of Aiken. I chant section III of “Tetélestai” to myself and think, of my life, that it is consumed. Some of us are courageous, some are not. We look back and wonder if it was courage. Aiken never went into the stupidity of battle, but few of my acquaintance came back from it enhanced. Summoning himself at the Christological age of thirty-three, Aiken is tempted to accept a total defeat:
IV
…Look! this flesh how it crumbles to dust and is blown!
These bones, how they grind in the granite of frost and are nothing!
This skull, how it yawns for a flicker of time in the darkness,
Yet laughs not and sees not! It is crushed by a hammer of sunlight,
And the hands are destroyed…Press down through the leaves of the jasmine,
Dig through the interlaced roots—nevermore will you find me;
I was no better than dust, yet you cannot replace me…
Take the soft dust in your hand—does it stir: does it sing?
Has it lips and a heart? Does it open its eyes to the sun?
Does it run, does it dream, does it burn with a secret, or tremble
In terror of death? Or ache with tremendous decisions?…
Listen!…It says: “I lean by the river. The willows
Are yellowed with bud. White clouds roar up from the south
And darken the ripples; but they cannot darken my heart,
Nor the face like a star in my heart…Rain falls on the water
And pelts it, and rings it with silver. The willow trees glisten,
The sparrows chirp under the eaves; but the face in my heart
Is a secret of music…I wait in the rain and am silent.”
Listen again!…It says: “I have worked, I am tired,
The pencil dulls in my hand: I see through
the window
Walls upon walls of windows with faces behind them,
Smoke floating up to the sky, an ascension of sea-gulls.
I am tired. I have struggled in vain, my decision was fruitless,
Why then do I wait? with darkness, so easy, at hand!…
But tomorrow, perhaps…I will wait and endure till tomorrow!…”
Or again: “It is dark. The decision is made. I am vanquished
By terror of life. The walls mount slowly about me
In coldness. I had not the courage. I was forsaken.
I cried out, was answered by silence…Tetélestai!…”
The terror of life can exceed the fear of dying. Silence, being unfallen, cannot give answers we understand. Transported as I am by “Tetélestai,” I sorrow at its fifth and final section:
V
Hear how it babbles!—Blow the dust out of your hand,
With its voices and visions, tread on it, forget it, turn homeward
With dreams in your brain…This, then, is the humble, the nameless,—
The lover, the husband and father, the struggler with shadows,
The one who went down under shoutings of chaos, the weakling
Who cried his “forsaken!” like Christ on the darkening hilltop!…
This, then, is the one who implores, as he dwindles to silence,
A fanfare of glory…And which of us dares to deny him?
Voices and visions, the high endowment of true poetry, blow away into Adamic dust. Eliot in The Waste Land opens “What the Thunder Said” with a very different evocation of the forsaken Christ:
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Though Eliot’s formal conversion came five years later, in 1927 his ethos was neo-Christian almost from the start. Aiken, always a skeptic, parodied Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” in section LXI of Preludes for Memnon: