by Mary Oliver
In "The Fall of the House of Usher," the gloomy mansion itself takes on the look of a face, with its "vacant and eye-like windows." The same face makes its grim appearance in the poem "The Haunted Palace." In the tale "William Wilson," on the other hand, such play of eye correspondence is significantly lacking; the two William Wilsons of the story are, of course, one person.
Neither does the flash of the eye, luminous or overcast, play a role in "The Pit and the Pendulum."
At length, with a wild desperation at heart, I quickly unclosed my eyes. My worst thoughts, then, were confirmed. The blackness of eternal night encompassed me.
Underneath its ropes and rats, its tensions and extraordinary machineries, "The Pit and the Pendulum" is the story of the soul struggling with the tortures of an indifferent universe. It is a tale of unmatchable horror—as it is equally a tale of all but unmatchable endurance. In the context of Poe's work as a whole, both the "eternal night" and the narrator's solitude are elements that make of the pit's chamber an even more terrible tableau. In the blackness of the pit there is nothing—and no one. Not even the eye with the blue veil.
4
It is not hard to recognize Poe's many narrators as a single sensibility, as one character, and to see this character as other than rational. He is a man of nervous temperament; he is capable of great love, loyalty, grief, of "wild excitement" (a recurring phrase); he owns a strange and unfettered imagination. His enterprise is to challenge and dissolve a particular fact or circumstance that represents the natural order of things—specifically, deaths irreversibility. He therefore seeks to understand the world in a way that will disprove such circumstance. Discovering a "different" world assumes experiencing manifestations of that different world. To begin, then, it is necessary to disassociate from the world as it is ordinarily experienced. And, not casually. He must unstring the universe to its farthest planet and star, and restring it in another way.
His posture is transcendentalism, of the nineteenth-century Germanic variety. The possibilities of alchemy, mesmerism, occultism, appeal to him. He is no Orpheus, begging an exception and a second chance, but rather—I mean from his own view—a visionary. To change his own fate, he would change our comprehension of the entire world.
The question of madness is always present. The actions of the narrator are often recognizably insane. But the definitions of madness and rationality have been thrown here into the wind; in Poe's stories, such states are uncertainly bordered areas in, which, suddenly, ghosts walk. "Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence," the narrator says in "Eleonora."
Illness, as well, is a presence, an excuse for clearly inexcusable actions. The narrator in "Berenice" is named Agaeus, a word wondrously close to "aegis," which, in English schools, is a term meaning a note that signifies sickness as an excuse. It is an uncommon term, but Poe, who went to school in England for five years while the Allans were living in London, no doubt knew it.
Upon the wing of such pure or near madness, the effort toward re-visioning goes on. The mind deranged, by alcohol, opium or morphine, or insanity, sees a world differently from the sane and the sober— but, in fact, it does see a world. Poe's narrators drink furiously and, when they can get it, they take into their bodies the white powder opium; thus they lean, trembling, against the walls of ordinary perception. And thus, over and over, with "wild excitement," they "swoon" out of this world.
To swoon is not only to pass from consciousness physically; it may also represent a willingness, even an eagerness, to experience unknown parts of life—obscure regions that might lead one toward a re-visioning. One swoons for many reasons and from many causes—from fever, sheer fright, extreme agitation, from exertion or exhaustion. The effects of opium and alcohol alone, in sufficient doses, will also bring on a kind of swooning; one leaves the realm of the rational and the known for that shapeless, unmapped region of "seeming." What is certain in the rational realm is by no means certain in the kingdom of swoon. And though nothing in that dark kingdom is provable, neither can its nonexistence be proven. If nothing there is solid to the hand, it is solid enough to the mind, and upon that smallest beginning the need of the mind builds.
Poe's fascination with enclosed space (the brain shape) as pit, maelstrom, catacomb, ballroom (in "Hop-Frog"), and the many chambers and turrets of castles, reaches a curious pitch in a piece called "Philosophy of Furniture." Here Poe describes, in intense and elaborate detail, his "favorite room." The description is obsessional. Here are carpets and curtains in mute and lustrous colors, paintings, furniture, giltwork and fringe, draperies, mirrors, Sèvres vases, candelabra; we are given not only their exact shapes and colors but their precise placement within the room. It is a room where "repose speaks in all." Yet it is not a bedroom—there is no bed here for sleeping on in the ordinary way of well-earned and deep rest. There are two sofas and, upon one, says Poe, the proprietor lies asleep. But it is sleep as Poe most sought and valued it—not for the sake of rest, but for escape. Sleep, too, is a kind of swooning out of this world.
5
Poe's work is exquisitely and opulently constructed; the narratives have a fascination that is a sure-hold—a quality that, for lack of another word, one might simply call entertainment. They are frightening—but not in the way that Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," for example, or James's "The Turn of the Screw" is frightening. In spite of the extreme and macabre symbolism in Kafka's story, both "The Metamorphosis" and "The Turn of the Screw" take place in a world uncomfortably familiar, and the stories unfold, both of them, in a terrifyingly low-key, unextraordinary way. They are, horribly and unmistakably, descriptions of life as we know it, or could easily know it. While Poe's stories are—stories. Full of the hardware of the nightmare—graves, corpses, storms, moldering castles, catacombs—and hovering always at the edge of tension and incredulity, they never fail to thrill as stories.
But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true, part of the composite human record—that is, not words but a reality.
Poe's work opens on this deeper level when we consider what we know about his life. Such consideration is a tricky business. In our own age such investigation and correspondence is, I think, grossly overdone; hardly a literary melancholy these days is explained in any terms but those of personal grievance. But Poe's case is exceptional. Life-grief was his earliest and his deepest life experience. Not to wonder how deeply it shaped his outlook and his work is to miss something sharply sorrowful, and deeply valiant.
But let us consider the matter in yet another way. Poe's inability to incorporate loss and move on was not a response born of his experience alone, but was also an invention, an endlessly repeatable dark adventure created by his exceedingly fertile mind. For Poe, in an artistically kaleidoscopic brilliance, does not write only about his own argument with the universe, but about everyone's argument.
For are we not all, at times, exactly like Poe's narrators—beating upon the confining walls of circumstance, the limits of the universe? In spiritual work, with good luck (or grace), we come to accept life's brevity for ourselves. But the lover that is in each of us—the part of us that adores another person—ah! that is another matter.
In the mystery and the energy of loving, we all view time's shadow upon the beloved as wretchedly as any of Poe's narrators. We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestation of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us. This is Poe's real story. As it is
ours. And this is why we honor him, why we are fascinated far past the simple narratives. He writes about our own inescapable destiny.
His words and his valor are all he has, and they are stunning. When in "The Masque of the Red Death" the stranger who is really nothing but an empty cloak enters and slays the Prince, it is Poe and it is ourselves with him who rush forward and batter hopelessly against that incomprehensibility, with our frail fists, with "the wild courage of despair."
A Man Named Frost
IN THE LYRICAL POEMS of Robert Frost there is almost always something wrong, a dissatisfaction or distress. The poet attempts an explanation and a correction. He is not successful. But he has, often in metaphoric language, named whatever it is that disquiets him. At the same time, in the same passages, the poem is so pleasant—so very pleasant—to read or to hear.
In fact we are hearing two different messages: everything is all right, say the meter and the rhyme; everything is not all right, say the words. This makes of the poem a complex discourse, although it is not felt to be so by the general public, who hear and feel more emphatically than they comprehend. Frost, it is believed by the thousands who love his work, is easily understandable; he is clear, musical, and bittersweet; in poem after poem he is felt to be rejoicing, if in a rather sad way, over the affairs of the world, especially the natural world.
I do not find that he rejoices at all. "What feels like rejoicing is the manner in which Frost describes the indifference and, just as attentively, the prettiness of the world. He does this through exact and often emblematic description, and by his habit of pausing—in fields, on hillsides, by woods. There is everywhere in Frost a sense that a man has time to look at things, to think and to feel. This, indeed, is the important Frostian work. But still, for all the world is full of handsome (or winsome, or profound) places, the speaker—this speaker, anyway—cannot unstick himself from his discomfort.
And the distress is never of the moment, but lifelong. It is philosophical and unsolvable. "Life," the poems seem to say, "is a descent. It is full of intimate and memorable details, but they are mutable, all of them, and woe is only followed in its course by more, and worse." This is the message I get from Frost, in poem after poem.
But: that reliable and easily accessible tone of the poets voice! That steady iambic! Those rhymes, comforting as handshakes! That diction so familiar to us all! Frost is eminently recognizable. The meditations, contemplations, devotions, revelations, outcries and love laments are uttered plainly, always in Frost's unmistakable clear, heavy-hearted voice. And we do like that. We like that very much. We like the poet to be avuncular and familiar as well as magical. To recognize the voice is halfway to understanding what is being said. So we think.
For decades Frost was this country's most beloved and popular poet. He enjoyed this popularity, and it enhanced him. After the long succession of years without publication, without any sort of literary reputation, he could never get enough of it: recognition, a response from the crowd. Though he never lost the capacity to speak in a voice that was tender and vulnerable—it is the voice we hear in "Bereft" and "My November Guest" and "Nothing Gold Can Stay" and "To Earthward"—he added greatly to his range: wit, polish, humor, malice, snobbery, an assumption of political savvy and philosophical acumen became part of him. All this late and heavy blossoming changed his voice; it changed the man too, no doubt. The later poems—beginning with the volume West-Running Brook, say—less commonly have that sense of a private man working at the conflicts of his life, which in the first books we are exquisitely privileged to overhear. The poems become, in the later books, entertainments and pronouncements. It is as though Frost felt himself obliged, as a public man, to display a reasonable cheerfulness, whatever he felt privately.
We know a great deal about Frost's life, yet without all the certainties that would allow our final guesses and surmises to be more than that. It is always so—biography must gather the facts as it can, then take the risk of summation. Thus Frost, whose public image for years was of a loving and lovable man, becomes the surly husband and father, the unforgiving, impatient, overtly ambitious man, if we believe what we read. Maybe it is true; probably it is partly true. But we would spend our time more profitably in the texts of his poems than in the chapters of his life. Surely every poem, from Smart's "Jubilate Agno" to Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," is both experience and fabrication. We do not have the man, or at least we do not know for sure if or not we have him—we have his work. The voice of Frost's poems, whether or not it is Frost himself, is the voice of a man who finds life a trial, who finds the physical world handsome but fragile, who finds reality less than his expectation, who finds no easy solution to his desire for solitude and his longing for community, who finds love an agony, who finds no sweet that is not bonded to bitter.
Moreover, throughout Frost's work there is one element missing altogether, and that is rapture. Not in the early poems, not in the late poems, in which there is sometimes a real abundance of play and pleasure, do we find it. No brimming satisfaction, no mad happiness, no bodied or unbodied joy. Wit there is, and wonder, and reason, and some brief moments of tranquility, and much hope, and endless bearing up under the weight of a life. But the great height is not there. The sharp spilling of the soul into the whistling air—the pure spine-involved and organ-attached bliss—is not there.
Instead its opposite—despair, wed to fortitude—is the dense emotion at the center of Frosts work and, as he displays it, equally at the center of the harsh rural New England landscapes of his books. The hill wife cannot bear her loneliness and runs into the ferny woods and is never seen again. The white spider, in a web strung upon the white weed called the heal-all, snags and feasts on the white moth. An acquaintance with the night walks the empty street with an ever-unanswered longing for some human connection. The poet is haunted by: the road not taken, the restlessness of the rooted trees, the quick descent of natures gold, the peril of the runaway colt playing on the snowy hills, the desire for respite in the world of "easy wind and downy flake." In the dramatic poems, the hired man dies, the young boy whose hand is cut by the leaping buzz saw dies, the man whose feet were chopped in a factory accident settles for five hundred miserable dollars. And so on.
And all the while the language is as sweet as Herrick's, and the poems are deliciously formed. So often it seems Frost is about to float away upon a lilting cadence, or barge away in some desperate rage, and then he reins himself in; there is the wondrous restraint, the words that are rich and resonant: dark and dee p. And there is also that other restraint: the impending rhyme-match and the line length that must reach, but never overreach, its companions. Or if on a rare day lines are given small license, it will be by no more than a single stress; he will companion decasyllables with hendecasyllables, although this seems done more to sound out the elasticity of the vernacular than any letting down of the guard. As the left wall of his poems is strict, so is the right. In the issue of form, of what is built, declares the design of the Frost poem, we are sure, and secure. Whatever the painful and unresolved interior of the poem, the poet has kept his balance, and we can too. Balance, restraint, steadiness, a controlled and reasonable tongue, and an eye that never fails to see the beauty of things whatever else it sees—these are victories. Whatever disappointments and woe Frost felt, he rocked his way through them and made the perfect cages of his poems to hold them. He did not fall, and the poems do not fall. To all our great and fine poets we go for advisement, for some stay against the chaos of our own experience. This steadiness of design and sweetness of speech are Frost's gift to us.
But they are not the whole gift. Frost's prickly grief and his disconsolation must be added to them before we can understand the gift entire. A hundred times Frost's misery, absolutely his misery, catches up some merry sparkle. A hundred times he sinks, and yet again opens his eyes to the stars. Yes, one must embrace the darkness with the light to get all of Frost's gift. For it seems he could not hear the trill of the
trees without the cry of the root, or see the golden leaves but with the sign of their death nearby, or witness easy wind and downy flake apart from the huge, cold, indifferent gears of nature spewing them out.
My November Guest
My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
Robert Frost
From A Boy's Will
The Poem as Prayer, the Prayer as Ornament: Gerard Manley Hopkins
IN GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS'S world of Christian faith and Jesuit rigor there exists always the incomparable gift of Christ's love and sacrifice; it is the model for everything. And there is also ever present the story of Mary: her mercy and her power of intercession. Between these two presences Hopkins's poems praise and leap, praise and shiver, praise and kneel, praise and self-condemn. It is a poetry of rapture and pain, of the perfection of God and the awkwardnesses and imperfections of the poet.