The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.
The speaker in Hugo’s poem digs in and finds consolation, light. He responds to the second line of the poem (“Say your life broke down”) with a recognition that the car still runs—and so does your life. The money may be mined elsewhere, but it can still buy things here. There is a faint tinge of the erotic in his vision of the slender waitress whose hair provides a luminous light on the wall. The world can still be lit from within.
It turns out that Richard Hugo, for all his despair, was also a poet of gritty optimism.
Stephen Berg
* * *
“On This Side of the River”
(1975)
Stephen Berg had an idiosyncratic voice—forthright, nervous, intimate, self-questioning. One might call him a confessional poet except he kept emptying out and interrogating the self that is the basis of that mode, which he felt was too narrowly interpreted. He wrote in the wake of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Eliot’s Four Quartets, Lowell’s Life Studies. He demanded utter authenticity in art—individuality of feeling, depth of sincerity. He was a fragmented postconfessional, a spiritual seeker, a poetic magpie, an antic skeptic, an agnostic Jew who kept looking for justice, for wisdom, and for God, who inevitably disappointed him.
Berg treated poetry as a soul-making activity, and one of the striking things about his poems, which are so intimate, is that they are also so oddly literary. He was a devoted reader. He read as a poet reads—avidly, intuitively, unreasonably. He experienced poetry on his pulse, and other people’s work stimulated much of his best work. He consistently turned other writers’ poems and stories to his own ends. They are interwoven into the fabric of his work. One might say that these figures delivered him to himself. He had a gift for fusion.
In 1969, Berg and Robert Mezey borrowed a phrase from the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez—poesia desnuda—for the title of their anthology Naked Poetry, which they followed seven years later with The New Naked Poetry. These anthologies of free-verse poetry in open forms followed their conviction that “the strongest and most alive poetry in America has broken the grip of traditional meters and had set out, once again, into ‘the wilderness of unopened life.’” That last phrase, which they borrowed from D. H. Lawrence’s essay on Walt Whitman (“Ahead of all poets, pioneering into the wilderness of unopened life, Whitman”), certainly marked Berg’s own path. He had a firm commitment to organic form and moved to eschew ornamentation, to let his poems “take shape from the shapes of their emotions.” At least that’s what he claimed. He also let them take shape from the shapes of other people’s work, which he translated and revised constantly. He craved contact, a Dante who kept seeking Virgilian guides. He was obsessive and went on his nerve.
Berg’s book Grief (1975) is a collection of poems with narrative values, lyrical perceptions, and psychological motives. His colloquial idiom and special mode—sometimes comic, sometimes tragic—is painstakingly clear. He employed it to ask large unanswerable questions. Here is a primary example, which begins with a haiku by the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828):
On This Side of the River
To Millie
Simply trust:
don’t the petals also flutter down
just like that?
—Issa
I undress and lie down next to you in bed
and throw one of my legs across yours, I wait
until you are completely lost
then slide my head on the pillow with yours.
Your hair gets caught in my teeth.
I stretch a little to rub my head against yours, so
gently neither of us can feel it,
my breath goes and returns with yours.
There is a moon. Clouds streak its face.
At this late hour by the river the cherry trees stand alone,
black tongueless sentinels
that report nothing.
Wind shakes the flowers that hang over the water,
on the other side families sit down to eat.
I know it.
Not one petal has been torn loose,
and I lie here with my hands on you, not moving,
seeing us today under the trees
sitting with our legs crossed facing each other, talking,
and try to remember what we said.
Get up. I want you to explain
what no couple has ever understood—
the silence, our two skins, the fact that one dies first.
One angry face the color of the
blossoms flashes up and leaves.
The moon pours in. I begin telling you about
my life like the cabdriver in the story
who plows all night through Moscow desperate
for someone to listen to him and winds up at dawn
standing under a streetlamp, snow chilling his mouth,
telling his horse how terrible life is because his
five-year-old son died yesterday, and not one passenger would listen,
pulling the nag’s ear down to his mouth, whispering deep
into it his unbearable story.
Berg first published this poem without the haiku and added the three lines from Issa when he reprinted it in his New and Selected Poems (1992). He had decided that he needed to start his own poem with the simple advice of another. It isn’t easy to “simply trust,” to put oneself in the hands of whatever fate comes. But, Issa asks, isn’t that how petals fall? Isn’t that how nature itself works?
The speaker in Berg’s poem, who is trying to take this lesson to heart, is some version of himself, a presumed person but not quite a full-fledged separate entity. Berg liked to blur the distance between the writer and speaker, to create the feeling of human warmth, the fiction of an actual presence. It’s the sort of move that Robert Lowell made in his poem “Night Sweat.”
Listen to the relaxed opening:
I undress and lie down next to you in bed
and throw one of my legs across yours, I wait
until you are completely lost
then slide my head on the pillow with yours.
We are present to the casual intimacy here, the telling detail (“Your hair gets caught in my teeth”), the close contact (“I stretch a little to rub my head against yours, so / gently neither of us can feel it, / my breath goes and returns with yours”). The address is so direct that it feels almost artless. It begins with a reference back to Issa’s haiku, to a moment of stopped time before the petal falls:
Not one petal has been torn loose,
and I lie here with my hands on you, not moving,
seeing us today under the trees
sitting with our legs crossed facing each other, talking
and try to remember what we said.
Get up. I want you to explain
what no couple has ever understood—
the silence, our two skins, the fact that one dies first.
The turn to his wife, Millie—“Get up. I want you to explain . . .”—is especially revealing because the speaker needs his spouse to talk to him, to tell him what he cannot come to terms with, which is that a husband and wife, two people who seem inextricably linked, are still ultimately separate despite their intimacy. They are mortal. But, of course, his wife is asleep, she is not talking at all—this is what he is secretly telling her. It is at this precise moment that the poet introduces Chekhov’s story “Grief.” The move is characteristic of Berg’s method. All the poems in the first section of Grief, for example
, are self-described as coming after Chekhov stories.
The moon pours in. I begin telling you about
my life like the cabdriver in the story
who plows all night through Moscow desperate
for someone to listen to him and winds up at dawn
standing under a streetlamp, snow chilling his mouth
telling his horse how terrible life is because his
five-year-old son died yesterday, and not one passenger would listen,
pulling the nag’s ear down to his mouth, whispering deep
into it his unbearable story.
The speaker recognizes his dependency here. The light pours in, he notes, a natural illumination. It also has a symbolic resonance, a sense of illumination. He knows that he can’t describe precisely what he means, his past, his secret life, his own grief. Instead he needs the Chekhov story, which gives its title to Berg’s volume, as a stand-in to talk about his own experience. He becomes like that desperate cabdriver, who is trying to tell an unacceptable story, to describe and alleviate his suffering. No one will listen to him but a poor unsuspecting animal.
Berg is seeking to capture an extreme feeling about life itself as it is lived and described, not over there, say, on the other side of the river, the transcendental side, the afterlife, but over here, on this side of the great divide, the earthly side. He has a palpable feeling of urgency. We feel ourselves listening to a man speaking to his sleeping wife. He is confessing some dreadful secret to her, to the ether—the subject is suffering—and to us, his future readers, his unseen listeners, who will someday overhear “his unbearable story.”
Philip Larkin
* * *
“Aubade”
(1977)
Philip Larkin essentially wrote from personal experience. His verbal antennae seemed precisely attuned to unhappiness. “Happiness writes white,” he often quipped, quoting the French novelist Henry de Montherlant, who stated that “happiness writes in white ink on a white page.” Larkin understood poetry as “emotional in nature and theatrical in operation.” His carefully honed style combined a self-deprecating, razorlike wit with an unshakable sense of worldly disappointment, of desires unfulfilled and dreams thwarted.
Larkin famously remarked to an interviewer, “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth,” which is both funny and acute, since the misery of diminished and unfulfilled experience is his enduring subject. The tone of sour majesty, of sardonic resignation infused with wordless romantic yearning, is something we might call Larkinesque. It is difficult to think of him as young—this man who seemed to have been born middle-aged, regretting a past that never took place and terrified of oncoming death.
Here is Larkin’s last truly great poem, which appeared in the Christmas issue of the Times Literary Supplement in 1977. One would be hard-pressed to find another poem that so purposefully upends and refutes the positive Christmas vision.
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
* * *
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—not wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness forever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
* * *
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none comes round.
* * *
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
* * *
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
Larkin’s “Aubade” is a terrifying spiritual confrontation with oblivion.
Remember that the aubade is traditionally a dawn song expressing the regret of lovers parting at daybreak. It has no fixed metrical form. It also typically recalls the joy of two lovers joined in original darkness. But there is no beloved at all in Larkin’s crossover poem at dawn, his anti-aubade, which has a precedent in bleak modern aubades with the same title by William Empson and Louis MacNeice. He establishes the sense of isolation right from the beginning. Instead of heralding the light at 4 a.m., “Aubade” is a dawn song that starts in darkness and sees only “Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, / Making all thought impossible but how / And where and when I shall myself die.”
Larkin wrote the first three stanzas of his poem in 1974, worked on it intermittently over the next three years, and finally completed it after his mother’s death in the fall of 1977. Christopher Fletcher relates it to John Betjeman’s poem “Before the Anaesthetic, or a Real Fright” and suggests that Larkin answers his friend’s question—“Is it extinction when I die?”—with a declaration about “The sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always.” Larkin’s letters are peppered with comments about his terror of the finality of death. He referred to “Aubade” as his “in-a-funk-about-death poem.” “Aubade,” he said, “the death thing, or rather ‘fear-of-death thing.’” He wrote to a friend, “I don’t know that I ever expected much of life, but it terrifies me to think it’s nearly over.” He said that he dreaded “endless extinction.”
There are times when the bleakness of Larkin’s message seems undercut by the technical poise and understated virtuosity of the poem, which consists of five exceptionally well-crafted ten-line stanzas. The rhyme scheme is ababccdeed. The poem unfolds in a fluent iambic pentameter, except for the penultimate foreshortened line, or half-line, which sets up the conclusive aperçu of each stanza. The language seems down to earth, close to speech, and yet somehow reaches greater heights of eloquence.
Larkin uses rhyme so tactically that it works as a strategic weapon. For example, he yokes “night” to “light,” “stare” to “there,” and “die” to “horrify”; he presses together “dread” and “dead,” “never” and “forever,” “here” and “anywhere.” The
re is grim merriment in the way he rhymes “afraid” and “brocade” and reduces the whole of religion to “That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.” The phrase “nothing to think with” leads with dark inevitability to the lilting line “Nothing to love or link with.” He takes the uplifting Yeatsian spiritual word “vision” and undercuts it with “indecision,” which echoes and inverts T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “And time yet for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions.” He undermines “brave” with “grave” and tunes “shape” to “escape.” He also expertly presses the consonants, like the d sounds in “yet the dread / Of dying, and being dead,” which is followed in the next line with the aspirated h sounds of “hold and horrify.” He uses alliteration to connect and cross lines, as in “time / Torn” and climb / Clear.” It is strange how the precision of certain rhymes and repetitions can still give us frissons of verbal pleasure even when the subject matter is so bleak.
Larkin was well known for his love of the blues. In a book called Larkin’s Blues, B. J. Leggett suggests that the first line of “Aubade” is a blues line: “I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.” It’s a line in the continuous present tense. He argues that “working and drinking are the common properties of the blues, drinking most often as a way of coping with despair.” So too the second line alludes to “one of the most common of all blues openings—‘woke up this morning’—but rephrasing it in nonblues language.”
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 22