Sobs and sobs,
while under the Atlantic
Depth and Darkness grieve among the fountains,
And the fountains weep out the grieving sea.
* * *
O listen, the steam engines shunt and switch
Asleep in their grieving. A sad family
In the next house over shifts mournfully
About staining the dim blind. The boy looks up
As the grieving sound of his own begetting
Keeps on,
And his willow mother mars her mirror
Of the lake with tears.
* * *
It is cold and snowing
And the snow is falling into the river.
On the bridge, lit by the white shadow of
The Wrigley Building,
A small woman wrapped in an old blue coat
Staggers to the rail weeping.
* * *
As I remember,
The same boy passes, announcing the fame
Of tears, calling out the terms
In a clear way, translating to the long
Dim human avenue.
“The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River” presents a world made from tears. It’s as if God, who is noticeably absent from the poem, had created a universe that does nothing else but weep, a universe of lamentation. We are now inhabiting some surreal or inverted version of Genesis. And yet, as Tom Lutz points out in Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears, weeping is an exclusively human activity. We are the only species that cries for emotional reasons. Indeed, crying is a human universal. Grossman’s poem therefore projects onto the cosmos a distinctively human feeling. It is an act of catharsis.
It’s worth pointing out that there isn’t much crying going on in modernist poetry, which cultivated aesthetic rigor and control, ironic distance. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, for example, were highly defended against too much feeling in poetry, which they considered sentimental and effeminate. Masculinist styles also emphasized stoicism. There is not much stoicism in Grossman’s wet lyric, however, which enacts a late Romantic alternative to a dry modernist aesthetic. It proposes a different idea about masculinity and feeling. It has a maternal source.
The title declares that this poem is going to be about a woman standing on a bridge overlooking the Chicago River. She is placed in a suspended or liminal position. But the supposed subject doesn’t come back into the poem until the penultimate stanza: “A small woman wrapped in an old blue coat / Staggers to the rail weeping.” It’s not until the poem heads toward its conclusion that we understand how the whole universe of sadness has finally come back down to her.
Everything is keening. There is a startling beauty in the opening image of this poem: “Stars are tears falling with light inside.” Falling stars may be tears—a sadness dropping from above—but they also have a brightness within. Notice the odd, rhetorical interpolations in the next two sentences: “In the moon, they say, is a sea of tears. / It is well known that the world weeps.” The speaker is bringing in a community of other people to concur that the stars, the moon, the wind, and the sea are all crying. The tears falling from the sky above the bridge join with the tears flowing below it. The speaker suggests that this is something all of us intuitively understand.
The second stanza unites cormorants weeping from cliffs, a gnat weeping as it crosses through the air of a room, and a moth weeping in the eye of a lamp. The weeping carries on inside houses too. It is everywhere. Think of the psalm-like or spiritual declaration “Each leaf is a soul in tears.” It’s as if there is a soul in all living things, as the Neoplatonists believed, and each soul grieves to be united with the whole. The third stanza suggests that this weeping continues to be fresh and yet it is as old as time, as death itself. The mourning never gets old: “A million years does not take off the freshness / Of the calling.”
Every sentence in this poem is a declaration. In the fourth stanza, philosophical abstractions and ideas also begin to weep. Wisława Szymborska may have apologized to these abstractions in her poem “Under One Small Star,” but Allen Grossman observes them crying. William Blake stated, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” In Grossman’s revision, Time is also weeping in Eternity’s arms. Being grieves, presumably because it must die, but Nothing also grieves, presumably because it does not exist. It’s as if the concepts, which take on life, could sadly intermingle breaths. We don’t usually think of ideas as having feelings, but here a mournfulness undergirds them: “And from all ideas / Hot tears irrepressible.” Thinking itself becomes a form of weeping.
Most autobiographical and epiphanic poems begin with the literal and move into the visionary. They situate us in a place and time and then shift into some other timeless realm. That’s the Wordsworthian strategy in such poems as Anthony Hecht’s “A Hill,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” and James Wright’s “A Blessing.” But Grossman reverses the mode. He begins in the high visionary mode and turns to the autobiographical content, or the seemingly autobiographical content, only in the second half of the poem.
There is a tent where Being and Nothing turn away from each other yet intermingle, and it is in this same tent that we find a small boy wearing a coat and sobbing uncontrollably. We do not know who the boy is, but we do learn that he is crying while the large allegorical figures of Depth and Darkness are grieving “among the fountains, / And the fountains weep out the grieving sea.” His crying is underpinned by all the grief under the Atlantic Ocean. This poem shuttles repeatedly between intimacy and expansiveness, between the miniature and the gigantic.
“O listen,” the speaker cries out, and part of what we listen to is a thicket of s sounds: “the steam engines shunt and switch / Asleep in their grieving.” It’s as if he himself is surprised to find himself in a city of trains. We observe a sorrowful family, presented in the third person, who are weeping so badly that their tears stain the blinds. We witness a boy who hears the sad sound of his own “begetting,” a word with an almost biblical feeling. The boy grieves, and goes on grieving, over his own birth, that primal separation, and so does his “willow mother.” The poet doesn’t say “willowy mother,” which would suggest her shape, but “willow mother,” which makes her nearly a mythological creature, part tree, part person. The repetition of the letter m slowly sounds out what is happening, how the “mother mars her mirror / Of the lake with tears.”
Grossman continues to move from the universal to the local, from the general to the particular, in the next-to-last stanza, where we are once more reminded that the poem is situated in downtown Chicago. The stanza sets the scene in the present tense, in winter: “It is cold and snowing / And the snow is falling into the river.” The mysterious woman—we have been waiting for her to show up all along—now appears on the bridge, which is lit by the large white shadow of the Wrigley Building. The last stanza turns from the present to the past and marks this scene as a personal memory:
As I remember,
The same boy passes, announcing the fame
Of tears, calling out the terms
In a clear way, translating to the long
Dim human avenue.
At the end of the poem, the woman on the bridge becomes in some sense the speaker’s mother. The speaker himself becomes the boy. This is an archetypal situation. One of the stranger things that Grossman told the poet Mark Halliday, in their stimulating conversations published as The Sighted Singer, is that he considers it a commonplace that persons write poems for their mothers. He said, “My poetry is, in the most literal sense, the speech of my mother, or rather, the completion of the speech of my mother.” He embraces an idea, which would seem extreme even for Freud, that a son’s poetic work fulfills his mother’s spoken and unspoken desires. “The sense in which my poetry is organized to justify hope goes deep back into a personal history of intimacy, of a mother who was restlessly and in some sense destructively dissatisfied with the world around her. The prolon
gation and, as it were, consummation of her will toward a golden world is as voracious an account as I can give of my motive to art.” In “The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River,” the poet vows to complete the weeping speech of his mother, his first beloved.
One implication of Grossman’s thinking is that poetry originates with our mothers, who first gave us speech, the texture of sounds, our mother tongue. They gave us the words that became our world and, in the process, sentenced us to ourselves. The maternal origin thus points to the “source of the world, the deep source of art, the point of intersection between nothing and something; both for myself as an individual, as the mother is, and myself as the member of a cosmos which did itself have a beginning.” The mother is thus both an individual person and a larger principle of inception and parentage.
Grossman also noted that the speaker in “The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River” vows to write a book against our vanishing. He rebels against our mortal forgetfulness. The phrase “the fame / Of tears” evokes the traditional dream of eternal Fame, a longstanding literary ideal that goes back to ancient Greece, to Homer and to Theogenes, who promised his beloved that she would be “known / To people of all time, your name imperishable.” In a sense, the speaker of this poem remembers the boy who is “calling out the terms” and vows to translate it into human speech. What he remembers is a monumental sadness, the sadness of mother and son, a grief with a depth beyond reason, and he vows to forever memorialize it in a visionary poem.
We read poems for all sorts of reasons—to be challenged, disturbed, consoled, recognized. We look to poetry for articulations, for knowledge. It is inevitable that we also ask What is poetry for? Allen Grossman answers this question with firm resolve: “Poetry is a principle of power invoked by all of us against our vanishing.”
Anthony Hecht
* * *
“The Book of Yolek”
(1981)
In 1945, Anthony Hecht was a twenty-two-year old private in the US Army’s Ninety-Seventh Infantry Division when he participated in the liberation of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. By the time his unit arrived to help free the camp, more than thirty thousand people had died there, and the SS personnel had fled. Prisoners were dying from typhus at the rate of five hundred a day. As Hecht explained in a book-length interview with Philip Hoy:
Since I had the rudiments of French and German, I was appointed to interview such French prisoners as were well enough to speak, in the hope of securing evidence against those who ran the camp. Later, when some of these were captured, I presented them with the charges leveled against them, translating their denials or defenses back into French for the sake of their accusers, in an attempt to get to the bottom of what was done and who was responsible.
Hecht found the whole experience “inexpressibly horrible” and was forever changed by what he witnessed in a remote area of northeastern Bavaria. Later, he tried to come to terms with the totality of what was done and who was responsible in a group of formally crafted, emotionally intense Holocaust poems, which includes “Rites and Ceremonies,” “ ‘More Light! More Light!,’” “It Out-Herods Herod, Pray You Avoid It,” “Persistences,” and “The Book of Yolek.”
“The Book of Yolek” is a sestina with a sacred or religious feeling. It reads like one of the lost or apocryphal books of the Bible. A small boy has perished and refuses to be forgotten. The German epigraph is Martin Luther’s translation of a verse in the Gospel of John (19:7), which translates as “We have a law, / And by that law he must die.” In the Gospel, the demand is attributed to the Jews who sought the death of Jesus. But Hecht ironically lifts the statement from its original context and uses it as an epigraph, where it now constitutes the German justification for killing children, including one named Yolek.
The Book of Yolek
Wir haben ein Gesetz,
Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben.
The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail, it doesn’t matter where to,
Just so you’re weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.
* * *
You remember, peacefully, an earlier day
In childhood, remember a quite specific meal:
A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk;
More than you dared admit, you thought of home;
No one else knows where the mind wanders to.
* * *
The fifth of August, 1942.
It was morning and very hot. It was the day
They came at dawn with rifles to The Home
For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal
Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk
In close formation off to a special camp.
* * *
How often you have thought about that camp,
As though in some strange way you were driven to,
And about the children, and how they were made to walk,
Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn’t a day
Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal
And shamble between armed guards to his long home.
* * *
We’re approaching August again. It will drive home
The regulation torments of that camp
Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal,
The electric fences, the numeral tattoo,
The quite extraordinary heat of the day
They were all forced to take that terrible walk.
* * *
Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day,
And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp.
Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too.
His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.
* * *
Prepare to receive him in your home some day.
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you’re sitting down to a meal.
Hecht marshals the form of the sestina to enact a kind of walk. An intricate verse form created and mastered by the Provençal poets, the sestina is a thirty-nine-line poem consisting of six six-line stanzas and one three-line envoi (or “send-off”). The six end-words of the first stanza are repeated, in a prescribed order, as end-words in each of the subsequent stanzas. The concluding tercet includes all six of the end-words. One feature of the form is its tendency to generate a narrative even as it circles back on itself as the end-words recur. It has a sense of expansiveness but also a sense of compulsive returning.
It is evident from “The Book of Yolek” that Hecht had been thinking seriously about the sestina as a form. He was trying to figure out how it operates, to achieve maximum impact. This formal preoccupation is confirmed in one of his letters: “And it occurred to me that because of the persistent reiteration of those terminal words, over and over in stanza after stanza, the sestina seemed to lend itself especially well to a topic felt obsessively, unremittingly.”
“The Book of Yolek” has a few explicit sources. One was a memorable photograph from the Warsaw ghetto, which Hecht describes: “It’s of a small boy, perhaps five or six, wearing a shabby peaked hat and short pants, his hands raised and a bewildered, forlorn look on his face as he gazes off at something to the side of the camera, while behind him uniformed, helmeted soldiers keep their rifles trained on him, as one of them looks directly at the camera without the least expression of embarrassment.”
Hecht also said that the poem derived from Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa’s fictionalized account of the last walk of the Jewish educator Janusz Korczak, who witnessed the deportation of the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto (he called it “The dis
trict of the damned!”) and tried to stop the liquidation of children’s homes and orphanages. Among the children were “little Hanka with lung trouble, Yolek who was ill . . .” The sixty-four-year-old Korczak, whose health had been ruined, refused to part with more than two hundred children and adolescents from the Children’s Home, who were in his charge, and he insisted on going with them to their deaths in the Treblinka extermination camp. New evidence suggests that Mortkowicz-Olczakowa’s account, which begins, “The day was Wednesday, 5th August, 1942, in the morning,” is highly romanticized. The truth was far darker. But Hecht’s ruthless formal and moral scrupulousness avoids the trap of sentimentalizing Korczak’s last walk and promising Yolek and his classmates “eternal glory.”
“The Book of Yolek” is written in a skillfully varied, seemingly effortless blank verse. The poem begins deceptively, at a leisurely pace. It is addressed to a “you,” using the second person, which creates a sense of intimacy, of someone talking to himself. It’s a way for the poet to speak to himself as well as to someone else. We feel invited in. This effect is heightened by the present tense. The first stanza is one sentence that ambles across six lines. The speaker is camping out. The coals are still hot after a fresh meal—is there an intimation of what’s to come in the way they “fume and hiss”?—as he saunters off for a walk amid the midsummer hills at twilight. It’s all quite lovely. This feeling is clinched in the alliterative repetition of the letter d in the last line: “In the deep bronze glories of declining day.” The reader who knows German will have picked up a darkness lurking in the epigraph, but otherwise we have no idea what the true subject of this poem is going to be.
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 25