The second stanza, which is divided neatly into two sentences, moves to the implied speaker’s childhood memory of being at summer camp: “You remember, peacefully . . .” He finds himself recalling the time he got lost on a hike and suddenly felt an unexpected fear and homesickness, more than he allowed himself to admit. The poem then turns on the line “No one else knows where the mind wanders to.”
Where the mind of the speaker abruptly wanders to, in fact, is a very particular day. Notice that Hecht doesn’t render it as “August 5, 1942,” but instead writes it out, “The fifth of August, 1942,” as in a formal document. The first line is a fragment, the second obsessively repeats the fateful timing: “It was morning . . .”; “It was the day . . .” Two things continue to happen throughout the rest of the poem. The story of five-year-old Yolek, and the other children forced to march to their fate, is narrated; we get a dramatic sense of their “terrible walk.” At the same time, there is always a person in the present tense recalling what happened. He is bedeviled and unable to forget. Hence the lines, which open the next three stanzas:
How often you have thought about that camp . . .
and
We’re approaching August again. It will drive home . . .
and
Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day . . .
Hecht’s poem has a quiet, hypnotic insistence. Sometimes this is delivered through anaphora (“Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn’t a day / Over five years old”), sometimes through consonance (“silent, solitary”), sometimes through changes in verb tense (“you were driven to”; “It will drive home”). But the fundamental formal achievement is the extremely adept use of the six end-words: “meal,” “walk,” “to,” “home,” “camp,” and “day.” Each of these words begins innocently enough but then takes on a much darker meaning over the course of the poem. Hecht finds multiple uses for “home,” “day,” “meal,” and “walk,” a word that serves as both a noun and a verb.
Take the word “camp.” It begins innocuously enough in the phrases “set up camp” and “summer camp.” But at the end of the third stanza and the beginning of the fourth, the word takes on an entirely different connotation: “In close formation off to a special camp. // How often you have thought about that camp.” This is the first time that we understand the word to mean “death camp.” Hecht is fulfilling the prescribed form and putting “camp” at the center of the poem. And we are experiencing the way a word migrates from innocence to horror.
Something equally transformative happens to the word “to,” which begins the poem as an inconsequential preposition but later becomes a consequential date, “1942,” and, even more haunting, part of the noun “tattoo.” It takes on a kind of inevitability as an adverb (“Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too”) and a dark fatefulness in the penultimate line (“Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to”).
The six end-words are ordained to come together in the final three lines. The envoi becomes an injunction. The speaker is still talking to himself, but now, very pointedly, he also seems to be addressing each of us. Reminiscent of Primo Levi’s poem “Shemà,” the envoi makes clear the Jewish injunction to remember the dead:
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.
Yolek has been transformed into a kind of Elijah figure. On Passover, Jews all over the world pour the prophet Elijah a cup of wine and open the door for him, inviting him to enter as a guest who will signal the advent of the Messiah. Thus far, Elijah has tarried and never come back. And neither has Yolek. At the end of Anthony Hecht’s testimonial poem, each of us is left at home, opening the door and sitting down to a meal, forever waiting for a murdered boy to return.
Zbigniew Herbert
* * *
“Mr Cogito and the Imagination”
(1983)
Zbigniew Herbert was an avant-garde classicist—a stubbornly idiosyncratic poet of isolation, disinheritance, and grief, a poet of “historical irony” (the phrase is Czesław Miłosz’s), continually confronting his own experience and juxtaposing it with that of the past, seeking grounds for what he called “universal compassion.” He deliberately cultivated a cool, economical, and anti-rhetorical style, dispensing with punctuation in his poems and eschewing grandiose effects.
Herbert was attracted to philosophy—he had a long correspondence with the Polish philosopher Henryk Elzenberg—and in the early 1970s he adopted the persona Pan Cogito, or Mr Cogito, his playful stand-in, whose name originated in Descartes’s famous Latin proposition Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Some of the Mr Cogito poems are written in the first person, others in the third person, but all of them give Herbert the wry perspective and distance of a figure who speaks both as himself and as someone else, a sort of Polish Everyman, who knows European philosophy. He has had Herbert’s life experiences. Mr Cogito is not a full-fledged dramatic persona, as in a poem by Robert Browning. He is a filter, or as the critic Hugh Kenner said about Eliot’s figure J. Alfred Prufrock, “a name plus a voice.”
Here is “Mr Cogito and the Imagination,” which appears in Report from a Besieged City (1983):
Mr Cogito and the Imagination
1
Mr Cogito has never trusted
the tricks of the imagination
* * *
the piano at the top of the Alps
played concerts false to his ear
* * *
he had no regard for labyrinths
the Sphinx filled him with disgust
* * *
he lived in a cellarless house
without mirrors or dialectics
* * *
jungles of tangled images
were never his homeland
* * *
he rarely got carried away
on the wings of a metaphor
he then plunged like Icarus
into the arms of the Great Mother
* * *
he adored tautologies
explanations
idem per idem
* * *
a bird is a bird
slavery slavery
a knife a knife
death is death
* * *
he loved
a flat horizon
a straight line
earth’s gravity
2
Mr Cogito
will be counted
among the species minores
* * *
he will receive indifferently
the verdict of men of letters
* * *
he employed the imagination
for wholly different purposes
* * *
he wanted to make of it
an instrument of compassion
* * *
he longed to understand fully
* * *
—Pascal’s night
—the nature of a diamond
—the prophets’ melancholy
—the wrath of Achilles
—the fury of mass murderers
—the dreams of Mary Stuart
—the fear of Neanderthals
—the last Aztecs’ despair
—Nietzsche’s long dying
—the Lascaux painter’s joy
—the rise and fall of an oak
—the rise and fall of Rome
* * *
in order to revive the dead
and maintain the covenant
* * *
Mr Cogito’s imagination
moves like a pendulum
* * *
it runs with great precision
from suffering to suffering
* * *
there is no place in it
for poetry’s artificial fires
* * *
he wants to be true
to uncertain clarity
(Translated by Alissa Valles)
Mr Cogito is a poet-philosopher and this is his aesthetic manifesto. It has a light touch and a serious purpose. The poem is divided into two parts. The first part lists some of the things that Mr Cogito distrusts, what he especially dislikes, what repels him. The second section points out some of the primary things that, by contrast, compel him. He recognizes that he is going against the grain of much twentieth-century thought, but he is determined to make his case for what he believes to be the true role and purpose of the imagination.
The poem begins with Mr Cogito’s innate skepticism, asserting that “Mr Cogito has never trusted / the tricks of the imagination,” and immediately takes a swipe at the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who coined the phrase “the piano in the Alps” (“After the Flood”) as an image for the Romantic sublime, music at its transcendental peak. The premise of Rimbaud’s image is that the artist is playing the music of the spheres, invoking some otherworldly power. Mr Cogito doesn’t elaborate or explain, but to him these concerts sound false.
Mr Cogito distrusts labyrinths, which have intricate corridors and secret passageways in which most people get completely lost, and he is disgusted by the Sphinx, a mythical creature with a human head and the body of a lion, presumably because, according to Greek legend, it devoured all travelers who could not decipher its riddle. Intellectually speaking, Mr Cogito doesn’t like mountaintops or basements; by implication he doesn’t trust the promise of secret knowledge, occult or labyrinthine thinking. He explicitly doesn’t like mirrors or “dialectics,” which suggests Hegelian or Marxist thinking. The implication is that one gets tied in knots trying to figure them out. The reader starts to detect an oppositional political undercurrent running through the poem.
Mr Cogito declares himself against Surrealism or Surrealist thinking—“jungles of tangled images / were never his homeland”—and metaphors that carry one away to another realm. He then purposefully mixes up metaphors and mythologies by stating that when he did get carried away “he then plunged like Icarus / into the arms of the Great Mother.” This is to say that he becomes like the son of Daedalus, who flies too close to the sun and pays for it with his life. The Great Mother is a reference to the psychologist Erich Neumann’s invocation of the Mother Goddess as an archetypal figure, and there is a subtle dig here at extravagant Jungian, or archetypal, interpretations of Greek myths.
What is Herbert so bothered about? Like many poems that we have been considering, “Mr Cogito and the Imagination” takes a key structural turn. It pivots in the seventh stanza with this statement: “he adored tautologies / explanations / idem per idem.” The legal term idem per idem means “the same for the same.” This is almost comically reductive, but it’s clear that Mr Cogito wants to keep things simple, even obvious. Herbert was supremely a poet of thought—self-questioning, philosophically self-conscious, a tragic post-Cartesian who recognized that fantasy can have a high price, that calling things by false names has ethical and political implications. He had lived through the political consequences of official Soviet lies—he wrote this poem during a period of martial law in Poland—and recognizes how crucial it is to question political double-speak, the so-called dialectics used to excuse totalitarian thinking. That’s why it’s so crucial to recognize that
a bird is a bird
slavery slavery
a knife a knife
death is death.
The poem rapidly changes categories—from a bird to slavery, from a knife to death—in order to unmask the concrete truth of things. There is something to be said, then, not just for intoxication but also for disenchantment in poetry. It is healthy to look out and see “a flat horizon / a straight line,” and to feel “earth’s gravity.” Herbert counters the impulse toward transcendence and brings us down to earth.
The second section of the poem begins by dryly observing that Mr Cogito knew that his position would force him to be counted “among the species minores”—that is, part of a lesser species. He accepts his literary fate and receives “indifferently / the verdict of men of letters.” Herbert was indifferent to aesthetic fashion and exemplary in his determination to treat the imagination as “an instrument of compassion.” He believed that it is essential for poetry to have humane ends in an inhumane world.
Here is the list of those things that Mr Cogito wanted to consider to the very end. It is a compelling catalog of subject rhymes:
—Pascal’s night
—the nature of a diamond
—the prophets’ melancholy
—the wrath of Achilles
—the fury of mass murderers
—the dreams of Mary Stuart
—the fear of Neanderthals
—the last Aztecs’ despair
—Nietzsche’s long dying
—the Lascaux painter’s joy
—the rise and fall of an oak
—the rise and fall of Rome
The list begins with “Pascal’s night,” the philosophical wager that human beings bet their lives on: whether or not God exists. It’s a metaphysical question. Think of what is called Pascal’s “night of fire,” that late night in November 1654 when the French scientist and skeptic had a dramatic encounter with God, which he then wrote down and sewed into the lining of his coat, his Memorial. This theological reference is followed by a puzzle about “the nature of a diamond,” the formation and miracle of an earthly gem. The poem has moved from the heavens to the earth. The prophets are melancholy because they know what is coming, what human beings are going to do to one another.
Herbert’s catalog moves from metaphysical questions to historical ones. Mr Cogito wants to know about the nature of religious faith and the miracle of nature, but he also wants to learn about the victims of history, both individual and collective. Compelled by the rage and madness of some (“the wrath of Achilles”), which leads to the fear and despair of others (“the dreams of Mary Stuart”), the catalog certainly points to the horrors of history (“the fury of mass murderers”). Mr Cogito wants to understand the primal despair of those on the point of extinction (“the fear of Neanderthals”). What must it have been like to be one of the last Aztecs? They were facing not only individual death but also the obliteration of an entire people, their whole history, their complete civilization. A large collective or communal suffering is then followed by the sustained death throes of one of Europe’s great philosophers; the suffering of a horse in the street tipped Nietzsche into madness. But Mr Cogito doesn’t just meditate on suffering; he also focuses on the mysteries of creation and the joys of artistic creativity. He refers to the ecstasy of the first painters, who captured the movement of animals on the walls of a French cave. He concludes by paralleling the cycle of nature (“the rise and fall of an oak”) with the cycle of a civilization (“the rise and fall of Rome”).
Herbert provides an essential corrective to what he calls “the artificial fires” of poetry and provides a greater imaginative imperative—a desire to bring the dead back to life and “maintain the covenant.” He keeps human suffering in view. Precision matters; accuracy is essential. He remains faithful not just to what we know but also to what we don’t or cannot know, to what he names “uncertain clarity.” He was a model of integrity, a hero of consciousness, unwavering in his humanity.
C. K. Williams
* * *
“From My Window”
(1983)
C. K. Williams had a large social imagination. He was a poet of disquietude, of psychological extremes, and probed the sorrows of a diligent, self-reflexive consciousness. In his first two books, Lies (1969) and I Am the Bitter Name (1971), he showed less interest in exploring linkages and connections than in what he called “varieties of disjunctive consciousness.” His early work, influenced by the Surrealism of the French dramatist Antonin Artaud and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, subverted logical connection
s and struggled to enact the movement of the mind as it swoops, hovers, and moves in at least three different directions. Unsparingly honest and violently self-divided (“I am going to rip myself down the middle into two pieces,” he declared in “Halves”), his poems were also motivated by a ferocious political consciousness, almost breaking apart from frustration and rage over the lies of the social and political worlds. He especially despised the war in Vietnam.
The decisive moment in Williams’s work came when he began to put things into his poems rather than take them out, to become a poet of inclusive consciousness. He enlarged and extended his lineation even further than Walt Whitman’s long free-verse lines, which harken back to the King James Bible, the model for prose in English. The test for Williams was to see how far he could push and shape that line before it faltered and turned into prose poetry. By using the line as the longest possible rhythmic unit, he forced himself to break the abbreviated rhetorical code, the conventional shorthand, that seems to characterize so much of the poetry of any given period. As if heeding Robert Frost’s directive to dramatize (“Everything written is as good as it is dramatic,” Frost said), Williams also became an insistent storyteller, burrowing his social message into the substance and political unconscious of his poems.
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 26