What the narrator chooses to focus on instead is the realization that this is the exact moment when she becomes herself, a different person than she used to be. The realization is so large that she feels the need to nail it down precisely, which gives it even greater credibility—“Six o’clock in the evening in April, stirring bones for soup.” At that instant, she understands everything at once, “An event whose knowledge arrived whole,” though it will take her years to figure it out, for it “to open, to seem a destiny.” In those thirty seconds, a mere half-minute out of time, her destiny has been laid out and sealed.
Notice the logical turns at the end of the poem, which are marked by two consequential uses of the word “Then,” each inaugurating a new action, a decisive next moment, a fresh realization:
Then my muscles unlocked, the surge and shaking left my body
* * *
and I lay still beneath the white high ceiling. Then I got up
and stood there, quiet, alone, just beginning to be afraid.
The daemonic possession has left her body. For one more moment she doesn’t move, lying still, trying to figure out what she has just experienced. But then she gets up and just stands there, unmoving, noticeably “quiet, alone.” It’s as if she is processing how she has just been returned to ordinary time. The world is restored, the exhilaration is over, and the fear has just begun to set in, a dark premonition, a first, fateful understanding of what is ahead of her, of how much she has been changed.
In “The Rapture,” Cynthia Huntington insightfully tells the story and re-creates the onslaught of a frightening lifelong illness. It took unusual skill, daring, and self-possession to recall and shape that moment into such a startling visionary poem.
Richard Howard
* * *
“Elementary Principles at Seventy-Two”
(2001)
Give us immedicable woes—woes that nothing can be done for—woes flat and final,” Robert Frost declares in a piece about the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson. “And then to play,” he continues. “The play’s the thing. Play’s the thing. All virtue in ‘as if.’” There are immedicable woes at the core of Richard Howard’s work, so much of which is elegiac, but he has resolutely deflected and transfigured those woes, those inmost losses, into other voices, which he calls inner voices, the reality of other lives sounded as his own, taking Hamlet’s “the play’s the thing” more seriously than almost any other American poet, and refashioning it to “play’s the thing. All virtue in ‘as if.’”
Richard Howard is among the most performance oriented of American poets. He is, in a way, helpless before his lived erudition and encyclopedic learning, the deaths he cannot abide, the lives he is sentenced to borrow, steal, and adapt, to refigure and reenact. His dependency on the work of others—abject, Borgesian—is an inescapable feature of his imagination. Since his third book of poems, Untitled Subjects (1969), Howard’s preferred method has been a version of the dramatic monologue, the apostrophe, the letter, the conversation, the voice of the poet inhabiting another. He identifies this as “the poem of helpless trust in remembering what is there.” He especially likes emblematic dialogues and meetings, “two-part inventions,” what one poem labels “Close Encounters of Another Kind.” His interior and dramatic monologues, which owe so much to Robert Browning, have rendered up an extraordinary cast of characters. His finest dramatic meditations and fictions, his derived terms, are almost always portraits of the artist in extremity—the artist in crisis mulling over his materials and his experience, witty, worldly, mannered, compulsively reflective, self-consciously struggling to imagine the great work into being. But in the end, all these other voices are creative ruses, vital deflections. “The poem of historical memory and of the placed person always concerns the poet’s need for secrecy,” Howard confesses in his essay “Sharing Secrets.” The more he throws his voice and conceals, or pretends to conceal, the more it comes back as his own counter-music, what Frost deemed “counter-love, original response.” Thus, the portraits of others have slowly evolved into a portrait of the poet himself. The Song of Everyone has slowly evolved into a Song of Myself.
It has also come as something of a surprise that every ten years or so Howard has written a short poem focused on taking stock. The mask drops and his voice is revealed in an objective lyric. The first of these was “At Sixty-Five,” the next “Elementary Principles at Seventy-Two,” the last poem in his twelfth collection, Talking Cures (2002). Howard’s winding syntax and fluent syllabic mode (like Marianne Moore, he seeks formal interference and likes the stringency of counting), his Jamesian way of speaking across strictly charted symmetrical structures, has always been a difficult pleasure, but, as the title Talking Cures makes clear, it also has a curative dimension. The art and act of speaking, as they are depicted through artificial forms, become a type of necessary action, a process of making, of constructing and reconstructing a self in the face of dissolution.
Elementary Principles at Seventy-Two
When we consider the stars
(what else can we do with them?) and even
recognize among them sidereal
* * *
father-figures (it was our
consideration that arranged them so),
they will always outshine us, for we change.
* * *
When we behold the water
(which cannot be held, for it keeps turning
into itself), that is how we would move—
* * *
but water overruns us.
And when we aspire to be clad in fire
(for who would not put on such apparel?)
* * *
the flames only pass us by—
it is a way they have of passing through.
But earth is another matter. Ask earth
* * *
to take us, the last mother—
one womb we may reassume. Yes indeed,
we can have the earth. Earth will have us.
“Elementary Principles at Seventy-Two” expresses our longing for transcendence while accepting our inevitable mortality. It is a poem of basic principles that also turns out to be a poem concerned with the four classical elements—indeed, as the poet runs through these elements over the course of the poem, we find out what he has come to understand as the elementary principles of mortality. Here Howard breezes through the air and begins in the ether. He subsequently takes up water and fire and then concludes, as he must, with earth. One feels the ludic pleasure he takes in this gamesmanship.
“Elementary Principles” consists of six equally balanced three-line stanzas. Each stanza commences with an emphatic, indented seven-syllable line. The subsequent two lines are each ten syllables long. The form is arbitrary, but it enables Howard to pace, qualify, and measure his thoughts, and to enact his thinking.
For example, no sooner does he begin a statement—“When we consider the stars”—than he interrupts himself with a pointed rhetorical question “(what else can we do with them?).” In fact, he interrupts himself twice in the first sentence, which unspools across the first two stanzas. It is the words themselves, some of which he italicizes, that spark his comments. Hence the verb “consider” morphs into the noun “consideration” and the noun “stars” transmutes into the adjective “sidereal.” What he is considering, and perhaps even recognizing, is how we turn the stars into constellations (something that human beings have conceptualized). These astral father-figures will “outshine” us because they are fixed, and we alone seem to change.
The second stanza is end-stopped, but after that Howard’s sentences carry across the stanzas until the very end. At every point, he self-consciously responds to the language that he is using. Thus, when he states, “When we behold the water,” he parenthetically comments “(which cannot be held . . .).” He rhymes “aspire” with “fire” and hears himself use the phrase “clad in fire,” which leads him to a rhetorical question: “(for who would not put on such apparel?).
” He seems to be at the mercy of his own linguistic play.
It is in Howard’s nature to make much of words. Hence the dual use of “matter”—“But earth is another matter”—which as a noun means “physical substance in general” and “subject of discussion” but as a verb means “to have importance.” Earth is matter, and it also matters. He calls earth “the last mother” and immediately literalizes the metaphor and makes a kind of aphoristic Jungian quip: “one womb we may reassume.” He says rhetorically, “Yes indeed, / we can have the earth.” And then, in an instance of what Greek rhetoricians called chiasmus, he reverses and crisscrosses the sentence with a final recognition: “Earth will have us.” Yes indeed. It is a beautifully balanced idea and creates a feeling of ultimate closure.
“Elementary Principles at Seventy-Two” takes great pleasure in working out an elemental idea. The play’s the thing. But here that play also leads the poet to a sudden finality. The stakes are mortal. The earth will accept us, after all. In the end, it all comes down to something fateful and elementary.
Eavan Boland
* * *
“Quarantine”
(2001)
Eavan Boland returned often in her poems to the Famine, a watershed moment in Irish history, which she called “a powerful once-and-for-all disruption of any kind of heroic history.” She reenters the nineteenth century with her poem “Quarantine,” which belongs with her other poems that address Irish amnesia: “The Famine Road,” “The Journey,” “The Achill Woman,” “The Making of an Irish Goddess,” and “That the Science of Cartography Is Limited.” All these poems point to the suffering and defenselessness of rural people in the face of an overwhelming historical disaster. “Looking at the 19th century was the first time I began to think that writing could add to a silence rather than break it,” she said. “I was interested in turning a light on the silences and erasers that we learn to tolerate in the name of history.”
Quarantine
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.
* * *
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
* * *
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
* * *
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
* * *
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
Boland’s poem was triggered by an anecdote in the 1915 autobiography Mo Scéal Féin (My Own Story) by An tAthair Peadar Ua Laoghaire (Peadar Ó Laoghaire), a depiction of rural life in the Irish-speaking areas of nineteenth-century Ireland and an especially valuable firsthand testament to the effects of the Famine. Here is the story about a married couple, Cáit and Pádraig, who had already lost their children and decided to slip out of quarantine and head home:
The cabin where they had lived before they went into the poorhouse was in . . . Doire Liath. So they made their way northwards . . . six miles to go and the night was falling. They were hungry and Cáit was sick with the fever. They had to walk very slowly. After a couple of miles they had to stop. Cáit could go no further. A neighbor . . . gave them something to eat and drink, but everyone was afraid to give them shelter because they had come from the poorhouse . . . Pádraig put [Cáit] on his back and pressed on . . .
The poor man was weak . . . With the load he was carrying he had to stop often and rest . . . But . . . he carried on. He did not abandon his burden. They reached the cabin. It was empty and cold, without fire or heat.
The next morning a neighbor . . . entered the cabin. He saw the two inside. They were both dead. Pádraig had his wife’s two feet against his chest as if he had been trying to warm them. It seems that he had realized that Cáit was dying and that her feet were cold so he had put them on his chest to draw the chill out . . .
“He was a good man, faithful and true,” some might say, “and what he did was a noble deed.”
That’s true. But I will tell you this. Thousands of similar things were done all over Ireland at that time and no one looked on them as being special . . .
(Translated by Barry Tobin)
This is just one story of the catastrophic Famine that killed more than a million Irish people between 1845 and 1852. Another one and a half million emigrated.
“Quarantine” sheds light on two ordinary people trapped in a dismal situation. It views them against a large historical backdrop and tragedy. The language of the poem is spare, almost documentary in style. Boland narrates a great deal in just twenty lines, five quatrains. Each stanza operates like a paragraph. There is only one exception, the carryover from the fourth to the fifth stanza. The second line of every stanza is also marked by an indentation, a slight disruption and change. We are reading a story self-consciously made from lines.
Note the emphatic repetition of the word “worst” in the first stanza, which is one sentence long. The pentameter-based rhythm is steady and stately. The alliterative drumbeat of the letter w, which is repeated eleven times, weaves the words together and connects the lines:
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.
We seem to watch the lens of a camera moving in, finding its focus on the worst of times. Boland begins with the time frame (“the worst hour,” “the worst season,” “the worst year”) and the great scale (“a whole people”) and then narrows the view. We see a man and his wife walking (the word is repeated twice) north—as if that can save them.
Poetry is a form of condensation (Ezra Pound’s slogan for this was a German-Latin equation: “dicten = condensare”). Boland’s second stanza condenses the journey, the one recounted in Ua Laoghaire’s memoir, into four action-packed lines:
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
Unlike lines in the first stanza, which snake across the line breaks, each line here is its own end-stopped unit. It consists of three short sentences and a final sentence fragment. Each line marks a stage in an arduous journey. The pronouns help tell the story in stages. They progress from “her” (“She was sick . . . and could not keep up”) to “him” (“He lifted her . . .”; “he walked”) to “them” (“Until . . . they arrived”). The first three sentences all begin with a subject and verb (“She was”; “He lifted”; “He walked”), but the fourth inverts the order, beginning with the phrase “Until at nightfall” and ending with the recognition that “they arrived.”
The third or middle stanza takes the story to its wrenching conclusion, the death of the couple overnight, the way they were found in the morning. It also makes special meaning out of their journey.
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Once more each line is end-stopped. Boland breaks up the first sentence, which would normally read, “In the morning they were both found dead / Of cold, of hunger, of the toxins of a whole history,” into constituent parts. She uses periods to interrupt the sentence and create full stops. Notice the progress of three phrases; each one compresses a reason why the couple die: “Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.” There is a silence between each fragment. The man and woman are subject to specific hardships—cold and hunger—and also to larger historical poisons that leave them defenseless. The bitterness here is evident. But the stanza moves on to emphasize the intimacy of the couple, the most touching part of the story, the way the man presses his wife’s feet up against his breastbone for warmth. It pivots on the word “But”: “But her feet were held . . .” Notice the migration of h sounds through the stanza, as Boland presses down from “hunger” to “history” to “her” to “held” to “his” to “heat” to “his” (used twice) and finally to “her.” There is an internal rhyme on “feet” and “heat,” an echo of st sounds in “against,” “breastbone,” and “last.” So too the poet repeats the word “last” for emphasis in a straightforward sentence consisting entirely of monosyllabic words: “The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.”
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 38