Collected Poems, 1953-1993

by John Updike

  Midpoint, Canto I, line 155: “… the Hill of Life?” My mother saved the drawing; here it is:

  Line 174: “… still alive.” My father died in April 1972, at the age of seventy-two; my mother in October 1989, at the age of eighty-five.

  Line 181, “From Time’s grim cover …” Issue of April 26, 1968.

  Canto II, this page. The two fine-grained portraits appeared, top, in The Register for Harvard’s freshman class and, bottom, four years later, in the yearbook for the graduating class. See “Apologies to Harvard,” lines 34–38: “… And spit me out, by God, a gentleman.”

  Canto II, this page, bottom. Two pictures of the same baby, the subject of “March: A Birthday Poem.”

  Canto III was closely based upon the September 1967 issue of Scientific American, devoted to “Materials.”

  In Canto IV, almost all of the quotations are from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The prose “his eyes shut … eye in it” is from the last chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses: referring not to Bloom but to Lieutenant Mulvey, on the rock of Gibraltar. The marginal quotation, “the ant’s … world,” is from Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Canto LXXXI. “The garden … south” is from Theodore Roethke’s “She.”

  Living with a Wife. Composed, evidently, the year we lived in London, at 59 Cumberland Terrace, though the imagery is all-American—except, possibly, for the bathtub. My wife did much of our wash in it, the washing machine having never worked, though we were paying a princely rent.

  On an Island. Tortola, in the British Virgins.

  Marching Through a Novel. Rabbit Redux, in 1970.

  Night Flight, over Ocean. The Pacific.

  Phenomena, line 1. We had moved to 50 Labor-in-Vain Road, on a tidal inlet called Labor-in-Vain Creek.

  The House Growing. The same ancestral Pennsylvania house as in “Sunshine on Sandstone” and “Old-Fashioned Lightning Rod,” and the site of the pear tree in “Query.”

  Cunts. A strange poem to follow the lines on my father’s death, but written eight months after, on the inspiration of the lewd flier amply quoted, and of the general sexual pressure of the times. New York Quarterly was good sport enough to publish it, and Frank Hall-man was enthusiastic enough to bring it out in a limited edition (276 signed copies, 1974)—a handsome thin brown book, wider than it is tall, that has become by now, I believe, my highest-priced collector’s item. Two friends have complained to me that their copies have been stolen from their shelves. No doubt it’s the title people are stealing, and not the content, whose firmly moral inspiration is announced in the opening line.

  Apologies to Harvard. Composed under the clear influence of L. E. Sissman, whose outburst of autobiographical verse, mostly blank, powered by the nearness of his death and a prodigious festive way with the English language, was to me the most impressive event in poetry in the 1960s. Ed’s own Phi Beta Kappa poem, the beautiful “Temporary Measures,” had been delivered two years earlier.

  Heading for Nandi. When this appeared in The New Yorker, several letters protested that that place was called Nadi. But it was identified as Nandi in the Honolulu airport, and if it had been called Nadi I wouldn’t have written the poem.

  Line 22. Fayaway is Melville’s lovely native companion in Typee: “the beauteous nymph Fayaway, who was my peculiar favourite. Her free pliant figure was the very perfection of female grace and beauty. Her complexion was a rich and mantling olive, and when watching the glow upon her cheeks I could almost swear that beneath the transparent medium there lurked the blushes of a faint vermilion. The face of this girl was a rounded oval, and each feature as perfectly formed as the heart or imagination of man could desire. Her full lips, when parted with a smile, disclosed teeth of a dazzling whiteness; and when her rosy mouth opened with a burst of merriment, they looked like the milk-white seeds of the ‘arta,’ a fruit of the valley, which, when cleft in twain, shows them reposing in rows on either side, embedded in the red and juicy pulp.”

  Note to the Previous Tenants. By the new tenant at 151 Beacon Street, where I lived for twenty months in the mid-1970s.

  Line 18. There is some connection, it may be, between the “ideal woman” and the “deal” hoped for in the last line of the preceding poem, written three months before.

  Sunday in Boston, line 9. A large equestrian statue of George Washington in the Public Garden, now restored to the brown tint of fresh bronze, was in those years weathered to a patina of pistachiogreen.

  Line 11. The spectacular Hancock Tower, presenting one of its broad glass sides in this direction, was credited to the architectural firm of I. M. Pei; Henry N. Cobb was its actual designer and—when its giant panes began to fall out—its defender against civic calls for a radical redesign.

  Raining in Magens Bay. On the island of St. Thomas.

  Leaving Church Early, lines 48–49. My dear grandmother, Katie Hoyer, in her seventies at this time, suffered from Parkinson’s disease and often could not get her speech organs working. My mother called this poem “harsh,” and now I see what she meant; an adolescent harshness is part of the picture.

  Lines 98–99. The “incongruous painting,” by Alice W. Davis in 1933, of the Provincetown dunes, now rests on my third floor, which has a view of the “unattainable sea.” I wonder if the painting, our landlocked family’s most precious work of art, got me to the New England shore.

  Another Dog’s Death. Helen, a golden retriever and family pet for many years.

  Spanish Sonnets, VIII, line 2. In Spanish, Juana la Loca (1479–1555): the third child of Ferdinand and Isabella, she inherited the thrones of Castile (in 1504) and Aragon (in 1516) through the deaths of the precedent heirs and the ambitions of her husband, Philip the Handsome of Habsburg. After her husband’s unexpected death in 1506, her mental imbalance passed into insanity, and in 1509 she retired to Tordesillas, where she lived in squalor, under guard, with the embalmed corpse of her husband. She was the mother of the Emperor Charles V.

  Line 6. The able favorite of the inept John II of Castile, de Luna was executed in 1453, after thirty years of dominating the throne and directing its prerogatives toward his own aggrandizement. According to William H. Prescott’s History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, “As he ascended the scaffold, he surveyed the apparatus of death with composure, and calmly submitted himself to the stroke of the executioner, who, in the savage style of the executions of that day, plunged his knife into the throat of his victim, and deliberately severed his head from his body.” The king, who did not long outlive his favorite, would have countermanded the execution but for the steely insistence of his queen, Isabella, the granddaughter of the monarch of Portugal and the mother of the more famous Isabella. It had been de Luna, ironically, who had arranged the marriage, against John II’s own inclination to marry a French princess.

  To Ed Sissman, I, line 5. Josèph’s, long-gone, was in the Seventies the premier eating-spot in Boston. The accented second syllable was part of its panache.

  Line 14. Most of Sissman’s witty and genial poetry was produced while he was struggling with Hodgkin’s disease, which eventually killed him, in 1976, at the age of forty-eight.

  An Oddly Lovely Day Alone, line 28. The Coup was up for it, as I remember. The calm day was typical of six years’ worth spent at 58 West Main Street, Georgetown, Massachusetts—a red clapboard house that reminded me, in its long shape and comforting proximity to a busy street, of the first house of my life, 117 Philadelphia Avenue, in Shillington.

  The Moons of Jupiter. Should this be classed as light verse, along with “Cosmic Gall,” “The High-Hearts,” “The Naked Ape,” “Skyey Developments,” and the not dissimilar “Open Letter to Voyager II”? Like these, “The Moons of Jupiter” derives from, to quote my own criterion, “the man-made world of information.” But the poem also derives from the real, and brings back things seen and felt—the unjust parental slap, the sneering note passed hand to hand in a classroom, the punch given back to the ribs of the opposing body, the love of excremen
t, and the cosmic acrophobia of the last stanza.

  Line 106, “enormity.” Used in its preferred sense of, as Webster says, “a grave offense against order, right, or decency,” with a pun upon its secondary, semi-literate, and increasingly common sense of “enormousness.”

  Upon the Last Day of His Forty-Ninth Year. That is, I was about to turn forty-nine and enter my fiftieth year. My fiftieth birthday was hedged with so much ceremony as to muffle the terror.

  Small-City People. Inspired by Lawrence, Massachusetts, a city my occasional visits to have supplied urban furniture for the short story “More Stately Mansions” and the novel Memories of the Ford Administration. The poem “July” came to me in the stately park there. Lawrence reminds me of Reading, Pennsylvania, a city where I always feel excited and childlike.

  Aerie. No sooner had this poem appeared in print, than the enchanted barbershop on a top floor of Massachusetts General Hospital vanished—one more amenity down the drain.

  The Code, lines 19–24. Cf. “English Train Compartment,” lines 12–21; “Sunday,” lines 6–12; and “Sāo Paulo,” lines 14–15.

  Seven Odes to Seven Natural Processes, Ode to Rot, lines 18–19. Richard Eberhardt’s most celebrated poem, “The Groundhog.” Among its noble lines: “And in intellectual chains / I lost both love and loathing, / Mured up in the wall of wisdom.”

  To Evaporation, lines 9–10. From the article “Kinetic Theory of Matter” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1969 edition.

  Ode to Growth, line 35. From the article on “Growth” in the same invaluable source.

  To Fragmentation, lines 40–41. Habakkuk 3:6.

  Hamletr, I.ii. Some editors have offered “sullied” as the word Shakespeare intended.

  Ode to Entropy, line 33. William Philip Arthur Louis, son of Prince Charles and Princess Diana of the United Kingdom, born June 21, 1982. After Charles, he stands next in line to the British throne.

  Lines 43–45. In Deliverance to the Captives (Harper & Brothers, 1961), this page: “But to believe, to accept, to let it be true for us, to begin to live with this truth, to believe it not only with our minds and with our lips, but also with our hearts and with all our life … no human being has ever prayed for this in vain.”

  To Crystallization, lines 35–37. Stendbal: On Love (Anchor edition, 1957), this page.

  Ode to Healing, line 31. Hamlet, II.ii.

  From Above. A distillation, this poem, of several poems composed high above the earth, gazing out of airplane windows at a level of global reality unseen until this century.

  Somewhere. Actually, in the Malá Strana section of Prague, while sitting in a guest suite of the Petschek “palace,” which since 1946 has been the American Ambassador’s Residence. William Luers, who had previously sheltered me on State Department-related trips to the Soviet Union and Venezuela, was my host.

  Klimt and Schiele Confront the Cunt. After viewing the Vienna Show at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1986, a show that included some meticulous watercolors by Adolf Hitler.

  Returning Native, line 13. Greenbrier (genus Smilax) is also called catbrier, for its anxious small claws. Cf. “The Solitary Pond,” lines 7 and 12.

  Goodbye, Göteborg, line 7. In this civilized country, a bell dings when the light is green, signalling to the blind that it is safe to cross.

  In Memoriam Felis Felis, line 37. A bit of poetic license: “spice” conceived as the plural of “spouse.”

  Line 38. Not “alcoholic angels,” as the editor made it when this poem appeared in Grand Street: the sense is “alcoholics [whom] angels copulating,” etc.

  Seattle Uplift, line 7. An irrational fear, of course. See “The Moons of Jupiter,” lines 104–8.

  Lines 12–14. For the frustrated satisfactions, see “In Memoriam Felis Felis,” lines 11–14, 42–48.

  Generic College, line 2. The epaulettes offer a clue to the specific college; few such institutions save Washington and Lee could claim a military man as a “founder”—though Lee might be better described as a resuscitator.

  Fly. Written in the winter of 1991, during the heavy-bombing phase of the Gulf War.

  July, lines 4–12. Perhaps these lines make full sense only to those few of us who remember the summer baseball games at the Shillington playground field in the Thirties and Forties, with soft drinks being sold for a nickel from a zinc-lined cooler there in the shade of the wild cherry trees. The trees were not shapely and Japanese but tall and scraggly; children climbed them. The bolder they were, the higher they went, the girls rewarding timid boys on the ground with a glimpse of their underpants.

  Literary Dublin, lines 3–4. An invented name, unlike the others.

  Light Verse

  Mountain Impasse. Composed in college. Included at the urging of Rodney Dennis, who claimed to like the poem above all others of mine. Heaven forbid that anyone buying this book would not find in it a favorite.

  Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums. From this poem’s acceptance by The New Yorker in June of 1954 I date my life as a professional writer. The concluding triple rhyme and final hexameter are devices I had noticed in Dryden.

  Player Piano. To the tune of “The Isle of Capri.” The rhythm came over me compulsively, I remember, on Star Island, off the New Hampshire coast.

  Shipbored. An allusion to the writing of this poem can be found in my short story “The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island” (Pigeon Feathers, 1962).

  The Clan. Celebrities all, as of 1954. The end-of-the-line punctuation has been adjusted repeatedly.

  Youth’s Progress. Epigraph from the overseas Life, which, to a young American in England, brimmed with native magic.

  Humanities Course. Professor Varder is the personification of Harvard College, I suppose. I resented the way that humanistic knowledge nibbled away at my Christian faith, but, then, did not knowledge—in the form, first, of the high regard in which the Middle Ages were held in the academic fashions of the early Fifties—help me to keep my faith, as well? I used to go to the Lutheran church just down the street from Lowell House, and successfully courted a Unitarian minister’s daughter.

  Superman. Written before Super Bowls (on Super Sundays) existed, or superdelegates.

  An Ode. The editorial appeared in the issue of September 12, 1955. The first quotation is considerably abridged, from the florid following: “… unparalleled prosperity. It has gone further than any other society in the history of man toward creating a truly classless society. Yet it is still producing a literature which sounds sometimes as if it were written by an unemployed homosexual living in a packing-box shanty on the city dump while awaiting admission to the county poorhouse.”

  A Bitter Life, lines 6–14. Hap: Apis, the bull-god of Egypt, a reincarnation of Osiris. Garuda: a man-bird, the steed of Vishnu; Hindu. Italapas: coyote, one of chief Chinook Indian deities. Seb: otherwise Geb, Keb, or Qeb, a divine goose; Egyptian. Huahu Tiao: a protean creature, snake or white rat, with the power to assume the shape of a man-eating winged elephant, etc.; Chinese. Gulltopr: also Goldropf; in Teutonic legend, Heimdall’s horse. Quetzalcoatl: the name means “serpent dressed with green feathers,” though he was, of course, an anthropomorphic Aztec god. Kukulkan: another feathered serpent, Maya this time. Onniont: a monster snake worshipped by the Huron Indians. Audhumbla: a cow who nourished Ymir, the first giant; both sprang from the mist, in Norse legend. Ix: one of the four Bacabs, who stood at the four corners of the world and held it up; Maya. Geryon: the son of Chrysaor and Callirrhoë, he lived on Erytheia and possessed three heads, three bodies, and enormous wings; Greek. 666: the beast of Revelation 13. The ox Abura Mazda made: a raging, senseless creature; the first creative effort in the animal line formed by the Persian Lord of Wisdom. Fomors: hideous misshapen monsters representing the kingdom of darkness; Celtic. Deevs: Persian evil spirits, huge and ugly, sporting long horns and fangs. Graeae: sisters to the Gorgons, they had only one tooth and one eye among them; Greek (see “Classical Optica
l,” this page).

  A Wooden Darning Egg. The first line of this quaint poem contributed the title of my first collection; it was my first book, and never since have I struggled so for a title. I found among my papers of the time one inscribed CELERY HEARTS, above this quotation: “… the pleasure given me as a child by that dainty white tree in the heart of the celery, tender and moist, that must grow first, before the necessities of growth force the plant to put up coarse and stringy shields; seemingly infrangible, until one bites the leafy top, and discovers in the trunk an intricacy of interlocking moons.” Never quite satisfied with The Carpentered Hen, I asked that the British edition, by Victor Gollancz, be titled Hoping for a Hoopoe.

  Publius Vergilius Maro, the Madison Avenue Hick. After Edgar Lee Guest’s once-celebrated poem “Home,” whose most famous line is remembered as “It takes a heap o’ living to make a house a home.” Actually, it runs, “It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home,” and is followed by, “A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam / Afore ye really ‘preciate the things ye lef’ behind, / An’ hunger fer ’em somehow, with ’em allus on yer mind.”

  Room 28. Though the manuscript is firmly dated nine months after my return from England, I must have taken notes on the contents of this exhibition room, as of 1955. It has long since been rearranged.

  Popular Revivals 1956, line 16. That is, The Last Hunt, with Stewart Granger, Robert Taylor, Debra Paget, and Lloyd Nolan (M-G-M, Eastmancolor CinemaScope).

  The second pair of lines in the second stanza represent, I suppose, a crest of verbal ingenuity from which I could only decline.

  A Rack of Paperbacks. When they were a novelty, fresh as spring flowers in the bookstores of Harvard Square and Greenwich Village. Those first charming Anchors, with their covers all by Edward Gorey! Everyman’s for the Silent Generation!