The 40s: The Story of a Decade
Page 70
And through the sullen heat’s migraine
The atavistic voice of Cain:
“Who entitled you to spy
From your easy heaven? Am I
My brother’s keeper? Let him die.”
And God, in words we soon forget,
Answers through the radio set,
“The curse is on his forehead yet.”
Mass destruction, mass disease—
We thank thee, Lord, upon our knees
That we were born in times like these,
When, with doom tumbling from the sky,
Each of us has an alibi
For doing nothing. Let him die.
Let him die, his death will be
A drop of water in the sea,
A journalist’s commodity.
Pretzels, crackers, chips, and beer—
Death is something that we fear,
But it titillates the ear.
Anchovy, almond, ice, and gin—
All shall die though none can win;
Let the Untergang begin.
Die the soldiers, die the Jews,
And all the breadless, homeless queues.
Give us this day our daily news.
—Louis MacNeice
January 4, 1941
Not the harsh voice in the microphone,
Not broken covenants or hate in armor,
But the smile like a cocktail gone flat,
The stifled yawn.
Not havoc from the skies, death underfoot,
The farmhouse gutted, or the massacred city,
But the very nice couple retired on their savings,
The weeded garden, the loveless bed.
House warm in winter, city free of vice,
Tree that outstood the equinoctial gales:
Dry at the heart, they crashed
On a windless day.
—Malcolm Cowley
November 22, 1941
The Sheep is blind; a passing Owl,
A surgeon of some local skill,
Has undertaken, for a fee,
The cure. A stump, his surgery,
Is licked clean by a Cat; his tools—
A tooth, a thorn, some battered nails—
He ranges by a shred of sponge,
And he is ready to begin.
Pushed forward through the gaping crowd,
“Wait,” bleats the Sheep. “Is all prepared?”
The Owl lists forceps, scalpel, lancet—
The old Sheep interrupts his answer:
“These lesser things may all be well,
But tell me, friend, how goes the world?”
The Owl says blankly, “You will find it
Goes as it went ere you were blinded.”
“What?” cries the Sheep. “Then take your fee,
But cure some other fool, not me.
To witness that enormity
I would not give a blade of grass.
I am a Sheep, and not an Ass.”
—Randall Jarrell
December 13, 1941
In this glass palace are flowers in golden baskets;
in that grim brownstone mansion are silver caskets;
the caskets watch and wait, and the baskets wait,
for a certain day, and hour, and a certain gate.
Wonderfully glow the colors in that bright palace!
Superb the flora, in pyx, and vase, and chalice!
The glass is steamed with a stifling tuberose breath;
and lilies, too, of the valley of the shadow of death.
The caskets are satin-lined, with silver handles,
and the janitor sings, “They’ll soon be lighting candles”;
he sweeps the sidewalk, and as he sweeps he sings
in praise of a hearse with completely noiseless springs.
Hush—the conspiracy works! It has crossed the street!
Someday, and it’s not far off, these lovers will meet!
Casket and basket at last set forth together
for the joyful journey, no matter how bleak the weather;
in a beautiful beetle-black hearse with noiseless tread,
basket and casket together will get to bed,
and start on a Pullman journey to a certain gate,
punctually, at a certain hour, on a certain date.
—Conrad Aiken
March 28, 1942
—Langston Hughes June 20, 1942
Have Gentlemen perhaps forgotten this?—
We write the histories.
Do Gentlemen who snigger at the poets,
Who speak the word professor with guffaws—
Do Gentlemen expect their fame to flourish
When we, not they, distribute the applause?
Or do they trust their hope of long remembrance
To those they name with such respectful care—
To those who write the tittle in the papers,
To those who tell the tattle on the air?
Do Gentlemen expect the generation
That counts the losers out when tolls the bell
To take some gossip-caster’s estimation,
Some junior voice of fame with fish to sell?
Do Gentlemen believe time’s hard-boiled jury,
Judging the sober truth, will trust again
The words some copperhead who owned a paper
Ordered one Friday from the hired men?
Have Gentlemen forgotten Mr. Lincoln?
A poet wrote that story, not a newspaper,
Not the New Yorker of the nameless name
Who spat with hatred like some others later
And left, as they will, in his hate his shame.
History’s not written in the kind of ink
The richest man of most ambitious mind
Who hates a president enough to print
A daily paper can afford or find.
Gentlemen have power now and know it,
But even the greatest and most famous kings
Feared and with reason to offend the poets
Whose songs are marble
and whose marble sings.
—Archibald MacLeish
September 11, 1943
A hundred minnows, little-finger length,
Own the slim pond. In sets they make
Maneuver: all one way
Change-minded, yet of one mind where clear water
Clouds with their speed an instant;
All one speed, one purpose, as they veer
And suddenly close circle; and some leap—
There! at an unseen fly,
There! at nothing at all.
Brown minnows, darkening daily
Since the thin time, the spring,
Since nothingness gave birth to such small bones,
Beat the soft water, fill
The wet world; as one,
Occupy movement, owning all August,
Proud minnows.
—Mark Van Doren
August 11, 1945
The children’s eyes, like shadows on the sea,
Were baffling with a false serenity
When they were told, and given all the cause,
“There is no Santa Claus.”
The children’s eyes did not become more bright
Or curious of sexual delight
When someone said, “Man couples like the beast.
The stork does not exist.”
The children’s eyes, like smoke or drifted snow,
White shifted over white, refused to show
They suffered loss: “At first it may seem odd—
There isn’t any God.”
The children, not perturbed or comforted,
Heard silently the news of their last bed:
“For moral care you need not stint your breath,
There’s no life after death.”
The children’s eyes grew hot, they glowed like stoves.
Ambitious, and equipped with all our proofs,
They
ran forth little women, little men,
And were not children then.
—Howard Nemerov
October 26, 1946
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
Down at the water’s edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals…One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I sang him “A mighty fortress is our God.”
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water…Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark-gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
—Elizabeth Bishop
August 9, 1947
Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin
Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds.
Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door.
The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red.
This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.
Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats
Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down.
Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath,
Dressed for the links, recounts an old Intourist tour.
—Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson.
Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant.
Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times. Robinson
Saying, “Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday
At five? I’d love to. Pretty well. And you?”
Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall.
Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing. Robinson
In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home;
Decisions: Toynbee or luminal? Where the sun
Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward
The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars.
Robinson in Glen-plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes,
Black four-in-hand, and oxford button-down,
The jewelled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief-
Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering
His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.
—Weldon Kees
April 24, 1948
After night, the waking knowledge—
The gravel path searching the Way;
The cobweb crystal on the hedge,
The empty station of the day.
So I remember each new morning
From childhood, when pebbles amaze.
Outside my window, with each dawning,
The whiteness of those days.
The sense felt behind darkened walls
Of a sun-drenched world; a lake
Of light, through which light falls—
It is this to which I wake.
Then the sun shifts the trees around,
And overtops the sky, and throws
House, horse, and rider to the ground,
With knock-out shadows.
The whole day opens to an O,
The cobweb dries, the petals spread,
The clocks grow long, the people go
Walking over themselves, the dead.
The world’s a circle, where all moves
Before after, after before,
And my aware awaking loves
The day—until I start to care.
—Stephen Spender
May 15, 1948
Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.
I’ve known the wind by waterbanks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
The
y seemed their own most perfect monument.
There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii
The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.
These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The Newyear bells are wrangling with the snow.
—Richard Wilbur
January 1, 1949
I have recently been pondering the life expectancy that the Bible allots to man,
And at this point I figure I have worked my way through nine-fourteenths of my hypothetical span.
I have been around a bit and met many interesting people and made and lost some money and acquired, in reverse order, a family and a wife,
And by now I should have drawn some valuable conclusions about life.
Well, I have learned that life is something about which you can’t conclude anything except that it is full of vicissitudes.
And where you expect logic you only come across eccentricitudes.
Life has a tendency to obfuscate and bewilder,
Such as fating us to spend the first part of our lives being embarrassed by our parents and the last part being embarrassed by our childer.
Life is constantly presenting us with experiences that are unprecedented and depleting,
Such as the friend who starts drinking at three in the afternoon and explains it’s only to develop a hearty appetite for dinner because it’s unhealthy to drink without eating.