XIV
Where, past all boundaries and all predicates,
Black, white or colorless, vague, volatile states,
Something, some object, comes to mind.
Perhaps a body. In our dim days and few,
The speed of light equals a fleeting view,
Even when blackout robs us blind.
NOTES
1 “The Deodand.” Deodand is defined as “A thing forfeited or to be given to God; spec. in Eng. Law, a personal chattel which, having been the immediate occasion of the death of a human being, was given to God as an expiatory offering, i.e., forfeited to the Crown to be applied to pious uses.…” The poem is based on a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, called Parisians Dressed in Algerian Costume, in the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.
2 The concluding lines in French may be rendered:
Let me be given nourishment at your hands
Since it’s for you I perform my little dance.
For I am the street-walker, Magdalen,
And come the dawn I’ll be on my way again,
The beauty queen, Miss France.
3 “Such was this place, a hapless rural seat”: cf. Paradise Lost, BK. IV, 11.246–7.
4 “Which also happens to be the word for bitter”: strictly speaking it is the adverbial “bitterly,” but this lapse is to be explained by the imperfect memory of a former student in an hour of stress.
5 “Shiva”: Hindu god of destruction, associated with dancing and with fire.
6 Ronsard, BK. II, ODE XIV
7 Horace, BK. I, ODE I
8 “REM” Rapid Eye Movement—a physiological indicator that a sleeper is dreaming.
9 Horace, BK. I, ODE V
10 “Of Byron writing, ‘Many a fine day’ ”: “I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law …” From a letter to Tom Moore, January 28, 1817.
11 “Byron confessed to: ‘If I should reach old age’ ”: “But I feel something, which makes me think that if I ever reach near to old age, like Swift, I shall die at ‘top’ first.” From a diary of 1821. Once, pointing at a lightning-blasted oak, Swift had said to Edward Young, about his apprehensions of approaching madness, “I shall be like that tree. I shall die first at the top.”
12 “Young Henry Fuseli, . .” Johann Heinrich Füssli, later known as John Henry Fuseli, born in Zurich, February 6, 1741, died in London, April 16, 1825. Ordained a Zwinglian minister in 1761, but abandoned the ministry, first for literature and later for painting. Settled in London in 1779, where he was elected to the Royal Academy in 1790. He was a friend of Blake, and The Nightmare is probably his best-known painting.
13 “Miller of Dee”:
There was a jolly miller once,
Lived on the river Dee;
He worked and sang from morn till night,
No lark more blithe than he.
And this the burden of his song
Forever used to be—
I care for nobody, no, not I,
And nobody cares for me.
14 “As through those gutters of which Swift once wrote”: “A Description of a City Shower,” Oct. 1710.
15 “I beheld new heavens, I beheld the earth made new” is an ironic echo of Isaiah 65:17—“For, behold, I create new heavens, and a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.” The blessedness of being allowed to forget the old and ruined life is clearly connected in this poem with getting drunk.
16 “Preserve these words,” a phrase which occurs both in Section VIII and Section X, is an echo of a Mandelstam poem, addressed and dedicated to Anna Akhmatova, which, in the translation by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, begins, “Keep my words forever for their aftertaste of misfortune and smoke.”
17 “northern Sphinxes”: sculptured figures placed along the embankments of the Neva River in St. Petersburg.
A Note About the Author
ANTHONY HECHT’s first book of poems, A Summoning of Stones, appeared in 1954. He is also the author of The Hard Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1968, of Millions of Strange Shadows, 1977, and of The Venetian Vespers, 1979, all included in Collected Earlier Poems (the first in selected form). The Transparent Man appeared in 1990, and his most recent, Flight Among the Tombs, in 1996. He is the translator (with Helen Bacon) of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, 1973, and coeditor (with John Hollander) in 1967 of a volume of light verse, Jiggery-Pokery. A collection of his critical essays, Obbligati, was published in 1986. His study of the poetry of W. H. Auden, The Hidden Law, appeared in 1993, and his Mellon Lectures On the Laws of the Poetic Art in 1995. He has received the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Librex-Guggenheim Eugenio Montale Award. He has taught widely, most recently as University Professor at Georgetown University, from which he recently retired.
Books by Anthony Hecht
POETRY
Flight Among the Tombs 1996
The Transparent Man 1990
Collected Earlier Poems 1990
The Venetian Vespers 1979
Millions of Strange Shadows 1977
The Hard Hours 1967
A Summoning of Stones 1954
TRANSLATION
Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes 1973
(WITH HELEN BACON)
ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
On the Laws of the Poetic Art 1995
(ANDREW W. MELLON LECTURES IN THE FINE ARTS)
The Hidden Law: the Poetry of W. H. Auden 1993
Obbligati 1986
EDITOR
Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls 1967
(WITH JOHN HOLLANDER)
The Essential George Herbert 1987
Collected Earlier Poems Page 21