by Kay Ryan
2.
“Duty was his Lodestar”
a song
Duty was my Lobster, my Lobster was she,
And when I walked with my Lobster
I was happy.
But one day my Lobster and I fell out,
And we did nothing but
Rave and shout.
Rejoice, rejoice, Hallelujah, drink the flowing
champagne,
For my darling Lobster and I
Are friends again.
Rejoice, rejoice, drink the flowing Champagne-cup,
My Lobster and I have made it up.
I can hardly begin to suggest the courage this poem gives to me. The strength of character it takes to set down something so radiantly indefensible.
I must suppose “Duty was his Lodestar” is an inspirational song that British people would recognize, but I don’t know anything about it. Which means I’m not even getting this spoof the way SS would have intended.
But as soon as she changed Lodestar to Lobster she had me. My friend Genie just sent me a New Yorker cartoon of a bunch of geese flying in formation, one wearing a propeller hat. The next goose turns to him and says, “That stopped being funny a thousand miles ago.”
I’m with the goose in the propeller hat. Jokes have real staying power in my book.
It gives me so much hope, to see language get pantsed.
It’s one thing to have duty as a lodestar: a high-toned piety one might repeat: perfect for lip service.
It’s another thing to have duty as a lobster. It doesn’t work at all. It just won’t abstract right. The lobster has torn free of duty by the first line. What we get is a clattery lobster dance with breaking-up and making-up.
In fact, we might say—it has just occurred to me—that the joy of this poem is that it has torn free of duty. The duty to be more than a prank, duty to rhyme decently, to keep to a rhythm, to find fresh words even.
It’s the special fun of laughing someplace you’re not supposed to laugh, like church. Because it must be said that the fun results from scrambling the piety; the fun is had at the expense of sobriety. And it wouldn’t be much fun to think about the lobster if one were not thinking about its not being a lodestar.
Maybe this poem really only works for people who are tyrannized by duty.
3.
It’s a strange courage you lend me, ancient star …
… . . toward which you lend no light.
This is a snatch of Williams I have loved. I don’t know if I even have this part right.
How weirdly little it takes, how few words.
It’s almost discouraging it’s so powerful.
Why do we write so much?
A few words of it do the job.
It’s not that I’m less lonely thanks to it. It’s access to the great hall of loneliness, the Milky Way. Williams is out here. It feels good to have company.
But what I wanted to do was to apply this line to the Stevie Smith “Duty” poem.
Her poem gives me that strange courage.
All I trust is whistling in the dark.
Borges thought there were maybe seven metaphors, everything resolved into those seven.
Something like that.
I guess the big job is trying to hold off the rush of matter toward itself, the collapse of space.
And of course the collapse of time. The “Sweet Afton” thing.
Poetry is generative—the tiniest bit of it—it’s like an Alka-Seltzer disk bubbling, creating a ridiculous abundance of someplace else.
There is a permanent time that poetry lets us into. There are doors in all the centuries, feeding into this permanent time.
Bronk talks about this in relation to the stonework of Machu Picchu; there is work that enters another kind of time.
Because poetry isn’t it, it isn’t a thing, it’s the portal.
But that’s also funny because poetry is the thing. I love the picture of the pointing finger: I love to study it. I don’t even care what it’s pointing toward. I don’t look where the finger instructs me to look. I look at the finger.
Or let me say rather, it is entirely insufficient that the finger is pointing to something. It depends upon the quality of the picture of the finger. So what if some poorly made thing is pointing to the Milky Way?
I haven’t got this at all well yet.
Exact articulation is all there is.
Something exactly right is the door through itself.
So it matters utterly.
But here’s the thing: the thing that’s exactly right may be a tiny part of a great deal that is much less exact, not very right at all and certainly not that right. Actually it’s got to be like that. Almost everything has to be packaging material. The job of almost all the words is to suspend the essential words, which cannot exist without some context.
This is ennobling all the way around. It imparts value to all the whistling needed to suspend those two transcendent notes that open the dark.
Nor will you know in advance which will be the two notes and which the packing.
All Love All Beauty
Dublinesque
Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings lights on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.
The hearse is ahead,
But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle-length dresses.
There is an air of great friendliness,
As if they were honouring
One they were fond of;
Some caper a few steps,
Skirts held skilfully
(Someone claps time),
And of great sadness also.
As they wend away
A voice is heard singing
Of Kitty, or Katy,
As if the name meant once
All love, all beauty.
—Philip Larkin
This poem sends feeling down a narrow channel, and you don’t even know it’s feeling until it explodes in a delicious mist at the end. It looks like a lot of scenery, local Dublin color, first the “sidestreets” with their “pewter” light from the “afternoon mist” that causes the lights to be on in the pokey shops of a particularly stock-Irish description “above race-guides and rosaries.” Larkin’s art is on intensely quiet display: so much atmosphere is generated in so few words. It’s grey, it’s low, it’s mean, it’s tight, and something is coming. Nice to start with that preposition, “Down stucco sidestreets.” Each element moves into the next: street>light>mist>light bulbs hanging over “race-guides and rosaries.” It feels cozy, damped down, dim. A channel, but for what? Larkin is so good at creating motion in a poem.
A funeral! This is a tiny poem, so all of this happens before it registers. But if one were to anticipate what kind of funeral this would turn out to be, you’d expect it to be … narrow and grey. Which is just what it isn’t. It’s loose and colorful, filled with warmth and exchanges, capers, clapping, song: “A troop of streetwalkers … honouring / One they were fond of.” Larkin gives us their dress, which feels so flowery and flouncy and animated, the opposite of the narrow street—“wide flowered hats, / Leg-of-mutton sleeves, / And ankle-length dresses.” Consider this attention to dress which sounds anachronistic even for the time. These women sound like Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke, attractive like that. And there’s a gang of them, they are their own self-approving community, progressing down the streets after the hearse, flamboyantly what they are, warm, united, and sad.
The poem moves to the interior so seamlessly. The static streets are invaded—the Dublin mist is rent—by this gaudy funeral. First the women’s clothes, then their women’s capers. Things are getting more and more animated. The poem brims with warmth by the end of stanza three and stanza four brings it home throug
h a single exquisitely baffled detail, a specific so specific that it becomes unspecific: are they singing of “Kitty, or Katy”?
This stanza is a marvel. First notice how cinematic it is. This whole poem has been movielike; the passage of the procession into and then out of the frame of the poem.
In this last stanza we don’t see them at all, just the disembodied voice “heard singing,” just the trailing voice raised in song. That means we have come to Larkin’s real stage, always: the pure interior. This place tends to be troubled when he gets there, but in “Dublinesque” it is incredibly sweet. Maybe because Larkin has watched like a camera, he hasn’t got his usual gloom spiral going. It’s a sound camera, and doesn’t quite catch the name: Kitty, or Katy. And now the relaxation of this camera discipline: “As if the name meant once / All love, all beauty.”
Enough cannot be said about this ending. Let me point out first the parallels in the rhythm and single instance in the poem of rhyme: of Kitty, or Katy / all love, all beauty.
The unrhymed poem ends, then, with a rhyme, and it opens on two of the great themes in all poetry: love and beauty. It invokes all love, all beauty. And guess what? It works; we feel the tide.
Because Larkin has succeeded in narrowing the opening to the point of blur. Kitty or Katy. This is so specific to this Dublin moment that it isn’t at all specific. Exact identity is lost as love and beauty are lost except absolutely available at the same fuzzy moment. First Larkin goes to the trouble to create a rich moving picture; then he erases it, or at least erases the object of it, Kitty or Katy, then he claps on the two biggest abstractions in English poetry: love and beauty. And it works like a charm.
This is one of those moments when everything coalesces. Everything is available because everything’s gone: no one is there; the street is empty.
I want to think about the genius of “Kitty, or Katy.” Everything depends upon this dislocation, this paradoxical exact focus of all love, all beauty.
It’s an exact focus that can’t find its mark and is therefore slippery and silky word-mist. The focus is baffled and ramified; it’s tiny. We don’t know if it’s Kitty or Katy and we can’t settle. Now Larkin can dump whatever he wants into us because we are between places; that’s exactly where we are: between. It’s perfect for poetry which has to get into the cracks, has to find and work the cracks. There has to be some way to let in the dazzle, to perfume the works.
This poem succeeds because it’s short and brisk; the deep dwelling occurs at parade speed. The parade of bright flowery streetwalkers becomes a gesture, taken all together, a single surprise flowery sweep across pewter. They are the same gesture that Frost’s crow makes in knocking snow onto Frost and giving his heart a change of mood. They bring a gift, then; they change the poet. Larkin is left in the street with the fumes of all love, all beauty.
On a Poem by Dickinson
#372
I know lives, I could miss
Without a Misery—
Others—whose instant’s wanting—
Would be Eternity—
The last—a scanty Number—
’Twould scarcely fill a Two—
The first—a Gnat’s Horizon
Could easily outgrow—
A tidy little poem, but nothing too special if you just take the first four of its eight lines. They’re pretty predictable Emily Dickinson—some people she wouldn’t mind missing, while the loss of others would immediately feel like eternity. It’s wonderful to think that this is just standard ED, how her mind cannot help generating instant opposites and categories and how she goes on to find little pleasures inside them such as the sound pun of “lives, I could miss / Without a Misery” or the compression of an “instant’s wanting.” “Eternity” is always at hand for her poetic deployment but in this case it exerts no particular force.
It’s the second quatrain that makes the poem sit up. In it she goes back to revisit the categories of the first stanza (as she often does). Those she’d miss would “scarcely fill a Two,” making the two a container, like a measuring cup, say—a very strange amount of person, obviously—a pleasing abstraction into some absolute fluid. She is summary; she is absolute; she is vigorously exercising her discriminatory powers; she is having fun.
Then in the last two lines she has more fun, and that fun is her intention here has to gradually dawn on the reader. The lives she wouldn’t mind missing are so many that “a Gnat’s Horizon / Could easily outgrow.” Now a gnat, being the emblem of tininess, enjoys the largest possible horizon since it occupies the least possible space. Thus the people ED doesn’t care about are more than all space minus a gnat. Thus they verge on all space, growing all the time. She is wonderfully dismissive, enlivened by the negative pole of her very polar soul.
No one else could possibly have written this poem. It is so amused, so effortlessly, uniquely cockeyed. Note the tightening focus of the second quatrain: how it has locked down on those generalizations as on a microscope slide.
She would be sitting there—first just thinking about how so few people really matter (not even a big enough number to admit her small family, you note) and how so many don’t matter. Then her image-maker starts up. The “fill a Two” seems easy till you think of it—it’s just about impossible to stay that close to the abstraction of naming a number (two) and making it physical. She does this with the absolute economy of a single verb: “fill.” Now a two is a thing, a container, here not quite topped up, a slightly underfilled two-tank.
The more I think about this “two,” the more I admire it. It takes almost no work to slide into the reader’s understanding. The “Gnat’s Horizon,” on the other hand, while probably affording her more fun to think up, takes a little more work on our part, making it a little strained and thus inferior.
The sounds of the poem are agreeable and easy to say. The rhymish bits—Misery / Eternity; Two / grow—add a mild glue to a fine little morning’s work.
No Time for Anything but Repetition
Tichborne’s Elegy
WRITTEN WITH HIS OWN HAND IN THE TOWER BEFORE HIS EXECUTION
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares;
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain:
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
My tale was heard, and yet it was not told,
My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green,
My youth is spent, and yet I am not old,
I saw the world, and yet I was not seen:
My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
I sought my death, and found it in my womb,
I looked for life, and saw it was a shade,
I trod the earth, and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
The glass is full, and now the glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
—Chidiock Tichborne (1586)
Look at the good it does a man to know he will be hanged in the morning. He has no time for anything but repetition. This is an eighteen-line poem of a single pure shocked bafflement said sixteen ways (he repeats one way three times). He knows two mutually exclusive things directly on top of each other. The lines should all be read at the same time; even the half-lines should be stacked on top of each other and read at once; maybe every word—all the words at once—to get at the simultaneity. There is something that can neither be digested nor got beyond: now I live, and now my life is done.
Tichborne goes over and over it, running through a lifetime’s worth of metaphors for loss. And since this is his whole lifetime, why not?
Metaphor can take the weight of this; it holds; not a drop of loss has been lost in five centuries. When you have no time, when something has to last, trust a stack of metaphors.
&nbs
p; The End of the Party
I had been reading the Saturday New York Times and came to the obituaries, which I always hope to enjoy. In a short graceful obituary for a woman of a certain age with a good haircut (photo) was quoted, by her daughter I assume, a poem that had made the dead woman cry. It turned out to be a poem by Philip Larkin. (One is always braced for the worst.) The grace of the whole thing, the pleasure in seeing this Larkin poem that ran in the New Yorker a couple years ago—something he never published, but nonetheless worthy—made me feel a number of things.
One, I wished I sought out excellence and beauty more and spent less time on maddeningly unnourishing newspapers.
Two, the experience reinforced my conviction that what moves me, jars me, cannot be sought but must surprise me. It must always come and save me. So I don’t have to worry about spending too much time on newspapers.
Three, the wonderful power of this Larkin poem comes clearly and simply from its being exactly what Larkin would write, from its issuing from a single self. It is his envy of those who can live forward, his chronic sense of missing out, and his enviable technique. But the stamp of him is the thing, how drenched in him the poem is and how that paradoxically gives the whole thing to us as readers. In feeling out his own exact sensation on that late-summer late afternoon and presenting it to us in its own atmosphere (not thinking he can say it, but only make something that might contain it) Larkin releases us to feel the moment from a variety of points of view. It seems clear that the dead woman had read the poem from the point of view of the woman Larkin is addressing, who has such an appetite for the future. That’s wonderful to me. “She cried when she showed me this because it described the life she felt so lucky to have.”