For thirty-three years, Lamb sat on a high stool, identical to those occupied by thirty other clerks; dipped his goose quill into two inkwells, one containing black ink and the other red (he called the latter Clerk’s Blood); and recorded the price of tea, indigo, and piece goods. Not only did he hate his work; as Winifred F. Courtney, one of the most perceptive of his biographers, has pointed out, he was bad at it. Courtney examined some of Lamb’s ledgers and found that he frequently made mistakes. He rubbed them out with his little finger, but they nonetheless haunted his dreams, from which, he wrote in his Elia essays, he “would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries.” It is worth remembering that while he was adding up figures in the East India House’s stygian offices at Nos. 12-21 Leadenhall Street (what name could be more appropriate?), his friends– Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Godwin, DeQuincey– were rambling in the Lake Country, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, siring illegitimate children, and planning a Utopian community in America (“We shall … criticise poetry when hunting a buffalo,” wrote Southey). And yet, improbable as it seems, Lamb was an essential member of their coterie. It’s as if the inner circle of the Beats had consisted of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, and an accountant at H&R Block.
–Anne Fadiman
from “The Unfuzzy Lamb” found in At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays
This is what I see in my dreams about final exams:
two monkeys, chained to the floor, sit on the windowsill,
the sky behind them flutters,
the sea is taking a bath.
The exam is History of Mankind.
I stammer and hedge.
One monkey stares and listens with mocking disdain,
the other seems to be dreaming away–
but when it’s clear I don’t know what to say
he prompts me with a gentle
clinking of his chain.
“America, it’s true, either spoils you with success or withers you with neglect. What other morality has the artist but to endure? The only ones who survive, I think, beyond the equally destructive temptations of self-praise and self-pity, are those whose ultimate discontent is with themselves. The fiercest hearts are in love with a wild perfection.”
–James Wright quoting a letter from Stanley Kunitz
from a letter to James Dickey, 1958
Somewhere I missed where it said not to do the emperor’s sister, and at last I get what the khans will be about: outside, nothing is more inviting than a wall visible from space. So I say to myself, O Greatest Etcetera of your generation, show me a cataclysm quieter than an exploding star and I’ll know there’s no need to console my mother for what I’ve become, a dream of walking so far at night that my clothes wake me in the morning, anxious to go, gasping for breath. I pray to Time to make this real.
In today’s mail I found the chain letter you’ve been sending for years. I know your handwriting, your desperation, the peculiar way in which you fold the paper. This plea, you tell me, has been around the world three, maybe four times. This plea is sacred. This plea is our last hope for anything. In theory, intimidation can penetrate anything. We all break sooner or later. The letters are carefully packed with case histories that go off like timed explosives. I can see you waiting for each one to go off, wondering if the one you designed for me will do the trick. One summer, you say, a Portuguese fisherman received this letter and burned it. He spent the rest of his life trying to read the ashes.
When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she’s Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives– Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That’ll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest. He And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
"To be honest, to be kind—to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy."
Touching your goodness, I am like a man Who turns a letter over in his hand And you might think that this was because the hand Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man Has never had a letter from anyone; And now he is both afraid of what it means And ashamed because he has no other means To find out what it says than to ask someone.
His uncle could have left the farm to him, Or his parents died before he sent them word, Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved. Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him. What would you call his feeling for the words that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
One last bit of Hopkins… another too appropriate not to share.
"Carrion Comfort"
NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
This is one of the first "adult" poems I memorized and one of the few I’ve never forgotten. Recent events reinforce what I’ve often said before… this poem has depth and complexity far beyond what is usually accorded to it in its frequent appearance in various anthologies. Of course the most fundamental idea of the poem is simple, but read carefully. And savor the incredible language, in the mastery of which Hopkins has few equals.
"Spring and Fall"
MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leáves, líke the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Áh! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you wíll weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It ís the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.
Just heard via email that poet, novelist, and short story author Rebecca Kavaler has passed away. Here’s a poem of hers that I’ve seen shared in a few places.
"The Animal Within"
Homage to Sir Thomas Browne
We, who supposedly contain all Africa and her prodigies, are revealed for what we are only in the dying when this flesh, once apostrophized as too too solid, has proven renderable as any carcass and in the process manufactured hollows where hillocks of cheeks once smiled, then weeded out the overgrowth of hair to uncover a tenderness-evoking curve of skull, a property we had thought only of the newly born.
The mirror reflects no longer a unique face but the template of the race: uncles, aunts, cousins far removed, some ancestor who left no trace in family history yet surfaces now like a species long thought extinct hauled up from the ocean’s depths and when that dissolves what is left but the animal within which we made so much of.
Love him or hate him, Pinsky has created a good model to keep in mind when considering questions of poetry, poets, and poetics. Answer the questions with poems. It’s at least as exact as the philosophical meandering I’m likely to subject others to at the drop of a hat.
It also gives me an excuse to share a Wallace Stevens poem that feels as if it sees right into me and seems appropriate given the endless winter we’ve been experiencing here.
“The Snow Man”
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of “The Waking”– one of my favorite Roethke poems– when I was thinking so much about villanelles last weekend. However, in one of those serendipitous exchanges that make participating in these social networks so worthwhile, David Weinstock (while you’re there, check out “I am the Eggman”) turned me on to this recording of Kurt Elling’s music version of “The Waking.”
“The Waking”
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
The window has glass in it the garden has not. There’s a path between grass but the grass is not a path. Fairies are not paying attention at what you see outside which is not the inside fo the inside is invented but the outside was.
If the world is not a dream is a dream not the world? Are you looking at a map to find where you are? The fairies are sitting over there by Asia inside and out, in every bedroom and haystack. They are part of nature now the way love has become fabric.
They were not asked to share our sofas, but once an idea is needed it spreads like salt and sugar. They are riding in our automobiles, eating our dinners. We say "I don’t see them!" as they go by like buses. There’s a fire burning inside our fireplaces, the inside is, is burning the outside. And you stand getting warm like an angel before a mirror full of furies.
A long train is standing at the station and the platform is empty. Winter, night, the frozen sky is flooded with red. Only a woman’s weeping is heard. She’s pleading for something from an officer in a stone coat.
September 8, 2008
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