`Dark Lamps'

Occasionally a poem by a previously unknown poet illuminates some dim interior region we never knew existed. This happened as I was reading The God of This World to His Prophet, by Bill Coyle, which won the New Criterion Poetry Prize. I was hopping about, reading poems that caught my attention for unpoetic reasons (title, length, upper-case nouns), when I flipped to “Aubade,” the final poem in the collection:

“On a dead street
in a high wall
a wooden gate
I don't recall

“ever seeing open
is today
and I who happen
to pass this way

“in passing glimpse
a garden lit
by dark lamps
at the heart of it.”

Technically, the poem is a marvel, one long wending sentence, three rhymes, 41 mostly one-syllable words, unpunctuated until the end. For reasons I can’t identify, I set the poem in Alexandria, Egypt – a downhill walk on a cobblestone street (none of which appears in the poem). Perhaps I hear an unconscious echo of Cavafy. The final lines contain “heart” and embody it – this is the heart of the poem. Why “dark” lamps? I read the poem again and conclude “dead street” is not the same as “dead end.” In so laconic a poem, “pass” followed so quickly by “passing” merits attention. One sort of passing, a euphemism I hear more often of late, is dying. And the speaker, like this reader, “happen[s]/to pass this way.” And why is the garden empty, without people? That brings us to the poem’s 42nd word, the title.

To well-versed readers, “Aubade” means Philip Larkin, his great late poem, one of his last, from 1977. Larkin claimed the word as his own and effectively redefined it. The Oxford English Dictionary gives us “A musical announcement of dawn, a sunrise song or open-air concert.” Pieces by Bizet, Lalo and Poulenc carry the name. It’s French, Provencal, ultimately Latin, from “dawn” (aube) by way of alba – “white.” Implied is the regret of parting lovers. That’s how William Empson intended it in his “Aubade,” from 1933, with “The heart of standing is you cannot fly” repeated four times until it modulates, once, into “The heart of standing is we cannot fly.”

Empson retains the tradition of parting lovers – woken by a pre-dawn earthquake in Tokyo – but the speaker in Larkin’s “Aubade” wakes up alone except for “Unresting death.” Hints of the older tradition remain – “In time the curtain edges will grow light” and “The sky is white as clay, with no sun” -- but this “Aubade” is not so much sad as desolate and comfortless.

Coyle, surely, knows all of this and more. Why has he chosen to join this company by titling his poem “Aubade?” Has the speaker just parted from a lover? Is it dawn? Is that why the “dark lamps” burn? Coyle crafts a fruitful mystery with his 42nd word.