`Yet This is Life Too'

A phrase from one of Zbigniew Herbert’s essays on Dutch Golden Age painting, collected in Still Life with a Bridle, comes back to me: “the insatiable, never satisfied hunger for reality.” All of us possess it and its opposite – hunger for unreality, for fantasy, evasion and falsehood. The day-to-day tug-of-war between them defines who we are. I thought of this while reading “Courtyards in Delft” by the Irish poet Derek Mahon. He subtitles it “Pieter de Hooch, 1659,” and the poem refers to a series of Courtyard paintings by de Hooch (1629-1684), including “The Courtyard of a House in Delft” and “A Musical Party in a Courtyard”:

“Oblique light on the trite, on brick and tile –
Immaculate masonry, and everywhere that
Water tap, that broom and wooden pail
To keep it so. House-proud, the wives
Of artisans pursue their thrifty lives
Among scrubbed yards, modest but adequate.
Foliage is sparse, and clings. No breeze
Ruffles the trim composure of those trees.

“No spinet-playing emblematic of
The harmonies and disharmonies of love;
No lewd fish, no fruit, no wide-eyed bird
About to fly its cage while a virgin
Listens to her seducer, mars the chaste
Perfection of the thing and the thing made.
Nothing is random, nothing goes to waste.
We miss the dirty dog, the fiery gin.

“That girl with her back to us who waits
For her man to come home for his tea
Will wait till the paint disintegrates
And ruined dikes admit the esurient sea;
Yet this is life too, and the cracked
Out-house door a verifiable fact
As vividly mnemonic as the sunlit
Railings that front the houses opposite.

“I lived there as a boy and know the coal
Glittering in its shed, late-afternoon
Lambency informing the deal table,
The ceiling cradled in a radiant spoon.
I must be lying low in a room there,
A strange child with a taste for verse,
While my hard-nosed companions dream of fire
And sword upon parched veldt and fields of rain-swept gorse.”

I love the opening, internally rhymed phrase – “Oblique light on the trite” – and Mahon’s statement of his theme: “the chaste/Perfection of the thing and the thing made.” Also, the grand third stanza, with its affirmation of the real: “Yet this is life too.” Mahon has written a credo for art as witness in the metaphysical, not the political sense. It’s a impulse, this dedicated regard for the real, that we often see in Whitman. Consider the eighth section of “Song of Myself”:

“The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.

“The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
I peeringly view them from the top.

“The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen.

“The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous'd mobs,
The flap of the curtain'd litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd,
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
What groans of over-fed or half-starv'd who fall sunstruck or in fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain'd by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the show or resonance of them -- I come and I depart.”