`I Could Not Love It Enough'

Almost 20 years before her death, Louise Bogan published an oddly valedictory poem, “After the Persian,” in the Nov. 3, 1951, issue of The New Yorker. Her biographer, Elizabeth Frank, tells us Bogan originally had titled it “From the Persian” but the magazine’s fact-checkers objected, noting that readers might mistakenly assume the poem was a translation – not that “After the Persian” is much of an improvement in that regard. Frank says the poem is based on Bogan’s longtime devotion to the Persian art collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston:

“The details of `After the Persian’ are thus distillations of visual memory. The vines and moths, the hunt and fountain and pool, have been gazed at and entered into.”

Out of these fragments and memories of another culture’s art, Bogan fashioned one of her loveliest and most obliquely autobiographical poems. For instance:

“I am the dweller on the temperate threshold,
The strip of corn and vine,
Where all is translucence (the light!),
Liquidity, and the sound of water.
Here the days pass under shade
And the nights have the waxing and the waning moon.
Here the moths take flight at evening;
Here at morning the dove whistles and the pigeons coo.
Here, as night comes on, the fireflies wink and snap
Close to the cool ground,
Shining in a profusion
Celestial or marine.”

Bogan paints an Edenic sanctuary, a vision rare in her work. One senses we are reading a personal mythology – lovely but intentionally muted and cryptic. Some of the lines are long and the rhythm is stately yet simple, like heightened prose, as in Whitman and some of the Psalms. Her exclamation “(the light!)” recalls Goethe’s final words: “More light!” (Bogan co-translated his Elective Affinities and The Sorrows of Young Werther) and some of the longer, looser lines might be the work of her former lover, Theodore Roethke. The poem’s culmination is piercing:

“Goodbye, goodbye!
There was so much to love, I could not love it all;
I could not love it enough.

“Some things I overlooked, and some I could not find.
Let the crystal clasp them
When you drink your wine, in autumn.”

Like Prospero, the speaker seems to be renouncing her art – prematurely – and readying herself for death. Often blocked and desolate, Bogan continued to write poems sporadically until her death in 1970. “There was so much to love,” and yet expressing it adequately was so difficult. In 1941, she wrote a letter to her friend Morton D. Zabel describing the renewal and intensification of her friendship with William Maxwell, the novelist and fiction editor for The New Yorker. She describes listening to Schubert and Mahler with him (“he is the most wonderful record-listener I have ever met”) and writes:

“Maxwell is really an exquisite human being; and I wish there was something between love and friendship that I could tender him; and some gesture, not quite a caress, I could give him. A sort of smoothing. I may be able to work out something along these lines later! Seriously, I simply love him like a brother.”