`A Lifetime of Autumns'

I read this passage from Louise Bogan’s 1961 journal –

“The long late light, in childhood. Autumn desolation. The windy raw autumn afternoon, with light and dark alternating over the hills and fields, and great sweeps of gray cloud giving the light its silence, its feeling of tears, of sorrow, of desperation. The light that would return, over a lifetime of autumns.”

-- and flashed on an autumn afternoon 40 years ago, a Sunday around the time of my 16th birthday. I had gone with my father to the lake where we spent our summers. He had work to do and I walked to the far side of the water and through an abandoned apple orchard. The light was as Bogan describes it, alternately brilliant -- shadows were long -- and diffused by high clouds. The remaining apples were hard and green or soft and brown. I wore a brown sweater and brushed my sleeve against a burdock, leaving stickers on the wool. I was a junior in high school and already some things seemed impossible.

I recall this otherwise trivial memory only because Bogan’s words brought it back to me with vividness and emotion. She is among the “special writers” I’ve described elsewhere, and this recollection is not the first her words have triggered in me. I already knew who she was that day in 1968 (she lived until 1970) because I read The New Yorker and I think I had read Alan Seager’s life of Theodore Roethke, Bogan’s one-time lover. Her work attracted me immediately and more lastingly than Roethke’s. I also loved or would eventually love some of the writers she loved – Thoreau, Henry James, Chekhov, Yeats, Colette, Elizabeth Bowen, Rilke, William Maxwell, Auden. In an exchange of e-mails with Ron Slate on Friday, he echoed some of my experience:

“I love Bogan too. The Elizabeth Frank bio made me so sad. Those years way, way up on the upper west side, grinding it out, the poems coming so slowly if at all. I'd give all of Bill Gates' money to write a poem as good as `Simple Autumnal.’ That line in the essay -- `the poem is always the last resort.’ It was so true for her -- and violated by almost all of us other practitioners.”

I’m glad Ron reminded me of “Simple Autumnal”:

“The measured blood beats out the year’s delay.
The tearless eyes and heart, forbidden grief,
Watch the burned, restless, but abiding leaf,
The brighter branches arming the bright day.

“The cone, the curving fruit should fall away,
The vine stem crumble, ripe grain know its sheaf.
Bonded to time, fires should have done, be brief,
But, serfs to sleep, they glitter and they stay.

“Because not last nor first, grief in its prime
Wakes in the day, and hears of life’s intent.
Sorrow would break the seal stamped over time
And set the baskets where the bough is bent.

“Full season’s come, yet filled trees keep the sky
And never scent the ground where they must lie.”

Bogan’s work will probably remain a minority taste. The sonnet suggests her customary method -- emotional volatility constrained by form. Bogan knew desolation, grief and immense sadness, but she knew the demands of art. To read her merely as a precursor of the “confessional” poets, a sort of proto-Anne Sexton, is a radical misunderstanding. She labored at her craft of artfully arranging words. As late as 1948 when she was 53, Bogan wrote in a letter to an aspiring book reviewer:

“This `writing with the ear’ is really the best technical practice you can give yourself. Remember that the reader’s attention span is usually v. short I cut and cut my sentences, right up to the last version; always keeping the adjectives down to the minimum and the adverbs practically to zero. The verb can do so much!”

This is from her 1934 journal:

“Whatever I do, apart from the short cry (lyric poetry) and the short remarks (journalism), must be in the form of notes. Mine is the talent of the cry or the cahier.”