`Good Fortune Is a Reassuring Ruse'

Perhaps the rest of the world already knows the life and work of Catherine Davis (1924-2002), a poet who studied with J.V. Cunningham and Yvor Winters, but I first saw her name over the weekend when a reader suggested I read her villanelle “After a Time”:

“After a time, all losses are the same.
One more thing lost is one thing less to lose;
And we go stripped at last the way we came.

“Though we shall probe, time and again, our shame,
Who lack the wit to keep or to refuse,
After a time, all losses are the same.

“No wit, no luck can beat a losing game;
Good fortune is a reassuring ruse:
And we all go stripped the way we came.

“Rage as we will for what we think to claim,
Nothing so much as this bare thought subdues:
After a time, all losses are the same.

“The sense of treachery—the want, the blame—
Goes in the end, whether or not we choose,
And we go stripped at last the way we came.

“So we, who would go raging, will go tame
When what we have can no longer use:
After a time, all losses are the same;
And we go stripped at last the way we came.”

The same grim matter written in free verse, without the ameliorating discipline of meter and rhyme, might read like a teenager’s diary. Form is freeing, not constricting. The art is not in the emotion but in its elegant containment. Anyone can feel; only poets craft.

What little I know about Davis’ life suggests she learned first-hand that “Good fortune is a reassuring ruse.” Perhaps her poem is an oblique retort (“So we, who would go raging, will go tame…”) to Dylan Thomas’ blustering, booze-bloated “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” I hear echoes of King Lear, as when Edgar says “A most poor man, made tame to fortune’s blows, / Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows, / Am pregnant to good pity.”

The reader who sent me Davis’ poem added, “I thought of your student when I saw this.” I know what she means and appreciate the thought but it doesn’t quite apply. My student and the other kids in our classroom nurse no aggrievement (“the sense of treachery”), no notion of loss or incapacity. When they suffer – and not all suffer -- there is no “great rage,” as the doctor says of Lear at the end of the play. My student, most days smiling and good-natured, cried much of Monday. I fretted but the women in the room assured me the cause of her unhappiness was merely menstrual.