`A Will and a Facility for Learning'

After a year and a half of almost daily work as a substitute, I’ve been hired by the school district as a fulltime employee, and Monday was the first day of school. Where better to be than a grade school on such a day? New clothes, backpacks and haircuts, bawling kids and deliriously happy kids.

I told the school psychologist, who was unable to console a first grader who had been whimpering longer than we thought humanly possible, that I remembered a similar event from my first day of first-grade fifty-two ago. A tall man in a blue Air Force dress uniform was trying to fit his son through the classroom door. The kid, who later became my best friend, was screaming and contorting his body so his father couldn’t squeeze him through. The boy was Korean, as was the kid squalling in the office on Monday. The counselor said, “Funny how we remember things like that.”

While eating lunch in the staff room I reread Eric Hoffer’s memoir Truth Imagined (1983), including Hoffer’s account of how reading Montaigne for the first time as a migrant worker during the Great Depression transformed his life forever. (I wrote about it here.) Montaigne, I know, is not part of the school-district curriculum, even for high-school students, but the alignment of school’s resumption and Montaigne sent me back after school to Hoffer’s Reflections on the Human Condition (1973):

“The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.”

`The Mountain Comes and Goes'

Louise Bogan taught at the University of Washington in Seattle for three months in 1960. The poet suffered periodically from depression and was for much of her life a city dweller. Her responses to the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, from flowers to mountains, are touching and precise. In a letter to the poet May Sarton written in April (What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan 1920-1970, edited by Ruth Limmer, 1973) she says:

“Here, I live in close proximity to a cherry tree in full flower. I never had this experience before. I look out my window, and there it is: some of the blossoms already hanging in clusters, like cherries, and others like little white muffs, on the upright racemes. So lovely; so chic! Nature’s elegance….The sun has come out and all is in bloom. [My landlady] brings me tiny bouquets—I have had garnet roses, freesias, and now a mixture of grape hyacinths, with yellow and lavender-purple primulas. English daisies grow well, along with dandelions. Camellias grow on bushes….”

Bogan sounds almost giddy. She uses botanical terms with precision – raceme and primula -- and includes the lowly dandelion. In the same letter she composes a haiku titled “Rainier”:

“The mountain comes and goes
Like a watermark
On celestial paper.”

This is clever and visually precise. Mount Rainier, indeed, “comes and goes” as atmospheric conditions change. Its colors, luminescence and size vary. We go for days without seeing it and suddenly, as we turn a corner, it looms. Bogan surely knew her friend Marianne Moore, almost forty years earlier, had written a great and far more ambitious poem about Mount Rainier, “An Octopus.” After the haiku Bogan adds: “…It is a lovely mountain. And, in spite of bouts of mild homesickness, I think things will work out well.” In a May 8 letter to Sarton, Bogan writes:

“Here, the red hawthorn (a tree!) [As opposed, presumably, to the cultivated shrub, a more modest plant.] is in full bloom. Also, dogwood and auricula. Do you know auricula? They turn up in flower prints, but I’ve never seen them in Eastern gardens.”

Bogan bolsters my conviction that poets ought to know the precise names of flowers, trees, birds, clouds and minerals – the stuff of the world. She writes in the same letter, “The weather continues to be spectacular: rare sunlight, with many showers, and tremendous cloud-effects,” and in one dated May 8 to Ruth Limmer:

“The mountain is out today! A cloud has just made floats above it. It is v. good at making clouds….”

An attentive writer encourages comparable attentiveness in readers. I see a new Mount Rainier since reading the passages above. Hopkins in his poems and notebooks, and Thoreau in his journal – both Bogan favorites – similarly renew our senses. In A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, editor Mary Kinzie includes a selection from Bogan’s journals, “The Time of Day.” It begins with a passage from Thoreau’s journal, dated Feb. 5, 1855, that Bogan transcribed into her own in 1933:

“In a journal it is important in a few words to describe the weather, or characters of the day, as it affects our feelings. That which was so important at the time cannot be unimportant to remember.”

`Most of the Energies of Civilized Man'

A friend and devoted reader of Anecdotal Evidence leaves New York City this afternoon for Sudan, where he’ll be working for the next two years:

“I’m taking with me to Africa about 15 to 18 books: Astley’s Staying Alive -- a 20th-century global poetry anthology; Jarrell’s anthology Book of Stories, Proust's first two books of A la recherche, Victor Hugo’s poetic collection Contemplations, Chekhov’s shorter stories of the last decade, Boswell's Johnson, Montaigne’s complete works in one very fat volume, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Barzun’s reader, Hemingway’s earlier stories, Frost in the Library of America edition, Wilbur’s collected and a few others. And Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra.”

I envy him the literary company if not the destination. How will it feel to read Richard Wilbur’s witty elegant lyrics in the heat and menace of the Sudanese desert? I trust my friend, who is neither naïve nor inexperienced in the Third World. He’s no dangerously blind idealist, and resembles Wilbur’s bat: “It has no need to falter or explore; / Darkly it knows what obstacles are there.”

Gary reminds me of a better-natured Evelyn Waugh, who in 1938 spent two months in Mexico where the Roman Catholic Church was officially outlawed and practicing priests were subject to execution. The following year he published Robbery Under Law, subtitled The Mexican Object-Lesson, implying we might learn something from the chaos and butchery in that country. The real slaughter was about to start in Europe and Asia. Here’s what Waugh wrote on the final page of his book:

“Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given it from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilised man to keep going at all. There are criminal ideas and a criminal class in every nation and the first action of every revolution, figuratively and literally, is to open the prisons. Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come from merely habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on.”

Gary is eminently civilized, as his reading list attests. He knows the lessons of Heart of Darkness. Saint-Beauve observed that Montaigne lived in “an age of struggle and combat” but managed to sustain his gift for “moderation, caution, and order.” I hope that’s sufficient, Gary, and I sign off as you did in your final e-mail, “Again many thanks and wishing you the very highest good.”

`The Supreme Sensual Pleasure'

“Art is the supreme sensual pleasure.”

Surpassing even the obvious, which for most of us will abate and disappear in time but so long as one’s sensibility – intellect, imagination, emotions, spirit -- remain vital, Shakespeare, Schubert and Matisse reliably render pleasure.

“Indifference to art is betrayed by the pompous solemnity of the homage often rendered it. True love remains silent or mocks.”

Don’t tell me how you just love Rilke and Les Fleurs du Mal. Show me. You have nothing to prove. In art as in other matters, those who speak the most generally have least to say.

“All literature is contemporary for the reader who knows how to read.”

Montaigne and Samuel Johnson tell us more about how we live, and how we ought to live, than any newspaper or blog. Most of the new soon turns to dust. Homer is fresh and present in a way Ashbery will never be.

“Contemporary literature, in any period, is the worst enemy of culture. The reader’s limited time is wasted by reading a thousand mediocre books that blunt his critical sense and impair his literary sensibility.”

When young we read everything. It’s the only way to hone literary taste and sift the worthy from the worthless. The market and media have product to move, and there’s pressure to consume what’s new and fashionable. And then you wonder: why did I waste my time?

“There are people who admit, without shame, that they `study’ literature.”

And fail to find pleasure or instruction in a word of it.

[The passages quoted above are from Don Colacho’s Aphorisms, a blog operated by “Stephen” and devoted to translating and celebrating the work of Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994), an unclassifiable Spanish writer. The blog is notably well-organized. The citations are drawn from the section titled Art & Letters. In a short time Don Colacho’s Aphorisms has become essential daily reading.]

`Glows Forever in This Poetry'

One of the joys of reading First Known When Lost is marveling at Steve Pentz’s gift for salvaging poems and poets previously unknown to me. From him I’ve learned of James Reeves, C. S. Calverley, Henry Newbolt and Bernard Spencer, among many others. For my money, using the internet to shares one’s enthusiasms, and by doing so educating and bringing pleasure to others, is worthy of canonization.

On Thursday, Steve shared his discovery of the word “euphrasy” in poems by Siegfried Sassoon and Walter de la Mare. The flower, better known as eye-bright, has been used for centuries as a folk remedy for infections of the eye. Even its etymology is lovely, from the Greek euphrasia, “gladness” or “good cheer.” I knew of euphrasy and, like Steve, first learned of it from an English poet – John Milton, who uses it in the herbalist sense in Book 11 of Paradise Lost:

“But to nobler sights
Michael from Adam's eyes the film removed
Which that false fruit that promised clearer sight
Had bred; then purged with euphrasy and rue
The visual nerve, for he had much to see,
And from the well of life three drops instilled.
So deep the power of these ingredients pierced,
Even to the inmost seat of mental sight,
That Adam, now enforced to close his eyes,
Sunk down, and all his spirits became intranced.”

This is powerfully moving -- the restoration of sight as described by a blind poet. “For he had much to see” echoes in my private theater with the naïveté of Miranda -- “O brave new world / That has such people in't!” -- answered by the gentle patience and understanding of her father: “`Tis new to thee.” Another blind poet, Borges, describes the convergence of Milton, blindness and a flower in “A Rose and Milton” (translated by Alistair Reid in Selected Poems, 1999):

“From all the generations of past roses,
Disintegrated in the depths of time,
I want one to be spared oblivion—
One unexceptional rose from all the things
That once existed. Destiny allows me
The privilege of choosing, this first time,
That silent flower, the very final rose
That Milton held before his face, but could
Not see. O rose, vermilion or yellow
Or white, from some obliterated garden,
Your past existence magically lasts
And glows forever in this poetry,
Gold or blood-covered, ivory of shadowed,
As once in Milton’s hands, invisible rose.”

Milton writes in "Light":

“Thus with the Year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine…”

`Those Men Are Unconscious Photographers'

Between 1938 and 1941, Walker Evans surreptitiously photographed hundreds of passengers on New York City subways. He strapped to his chest a 35-mm Contax with the chrome painted black and aimed it between two buttons of his topcoat. He worked the shutter with a long cord running down the sleeve to his right hand. Mostly he shot the people seated across the aisle from him. The resulting photographs are a voyeur’s dream, public but candid. Evans turns into art what all of us do privately every day – watch (and evaluate) our fellow humans, whether in a spirit of lust, comedy or idle curiosity.

Many Are Called, not published until 1966, collects eighty-nine of Evans’ candid photos. Go here to see an image of the 2004 reissue, the cover of which pictures a man reading the Feb. 15, 1938, issue of the New York Daily News: “Pal Tells How Gungirl Killed.” In Walker Evans, his 1999 biography of the photographer, James R. Mellow cites a passage from “The Tunnel” section of The Bridge in which Hart Crane (an Evans acquaintance) sees the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe on the subway:

“And why do I often meet your visage here,
Your eyes like agate lanterns – on and on
Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?”

Like Crane, Evans noticed advertizing and signs of any sort. The epigraph Evans gave to the 1966 edition of Many Are Called was first attributed to Henry James, but corrected to the novelist’s father, Henry James Sr., on an erratum slip: “To a right-minded man, a crowded Cambridge horsecar is the nearest approach to heaven upon earth.” The line might be Whitman’s (“The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb…"). Mellow says the choice of epigraph reveals Evans’ “sly perversity,” and continues:

“…Evans had a deep respect for Henry James, Jr., as well as for James Joyce, and felt a connection between a `great piece of writing and photography.’ Evans maintained: `There’s no book but what’s full of photography. James Joyce is. Henry James is. That’s a pet subject of mine – how those men are unconscious photographers.’”

Walker Evans was no dutiful documentarian. Like any artist, like James and Joyce, his deepest concerns were formal, but his work, like theirs, is suffused with the human. This is no contradiction. Form and content are inextricable. Consider James’ greatest story, “The Beast in the Jungle,” from 1903. In the cemetery, beside the grave of May Bartram, whose love he never recognized or returned, John Marcher finally perceives “the sounded void of his life.” He observes another mourner whose grief is apparent:

“Marcher knew him at once for one of the deeply stricken--a perception so sharp that nothing else in the picture comparatively lived, neither his dress, his age, nor his presumable character and class; nothing lived but the deep ravage of the features that he showed. He showed them--that was the point; he was moved, as he passed, by some impulse that was either a signal for sympathy or, more possibly, a challenge to an opposed sorrow.”

This reads like a photograph – not a naturalistic transcript of reality but an artist’s carefully selective rendering, like one of the faces Evans shot in the subway. The linking of James and photography, form and content, remind me of Herbert Morris’ poem about the novelist, “House of Words” (What Was Lost, 2000), a 657-line dramatic monologue set in 1906. James examines proofs of his portrait taken by Alvin Langdon Coburn, the American photographer whose atmospheric pictures illustrate the New York Edition. James’ mood ten years before his death is sadly resigned, autumnal, almost self-pitying, though he continues to write. The novelist recalls his meeting with Coburn and says he:

“…spoke of the vagaries of photographic
portraiture, as he sees them, and to which
the gentleman has not, to hear him tell it,
accustomed himself, wholly made his peace with,
followed by the man’s pained, detailed recital
(admirably restrained, almost reluctant),
albeit cogent, moving, of dilemmas
in willing mere mechanical devices,
lens, timer, shutter, dimmest `apparatus’
(quiescent, mindless until now, awaiting
someone—oneself—to rouse them into life),
to reproduce, as best they can, that vision
one possesses as much as is possessed by—
one’s version of the world, one thinks to call it--,
the problem, too, with words, if I may say so,
dilemmas, in all truth, with which I am not,
nor ever have been, a fine point made finer,
wholly—irredeemably—unfamiliar.”

`The Rest of Us Will Forget Too Soon'

A reader in Dallas reminds us:

"August 25, 1944 - A.J. Liebling arrives in Paris, several hours before the surrender of the German garrison."

Liebling concludes his “Letter from Paris,” published in The New Yorker on Sept. 30, 1944, like this:

“The exuberance of the first week of liberation has died down. The children in the little park under my window who sang the `Marseillaise’ all day every day that week and walked about waving tiny flags are now playing the French equivalent of hopscotch, as they used to in 1940, when I lived in the same room I live in now, overlooking the same park. The small gardien in the green uniform who stood by the fountain in the park on the day I went away is there again, his hands locked behind his back. The fountain, with its four allegorical female figures (the rivers of France), plays on and I am once again tempted to throw peachstones into the navel of the fat stone woman who represents the Loire. A fat flesh-and-blood woman in flowered wrapper comes out on a sixth-story balcony of a house fronting on the park and waters some geraniums. I recognize her; she is the woman who came out on the same balcony early in the morning of May 10, 1940, when German planes first appeared over Paris, and waved at some frightened pigeons and cried, `Confidence!’ And I remember how people at other windows on the square laughed and waved, too. She was wearing a flannel nightgown then. The children have forgotten the Germans already, I am sure. The rest of us will forget too soon.”

[from Liebling’s World War II Writings, Library of America, 2008.]

`The Only End of Writing'

Arguably it's a fate preferable to oblivion – surviving as a literary footnote because one’s book is memorably eviscerated by a much greater writer. We know Soame Jenyns because Samuel Johnson in 1757 reviewed his Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil. Even Johnson’s most learned and level-headed biographer, W. Jackson Bate, calls Jenyns’ volume “a foolish book and foolish in many ways,” but concedes Johnson uses “an array of artillery” to demolish it. Jenyns’ thesis reminds me of a television interview some forty years ago with another deep thinker, Arlo Guthrie, who denied the existence of evil with these words: “If it is, it’s gotta be good.” Q.E.D.

The latest writer to examine Jenyns’ book, Johnson’s cannonade and the nature of evil is Theodore Dalrymple in “Modernity’s Uninvited Guest”:

“Self-understanding may even have regressed since Johnson, for no man was better at self-examination than he. If more people proved adept at it, perhaps the prevalence of evil would decline. Johnson was highly imperfect, knew himself to be so, and always struggled against his imperfections without expecting more than partial victory.”

Dalrymple’s eye is focused almost exclusively on the question of evil, so he makes no mention of the nineteen words in Johnson’s essay that I prize above all the others. They distill Johnson’s thinking and echo my own:

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

Writing instructs and that doesn’t necessarily make it dictatorial, elitist, self-righteous or school-marmish. A good writer writes with authority. He has something to give us – pleasure, insight, information – something he convinces us is worth having. He may do so by arguing, explaining, seducing or amusing. An exchange takes place: He convinces us to listen and we give our attentiveness, which is respectful but neither naïve nor credulous. If he tries too hard – if he tailgates like an overheated driver – the contract is broken and we close the book. If we are writers and don't uphold our end of the bargain, we're soon out of readers. Yvor Winters writes:

“Write little; do it well.
Your knowledge will be such,
At last, as to dispel
What moves you overmuch.”

`A New Part of the American Environment'

Twenty years ago a gifted colleague at the newspaper where we worked hacked into the computer of an editor we both detested. Another colleague has described this editor as the only man he ever knew who could swagger while seated. Among the editor’s files my friend found a document slugged “Things I Hate.” It was a list of ideas for future columns, but on it were not what you might expect and even endorse – solipsism, most newspaper writing, communism, modern architecture – but small-minded banalities: motorists who drive too slowly in the passing lane, tofu, freeway tolls, intelligent women. We promptly made copies and circulated them among the staff.

I was reminded of my former supervisor’s festering mind while reading Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology (2000), photos and documents from the Evans archives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, edited by Jeff L. Rosenheim and Douglas Eklund. To my taste, Evans (1903-1975) is among the great artists of the last century, best known for his collaboration with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Agee’s prose is overripe and precious but Evans’ photos, because of their elegant directness, have grown in beauty and power.

Included in Unclassified are lists labeled “Contempt for” and “Contempt or hatred for” made by Evans and Agee, respectively, in 1937. Evans’ list is fairly genteel: “gourmets, liberals, cultivated women,” “limited editions, `atmosphere,’ Bennington College, politics,” “critics.” Agee’s is nastier and more pretentious: “most whose feelings get hurt,” “those who bring forth, and up, children,” “Jane Austen.” To his credit, Agee does include “sensitive young men” and “Karl Marx.”

Also included is a much shorter list, “Likes,” prepared by Agee on the same day. It’s a more appealing artifact: “movies,” “music,” “Buster Keaton,” “city streets,” “the life and conduct of Joyce,” though he adds, ominously, “Lenin.” I already admired Evans and disliked Agee’s life and work before seeing these lists, and that certainly colors my reading of them, but I’m still disturbed by minds attracted to hit lists, the quantification of whims and petty dissatisfactions, especially among nominal adults. There’s something Travis Bickle-like about it, a form of arrested adolescence.

In contrast, while reading Stuart Davis (edited by Philip Rylands, 1997), I came upon a passage from an essay, “The Cube Root,” the painter published in Art News in 1943. Davis (1892-1964) reminds me of Evans in his formal elegance and love of the American scene. He writes:

“Some of the things which make me want to paint, outside of other paintings, are: American wood and iron work of the past; Civil War and skyscraper architecture; the brilliant colors on gasoline stations; chain-store fronts, and taxi-cabs; the music of Bach; synthetic chemistry; the poetry of Rimbaud; fast travel by train, auto, and aeroplane which brought new and multiple perspectives; electric signs; the landscape and boats of Glouchester, Mass.; 5 & 10 cent store kitchen utensils; movies and radio; Earl Hines hot piano and Negro jazz music in general, etc. In one way or another the quality of these things plays a role in determining the character of my paintings. Not in the sense of describing them in graphic images, but by predetermining an analogous dynamics in the design, which becomes a new part of the American environment.”

Davis, a great modernist painter and instinctive democrat, was enthusiastically responsive to his American surroundings. He named his son Earl, after Hines.

`Literary Staples'

“You can’t even get literary staples in the new, gimcrack bookshops, Ruskin, Burton, Coleridge’s Letters, Sartor Resartus, The City of God by St. Augustine.”

That’s Edward Dahlberg in a 1958 letter to Robert M. Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago (where he abolished the school’s football program) and founder of the Great Books Curricula. I love that casual “literary staples.” All are books and writers I’ve accumulated over the last forty years (in part, thanks to Dahlberg) because you can’t depend on libraries and “gimcrack bookshops.” In an age when, given enough time and money, you can possess any book, you have to scramble and hoard and pay attention to what a friend in Texas calls “very talented readers.” She writes:

“Right now I'm reading [Robert Louis] Wilken's Spirit of Early Christian Thought. I love it. Love it. I'm forcing myself to go slow. As I read your post … about Herbert and striving to touch reality, it struck me that he is talking about exactly the same thing as Wilken. This would draw a scoff at best from many of my academic friends, but I know that there is more to reality than meets the eye. They reject religion as `obviously’ unscientific and therefore worthy of scorn, but they know as little about the New Testament as they do about poetry. I don't think it’s an accident that the things they choose to remain ignorant of are things that require you to have a conscience. But I'm being uncharitable. I didn't love these things myself until relatively recently. (I'm breathlessly waiting for my copy of Herbert's Collected Prose!)”

Has a writer ever been blessed with so very talented a reader? Books are not props of a “lifestyle” or emblems of status but what Kenneth Burke called “equipment for living.” A new illiteracy grows daily -- read a book blog or speak with a college student if you need proof -- but not all is lost. My friend writes:

“Have you ever heard of the Jesuits' Cristo Rey schools? They've started several of these schools in cities around the country. In Houston, they bought a shuttered diocesan high school called Mt Carmel, over near Hobby airport. It sits right on the line that separates a large black neighborhood from a burgeoning Hispanic one. It's college prep, and tuition is $25 a month. There are several families that can't pay it, so they barter. One mom runs a taco truck, so she gives 25 tacos every month. Anyway, they've been phenomenally successful in raising money, but it's still going to be a long process. They opened last year with freshmen only; this year there are two classes. The school itself is still undergoing massive renovations. They don't have the budget yet to hire a librarian--so I volunteered to start the library from scratch. It's been quite the education. The most interesting thing was getting a call from the librarian at Dallas Jesuit High School, which is very wealthy. They're renovating their library and--get this--offered to give us all their books. They don't think they need them any more, because they do everything online. I think they've completely lost it, but I immediately agreed to come up and take whatever we could use. So I drove up there with one of the Cristo Rey English teachers. They had all the books spread out in long piles on the floor of the empty library--it was eerie. We spent two days on our hands and knees sorting through about 7,000 books, ended up taking almost 3,000. Oh man, it was strange. I saw some weird stuff--who would have guessed that there are about eight different biographies of Tom Landry?”

I’ll confess my ignorance: I didn’t know who Tom Landry was or why he merited eight biographies. He was a football player and coach.

`Stand for Truth, and 'Tis Enough'

“Many writers perplex their readers, and hearers with mere nonsense. Their writings need sunshine. Pure and neat language I love, yet plain and customary. A barbarous phrase hath often made me out of love with a good sense; and doubtful writing hath racked me beyond my patience.”

So writes Ben Jonson in Timber: or Discoveries, a commonplace book and gathering of aphorisms and meditations distilled from vast reading and published in 1641, four years after the poet's death. I’m rereading it in George Parfitt’s edition of The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics, 1988). Jonson is deemed the arch-classicist among English poets – a judgment not always intended as praise – and Timber is a densely wooded forest of quotations, mostly Greek and Roman, we can read as a proto-blog of the better sort. Parfitt translates Jonson’s prefatory note, “Sylva,” from the Latin:

“The fundamental material of facts and ideas, the wood – so to speak – and called so as a result of the variety and multifarious nature of the contents. Exactly as we call a great number of trees growing at random `a wood,’ so the ancients use the word `wood’ or `timber-trees’ for those writings of theirs which had in them material on a range and diversity of things collected at random.”

Not quite “at random,” at least in Jonson’s case. His reading was athletic in its exertions and his literary taste was almost flawless. In the first three pages of Timber, Parfitt glosses citations from Seneca, Plutarch, Tacitus, Juvenal, Euripides and Quintilian. Jonson’s prose recalls Montaigne’s and Burton’s in its learning but is more concise, less baroquely discursive. Like his poetry, his prose is a model of compactness and common sense. For readers suspicious of reliance on the wisdom of the ancients and deferral to tradition, Parfitt has an explanation:

“The basically derivative nature of the work is admitted in the prefatory note: he takes material from others which interests him or which expresses views with which he agrees, adding his own comments and illustrations whenever he wishes. The process is not unlike that found in the poems and it should be remembered that borrowing can be as selective and personally revealing an activity as invention.”

No writer, regardless of pertinent biology, practices autogamy. Guy Davenport taught me that every book is a response, a creative echo, acknowledged or otherwise, to at least one other book. Every sentence is half a dialogue. Beware of pretensions to originality. Don’t make it new; make it excellent. Jonson writes in Timber:

“I do not desire to be equal to those that went before; but to have my reason examined with theirs, and so much faith to be given them, or me, as those shall evict. I am neither author, or fautor [patron, one who gives support] of any sect. I will have no man addict himself to me; but if I have anything right, defend it as truth’s, not mine (save as it conduceth to a common good). It profits not me to have any man fence, or fight for me, to flourish, or take a side. Stand for truth, and ‘tis enough.”

`Your Worth Will Dignifie Our Feast'

“To-night, grave sir, both my poore house, and I
Doe equally desire your companie:
Not that we thinke us worthy such a guest,
But that your worth will dignifie our feast,
With those that come…”

David Myers returns to A Commonplace Blog after leaving Texas and setting up shop in my home state, Ohio (our paths have never quite intersected in time or space). As he says at the end of his six-week absence: “It is past time to reignite the conversation. Let’s begin again.” The rhythm and sentiment echo the opening lines of Ben Jonson’s “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” cited above. The poem is an invitation, a welcome, to David and all readers: Come, join us, help yourself, enjoy the feast. Jonson concludes with these words:

“No simple word
That shall be utter'd at our mirthfull board
Shall make us sad next morning : or affright
The libertie, that wee'll enjoy to-night.”

`That Other Restlessness'

A month ahead of the calendar, autumn has arrived in the garden. The smells are tart, tomatoes and marigolds, no longer the floral sweetness of July. The sense of display and allurement, the high frivolity of true summer, has lapsed. There’s a new seriousness among the green beans. In “August” (Toward the Winter Solstice, 2006) Timothy Steele writes of “a rioting of salad greens” but hints at the unannounced change:

“In such rich warmth, it’s easy to relax
And hard to credit calendars and clocks,
Which register, among other facts,
The shorter days, the coming equinox.”

The boys and I picked a fat yellow squash, red onions, beans, a handful of cherry tomatoes (sweet, unmistakably fruit) and the last of the lettuce (a little bitter, the way I like it). In our modest way, since spring planting we’ve ridden the turn of the seasons, emotions keyed to celestial motions. Circadian rhythm is nothing next to a Northerner’s sense of seasonal rhythm, matters of temperature, moisture and light. The marigolds we left unpicked. It was my job as a boy to harvest their seeds and store them in pipe tobacco cans until the following spring. I remember the riddle John Gay poses in “The Shepherd’s Week” (1714):

“`What flower is that which bears the Virgin's name,
The richest metal joined with the same?’”

The answer: Mary + gold = marigold. Gardens always brings thoughts of poems, Marvell’s and Donne’s, for instance, and Yvor Winters’ “Time and the Garden,” which explicitly links the subjects. As his garden grows, so does his sense of anticipation:

“I long to crowd the little garden, gain
Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small
And taste it in a moment, time and all!”

The urge reminds him of “that other restlessness”:

“To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,
One which the tougher poets have discerned—
Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.”

`To Describe Reality'

The bravest words I’ve read of late ought to be a truism:

“I am convinced that poetry in all its ambitious attempts strives to touch reality. It does so by other paths than science and should not yield too much to the pressures of our all-too-rational age.”

Not a call for irrationality; rather, a caveat against the reductively rational, hard faith in scientism that blinkers imagination. Poetry – good poetry – teaches us something about the world. Was Heraclitus a positivist? Consider fragment 3 in Guy Davenport’s translation:

“Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in particular details.”

The first passage is from “To Describe Reality,” a brief Zbigniew Herbert essay newly translated by Alissa Valles (The Collected Prose 1948-1998). Looking at a pebble is not the same as reading a poem about one. We may, if the poet is sufficiently gifted and we are sufficiently attentive, learn more about a pebble from the poem – “equal to itself / mindful of its limits” -- than from mutely staring at one. Both acts are essential; both, if engaged, help us “to touch reality.” Call it, as Yvor Winters might, a “pre-Socratic stratagem.” Herbert concludes his essay, written for a German radio program in 1966, with this paragraph:

“A sense of the fragility and transience of human life may be less oppressive if placed in a historical chain of events that are a transmission of faith in the purposefulness of efforts and strivings. Then even anxiety will be nothing but a call for hope.”

`Our Little "I" Whines and Balks'

“One of the deadly sins of contemporary culture is that it meanspiritedly avoids a frontal confrontation with the highest values. Also the arrogant conviction that we can do without models (both aesthetic and moral), because our place in the world is supposedly so exceptional and can’t be compared with anything. That’s why we reject the aid of tradition and stumble around in our solitude, digging around in the dark corners of the desolate little soul.”

Refreshingly stringent, as always, Zbigniew Herbert reminds us of our inability to write a worthy sentence without reference, conscious or otherwise, to forebears. Even that sentence, the one I just wrote, is built on words and thoughts crafted by Herbert and certainly Samuel Johnson. Probably there are others but tradition is truest, and we are most indebted to it for our small accomplishments, when internalized. This should not be mistaken for imitation or modish parroting. Tradition cultivates a literary eco-system at once personal and traditional. Originality is a pernicious myth.

I heard another echo in my understanding of Herbert’s sentences which took time to identify: Yvor Winters, of all writers, whose poems and prose I’ve been rereading of late. Consider his discussion of what he calls “the Romantic theory of literature”:

“Literature thus becomes a form of what is known popularly as self-expression. It is not the business of man to understand and improve himself, for such an effort is superfluous: he is good as he is, if he will only let himself alone, or, as we might say, let himself go. The poem is valuable because it enables us to share the experience of a man who has let himself go, who has expressed his feelings, without hindrance, as he has found them at a given moment. The ultimate ideal at which such a theory aims is automatism.”

The passage is from Winters’ foreword to In Defense of Reason (1947). The opposite of automatism in the literary sense is deliberation, application of craft to achieve artistic goals, a strategy which does not prohibit reliance on intuition but tempers it. For most of us on most occasions, first thought is not best thought. Automatism literally applied results in such curiosities as the Surrealists’ adoration of “automatic writing” or Kerouac’s “spontaneous bop prosody,” practices which may achieve therapeutic but not artistic benefits. An automaton, after all, is just a machine. Herbert writes in the paragraph following the one cited above (in “Animula,” from Labyrinth on the Sea, in The Collected Prose 1948-1998):

“There exists the false view to the effect that tradition is like a fortune, a legacy, which you inherit mechanically, without effort, and that’s why those who object to inherited wealth and unearned privileges are against tradition. But in fact every contact with the past requires an effort, a labor, and a difficult and thankless labor to boot, for our little `I’ whines and balks at it.”

`Serenity, Dignity, and Cool Radiance'

“History does not know a single example of art or an artist anywhere ever exerting a direct influence on the world’s destiny – and from this sad truth follows the conclusion that we should be modest, conscious of our limited role and strength.”

One scrambles for exceptions – Orwell? Koestler? Solzhenitsyn, surely? But Zbigniew Herbert’s careful qualification – “direct” – would seem to leave out even the author of The Gulag Archipelago (Roger Boylan might think otherwise). The passage above is from “The Poet and the Present,” a previously untranslated essay included in The Collected Prose 1948-1998, for me the most excitedly anticipated new book of the year.

Gathered are three volumes already available in English – Barbarian in the Garden (1985), Still Life with a Bridle (1991) and The King of the Ants (1999). New to English-language readers are Labyrinth on the Sea (published in Polish in 1999, the year after Herbert’s death) and a selection of twenty-eight pieces, “Short Prose (1948-1998),” from the Polish volume The Gordian Knot published in 2001. Collected Prose is edited and partially translated by Alissa Valles, who in 2007 did the same for Herbert’s The Collected Poems 1956-1998. She includes additional work from The King of the Ants not part of the original English edition.

The book arrived on Monday and I’ve only wandered around in it but “The Poet and the Present” has already vindicated my sense of anticipation. Less than three pages long, it was written for a Silesian poetry festival in 1972, shortly after Herbert returned from a year of teaching at California State College in Los Angeles. Almost forty years later it stands as a principled refutation of virtually all the poetry being written today in the United States and England. In the paragraph following the one quoted above Herbert writes:

“This sounds like an aesthete’s avowal, an encouragement to lock oneself up in an ivory tower, but that stance, too, is quite alien to me. My concern is to oppose the tyranny of dichotomies chopping up complicated human reality, and to draw the borders of poetry—as I understand them—without usurpation but also without an inferiority complex.”

If poetry or any art is to be memorable and moving, it can be neither engagé nor an empty game. Herbert cites his conversations with young Americans in 1970-71 and says “those who dabble in film, art, or literature, loudly declare they are on the side of the `Left’.” If anything, that hegemony is even more absolute today. He continues:

“And I often wonder why the work that results from this essentially noble stance is intellectually immature, as if the proclamation of humanist ideals led the artist into the realm of banality. I’ve often asked myself if it isn’t too cruel a punishment that political kindheartedness should cancel out a work’s artistic value.”

Good wishes and good feelings, whether in Steinbeck or Neruda, don’t make good art. In fact, they make good art almost impossible. A poet cannot be a propagandist and remain a poet, any more than a neurosurgeon can simultaneously practice découpage. Herbert, survivor of Nazi and Communist barbarism and vulgarity, writes:

“The poet’s sphere of action, if he has a serious attitude toward his work, is not the present, by which I mean the current state of socio-political and scientific knowledge, but reality, man’s stubborn dialogue with the concrete reality surrounding him, with this stool, with that person, with this time of day—the cultivation of the vanishing capacity for contemplation.”

In the photograph on the cover of Collected Prose, Herbert wears a small cross on a chain around his neck. He also had Jewish ancestry and was an enthusiastic cultural heir of the best, from the Hebrews and Greeks onward, in the Western tradition. Herbert’s is the rare brave voice of sanity and civilization. In another essay, “Animula” (from Labyrinth on the Sea), he writes:

“I always wished I would never lose the belief that great works of the spirit are more objective than we are. And that they will judge us. Someone very rightly said that not only do we read Homer, look at frescoes of Giotto, listen to Mozart, but Homer, Giotto, and Mozart spy and eavesdrop on us and ascertain our vanity and stupidity. Poor utopians, history’s debutants, museum arsonists, liquidators of the past are like those madmen who destroy works of art because they cannot forgive them their serenity, dignity, and cool radiance.”

`O! the Joy"

I took a great knight’s jump across the country – five and half hours from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles and a little more than two hours from Los Angeles to Seattle. It’s still seems a miracle to span the continent and more, effortlessly and quickly and in such comfort. Late in the first leg the captain announced we were passing over the Grand Canyon, visible through the windows on the right. I was on the aisle seat on the left and the view was blocked by a wing and three heads. The woman across the aisle took a picture with her digital camera and showed it to me. The image resembled a colorized photo of Manhattan Island from the air but I was grateful.

By education and experience John Wesley Powell was a soldier (he lost an arm at Shiloh) and a geologist, not a poet. In 1869, Powell led the first passage by Americans through the Grand Canyon. In Canyons of the Colorado (1895), a mingling of geology and romantic adventure, he writes:

“The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail.”

On the northerly third of the trip we followed the coast out of Los Angeles. Most of the time, the Pacific was a hazy glare on the left. The mountains of California looked gray-green or blue-green. Agriculture from thirty-five thousand feet looks like shards of pottery and broken mirrors. We bypassed a thunderstorm over Oregon and at some point crossed the Columbia River. In his journal for Nov. 7, 1805, William Clark wrote after he and Meriwether Lewis saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time:

“Ocian [sic] in view! O! the joy.”

`Grace Is the Gift'

Saturday morning my brother e-mailed a photograph he had just taken of a morning glory blossom surrounded by dense greenery. I recognized spearmint and white clover. Ken wrote: “This was taken 10 minutes ago under the fir tree in front of the garage.” The flower is a deep, piercing blue, like lapis lazuli. Details from the vegetation, the planes and angles formed by stems and leaves, recall late Cezanne landscapes. Another e-mail, from Dave Lull, sent me to this:

“Honour for [Jacques] Barzun means recognising the immense debt each of us owes to so many others, both dead and living, which can only be discharged by living for those others.”

That’s how Harry Eyres concludes his Financial Times column on Barzun, who celebrates his 103rd birthday on Nov. 30. I like this notion of moral reciprocity, accounts balanced across a lifetime, discharging un-repayable debt by living the gifts. Like most of us I’m luckier than I deserve to be. Despite my best efforts good people have entered my life and left gifts, from Suzanne Murphy, my high-school writing teacher, to Guy Davenport and, most recently, Helen Pinkerton, whose poem “The Gift” is collected in Taken in Faith: Poems:

“I had a gift once that I then refused.
Now, when I take it, though I be accused
Of softness, cant, self-weariness at best,
Of failure, fear, neurosis, and the rest.
Still, I am here and I shall not remove.
I know my need. And this reluctant love,
This little that I have, is something true,
Sign of the unrevealed that lies in you.
Grace is the gift. To take it my concern—
Itself the only possible return.”

Morning glory.

`Speaking Truth About the Human Word'

Behind my in-laws’ house in Fredericksburg, Va., runs a power line, a perch for red-tailed hawks, hanging from tall wooden poles. The utility company used to keep the ground beneath the wires free of trees and most of the underbrush. As recently as four years ago my wife and I walked the cut-back trail and watched white-tailed deer feeding by swimming pools in the backyards of suburban houses. Now the path is choked with blackberry thickets, goldenrod, sumac, poison ivy and saplings of red oak, tulip, wild cherry, poplar and laurel. Walking is curtailed but voluptuous greenery, laurel in particular, is beautiful. Chaucer was right: “…a fresh grene laurer tree… / That gave so passing a delicious smelle…”

Even before I think of Chaucer, or Apollo and Daphne, the sight of laurel brings to mind three words, the final line of a poem by Yvor Winters, a sort of poetic counterpoint to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” -- “On Teaching the Young”:

“The young are quick of speech.
Grown middle-aged, I teach
Corrosion and distrust,
Exacting what I must.

“A poem is what stands
When imperceptive hands,
Feeling, have gone astray.
It is what one should say.

“Few minds will come to this.
The poet’s only bliss
Is in cold certitude—
Laurel, archaic, rude.”

We can only imagine what Winters would make of an age that takes John Ashbery and Sharon Olds seriously and even judges them poets. Laurel implies triumph or distinction – notions denigrated as “elitist,” as though the best poems were anything but a triumph of distinction over mediocrity. Helen Pinkerton echoes the themes of “On Teaching the Young” in “Autumn Drought” (Taken in Faith: Poems), a poem she dedicates to Winters, her former teacher who died in 1968. The dedication reads “In memory of Yvor Winters—Stanford University 1976”:

“November brings no rain. Brown stubble blackens.
Torn paper litter, wind-blown with the leaves,
Piles up against dead stems. As traffic slackens,
Nightfall brings fear, and always now one grieves.

“Where I once listened, lonely as these young,
But with some hope beyond what I could see
That meaning might be mastered by my tongue,
Anonymous process now claims them and me.

“Perhaps the enterprise of mind is vain;
Where hucksters sell opinions, knowledge fails,
Wit pandering to the market, for gross gain,
Corrupted words, false morals, falser tales.

“Though one I loved taught here, provoking strife,
By speaking truth about the human word,
And died—as few men do—ready for life,
I, teaching in his absence, seem absurd,

“Seem almost unremembering, unawake.
And should his poems live—some consolation
To those who knew him and to those who take
His measure by their worth—their celebration

“Will not be here, not where the idle gaze,
Touristic, slides past phoenix psalms to stare
Where Mount Diablo dominates through haze
The ever-diminishing waters and the glare.”

The notion that “meaning might be mastered by my tongue” will seem quaint to some readers and writers. Pinkerton’s poem recalls one written by another former Winters student, Edgar Bowers’ “For Louis Pasteur,” in which he asks: “How shall a generation know its story / If it will know no other?” Pinkerton honors the triumph and distinction of Winters, “speaking truth about the human word,” and posthumously crowns him poet laureate, at least for some of us.

`The Best Companions'

On my father-in-law’s shelves I found a leather-bound volume titled The Pageant of English Poetry, subtitled Being 1150 Poems and Extracts by 300 Authors. The first edition, edited by Robert Maynard Leonard, was published by Oxford University Press in 1909.This is the 1946 printing, lightly foxed but otherwise almost pristine.

According to the bookplate it was awarded to my father-in-law on June 8, 1952, “Ex Collegio Sancti Andreae Apud Aurorenses,” that is, St. Andrews College in Aurora, Ontario, Canada. The head master, K.G.B. Ketchum, signed his name with a fountain pen in a crabbed but legible hand. I asked my father-in-law if remembered the occasion of the award but he has no recollection.

The book has a reassuring heft and inspires a reader, as Hazlitt says, to “shake hands with, and look an old, tried, and valued friend in the face.” The editor enlists familiar names – Spenser, Milton, Tennyson – with strangers – Allan Ramsay, William Julius Mickle, Walter Pope. I relish this couplet from Pope’s “The Old Man’s Wish”:

“With a pudding on Sunday, and stout humming Liquor,
And remnants of Latin to puzzle the vicar…”

Not surprisingly, in earlier, more bookish times, poets wrote in praise of books, and sixteen such poems are noted in Leonard’s subject index. I found this excerpt from The Elder Brother by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. The comedy is believed to be the final work for the stage by Fletcher, who died in August 1625:

“That place that does contain
My books, the best companions, is to me
A glorious court, where hourly I converse
With the old sages and philosophers;
And sometimes, for variety, I confer
With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels;
Calling their victories, if unjustly got,
Unto a strict account, and, in my fancy,
Deface their ill-placed statues. Can I then
Part with such constant pleasures, to embrace
Uncertain vanities? No: be it your care
To augment your heap of wealth; it shall be mine
To increase in knowledge. Lights there for my study!”

And this from Book VI of William Cowper’s The Task:

“Books are not seldom talismans and spells
By which the magic art of shrewder wits
Holds an unthinking multitude enthralled.
Some to the fascination of a name
Surrender judgment hoodwinked. Some the style
Infatuates, and, through labyrinths and wilds
Of error, leads them by a tune entranced.
While sloth seduces more, too weak to bear
The insupportable fatigue of thought,
And swallowing therefore without pause or choice
The total grist unsifted, husks and all.”

I have a soft spot for Cowper, for “talismans and spells,” for Latin tags and most of all, like Hazlitt, for old friends.

`We Should Grow Too Fond of It'

It started out as a day for heroes, not a fashionable notion, and never stopped. After the Lincoln Memorial we walked to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial where I riffled through the book of the dead and found the name of my first best friend, Thomas James Schneider, whom I knew as Robbie. He was almost three years older and lived next door to the house in Maple Heights, Ohio, where I lived for my first three years.

From life I’ve retained two Tom Sawyer-like memories: The time we nailed a stack of two-by-fours to the back of his father’s garage and the time we put a garden hose inside my father’s Willy’s Jeep under the sincere impression we were cleaning it. From his death I remember Robbie’s funeral, during which his grandmother suffered a fatal heart attack. I didn’t make a rubbing of Robbie’s name on the wall but ran my fingers along the letters carved in the granite.

We crossed Constitution Avenue and walked to the Albert Einstein Memorial so our ten-year-old could see his hero in bronze. Both boys climbed the physicist to rub his nose, already shiny from the hands of admirers. From the bench where Einstein is seated I copied into my notebook this quotation attributed to the great American who chose to be an American:

“As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevail.”

We moved on to the National Museum of American History and for the first time I saw the “Star-Spangled Banner” spied by Francis Scott Key over Fort McHenry. On the train from Washington to Fredericksburg, I read Fredericksburg: A Guided Tour Through History (2010), a combination tourist guide and potted history of the battle written by Randi Minetor. Of the fifteen thousand three-hundred men buried in the Fredericksburg National Cemetery, fewer than three thousand are identified. Minetor quotes General Robert E. Lee as he observed his men driving Union troops into Deep Run on Dec. 13, 1862:

“It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.”

`The Only Form of Clarification and Justification'

An eighty-two-year old volunteer in the Arthropod Room at the National Museum of Natural History fed a cricket to a Mexican orange-kneed tarantula. She retired as a statistician with the National Institutes of Health and resumed her childhood love of insects and spiders. “Now I’m happy,” she said. On the wall was a sentence from Oliver Wendell Holmes’ The Poet at the Breakfast Table:

“No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp."

Later, my in-laws and I took a cab out of D.C. into Virginia. Our driver, another retiree, wore a tie, jacket, cap and gloves. “Every day,” he said. “I do what I’ve always done.” He worked for forty years as a porter in the U.S. Senate. He’s also eighty-two and started driving a cab two years ago. His speech is formal, courtly and weathered-sounding. He never smiled but seemed perfectly doing what he was doing. “The tips are not good,” he said.

Tuesday was the publication date for The Collected Prose, 1948-1998 by Zbigniew Herbert. I ordered a copy last month and hope it’s waiting for me when I return home next weekend. Thanks to Dave Lull, I got preview of a Herbert essay from 1951 I've never read before, “The Blood of Thought”:

“Thinking is sometimes seen as a form of luxury in life, a narrow little puff of reflection trailing from the forehead. Down below the instincts, senses, and all the other condemned dark forces are seething. Thought is opposed to life as the only form of clarification and justification.”

[Go here to read Herbert’s “Elegy for Fortinbras,” dedicated to Czeslaw Milosz and translated by Milosz and Peter Dale Scott.]

`A Small Increase of Right'

I sat beside an Army captain half my age on the flight from Seattle to Washington, D.C. He’s a Mexican-American born in Brownsville who joined ROTC at Texas A&M and has served two tours in Iraq. His desert-camouflage-covered day book is scorched on the back – by a Humvee’s muffler, he explained. He’s a polite, thoughtful, soft-spoken fellow, and he spent much of the flight writing e-mails on his laptop and processing a stack of invoices. We talked music – his iPod mostly holds Mozart and Miles Davis – and military history, and shook our heads over Burnside’s debacle at Fredericksburg.

I was on the aisle seat and the first landmark I recognized through the window as we descended into Washington was Arlington Cemetery and then, briefly, the Lincoln Memorial. For much of the flight I was reading Helen Pinkerton’s Taken in Faith: Poems, in particular the four dramatic monologues she devotes to the causes and legacies of the Civil War. From “Melville’s Letter to William Clark Russell,” I noted these lines, written in Melville’s voice about the dead on both sides:

“They felt their immortality beyond
The fame we try to give them with our words.”

Lincoln appears, though not by name, in “Lemuel Shaw’s Meditation.” Shaw (1781-1861) was Melville’s father-in-law and the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He opposed slavery but was compelled by the law in several cases to order the return of fugitive slaves to their owners. Pinkerton’s poem is set in 1861 between Lincoln’s election as president and the start of the war on April 12. Shaw died on March 31. The poem weaves Shaw’s affection for Melville and admiration for his books with slavery, Lincoln and the looming war. Here is Shaw’s first mention of Lincoln:

“Then I recalled a speech made years ago,
A strong lyceum speech in Illinois
By a young Western lawyer, a Whig like me,
That made my point exactly: the risk we ran
In that mob-ridden time, prelude to this,
That some mad, towering genius, seeking glory,
Through antislavery or its opposite,
Might overturn our laws, for personal fame,
Might break the Union to enhance his name.
The lawyer urged obedience to law
Till laws, if bad, as slavery’s code, be changed.”

Near the end of the poem Lincoln reappears, this time as president. At least in Pinkerton’s retelling of history, Shaw has read Moby-Dick:

“If this young lawyer—no one-idea’d Ahab
Nor coward Starbuck he – can find his way
As President, during the coming conflict
To use his war powers, citing the Union’s need
In mortal danger, for black-soldier power,
Ending the nightmare slavery has been,
Though he’ll not change our human nature’s evil,
He might permit a lessening of the wrong,
A small increase of right.”

Pinkerton’s epigraph is from Chapter 132, “The Symphony,” one of Ahab’s great Lear-like rants in Moby-Dick:

“Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?”

`A Child Prattles No Less Convincingly'

“Such utterances as `Hippo gerosto niparos boorastin farini O fastor sungor boorinos epoongos menati’, or `Hey amei Hassan alla do hoc alors lore has heo massan amor ho ti prov his aso me’, hardly bear out the claim that `the languages are distinct, well-inflected, well-compacted languages’. The philology of another world does not abide our question, but if we are to judge these results by merely human standards, we must admit that a child prattles no less convincingly.”

This is Ronald Knox in Chapter XXII of Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950), “Some Vagaries of Modern Revivalism.” He is addressing glossolaly, or glossolalia – speaking in tongues, or the gift of tongues, specifically as practiced by followers of the Scottish clergyman Edward Irving (1793-1834), known as Irvingites. The tone of Knox’s pages on this phenomenon are skeptical and drily amusing. He writes:

“…nobody who is present in a merely inquiring spirit will be impressed by the sight of A talking gibberish and B saying the gibberish means this and that. But I doubt if Irving thought of the tongues as evidential in that sense. Rather, he seems to have valued them because they gave people fresh opportunities of exercising faith: you were to leave your `understanding’ behind when you entered the doors of Regent Square.”

The two sentences of glossolaly Knox quotes in the first passage (taken from Andrew Lansdale Drummond’s Edward Irving and His Circle, 1937) seem oddly familiar in two senses. My spell-check software failed to recognize eighteen of the twenty-nine words. Of the eleven it recognizes, six begin with “h” -- “Hey,” “Hassan,” “hoc,” “has,” “ho,” “his.” Superficially, the sentences resemble an Esperanto-like mish-mash of Romantic and Germanic elements. The sentences are “gibberish,” in Knox’s sense, but familiar gibberish. Given the way our minds work, it’s notoriously difficult to generate random numbers, words or sounds without assistance, mechanical or digital. We like pattern and form.

Second, the glossolaly reminded me of much work by the so-called Language Poets and their confreres. Consider this sample from Bob Grumman’s “Mathemaku 6-12”:

“(August afternoon)( ) – swans = willow.wwwwwww…”

And so forth. One hopes in vain for a whiff of parody but it’s not to be found. The convergence of avant-garde poetry and possession by the Holy Spirit is a spectacle to savor. As Knox says:

“Whether you found the performance impressive was, I suppose, a matter of temperament.”

`A Glory Lights an Earnest End'

We fly to Washington, D.C., on Monday, spend two days wandering museums and monuments, and then drive south to Fredericksburg, Va., where my in-laws live. Each day I’ll walk the battlefield which, like Gettysburg and Antietam, is a beautiful landscape of woods, hills and fields. There, between Dec. 11 and 15, 1862, the Union army suffered 12,653 casualties; the Confederates, 5,377. The pig-headed blunders of Maj. Gen Ambrose E. Burnside resulted in carnage reminiscent, on a smaller scale, of the Somme half a century later.

Walt Whitman read his brother’s name on a list of Union casualties at Fredericksburg and headed south to find him. On Dec. 29, he confirmed that George Whitman, a lieutenant with the 51st New York Infantry Regiment, was recovering from wounds in a field hospital in Falmouth, across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg. The poet, then forty-three years old, spent most of the rest of the war nursing casualties on both sides. He writes in Specimen Days:

“The results of the late battle are exhibited everywhere about here in thousands of cases, (hundreds die every day) in the camp, brigade, and division hospitals. These are merely tents, and sometimes very poor ones, the wounded lying on the ground, lucky if their blankets are spread on layers of pine or hemlock twigs, or small leaves. No cots; seldom even a mattress. It is pretty cold. The ground is frozen hard, and there is occasional snow. I go around from one case to another. I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying; but I cannot leave them. Once in a while some youngster holds on to me convulsively, and I do what I can for him; at any rate, stop with him and sit near him for hours, if he wishes it.”

Herman Melville and his brother Allan visited the front lines in Virginia in April 1864, occasionally drawing fire from Confederate troops. According to Herschel Parker’s Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2, 1851-1891, the poet (who by this time had virtually renounced writing fiction) had already written “Inscription for the Slain at Fredericksburgh [sic]”:

“A glory lights an earnest end;
In jubilee the patriot ghosts ascend.
Transfigured at the rapturous height
Of their passionate feat of arms,
Death to the brave’s a starry night,--
Strewn their vale of death with palms.”

Parker gives no evidence of Melville visiting Fredericksburg, but in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), he included “Inscription for Marye’s Heights.”

“To them who crossed the flood
And climbed the hill, with eyes
Upon the heavenly flag intent,
And through the deathful tumult went
Even unto death: to them this Stone--
Erect, where they were overthrown--
Of more than victory the monument.”

Randall Jarrell wrote: “Whitman, Dickinson and Melville seem to me the best poets of the nineteenth century here in America,” and I wish I could share his enthusiasm for Melville’s verse. An occasional line or phrase is notable but his finest poetry was prose. In “Melville’s Letter to William Clark Russell” (Taken in Faith: Poems, 2002), Helen Pinkerton has the novelist writing late in his life to the British novelist and historian. He tells Russell the war killed his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated Moby-Dick. The war, Pinkerton’s Melville says, “Played out the tragedy we had foreseen / But had not guessed the actors nor the places…” then he lists some of those places, including:

“The heights at Fredericksburg, where Cobb’s men saw
Our blue ranks melt like snow, and the living piled
The frozen dead as breastworks….”

Like Antietam and Gettysburg, Fredericksburg is a holy place for those who remember.

`Maintained in Being'

The recent discovery for which I’m most grateful is Helen Pinkerton’s Taken in Faith: Poems (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2002), reassuring evidence of a life well spent. Born in 1927, she was a student of Yvor Winters, and her interests, as reflected in her poems, include Thomas Aquinas, Herman Melville, the natural world, the Civil War and the landscape of the American West. The poems, given their subject matter, seriousness and quiet formality, are probably as unfashionable as any being written today by an American poet. Pinkerton offers the rare and comforting assurance of being in the company of a poet who is also a grownup. Here is “Degrees of Shade”:

“Our darkness stays, the self-made dark we know,
And I, ever desiring to be right,
Am ever more removed, conceiving not—
As foot can feel the earth and hand the snow
And still be unaware—I live in light,
Within yet willfully without your thought.

“Your partial absence, as a shade, extends
Upon the brightness that my will obscures.
I am confounded by degrees of shade
And sometimes think the shade’s arc reascends
To perfect separation. But I am yours,
Though nothing, if again I am unmade.

“I cannot do as some in rage have done,
Who hating love’s compulsions love their hate
So much they slay themselves perfecting it.
The course must be endured that was begun
In shade’s dominion and empowered so late
To move from out the darkness you permit.”

Pinkerton’s poems often dramatize our divided natures. Our selves, “ever desiring to be right,” sabotage goodness freely given. We choose darkness over “the brightness that my will obscures,” and some, non-being over being. Those who “hating love’s compulsions love their hate” have been making a lot of noise lately and receiving a lot of attention. Pinkerton appends an epigraph from Summa Theologica: “Sic autem se habet omnis creatura ad Deum sicut aer ad solem illuminantem.” In T.C. O’Brien’s translation: “To apply this: every creature stands in relation to God as the air to the light of the sun.” Here is the subsequent sentence:

“For the sun is light-giving by its very nature, while the air comes to be lighted through sharing in the sun’s nature, so also God alone is being by his essence, which is his esse, while every creature is being participatively, i.e. its essence is not its esse.”

Only the invisible makes the visible possible. In Chapter XVI of Mont San Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams quotes the same passage from Aquinas:

“If, for an instant, God's action, which is also His will, were to stop, the universe would not merely fall to pieces, but would vanish, and must then be created anew from nothing: `Quia non habet radicem in aere, statim cessat lumen, cessante actione solis. Sic autem se habet omnis creatura ad Deum sicut aer ad solem illuminantem.’ God radiates energy as the sun radiates light, and `the whole fabric of nature would return to nothing’ if that radiation ceased even for an instant. Everything is created by one instantaneous, eternal, universal act of will, and by the same act is maintained in being.”

`Flexions and Reprisals'

There’s much to admire in otherness, which gives us another reason not to indulge in boredom. The final day of Cub Scout camp was the hottest, dustiest yet. Almost everyone was cranky. Kids dragged their feet, kicking up more dust. It hung in the air like the mosquitoes clouding the archery range. I sat in a lawn chair with a water bottle, feet on a picnic table, watching dragonflies with Dennis Paulson’s Dragonflies and Damselflies of the West (Princeton University Press, 2009) open on my lap.

On a family trip in the summer of 1966, we stopped for a swim in the Missouri River at Chamberlain, S.D., where the Army Corps of Engineers had built a levee. The temperature was one hundred twenty degrees and my brother and I got the worst sunburns of our lives because we spent most of the swim studying a leafless bush on the shore covered with hundreds of blue-bellied damselflies. They looked like neon wires, somebody’s vulgar idea of a non-traditional Christmas tree. The fascination with these beautiful, efficient hunters has never left.

For the first time, with Paulson’s assistance, I identified a dragonfly by species – common whitetail (Plathemis lydia). Only the male’s “tail” (actually, abdomen) is white. I saw a female whose abdomen was brown on top and black on the sides with white comma-shaped markings. Her wings were transparent but for three black spots on each. She perched for several minutes on a mound of moist soil near a low marshy spot. I assumed she was drinking but Paulson suggests otherwise:

“May remain in same spot for up to several minutes with male in attendance. Often flick water drops forward with eggs, laying 25-50 eggs at each tap. Females lay around 1000 eggs total, at around 25/sec. Reproductive adults can live up to 36 days.”

Otherness, yes, but not entirely other. The single-minded ferocity, evanescence, gratuitous beauty – all as human as they are dragonfly. Our styles are different. In “The Pool” (Taken in Faith, 2002), Helen Pinkerton projects herself into the otherness of a fish in a mountain pool. The fish hunts dragonflies, the most efficient of hunters, and in turn is hunted efficiently by humans:

“One day the brittle fly is cast and you,
Leaping and drawn at once, are pulled beyond
The flexions and reprisals of the pool.”

`A Random Gathering of Things'

“Nature loves to hide. [Becoming is a secret process].”

A shrill descending call from the woods. I turned to look and so did a woman, another Cub Scout parent. “Hawk?” she said. “Sounds like it,” I said. “A kestrel, probably.” She nodded and we kept looking but never saw the bird.

“The unseen design of things is more harmonious than the seen.”

Boys knelt and fired BB guns at balloons and paper targets pinned to bails of straw. A muted pop, the squeak of springs in the rifles, and Thwock! when BBs hit targets. The amphitheater of cedars towered over the firing range, still and silent.

“The most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves.”

Three sprigs of Queen-Anne’s lace in a Hire’s Root Beer can on the lichened planks of a picnic table. Bolt heads. A spatter of bird shit. “C.D.” carved in the gray, wide-grained wood.

[The quoted passages are fragments from Herakleitos numbered 17, 116 and 40, respectively, as translated by Guy Davenport in Herakleitos and Diogenes, 1981.]

`The Ornament of Beauty is Suspect'

From my seat in the shade at flag-folding class I could keep an eye on the picnic tables where we had eaten lunch an hour earlier. On Monday, when the area was human-free, crows walked in and helped themselves to leftovers including somebody’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This seemed reasonable and was about the closest most of the Cub Scouts got to learning something about nature. The leaders, however, issued a stern diktat about securing “food products.”

As an experiment I had placed six Thai Lime and Chili Cashews in a row under the picnic table where we had eaten lunch. They’re incendiary enough to make my nose run and I wondered how corvine sinuses would react. From my perch I watched three crows work the dining area, poking at the ground and tabletops but moving too speedily to suggest they had found much deemed toothsome – until they arrived at my table. One poked and threw his head back, the familiar gesture of a crow swallowing something. Without pause he took a couple of steps and repeated his actions. By then his pals arrived, cleaned up the rest of the hot cashews and resumed scavenging.

They might as well have been eating beetles or cracked corn. No reaction, hardly a pause in their dining. Crows, of course, feast on roadkill. They’re nearly as omnivorous as humans. I felt a certain proud solidarity with Corvus, already my favorite bird. I admire an enthusiastic trencherman of any species.

Packed with my Dickinson was my New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of The Sonnets, edited by Gwynne Blakemore Evans, with an introduction by Anthony Hecht. I read #70:

“That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect,
For slander's mark was ever yet the fair;
The ornament of beauty is suspect,
A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air.
So thou be good, slander doth but approve
Thy worth the greater, being woo'd of time;
For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love,
And thou present'st a pure unstained prime.
Thou hast pass'd by the ambush of young days,
Either not assail'd or victor being charged;
Yet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise,
To tie up envy evermore enlarged:
If some suspect of ill mask'd not thy show,
Then thou alone kingdoms of hearts shouldst owe.”

“Suspect” is the antecedent to “crow.” As Evans says in the note to the avian reference: “The crow was considered a dirty, raucous, thievish, malicious, and ill-omened bird and was associated with the Devil.”

That sounds like an apt description not of crows but some Cub Scouts – and some of their leaders.

`Forever is Deciduous'

“Now summer grasses, brown with heat,
Have crowded sweetness through the air;
The very roadside dust is sweet;
Even the unshadowed earth is fair.”

From my seat at the picnic table under the big-leaf maple, the field was a haze of dust pierced by dragonflies. I was still cool and fresh; the boys, hot, dusty and happy playing kickball. The first day at Cub Scout camp and I was reconciled. My job as nature instructor had been eliminated so boys can build catapults from plastic cups and rubber bands, and shoot dry dog food (“asteroids”) through a hoop. No one cared, so why should I? The week’s theme is outer space. Our den has been renamed “Orion” and by default I was elected to pen the den cheer:

“Orion! Orion!
We ain’t cryin’!
Orion! Orion!
We keep tryin’!
Orion! Orion!
Now we’re flyin’!”

The camp is a long narrow clearing bisected by a gravel road. The edge of the woods is mostly maples and blackberry thickets, beyond which loom fat cedars shrouding the woods in deep shadow even at noon. I packed Dickinson in my bag: “Forever is deciduous-- / Except to those who die--.” By late afternoon we were hot and sweaty, and kept the water flowing. We picked blackberries. I like the ritual of flag raising and lowering but detest the goofy songs and games, most of which assume children are uniformly retarded. I tried to focus my boys and others, with some success, on crows, lichens, moss, cabbage butterflies and those lovely sour berries. The stanza at the top is by Yvor Winters, packed in my bag with Dickinson. The poem is “A Summer Commentary” and this is the final stanza:

“Amid the rubble, the fallen fruit,
Fermenting in its rich decay,
Smears brandy on the trampling boot
And sends it sweeter on its way.”

`But Reason Has Short Wings'

“the heart
Must bear the longest part.”

Sometimes good taste in poetry seems almost as endangered as the Karner blue butterfly – or good poetry. For an academic to shown discernment in such matters seems miraculous. It helps, of course, that Robert Louis Wilken teaches the history of Christianity, not English, at the University of Virginia. The lines above, from George Herbert’s “Antiphon,” are among the four epigraphs to his The Spirit of Early Christianity (Yale University Press, 2003). The others are taken from 2 Corinthians, Saint Basil of Caesarea and Dante’s Paradiso.

Wilken devotes much of a chapter to Prudentius, the fourth-century Roman Christian poet of whom he writes: “Unlike Jerome, Prudentius did not reject the Muses. He saw no reason Christians should shun literature.” I know little of Prudentius and will fix that failing, but the final sentence of the Prudentius chapter impressed me:

“His oeuvre is at once deeply Christian and indisputably literary, and it set the Christian intellectual tradition on a course that would find place for poets as different as Dante Alighieri, William Langland, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Geoffrey Hill.”

Fine company. That was Chapter 9, and the next begins with an epigraph from David Jones, the Welsh poet and artist, author of In Parenthesis and The Anathemata: “We already and first of all discern him making this thing other.” History, theology and philosophy intelligently leavened with poetry. I didn’t expect this when I picked up Wilken’s book, but things got even better in Chapter 12, “The Knowledge of Sensuous Intelligence,” which takes its title from “That Man as a Rational Animal Desires the Knowledge Which Is His Perfection,” the second poem in Geoffrey Hill’s Canaan (1996). Wilken reproduces the poem as his epigraph to the chapter:

“Abiding provenance I would have said
the question stands
even in adoration
clause upon clause
with or without assent
reason and desire on the same loop—
I imagine singing I imagine
getting it right—the knowledge
of sensuous intelligence
entering into the work—
spontaneous happiness as it was once
given our sleeping nature to awaken by
and know
innocence of first inscription”

It’s a pleasure to read a familiar Hill poem in an unfamiliar but congenial context. Wilken reproduces line six through ten at the conclusion of his final chapter, preceded by these sentences:

“`Knowledge becomes love,’ says Gregory [of Nyassa], `because that which is known is by nature beautiful.’ Christian thinking, like all thinking, requires questioning, reflection, interpretation, argument. But reason has short wings. Without love it is tethered to the earth."

`Like Being, Unrecorded, Always There'

The kestrel flew around the room close to the walls like a bat, in a tight orbit of disciplined panic. Moths bump off walls and lamps but raptors are always predators. Their competence is savage, even the kestrel’s, a small hawk with a songbird’s voice. He had escaped a park ranger readying him for visitors. For ten seconds or more I was alone with the circling bird. I felt fear, pity, admiration, helplessness; the kestrel – fear and shame, the indignity of entrapment? In “Red-Tailed Hawk” (Taken in Faith: Poems, 2002) Helen Pinkerton quietly celebrates the otherness of a predator. The poem is dedicated to Kenneth Fields, fellow poet and Yvor Winters alumnus:

“Your hawk today floated the loft of air
That lifts each morning from the valley floor.
Dark idler, predator of mice and hare
And greater vermin, as I watched him soar

“Out of my sight, taking a certain path,
Knowing from ancient blood, instinctive might,
How to survive beyond the present drift,
He seemed to shift from nothingness toward flight.

“Yet it was real, the warm column of air—
Like being, unrecorded, always there.”

The shift in the final couplet, like the hawk’s effortless course correction, is breathtaking. No longer is the bird the focus, but the thermal, “the warm column of air,” the invisible shaft of energy buoying the bird. Hawks, like all creation, move from nothingness to being, invisibly.

[Cynthia Haven wrote a fine profile of Pinkerton when Taken in Faith: Poems was published.]