'Who Shall Avenge Unreason?'

“Well, you’ve gone and done it. You’ve got me reading poems. The volume of Nemerov you sent got me started. I liked it a lot. I'm reading three or four poems a week, that’s all, one at a time.” 

I had a spare copy of Nemerov’s Selected, so I sent it to a friend I knew not to be an enthusiastic reader of poetry. It seems to have worked. He’s well-read in fiction and history but, as with so many readers, school eradicated any pleasure he might have taken in poetry. Generations of teachers (and poets) have been trained to do that. I figured Nemerov is seldom less than intelligent and witty, and never gratuitously obscure, so he seemed a user-friendly choice. “So far,” he writes, “I've limited my reading to Larkin, Nemerov and Auden. But any day, thanks to Anecdotal Evidence, I'll be moving on to [Zbigniew] Herbert, whose Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems I recently purchased.” Then he asked more suggestions. Two American poets came to mind immediately. First, Karl Shapiro, from whose poem “Hospital” Joseph Epstein borrowed the title for his 2003 story collection Fabulous Small Jews:

 

“This is the Oxford of all sicknesses.

Kings have lain here and fabulous small Jews

And actresses whose legs were always news.”

 

And then, another poem from 1941, “August Hail,” by J.V. Cunningham:

 

“In late summer the wild geese

In the white draws are flying.

The grain beards in the blue peace.

The weeds are drying.

 

“The hushed sky breeds hail.

Who shall avenge unreason?

Wheat headless in the white flail

Denies the season.”

 

In The Quest of the Opal (1942), Cunningham comments of this poem:

 

“Its subject was the sudden incidence of passion, which comes like an impersonal force and apparently from the outside; and it had a moral: ‘Who shall revenge unreason?’ though it destroy all.”