'Your Grin Is Gone. So’s Mine'

R.L. Barth asks if I know the poem “Setting the Jug Down Slowly” by Catherine Davis. “It’s not one of her best poems,” he writes, “but it’s an interesting one. I do not think it was included in that relatively recent paperback. It was originally in the Southern Review and also appeared in the chapbook of her poems that I published.” Here it is: 

“Old Eben, friend,

I look for no one else tonight

But his perspicuous ghost

Who knew how most things end.

He found you there, wine-snug,

And made you set the jug

Down slowly, being your friend;

So you, as he, had--host

And guest--as good as second sight

Before the end.”

 

Bob was responding to my post on Wednesday in which I quoted Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Mr. [Eben] Flood’s Party.” Davis’ poem, published in Southern Review in 1965, is answering Robinson’s. The paperback Bob refers to is Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades Press, 2015). Before its publication, Davis (1924-2002) as a poet and woman hardly existed.

 

The late Helen Pinkerton, who attended Stanford with Davis and edited her poems in an earlier unsuccessful effort to get them published, contributes an essay to the Pleiades volume, placing Davis’ poems in their poetic context: “Her best poems are in the classical plain style of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets – Wyatt, Ralegh, Donne, and Herrick—and are further influenced by the modern American plainness of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Louise Bogan and J.V. Cunningham.” Davis’ academic pedigree was impeccable: among her teachers were Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Cunningham, Yvor Winters and Donald Justice.

 

The poet Kenneth Fields, in another essay from the collection, chronicles Davis’ “rough life, never far from poverty.” Her father went to prison for armed robbery when she was a baby, and she never saw him again. Her mother ran a brothel and was a textbook monster. Davis suffered a mild case of cerebral palsy, misdiagnosed as polio. When her mother discovered Davis was a lesbian, she threw her out of the house and never saw her again. Davis suffered from mental illness, alcoholism (as the poem quoted above suggests) and, later, Alzheimer’s disease. As Fields says, “She knew about loss.”

 

Here’s a Davis poem, included in the Pleiades volume, related to “Setting the Jug Down Slowly” thematically, “To a Bottle”:

 

“At first, while I was sober, friend,

Thinking the night would never end,

You sat there loaded. Spirits high,

You seemed all smiles and glow, so I

Smiled back at you. And all was well,

But as my spirits rose, yours fell.

Now I am loaded. You sit there

With a cold-sober, empty stare.

Why did I ever take a shine

To you? Your grin is gone. So’s mine.”

  

This is as close to light verse as Davis ever gets. I don’t recall the ambiguity of “spirits” being played with so wittily. Davis adds an epigraph to her poem, from Robert Herrick’s “His Farewell to Sack”: “Prithee not smile, /Or smile more inly.” Sack is white wine, originally from Spain or the Canary Islands. Herrick wrote another poem, “The Welcome to Sack,” including these lines:

 

"Call me the son of beer, and then confine

Me to the tap, the toast, the turf; let wine

Ne’er shine upon me; may my numbers all

Run to a sudden death and funeral.”