'The Meaning of Sidereal Time'

Years ago I was at a birthday party where one of the other guests was a stand-up comic and part-time journalist who lived in Woodstock, N.Y. He was smart, quick, funny and surprisingly well-read (he knew who Edward Dahlberg was). Neither of us was much of a party-goer so we spent most of the time in a corner, yacking. All went well until the conversation turned to poetry and poets. He revealed himself an enthusiast for Charles Olson and his “Maximus” poems, which I find simultaneously pretentious and incoherent, often pathologically so. 

Things got a little heated when I shared my admiration for the work of Anthony Hecht. This was 1985. In the previous decade Hecht had published his finest volumes, Millions of Strange Shadows (1977) and The Venetian Vespers (1979), and the comedian would have none of it. He dragged out the predictable adjectives – “academic,” “formalist,” “elitist.” We had reached that place in a difference of opinion where both parties realize changing the mind of the other is hopeless, and both are sufficiently grown up to respect the other and move on. What I retain of our conversation is his passionate distaste for Hecht’s work, something I had never before encountered. I’ve since learned it’s hardly uncommon and often even nastier and accompanied by obscenities.

 

Rather than launching a general defense of Hecht’s work, I’ll point out a single quality we repeatedly encounter in his poems that makes the best of them endlessly rereadable. Along with his gorgeous, neo-Shakespearean language, Hecht, like a first-rate novelist, enters the minds of his characters. He’s fond of dramatic monologues, usually written in blank verse. He often includes a moment of epiphany described by the narrator, as in “The Grapes” (The Venetian Vespers), in which the narrator is a young chambermaid:

 

“I stood beside a table near a window,

Gazing down at a crystal bowl of grapes

in ice-water. They were green grapes, or rather,

They were a sort of pure, unblemished jade,

Like turbulent ocean water, with misted skins,

Their own pale, smoky sweat, or tiny frost.

I leaned over the table, letting the sun

Fall on my forearm, contemplating them.

Reflections of the water dodged and swam

In nervous incandescent filaments

Over my blouse and up along the ceiling.

And all those little bags of glassiness,

Those clustered planets, leaned their eastern cheeks

Into the sunlight, each one showing a soft

Meridian swelling where the thinning light

Mysteriously tapered into shadow,

To cool recesses, to the tranquil blues

That then were pillowing the Beau Rivage.

Edge slowly over their simple surfaces,

And feel the sunlight moving on my skin

Like a warm glacier. And I seemed to know

In my blood the meaning of sidereal time

And know my little life had somehow crested.

There was nothing left for me now, nothing but years.”

 

Another blank-verse monologue is “Green: An Epistle” (Millions of Strange Shadows), which begins:

 

“I write at last of the one forbidden topic

We, by a truce, have never touched upon:

Resentment, malice, hatred so inwrought

With moral inhibitions, so at odds with

The home-movie of yourself as patience, kindness,

And Charlton Heston playing Socrates,

That almost all of us were taken in,

Yourself not least, as to a giant Roxy,

Where the lights dimmed and the famous allegory

Of Good and Evil, clearly identified

By the unshaven surliness of the Bad Guys,

The virginal meekness of the ingénue,

Seduced us straight into that perfect world

Of Justice under God.”

 

In 2001, the English publisher Between the Lines put out a book-length interview, Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy. Hecht discusses “Green: An Epistle” at length:

 

“[It] is about the disguises of Pride. It is about how attempts to suppress the ego in behalf of some idealism or the desire to appear kind and generous will quietly and all unbeknownst to someone convert that suppression into a corruption of the soul, a deformity of spirit, and the longer the suppression goes on the more martyred and selfless one feels, and the more monstrous the deformity. . . . The speaker . . . who is admittedly partly me, has succeeded in deceiving himself into believing that his long-suffering patience and forbearance, his stoic endurance, have paid off in the form of a noble and selfless character, and in this he is profoundly mistaken.”

 

Finally, consider the title poem in The Transparent Man (1990), spoken by a thirty-year-old hospitalized woman dying of leukemia. Her thoughts turn inevitably inward, but she remains engaged with the world:

 

“Now all the leaves are down, you can see the spare,

Delicate structures of the sycamores,

The fine articulation of the beeches.

I have sat here for days studying them,

And I have only just begun to see

What it is that they resemble. One by one,

They stand there like magnificent enlargements

Of the vascular system of the human brain.

I see them there like huge discarnate minds,

Lost in their meditative silences.”

 

Near the end of the poem, this dying young woman, like the speaker in “Green: An Epistle,” comes to understand the bottomless human capacity for self-delusion:

 

“And the eye, self-satisfied, will be misled,

Thinking the puzzle solved, supposing at last

It can look forth and comprehend the world.

That's when you have to really watch yourself.”

 

Hecht died at age eighty-one on this date, October 20, in 2004. That same year we also lost Donald Justice, Thom Gunn and Czesław Miłosz.