The final stanza of Howard Nemerov’s “Elegy of Last Resort” from his second collection, Guide to the Ruins (1950):
“We enter
again November; cold late light
Glazes the field, a little fever of love,
Held in numbed hands, admires the false gods;
While lonely on this coast the sea bids us
Farewell, and the salt crust hardens toward
winter.”
The poem first
appeared in the Autumn 1948 issue of The
Sewanee Review, three years after Nemerov's discharge from the service at age
twenty-five. After graduating from Harvard in 1941, he had flown fifty
combat missions with the Royal Canadian Air Force as a fighter pilot and
another fifty-seven with the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force. As we expect with the
work of a young poet, we hear
self-conscious echoes – of Eliot and Auden, and an allusion to Death in Venice. The poem evokes life entering dormancy and suggests the tawdry sadness of Atlantic City in
the off-season (“The boardwalks are empty, the cafes closed,” it begins.)
In “The
Consent,” published more than thirty years later in Sentences (198o), Nemerov returns to November, this time recounting
the odd behavior of ginkgo trees: They drop all of their leaves on a single
night:
“Late in
November, on a single night
Not even
near to freezing, the ginkgo trees
That stand
along the walk drop all their leaves
In one
consent, and neither to rain nor to wind
But as
though to time alone: the golden and green
Leaves
litter the lawn today, that yesterday
Had spread
aloft their fluttering fans of light.
“What signal
from the stars? What senses took it in?
What in
those wooden motives so decided
To strike
their leaves, to down their leaves,
Rebellion or
surrender? and if this
Can happen
thus, what race shall be exempt?
What use to
learn the lessons taught by time,
If a star at
any time may tell us: Now.”
Ginkgo biloba first
evolved in East Asia during the Middle Jurassic epoch some 170 million years
ago. We think of them, figuratively, as living fossils. In recent years they have
gained popularity in the West for their reputed health benefits. Their fan-shaped
leaves turn a buttery yellow in the fall and are the most beautiful in the world. Nemerov mentions none of this. He reminds us that we are as mortal as
leaves. We dismiss determinism and proudly parade our free will. What force
beyond us might some early winter night erase us from creation? Clearly, apart
from their beauty, gingkoes intrigued Nemerov.
Poets and
other writers develop private lexicons of reference. Some dwell on October.
Whether consciously or otherwise, November appears throughout Nemerov’s work,
an uneasy spell between autumn and winter.
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