'Illumination of the Past'

Despite the repellant spectacle of Allen Ginsburg, poetry as a career is not a guarantee of fame and fortune. One of our finest recent poets, Herbert Morris, is forgotten and was hardly remembered even during his life. He published six collections between 1978 and 2000 and died at age seventy-three in 2001. Only now have I stumbled on a review by J.P. White of Morris’ fourth book, Dream Palace, published in the December 1986 issue of Poetry. I wouldn’t discover Morris for another fourteen years when his final book, What Was Lost, was published. He favored dramatic or interior monologues. White begins his review by suggesting an interesting possible lineage for Morris’ blank verse: 

“Lawrence Sterne's Tristam Shandy took its motto from Epictetus: ‘It is not action, but opinions about actions, which disturb men’; and so began the first novel to interpret the invisible life of the mind. Herbert Morris -- an unusually gifted master of the inner monologue -- works in a tradition created more by novelists like Sterne, James, Proust, Joyce, and Herman Broch.”

 

The distinctive quality of Morris’ poetry is difficult to convey in brief quotations. He’s not an aphorist, not conventionally “quotable” because most of his poems are densely woven monologues. As White writes, “The long, talky lines capture the shifting, disjointed flow of the free-associating mind as it works over memory.” This is from “House of Words” (What Was Lost) in which the speaker is an aging Henry James,  delivering a nineteen-page, 657-line monologue:

 

“I, finder of refuge, maker of refuge,

in words. Whose life, indeed, was spun of words,

spun and respun, spun once more, then respun,

a life which has itself become a refuge

(words, in a world bordered by blood, on one side,

by the tumult of passion on the other);

the thinness, yes, the thinness of one’s life:

what has one built if not a house of words?”

 

White refers to Morris’ “memory narratives of the finest order keenly imagined and confidently played out.” His recurrent theme is memory, whether of the historical or personal past. He often writes about old photographs and their power to evoke memories. Morris imaginatively reanimates them, probing their meaning. White writes:

 

“Morris’s illumination of the past acquires the accent of prophecy, and his fluid style, which often takes twenty to thirty lines to complete a thought, is especially drawn to moments frozen in time through photographs. These static frames permit him to inhabit the inner imaginative life of outward appearance.”

 

Memories are frequently heartbreaking. In his eleven-page “Boardwalk” (Dream Palace), Morris searches an old photograph of his family, focusing on his doomed brother’s shoes, looking for clues: “. . . the way he holds himself may have to do / with having come to learn—how can I say this?-- / what it will be to die, and to die young.” White writes: “Memory connects split moments and the accretion of nuances, and it’s the only tool that provides insight into the spiritual reality waiting to be transformed within us.”

 

Morris' poems recall Dr. Johnson writing in the February 17, 1759 edition of The Idler:

 

“He remembers many calamities incurred by folly, many opportunities lost by negligence. The shades of the dead rise up before him; and he laments the companions of his youth, the partners of his amusements, the assistants of his labours, whom the hand of death has snatched away.”