'The Secret Hidden From Yourself'

Howard Nemerov was born on Leap Year Day in 1920 – February 29 -- meaning his birthday can be accurately observed only every fourth year – a nice metaphysical conundrum. This reminds me of a cousin who was bitter because she was born on Christmas Day and felt she was getting less attention and loot than she deserved. Let’s celebrate Nemerov today. 

We no longer expect poets to be intelligent and learned, to respect form and craft, or to have a sense of humor and little interest in politics. Nemerov inherited no Modernist fashion for obscurity. His poems are accessible in the sense that they don’t revel in self-indulgent opacity. He’s seldom pretentious and never condescends to the reader. Often his concerns are ours. He writes to us and for us, not other poets or fellow academics. Take “Runes” from New Poems (1960), with an epigraph from St. Augustine’s Confessions: “insanibam salubriter et moriebar vitaliter.” Roughly, “I was healthily insane and vitally dying.” Here is the first of Nemerov’s fifteen fifteen-line stanzas:

 

“This is about the stillness in moving things,

In running water, also in the sleep

Of winter seeds, where time to come has tensed

Itself, enciphering a script so fine

Only the hourglass can magnify it, only

The years unfold its sentence from the root.

I have considered such things often, but

I cannot say I have thought deeply of them:

That is my theme, of thought and the defeat

Of thought before its object, where it turns

As from a mirror, and returns to be

The thought of something and the thought of thought,

A trader doubly burdened, commercing

Out of one stillness and into another.”

 

Nemerov cherishes paradox, seeing it as somehow the nature of reality. Thisness is forever in flux. What exists today contains tomorrow. He gently hints at Aquinas’ understanding of potentia. Here is the poem’s final, meditative stanza:                                                                   

 

“To watch water, to watch running water,

Is to know a secret, seeing the twisted rope

Of runnels on the hillside, the small freshets

Leaping and limping down the tilted field

In April's light, the green, grave and opaque

Swirl in the millpond where the current slides

To be combed and carded silver at the fall;

It is a secret. Or it is not to know

The secret, but to have it in your keeping,

A locked box, Bluebeard’s room, the deathless thing

Which it is death to open. Knowing the secret,

Keeping the secret--herringbones of light

Ebbing on beaches, the huge artillery

 Of tides--it is not knowing, it is not keeping,

 But being the secret hidden from yourself.”

 

I would also like to plug Nemerov’s three novels, which seem to get little attention: The Melodramatists (1949), Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954) and The Homecoming Game (1957). The last is especially good, and I say that as a sports-hater. In a February 18, 1957 letter to Nemerov, Vladimir Nabokov wrote of the novel: “It is full of true wit, and its structure—the intricate and satisfying interlacing of themes—is admirable.”

 

Montaigne was born on this date, February 28, in 1533. A Nemerov poem in Gnomes & Occasions (1973) shares a title with Montaigne’s final essay, “Of Experience”:

 

“Nature from life by piece and piece

Gently disparts us; power fails

Before desire does. It needs not sex

To illustrate what Montaigne saith.

But only what’s befallen X—

Now he no longer has his teeth

He can no longer bite his nails.”

 

Montaigne writes in the essay, as translated by Donald Frame:

 

“We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say? He must know how to use them together and blend them. And so must we do with good and evil, which are consubstantial with our life. Our existence is impossible without this mixture, and one element is no less necessary for it than the other. To try to kick against natural necessity is to imitate the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook a kicking match with his mule.”

 

[Washington University, where Nemerov taught for thirty-two years until his death in 1991, has announced the donation of 513 letters from the family of Nemerov’s lover, Joan Coale of Philadelphia, written between 1972 and 1990.]