'The Rest Is Silence'

Here I pause to remember a forgotten poet who remembered a slightly less forgotten poet – a reminder that all of us are eminently forgettable, regardless of our purported virtues. Walter de la Mare died on June 22, 1956, at age eighty-three. The journal Poetry assigned William Burford to write a remembrance of the English writer, “Master of Silences,” which was published in the November 1957 issue. 

Scrap that.

 

As I was reading “Burford’s” commemoration, it seemed familiar. I dug around and realized I had written about the same piece almost two years ago, under its true byline: William Jay Smith. In the same issue of Poetry, the piece after Smith’s remembrance is a review by Burford (I trust) of a Hart Crane biography. Someone at some time, whether in 1957 or last week, switched bylines -- which, of course, bolsters my observations above about forgettability. Smith’s piece on de la Mare remains definitive:

 

“When a poet of stature dies, a silence settles upon language. One becomes suddenly aware that words will never again be handled as they have been by this particular man. All that can be said or heard resides in his poems: the rest is silence.”

 

So, what about Burford? I don’t think I had ever heard of him. I see he died in Dallas in 2004 at age seventy-seven. He had a long academic career and published at least three collections of poems. His work appeared prolifically in Poetry, especially in the nineteen-fifties. In 1967, he translated and published with Christopher Middleton The Poet’s Vocation: Selections from Letters of Hölderlin, Rimbaud, & Hart Crane. He translated minor work by Proust. I would love to say his poems are unforgettable, or even memorably funny and incisive, and that I have salvaged a forgotten genius. Here is “Local God,” published in the Summer 1953 issue of Southwest Review:

 

“There stands a man in Texas,

can grab the rattlers by the tail

and crack them like a whip,

snapping the vertebrae.

He is the curse of all the snakes;

milks the venom out of their mouths

and wraps them round his arms for bracelets.

Strange to say how the little children

all steal away from his loving fingers.”