'Conserved in Treasure, Finally'

Rare is the poet who can simultaneously think and sing. C.H. Sisson once quoted the French critic Charles Maurras saying, “Reason may convince, but it is rhythm that persuades.” Prose writers don’t talk much about the rhythms of their words, which is probably a good thing. Prose is the draft horse of style, getting the heavy job done. Too much filigree and the language turns precious. The reader rightly suspects the writer is compensating for sparsity of content (e.g., John Updike). 

Words are never in isolation and are more like notation in a musical score than stones in a mosaic. One word follows another according to the logic of sound and sense. We spend a lot of time matching words to the rhythm that already exists in our heads, a rhythm we can’t begin to perceive until we start arranging the words. Sometimes for emphasis we purposely break the rhythm, always with resolution or absence of resolution in mind.

 

Much of the poetry written in the last century and a quarter is indistinguishable from prose – often tone-deaf prose. No need to name names. A writer who wrote superior prose and poetry, a rare feat of juggling, is Janet Lewis. Consider “Carmel Highlands” (Selected Poems of Janet Lewis, ed. R.L. Barth, 2000):

 

“Below the gardens and the darkening pines

The living water sinks among the stones,

Sinking yet foaming till the snowy tones

Merge with the fog drawn landward in dim lines.

The cloud dissolves among the flowering vines,

And now the definite mountain-side disowns

The fluid world, the immeasurable zones.

Then white oblivion swallows all designs.

 

“But still the rich confusion of the sea,

Unceasing voice, sombre and solacing,

Rises through veils of silence past the trees;

In restless repetition bound, yet free,

Wave after wave in deluge fresh releasing

An ancient speech, hushed in tremendous ease.”

 

The words float like leaves in the currents of a river. There’s no hurry, no rush to the finish, but the lines are suffused with a steady, uninsistent sense of momentum. Throughout the seventy years of Lewis’ writing life, she wrote poems in both form and free verse. She is a writer seriously in need of rediscovery. One of her novels, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), is among the four or five finest ever written by an American. Here is a 1945 poem, “Lines with a Gift of Herbs”:

 

“The summer's residue

In aromatic leaf,

Shrunken and dry, yet true

In fragrance, their belief,

  

“These from the hard earth drew

Essence of rosemary,

Of lavender, faintly blue,

While unconfused nearby

 

“From the same earth distilled

Grey sage and savory,

Each one distinctly willed,

Stoic morality.

 

“The Emperor said: ‘Though all

Conspire to break thy will,

Clear stone, thou emerald, shall

Be ever emerald still.’

 

“And these, small, unobserved,

Through summer chemistry,

Have all their might conserved

In treasure, finally.”

 

“The Emperor” is Marcus Aurelius in Meditations (trans. Maxwell Staniforth): “Whatever the world may say or do, my part is to keep myself good; just as a gold piece, or an emerald, or a purple robe insists perpetually, ‘Whatever the world may say or do, my part is to remain an emerald and keep my color true.’” The passage suggests Lewis’ courage and steadfastness, her “Stoic morality.” Here is a 1941 poem she wrote after the death of a friend and fellow novelist, “For Elizabeth Madox Roberts”:

 

“From the confusion of estranging years,

The imperfections of the changing heart,

This hour leaves only tears;

Tears, and my earliest love, Elizabeth, and changeless art.”

 

Lewis, in her fiction and verse, is one of the few essential American writers of the last century, along with Cather, Nabokov and her husband, Yvor Winters. Lewis was born on this date, August 17, in 1899 and died in 1998 at ninety-nine.