`Words and Rhythms in Hopeless Conjunction'

“So, what’ve you been reading?” asked the librarian as she checked out my books. Careful, this can be a trick question. Serious readers want a detailed list. Others may ask out of social obligation, wanting to fill time and appear concerned about your welfare. The librarian in question I don’t know well and I know nothing about her reading habits. I mentioned Oliver Sacks’ On the Move, Paul Seydor’s The Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (abbreviated to “a book about Sam Peckinpah”), and poetry by Jonathan Swift, C.H. Sisson and Eric Ormsby. “I have trouble with poetry,” she said, shaking her head guiltily. “I don’t get it.” I probed a bit, asking if teachers had contributed to her distaste for verse, which she confirmed. I paraphrased Eliot’s line about good poetry communicating before it is understood. She confessed to liking nursery rhymes, Walter de la Mare, and Lennon and McCartney when she was a girl, and Emily Dickinson later on, but like millions of others she has come to think of poetry as something probably good for you but unpleasant, like Brussels sprouts, and one can only sympathize. 

In his review of Ted Hughes’ unreadable Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Sisson questions Hughes’ claim that as a boy his interest in mythology and folklore preceded his interest in poetry. Sisson says: “The sequence must be unusual, not only in poets but in anyone for whom poetry has any real importance. To be alerted by words and rhythms in hopeless conjunction, before there is anything of the analytical apprehension which passes for understanding, must be the normal condition of a child still in the world of lullabies and nursery rhymes.” Rhythm is pre-eminent, the reason one seldom meets a child indifferent to music. Most of us sing before we can read. Most of us have memorized, without effort, more songs than poems. By heart I know many lines of verse I don’t even particularly like: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree.” 

In English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment(1971), Sisson praises In Retreat (1925), a prose memoir of World War I by Herbert Read (1893-1968), but eviscerates Read’s flat, charmless poetry. Read was a writer we might recognize as a “progressive,” always dedicated to the latest fashionable crusades. Sisson says Read was “certainly the most intelligent and attractive figure who ever lent himself to so much nonsense.” He devoted himself to “peace, freedom, and art, things so patently good that one wondered why so much explanation was necessary to recommend them.” Read’s poems were suffused with such sympathies, but Sisson will have none of it, at least as poetry: “The rhythm is secondary to the effect of the poem, and unpromising. This idiosyncrasy recurred in most of Read’s work throughout his career. For those who regard rhythm as of the essence of poetry, this marks a limitation which leaves him with a very modest place as a poet.” Poetry sings, in other words, before it is sung.

`You Can Scarcely Live Without It'

Poetry (and most of the rest of literature, but that’s another story) started hemorrhaging sometime in the last century and a half. Today, the patient’s heart rate is only intermittently perceptible. Precise dating of the earliest pathological symptoms is much contested and open to clinical interpretation. Whitman is an obvious diagnosis, but a second opinion should always be sought. What’s indisputable is that the patient’s near-death state was self-inflicted. Poets have done their best to euthanize their craft, with the assistance of critics, teachers, bureaucrats and other specialists. There’s much poetry-related activity, much happy talk about its virtues, but little of the genuine article. As John Berryman writes in his biography of Stephen Crane: “Crane was a writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.” Sounds dreary, no? Berryman leaves out workshops, slams, open-mike nights and Twitter. Never have there been so many ways to write badly.

Catharine Savage Brosman notes that poetry in prisons serve principally as “therapy, a way of exteriorizing feelings. But, as Paul Valéry observed, all the feelings in the world are incapable, by themselves, of producing one good poetic line.” She might have broadened her point beyond the prison walls. Brosman’s “Poetry’s Place in America,” published in Chronicles, where she serves as poetry editor, is fair-minded, comprehensive and dispiriting. She writes like a monk in fifth-century Ireland but with more feeble optimism:

“Moreover, among others knowledgeable enough to have an opinion, even modest, on current poetry, there is widespread disillusion.  That is encouraging, in a way; the common reader retains some sense of what a poem should and should not be.  Art—style and form—is expected.”

Though seldom, at least by poets. Brosman doesn’t mention the rare spots of light in our dark poetic age. A few masters, after all, are still at work – Geoffrey Hill, Richard Wilbur, Les Murray, Helen Pinkerton, Eric Ormsby and David Middleton, to cite only the obvious names and to enlarge the category to include non-Americans. At the conclusion of her essay, Brosman works hard to muster hope:

“Poetry must not, however, be viewed as utilitarian; that is an aesthetic and human error.  Yet nonutilitarian does not mean without place, without purpose.  Poetry appeals to our senses and emotions, stirring us, soothing us, sending us soaring.  Perhaps it is also like love: hard to define, not strictly necessary for physical existence, but fundamental to our natures and to all we deem worthwhile.  You can scarcely live without it.  We must rely on ourselves and our fellows, not the common millions and their Pied Pipers, but small circles of readers and writers (including, we hope, converts)—those intellectual and spiritual kin who appreciate poetic value.”

`Sweet Day, So Cool, So Calm, So Bright'

Call it second-hand nostalgia: a longing for another’s longing for a past we (and they) never knew. I feel nothing comparable for anything in my personal past, and I say that not in a spirit of complaint but with the recognition that my experience has merely served to make me who I am. The nostalgia I’m trying to describe is probably rare, though it occurs with some frequency among dedicated readers and perhaps moviegoers. Let’s distinguish it from false nostalgia, about which Terry Teachout has written: “The English language needs a word whose definition would be `nostalgia for that which one has not experienced.’” I knew instinctively what Terry meant, but I mean something else.

In A Man Could Stand Up (1926), the third novel in Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End, Christopher Tietjens describes another officer, Capt. McKechnie, as a “fellow [who] spread seventeenth-century atmosphere across the landscape over which the sun’s rays were beginning to flood a yellow wash.” Ford continues: “What had become of the seventeenth century? And Herbert and Donne and Crashaw and Vaughan, the Silurist? . . . Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky!” And then this:

“The only satisfactory age in England! . . . Yet what chance had it to-day? Or, still more, to-morrow? In the sense that the age of, say, Shakespeare had a chance. Or Pericles! or Augustus!”

Even as nostalgia envelopes him, Tietjens questions it, almost mocking his susceptibility to such longings. But the longing returns as Tietjens awaits another German offensive:

“The land remains . . . It remains! . . . At that same moment the dawn was wetly revealing; over there in George Herbert’s parish What was it called? . . . What the devil was its name? Oh, Hell! . . . Between Salisbury and Wilton . . . The tiny church . . . But he refused to consider the plough-lands, the heavy groves, the slow highroad above the church that the dawn was at that moment wetly revealing--until he could remember that name. . . He refused to consider that, probably even to-day, that land ran to . . . produced the stock of . . . Anglican sainthood. The quiet thing!”

Finally, Tietjens recalls the name of Herbert’s parish:

“The name Bemerton suddenly came on to his tongue. Yes, Bemerton, Bemerton, Bemerton was George Herbert's parsonage. Bemerton, outside Salisbury...The cradle of the race as far as our race was worth thinking about. He imagined himself standing up on a little hill, a lean contemplative parson, looking at the land sloping down to Salisbury spire. A large, clumsily bound seventeenth-century testament, Greek, beneath his elbow. . . Imagine standing up on a hill! It was the unthinkable thing there!”

The scene is powerfully poignant. Ford sets it up as a series of lenses in a telescope peering three centuries from the Western Front into Herbert’s day. The effect is heightened if we recognize the opening lines of Herbert’s “The Virtue”: “Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, / The bridal of the earth and sky.” In a lecture on C.H. Sisson delivered in 1980, Geoffrey Hill looks at the same scene that struck me recently while rereading Parade’s End:

“The capacity to interfuse ideas with landscape is one of the great creative secrets: to make a tree or a field either draw out, or reciprocate, or feed images into, the life of the mind. It is a great art we become palpably aware of in Wordsworth; scarcely anyone does it more beautifully than George Eliot. Ford Madox Ford, in a passage from one of the Tietjens novels, deliberately eschews balanced reciprocity: the mind and the landscape mirroring and stabilizing each other; shows, instead, the `wind,’ `twist,’ of the process of memory and its blank-faced twin aphasia. Tietjens is in the trenches: his groping for the name of George Herbert’s parish (Bemerton) is partly an unconscious strategy to ward off shell-shocked despair and paranoia; partly the attachment of a particular religious and political vision to the soil of England itself; an intellectual sensuousness, a sensuousness of intellect: `But what chance had quiet fields, Anglican sainthood, accuracy of thought, heavy-leaved, timbered hedgerows. . . ”

Hill notes Sisson’s frequently expressed admiration for Ford, suggests these scenes in Parade’s End had a powerful influence on him, and quotes lines from Sisson’s “On My Fifty-First Birthday”:

“A great sunlit field full of lambs.

The distant perspectives are of the patched earth

With hedges creeping about. If I were to die now

No need of angels to carry me to paradise.

O Lord my God, simplify my existence.”

`Little Autumnal Moments of Vision'

We find this in Anthony Powell’s A Writer’s Notebook (William Heinemann, 2001): “One of the most difficult things to realize when one is young is that all the awful odds and ends taking place round one are, in fact, the process of living.”

It takes a novelist to notice this truth, as novels consist largely of “the awful [and not-quite-awful] odds and ends taking place round one.” Our imaginations when young tend toward naiveté and vulgarity. They deal in cartoonish fancies, heightened states, the melodramatic. Nuance is generally reserved for the mature (of any age). Life for the young (of any age) is deferred by living, and every day is preamble to John Marcher’s “arid end.” Elsewhere in his Notebook, Powell writes: “People are boring, but not life.” And this, on the literary side of things: “A novel is simply one means of giving information.” Combine those two notebook entries, and every honest grownup recognizes the essential truth. Powell’s observations recall some thoughts sent to me via email by D.G. Myers on May 9, 2013, a little more than sixteen months before his death from cancer:

“I’ve been thinking how much of life is absorbed with `small cares’ that seem overwhelmingly important at the time--or at least disabling--which are forgotten in the sequel: the headaches, stomach aches, the traffic jams, the appointments which are late. Do these take up the majority of our time? They almost never make it into literature, and in fact literature seems an unstinting propaganda on behalf of the dramatic occurrences of human life. I may try to write about the `small cares,’ but I'm not sure yet what I want to say.”

“Small cares” is not to be read ironically. David disliked the sort of fiction that pretended to be abstracted from life – Donald Barthelme’s artsy-fartsy bric-a-brac, for instance. Joyce devoted much of Ulysses to Bloom’s “small cares.” Nobody reads Shakespeare for the sword fights. David’s mention of “unstinting propaganda” offers a ready explanation for the recent respectability given genre fiction – fantasy, mysteries, science fiction and such -- among readers and critics who ought to know better. That much of life consists of the familiar, ordinary, unheroic and tedious is self-evident and probably sounds rather appealing to a lot of people in Darfur and Syria. David’s email recalls the gallant letter Larkin wrote in 1965 to Charles Monteith, an editor at Faber and Faber, lobbying for publication of Barbara Pym’s novels: 

“Personally, too, I feel it is a great shame if ordinary sane novels about ordinary sane people doing ordinary sane things can’t find a publisher these days. This is the tradition of Jane Austen & Trollope, and I refuse to believe that no one wants its successors today. Why shd I have to choose between spy rubbish, science fiction rubbish, Negro-homosexual rubbish, or dope-take nervous-breakdown rubbish?”

The ascendency of bad taste and impaired literacy was well underway even half a century ago. Larkin goes on:

“I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful or lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in the little autumnal moments of vision, that the so called ‘big’ experiences of life are going to miss them; and I like to read about such things presented not with self  pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness & even humour, that is in fact what the critics wd call the moral tone of the book.”

`A Warm Comfortable Feeling, Late at Night'

To his monstrous wife Sylvia, Christopher Tietjens, “the last Tory,” is an “eighteenth-century figure of the Dr. Johnson type.” One recalls that Johnson in his Dictionary defines Tory as “one who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of England,” while a Whig is “a member of a faction.” The ever-Johnsonian C.H. Sisson, in defense of Johnson’s Tory, describes it as “a four letter word” (“A Four Letter Word,” The Avoidance of Literature: Collected Essays, 1978). In Last Post (1928), the concluding volume of Ford Madox Ford’s great tetralogy Parade’s End, Tietjens reads to his older brother Mark, who is paralyzed and whose relations with Christopher have been strained by Sylvia’s lies:

“Over Boswell, the brothers had got thick as thieves with an astonishing intimacy—and with an astonishing similarity. If one of them made a comment on Bennet Langton it would be precisely the comment that the other had on his lips. It was what asses call telepathy, nowadays . . . a warm comfortable feeling, late at night with the light shaded from your eyes, the voice going on through the deep silence of London that awaited the crash of falling bombs.”

Ford implies that the sharing of Boswell’s words by the brothers constitutes a sanctuary of civilization in a world threatened again by barbarism in the form of German bombs and domestic egotism. This may be my favorite literary depiction of reading. I admire the choice of book, obviously, and its ability to ease fraternal friction, at least briefly. The brothers, for a few moments, achieve some of the unlikely fondness that existed between Boswell and his subject. In the next paragraph, Ford permits Mark to trump his brother:

“ . . . Well, Mark accepted Christopher’s dictum that he himself was an eighteenth-century bloke and was only forestalled when he had wanted to tell Christopher that he was more old-fashioned still—a sort of seventeenth-century Anglican who ought to be strolling in a grove with Greek Testament beneath the arm and all . . .”

In the last of his many books, The March of Literature, published less than a year before his death in 1939, Ford writes of Johnson:

“This was a man who loved truth and the expression of truth with a passion that when he spoke resembled epilepsy and when he meditated was an agony. It does not need Boswell to tell us that; the fact shines in every word he wrote, coming up through his Latinisms as swans emerge, slightly draped with weeds, from beneath the surface of a duck pond. His very intolerances are merely rougher truths; they render him the more human – and the more humane.”

`Hostages to Vastation'

Walking in front of me as I left the university library was a young man, probably a student, with these words printed on the back of his t-shirt: poder es hacer. I sometimes experience a dyslexia-like condition that turns printed language into an Esperanto-impasto of nonsense. Simple prose is Finnegans Wake-ified. I thought I was having such an attack. What language was this? Dog Latin? Some hipster dialect of English? Back in my office I looked up the phrase, which turns out to be elementary Spanish: “power is doing” or “power is making.” A “Maker” subculture thrives on campus, especially among engineering students, and I suspect the young man is aligned with that tribe.

The night before I was reading Guy Davenport’s Da Vinci's Bicycle: Ten Stories (1979), when I came upon the first sentence of the second paragraph of “C. Musonius Rufus”: “All at first was the fremitus of things, the jigget of gnats, drum of the blood, fidget of leaves, shiver of light, boom of the wind.” I’ve read the story many times before and recall no past confusion. This time, I tripped over the sentence as though it were a log on the sidewalk – proof, if any was needed, that we change as readers across time, that an interesting text is incomplete without a reader and that no reading is ever final.

Davenport’s grammar and syntax are straightforward. His essays tend to be crystalline, readily accessible to literate, book-minded readers. The fiction is more daring, more “experimental,” and in general less successful than the nonfiction, but let’s give Davenport’s sentence a chance. Fremitus is from the Latin for “to roar,” and Davenport was a classicist.  The OED gives “a dull roaring noise” and “a palpable vibration or thrill, e.g. of the walls of the chest.” The most recent citation dates from precisely a century before Davenport published Da Vinci’s Bicycle. The rest of the sentence, a catalog of ambient sounds, proceeds from this word. What of jigget? The OED gives “to move about with a jerky or shaky motion; to jig; to hop or skip about; to shake up and down; to fidget.” One would be incorrect to say gnats “fidget,” but in a swarm they undeniably jigget. It’s a good serviceable word used by one of Davenport’s favorite writers, Rudyard Kipling, in A Fleet in Being: Notes of Two Trips with the Channel Squadron (1898): “At eight knots you heard the vicious little twin-screws jiggitting like restive horses; at seventeen they pegged away into the sea like a pair of short-gaited trotting ponies on a hard road.” Kipling’s prose is strong and vivid – no lapse into Esperanto there.     

“C. Musonius Rufus” mingles three strands of narrative by three narrators. The sentence in question describes a wakening awareness, from sleep or some other dulling of consciousness. The historical Gaius Musonius Rufus was a Stoic philosopher of the first century A.D., the teacher of Epictetus. In “Ezra Pound 1885-1972” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), Davenport writes: “Art is a matter of models; life is a matter of models. In St. Elizabeth’s he remembered C. Musonius Rufus, condemned first to a waterless Aegean island by Nero (he survived by discovering a spring for himself and his fellow prisoners) and finally to swinging a pickaxe in the chain gang that dug the canal across the isthmus of Corinth.” Davenport implicitly suggests parallels between the exiles of Musonius and Pound. The sentences that follow the one quoted above from “C. Musonius Rufus” are transparent:

“The tremor of my cry may have had something to do with choosing this threshold. There are other sills, empty places with intolerable glare, presences, noon quiet, lonely desperate desert wastes. I have died again in them. Those who go to the inhuman to place their hopes upon its alien rhythms, its bitter familiarity with nothing, its constant retreat from all that we can love, are hostages to vastation.”

`Only What Truly Matters'

Lovely word, clepsydra. From the Greek; literally, “water thief” (think: kleptomania). The word designates a water clock, an ancient and elegant device to measure time. Variations were devised independently in Babylon, Egypt, India, China, Greece and elsewhere. Sir Thomas Browne refers to them in Pseudodoxia Epidemica: “It is not to be denied that before the dayes of Jerom there were Horologies, and several accounts of time; for they measured the hours not only by drops of water in glasses called Clepsydræ, but also by sand in glasses called Clepsammia.” In the first poem in Doctor Honoris Causa (Anvil, 1993) Marius Kociejowski turns “The Water Clock” into an emblem of the poet himself and, by way of imaginative logic, the human imagination: 

“I will construct for you
Out of the words I think
Will work best this clock 

“Whose running depends upon
A steady flow we shall call
The imagination at work. 

In a note to the poem, Kociejowski cites a passage in Carlo M. Cipolla’s Clocks and Culture (1967) describing the gift of a water clock from Haroun al Rashid to Charlemagne in 807 A.D. Cipolla, in turn, quotes a mention in Eginhard’s Annales of “the astonishment and the admiration that the Arabian clock aroused in the Frankish court.” Kociejowski’s thirteen three-line stanzas are stacked narrowly and remind me of a country saying: “That girl’s skinny as six o’clock.” Both time and water are said to flow: 

“Only what truly matters
Will be given clearance”

`Teach Men Soberness: To Be Awake'

Marius Kociejowski: “Yes, he was a fool and he could be such a silly poet but he produced a handful of great poems.” 

Christopher Middleton: “It was the alcohol, of course. I don’t know if he ever wrote under the influence or just let it go, but his poetry is wonderful to me because, by and large, it has a strict sobriety about it.” 

The poet in question is Zbigniew Herbert. The exchange comes in Palavers and a Nocturnal Journal (Shearsman Books, 2004), which includes conversations between Kociejowski and Middleton recorded in 2002 and 2003. Marius has sent me copies of Palavers and two of his poetry collections, Doctor Honoris Causa (Anvil, 1993) and Music’s Bride (Anvil, 1999). I won’t pretend to accurately describe the flavor of these volumes, as they arrived only on Friday, but will note the recurrence of Herbert throughout Kociejowski’s work. Both men befriended the Pole, who died in 1998. Through the grapevine I knew Herbert had a reputation for hard drinking. In some poets, alcohol suffuses their lines. Consider Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas and John Berryman. But in others – Herbert and Auden, foremost – the booze is hardly a shadow on the work. Most of Herbert’s poems are notably sober-minded. The best of them, however fanciful, fractured or funny they seem, usually suggest a certain gravitas. As Chesterton noted, the opposite of “funny” is not “serious” but “not funny.” Herbert deftly balances “funny” (or witty, or jokey, or amusing) and “serious,” as in the Mr. Cogito poems. 

In Labyrinth on the Sea (The Collected Prose 1948-1998, Ecco, 2010), Herbert tells us he explores a Minoan sarcophagus and experiences a “happy moment of illuminating knowledge and inspired sobriety.” “Happy” is not a word often encountered in Herbert’s poetry and prose. “Inspired sobriety” is an inspired coinage. Customarily, sobriety is associated with stony dullness, a literal-minded plodding. In a 1984 interview, Herbert makes even grander claims for the importance of sobriety: 

“Writing—and in this I disagree with everybody—must teach men soberness: to be awake. [Spoken in English.] To make people sober. It does not mean, not to try. But with a small internal correction. I reject optimism despite all the theologians. Despair is a fruitful feeling. It is a cleanser, from desire, from hope. `Hope is the mother of the stupid.’ [This is a Polish proverb.] I don’t like hope.” 

Herbert the provocateur is at work here, of course, but so is Herbert the cool, stoical, classical-minded veteran of the twentieth century and its horrors. In Doctor Honoris Causa, in a poem he dedicates to Herbert, “The Stag,” Kociejowski writes: 

“How to say that once again darkness falls,

That plainness of speech ripens into song,

A nightjar swooping through its silences.

We are smuggled home to our sleek places,

The malevolent wasp its empty comb.”

`Genuine Ebullience and Elegant Despair'

“Let the All-Stars shine from that jerry-built stage.
Let their high notes shimmer above the cold waves.
Time and the tide are counting the beats.
Death the collector is keeping the tab.” 

Might as well make a party of the inevitable, with friends and good music. Brood about death, yes. Dread it, of course. But don’t let “Death the collector” be a party pooper. The poem is Dana Gioia’s “Meet Me at the Lighthouse,” a celebration of the fabled West Coast jazz club. All of the musicians recruited by Gioia (“the best talent in Tartarus”) are still alive when he calls the party in the summer of ’71– Gerry Mulligan (d. 1996), Cannonball Adderley (d. 1975), Hampton Hawes (d. 1977), Stan Getz (d. 1991), Chet Baker (d. 1988) and Art Pepper (d. 1982). 

The poem is witty and audacious enough to have been written by Tom Disch, the poet and science fiction writer once described by Gioia as “an illegal immigrant from across the literary Rio Grande.” Even while writing the lightest of light verse, Disch is darkly addressing his old friend and antagonist, “Death the collector.” As Elizabeth Hand puts it: “Few people make a successful career of contemplating death and suicide; fewer still approach the subject with the genuine ebullience and elegant despair of the prolific, criminally underappreciated writer Thomas M. Disch.” Here is “A Cape Mendocino Rose,” set on the shore of Gioia’s Pacific, from Disch’s final collection, About the Size of It (Anvil, 2007): 

“Trapped in this single hope

That life goes on, life does go on,

We search for a suitable trope. 

“That life goes on, life does go on

Can’t be denied, until it can.

`Gather ye rosebuds,’ that dark koan 

“Expresses best, and earliest,

The search for a suitable trope.

Or there’s old Horace G’s `Go west!’ 

“He on the Pacific coast

The sun spotlights a spectral rose.

Trapped in a single trope,

We lurch from hope to specious hope.” 

On this date, July 4, in 2008, Disch, age sixty-eight, took his own life.

`Contractility Is a Virtue'

From a distance they resemble wood-colored buttons incongruously tacked to the garage door. They number among summer’s sadder emblems: Snails, marooned, dried-out, glued to an inhabitable surface. In the night, they climb, seeking – what? Morning adheres them in place. They are not swimmers but their medium is moisture. Snails are toothless, indiscriminate feeders. “Gastropod” means stomach foot. They move with the aid of a mucus-like secretion and leave glistening trails. Their lives are allegories, rich in inference, as Marianne Moore recognizes in “To a Snail” (Observations, 1924): 

“If `compression is the first grace of style,’

you have it.  Contractility is a virtue

as modesty is a virtue.

It is not the acquisition of any one thing

that is able to adorn,

or the incidental quality that occurs

as a concomitant of something well said,

that we value in style,

but the principle that is hid:

in the absence of feet, `a method of conclusions’;

`a knowledge of principles,’

in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.” 

Moore preferred her animals armored, prickly and well-defended, exotic yet familiar, like her verse. The quoted matter in the first line she attributes to Democritus, though it sounds more like Moore. In fact, it’s probably Demetrius of Phalerum (c. 350-c. 280 B.C.) The latter quotes are Duns Scotus’. Moore’s interest is aesthetics, not natural science. Her “absence of feet” refers, I’m certain, to prosody.  See “Diamonds” by Kay Ryan, a poetic descendent of Moore’s.

`When I Get Among the Highlanders'

The John Keats I love is not a “dainty sprite.” As poet and man, even after hours of violent hemoptyses, he is made of sturdier stuff.  In 1816, Keats completed medical studies and acquired his Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. By the standards of his time and place, he was a family practitioner. Soon after his twenty-first birthday, Keats’ guardian, Richard Abbey, enquired after his professional intentions. “I mean to rely on my abilities as a poet,” he replied. “You are either mad or a fool to talk in so absurd a manner,” Abbey said. “My mind is made up,” Keats said, and he never practiced medicine. (John Keats, Robert Gittings, 1969).

No, the Keats I love is resolute, a magician with language, and a devoted brother. His finest work is in his letters. With his friend Charles Brown he left for a walking tour of the Lake District, Ireland and Scotland in June 1818, a journey that would last through August. On the way, Keats’ brother and his wife, George and Georgina, left them at Lancaster, headed for Liverpool, where they boarded a ship for America. The poet never saw them again. On the Isle of Mull, Keats caught a cold and concluded he was “too thin and fevered to proceed on the journey.” He returned home on Aug. 8 and resumed nursing his brother Tom, who died of tuberculosis on Dec. 1. John had already contracted the disease that would kill him in 1821 at age twenty-five.

With his sister Frances Mary, always known in the family as “Fanny” (1803-89), eight years his junior, Keats is always solicitous and amusing, the big-brother clown. On this date, July 2, in 1818, while in Dumfries, Scotland, he writes to her: “We are employed in going up Mountains, looking at strange towns, prying into old ruins and eating very hearty breakfasts.” No hint of illness or distress. This is no shrinking violet: “Mr. Abbey says we are Don Quixotes—tell him we are more generally taken for Pedlars. All I hope is that we may not be taken for excisemen in this whisky country. We are generally up about 5 walking before breakfast and we complete our 20 miles before dinner.” That evening, Keats writes his sister a singable sequence of nonsense verses, “a song about myself”:

“There was a naughty Boy,

A naughty boy was he,

He would not stop at home,

He could not quiet be—

He took

In his Knapsack

A Book

Full of vowels

And a shirt

With some towels—

A slight cap

For night cap—”

Keats, no doubt, was amusing himself, but think of Fanny. Imagine getting such a letter from your brother, who is tramping somewhere in the pre-telephone North. Your parents are dead. One brother has left for America, another is dying of consumption. You don’t yet know that you will outlive all of them. For now, you know John is well enough to take the time to make you laugh. After the nonsense rhymes, your big brother adds:

“I am ashamed of writing you such stuff, nor would I if it were not for being tired after my day’s walking, and ready to tumble into bed so fatigued that when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me round the town, like a Hoop, without waking me. Then I get so hungry a Ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like Larks to me—A Batch of Bread I make no more ado with than a sheet of parliament; and I can eat a Bull’s head as easily as I used to do Bull’s eyes. I take a whole string of Pork Sausages down as easily as a Pen’orth of Lady’s fingers. Ah dear I must soon be contented with an acre or two of oaten cake a hogshead of Milk and a Clothes-basket of Eggs morning noon and night when I get among the Highlanders.”

What a shame Keats was never a father.

`The Only Antidote Is in the Bite'

Eric Ormsby has sent me a signed copy of Araby, his poetry collection published in 2001 by Signal Editions, an imprint of Véhicule Press of Montreal. In addition to being a fine critic and one of our best poets, Ormsby for nine years was a professor and director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, and since 2006 has served as chief librarian at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. This recitation from his C.V. hints at Ormsby’s scholarly, bookish and polylingual gifts, but leaves out his ear, one of the most voluptuous in the business. Consider the opening lines of “Jaham and His Cat”:

“The pink melodious ratchet of her tongue

psalmodized as she hunched on Jaham’s chest.

Jaham admired her reverence of repose,

the prayerful alertness of her ears,

the pierced opacity of her green eyes

whose irises held aloof the more they shone,

her silken dignity, the way she made

a pedestal of paw to rest upon

behind a twitching balustrade of tail.”

Araby is a suite of related poems devoted to the lives of Jaham, “the Father of Clouds” (his name is the Arabic words for “clouds”), a poet and auto mechanic, and his sidekick Bald Adham, also a mechanic, “a sleek grease-monkey from Jizan,” a clownish fanatic. When Adham “hectored Jaham to join the Holy War,” Jaham “humored his friend. Theology, he thought, / was a tumor of reason caused by the Jinn. / He loathed transcendence as he loathed the clap.” Meet the Don and Sancho Panza (or Laurel and Hardy) reborn as Saudis. And here are the concluding lines of “Jaham and the Old Poet”:

“With unexpected vigor the old man

sank two sharp incisors into the boy

--into his sweet and nearly speechless mouth--

and chawed him like an elapid,

working the poison well into his skin,

gnawing at his mouth till the hot bite

brought blood. And then he said,

“The only antidote is in the bite.

“Jaham went home writhingly and learned to write.”

Ormsby is never averse to savory, high-cholesterol words. As if by reflex, he avoids what Thom Gunn has called “the dull thunder of approximate words.” His language is at once lush and precise, never a purple gush. “Bite” means the obvious but also, the OED reminds us, “incisiveness, pungency; point or cogency of style, language.” “Elapid” refers to a venomous colubrid snake (most snakes are colubrids, but few colubrids are venomous). “Chaw” as a verb means to chew or champ, and hints at a plug of tobacco (Ormsby was born in Georgia and grew up in Florida). The OED reports the word can also mean “to ruminate upon, brood over.” In Ormsby’s hands, a word can never be reduced to a blunt, one-purpose tool. He hears echoes, connotations and harmonies, and isn’t shy about deploying them. But Araby cannot be reduced to filigree. Ormsby has stories to tell, lives to chronicle. First Adham, and then Jaham, are dead by the conclusion of the volume’s final poem, “Jaham’s Last Words,” and here are those words: “I love everything that perishes, / everything that perishes entrances me.”  Ormsby’s friend Marius Kociejowski, in “A Voyage Through Ormsby’s Araby” (The Pebble Chance: Feuilletons and Other Prose (Biblioasis, 2014), writes:

“A hunger for the exotic barely enters the equation, and, as anyone who has ever spent time in the Middle East will tell you, one of its perils is a powerful dose of taedium vitae. Something there puts one’s brain in a sling from time to time, and it’s all one can do just to rise from a rock-hard mattress and breathe the traffic fumes. It’s not all bejeweled navels, fancy turbans and aromatic spices. Was it ever? Anyway, Orientalism is not my concern here. That’s student’s fare. The figure of Jaham, it has to be said, is a dying breed within his own culture. There are few poets today who’d recognize the Pleiades. Ormsby’s Araby, which represents a remarkable interlude in an already remarkable poetic oeuvre, is a nod in the direction of all we stand to lose.”

`More Than Grilled Chicken and Wine'

Václav Havel writes to his wife Olga Havlová on April 3, 1982:

“I have another task for you till the end of my sentence: to build up a philosophical library so that when I return, I shall learn at last how it all is (you have no idea how hungry I am for such reading matter; I miss it a hundred times more than grilled chicken and wine). Buy everything that comes out; comb the secondhand bookstores; buy, or put on long-term deposit in our place, the libraries of emigrating friends…”

Much of Letters to Olga (trans. Paul Wilson) is filled with the mundane, non-literary concerns of a literary man working hard to maintain dignity in a setting engineered to eradicate that virtue. Along with books he asks his wife for a toothbrush, razor blades, cigarettes, chocolate and tea, preferably Earl Gray (“My happiest moment is when I prepare a glass of hot, strong tea, and then sit down with it to read, think or write a letter”). He complains of hemorrhoids and lumbago (“I can't shake the feeling that my organism is only functioning on its word of honor, as it were”). In the early letters, Havel comes across as a nag, and at the same time as a modern-day Boethius, a philosophical quester behind bars. He revels in phenomenology.

In October 1979, the playwright and future president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for “subversion of the republic.” Havel was a leader of Charter 77 and the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted. Communism spawned a remarkable library of prison literature, from Koestler, Solzhenitsyn and Aleksander Wat to Armando Valladares’ Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag (1985). Such books, not Modernism or “postmodernism,” constitute the signature genre or movement of twentieth-century literature. Much of it, including Havel’s letters, started as samizdat. The Czech critic Jan Lopatka usefully reads Havel’s letters not as documentation of Marxist inhumanity but as a novel of “character and destiny” like those of Balzac and George Eliot. While in prison, Havel’s reading matter is subject to bureaucratic vagaries. He scavenges Stendhal, Pickwick Papers, Max Brod’s biography of Kafka, a Czech volume on the Watergate scandal, To Kill a Mockingbird and Introduction to Christianity by Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. While reading an unnamed volume by Musil, he writes: “It’s just what I need: it allows me to be in contact, for a while each day, with cultivated language and a clever text.”

I first read Letters to Olga when the English translation was published in 1988, a year before the Velvet Revolution. I remember a fleeting sense of guilt that I, as a young American, had been in the early years of my journalism career, moving where I wished, reading and writing what I wished, while Havel was held in Ruzyné Prison. Rereading the book now, three and a half years after Havel’s death, I dismiss that earlier guilt as cheap self-indulgence. Havel’s example is more worthy of study and respect than ever before: ''The more slavishly and dogmatically a person falls for a ready-made ideological system or `worldview,’ the more certainly he will bury all chances of thinking, of freedom, of being clear about what he knows.” 

Havel also reminds us that prisons take many forms besides the usual brick-and mortar variety. On March 8, 1980, he writes:

“I’ve discovered that in lengthy prison terms, sensitive people are in danger of becoming embittered, developing grudges against the world, growing dull, indifferent and selfish. One of my main aims is not to yield an inch to such threats, regardless of how long I’m here. I want to remain open to the world, not to shut myself up against it; I want to retain my interest in other people and my love for them.”

`His Cackleophilous Concubines'

My youngest son has a video of me carrying on an extended conversation with a rooster. The bird was strutting behind a fence on the grounds of a nearby grade school, the one he (my son, that is) had attended years before. I cock-a-doodle-doo’ed, the bird, after hustling his hens into the coop, answered in kind, and we carried on a call-and-response for ten minutes or so, until the rest of the (human) family was fed up with the Dr. Doolittle routine. I do the same with squirrels, cats, dogs and several species of birds. Dogs are particularly responsive. The neighbors have a Dachshund that barks with a precisely enunciated “Ruff, ruff,” like a cartoon dog. My accent when barking with him is good, better than my French. I enjoy the illusory sense of intimacy with another species and the total ridiculousness of the whole thing, similar to many conversations with my fellow humans, though I don’t fall for any of that “horse whisperer” crap. In his review of a book titled The Animal Dialogues, Eric Ormsby writes: 

“Conversations with wild animals are always one-sided. If we speak to them, we hear how empty our words sound in the silence between us. If we manage to make eye contact with some startled deer in a forest clearing or with a caged lion in the local zoo, we search their faces for visual clues, but we can't quite decipher the look they give us back. We depend almost exclusively on our eyes, but animals apprehend us with all their senses. They know us by our smells and sounds as well as by sight; the lion may even anticipate the way we taste. For all our wordiness, we are mute in this wordless realm.” 

Note that Ormsby specifies “wild” animals, leaving open the possibility that two-way conversations with domesticated creatures are possible. My cat is not shy about expressing his preferences and aversions. He is laconic, never verbose (expect when purring), and has little use for small talk. Language for him is largely utilitarian, but never less than elegant and eloquent, accompanied as it is by rubbing, paw-kneading and head butting, a uniquely feline mingling of speech and dance. Ormsby’s poems, like Marianne Moore’s, are densely populated with animals, and roosters seem to be among his favorites. In “Watchdog and Rooster,” he contrasts the communication styles of the titular beasts: 

“The rooster, however,
accustomed to the chuckling palaver
of his cackleophilous concubines,
disliked the stolid silence of the dog
who hunched there like a stinkpot on a log
and only uttered small, obsequious whines
about his master's boots at supper-time.” 

And in “Rooster” he writes: 

“I like the way his stubby little beak
Produces that dark, corroded croak
Like a grudging nail tugged out of stubborn wood:
No `cock-a-doodle-doo’  but awk-a-awk!
He yawps whenever he's in the mood
And the thirst and clutch of life are in his squawk.” 

With that “yawps” Ormsby sneaks in a nice Whitmanesque echo.

`To Compare Experience with Expectation'

Boswell tells us that Bennet Langton, a devoted reader of The Rambler (1750-52), journeyed from Lincolnshire to London “chiefly with the view of endeavouring to be introduced to its authour.” Born in 1736, Langton was still a teenager when we went to meet his hero, who at once took a liking to him. In 1757, Langton matriculated from Trinity College, Oxford, where he befriended Topham Beauclerk. Together, early in their acquaintance, they took Johnson for his famous “frisk” to Billingsgate. That Johnson maintained friendships with his juniors speaks well of his avidity and love of life. Johnson was forty-eight and the author of his Dictionary and “The Vanity of Human Wishes” when he wrote to Langton (whom he called “Lanky,” as he called Beauclerk “Beau”) on this date, June 28, in 1758: 

“I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.” 

Already middle-aged and accomplished, Johnson had a right to coast complacently on his reputation, but was too restless, self-doubting, ambitious and penurious to do so. What he suggests to Langton was his customary practice – life lived attentively and conducted as a sort of experiment in which the outcome in advance is unknown. Johnson resumes his letter: 

“You, who are very capable of anticipating futurity, and raising phantoms before your own eyes, must often have imagined to yourself an academical life, and have conceived what would be the manners, the views, and the conversation, of men devoted to letters; how they would choose their companions, how they would direct their studies, and how they would regulate their lives. Let me know what you expected, and what you have found.” 

What interests Johnson, beyond his solicitousness for his young friend, is the process of living and maturing. What do we expect, what actually happens, and what do we make of the differences? Those who live with an indelibly fixed image of their future risk disappointment and despair. How well Bennet heeded his friend’s example is not known. He published little. In his will, Johnson left him a book and £750, out of which he was to pay an annuity to Francis Barber, Johnson’s servant. The first identification of Langton in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is not as writer or captain in the militia but “friend of Samuel Johnson.”

`The Obscene Graffiti of Life'

“When it comes to other people’s vices, most of us are thick-skinned; but the satirist is a man without a skin. He senses faults before anyone else, and wears a perpetual frown. Most of us encounter grossness, cowardice, and obsequiousness two or three times a day and never give it a second thought. These are the obscene graffiti of life, seen so often that we have become accustomed to them. The satirist’s gift is the ability to point out that which we already know, and to provoke a moral or aesthetic response. He does not discover new vices, but uncovers old ones to which we have become inured. He provides no new information, but only reminds us that we already know enough to be shocked, but we have resigned ourselves to a contented indifference.”

This comes in a section of F.H. Buckley’s The Morality of Laughter (University of Michigan Press, 2003) titled “The Paradox of Satire,” in which he contrasts the playful and the bitter. Gulliver’s third voyage, to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan, is playful. In Laputa, where scientists labor to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, he pokes fun at the Royal Society, but Swift was never more savage than in Gulliver’s fourth voyage, to the land of the Houyhnhnms. Buckley describes the chapter as “one of the most caustic attacks on human pretensions ever written, which shocks the reader without amusing him.” Perhaps I’m among the thick-skinned, because I judge the Yahoos very amusing, but I appreciate Buckley’s larger point: “The more intense the satire, the fewer laughs it raises. The Paradox of Satire is that it asks the reader to share its rancor; and if it succeeds the satire fails.”

Satire is tricky. The most vicious of art forms calls for a delicate hand. Heavy-handed satire is almost a contradiction in terms. It requires well-calibrated wit, not a slugfest, and certainly not a preening sense of self-righteousness. Too much subtlety or too much simple-minded explicitness, and satire is a dud. I’ve been reading Juvenal again (Juvenal in English, ed. Martin M. Winkler, Penguin, 2001) and, as Buckley says, “Bitter satire is Juvenalian.” He quotes a brief, apparently self-translated passage from Satire 2.8-10: Rome, says Juvenal, is a city where “every street is just full of stern-faced sodomites. How can you lash corruption when you are the most notorious furrows among our Socratic fairies?” Here is Peter Green’s translation of the same lines (The Sixteen Satires, Penguin, 1974):

“Every back street swarms with solemn-faced humbuggers.

You there—have you the nerve to thunder at vice, who are

The most notorious dyke among all our Socratic fairies?”

       

In his footnote, Green explains: “This is a variant on the classical gibe of antiquity (derived largely from Plato’s Symposium and Aristophanes’ Clouds) which assumes that all `philosophers’ are homosexuals. Juvenal inverts the cliché: in his day many homosexuals pretended to be philosophers.”

Buckley doesn’t address self-satirizing, a phenomenon that proliferates in our culture and age, and requires a degree of self-obliviousness to be effective. Some things can’t be done by others because the job has already been accomplished.  A friend in South Carolina alerts me to “When we’re told we’ll never understand,” a piece of writing produced by Ed Madden, the poet laureate of Charleston, S.C., the city where a nasty little punk last week murdered nine people. Aesthetically and morally, the piece is a satire of conventional groupthink reactions to the slaughter, a parody of pre-approved sentiments. Let my friend, a native of South Carolina, have his say:

“What a piece of shit this work is. When an obviously mentally ill white boy goes into a church and kills nine black people, we understand it’s a terrible thing, but the writer of the poem wants to ascribe the fault to the culture. The writer says when we say the boy was mentally ill we know he killed those people because of hate, because of racism, because he had a Confederate flag. The writer is saying that if the boy’s mind had not been poisoned by racism (endemic in S.C., implies the author) he’d not have murdered those people. Any sane and fair mind would understand that the monstrous act is, in fact, not explicable to a sound mind, even if that mind is racist. I grew up with racists, was probably to some degree one myself, but the most virulent racist I know, or ever knew, would never do what this mentally ill boy did. This absurd and worthless poem reminds me of Kenneth Rexroth’s rant on the death of Dylan Thomas. Rexroth says it was the son of a bitch in a Brooks Brothers suit that killed Thomas. Dylan Thomas died of drink.”

Madden’s words embody yet again what Orwell called “the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”

[Thanks to the reader who noted my error in writing "Columbia" for "Charleston."]

`Its Recoveries of Freshness'

How peculiar that one’s reading habits should irritate another reader. We all belong to the same club, right? Dedicated to perpetuating literacy in a dimming age? Sharing the pleasures of reading at all scales, from comma to canon? Perhaps I’m naïve. In some, the temptation to police and regulate is powerful, a sort of hunger or lust, whereas the impulse to read and revel in books is by nature antiauthoritarian. Readers are freebooters, each a non-aligned sovereignty. One reader of Anecdotal Evidence brands me “an old foggy [sic]” and a reactionary for “reading all those old books.” I don’t read enough new books, he tells me, I “waste too much time reading books you read before,” and so forth. Similar notes arrive periodically and they leave me, at first, puzzled, and then amused. I suppose I should be grateful that someone cares enough about books to get angry about them.

In two books I’ve been lately rereading I find similar defenses of reading a poem, and by extension any work of literature, twice, or three times, or more. The first is written by Gerald Brenan (1894-1987), author of The Spanish Labyrinth and longtime friend to V.S. Pritchett. Brenan writes in Thoughts in a Dry Season: A Miscellany (1978):

“There is a simple rule for distinguishing between what is great poetry and what is not great poetry. Does one read it again and again? Does it affect us more the better we know it? Judged by this test, great poetry is something that occurs from time to time when good poets write verse. That is to say, it is hardly ever found continuously in long passages, and if it were it would stun and exhaust the reader.”

Common-sense, field-ready, foolproof criticism. Does anyone read Charles Olson twice? Of course not. Not even Olson. Norman Mailer? Joyce Carol Oates? Case closed. The other defense of rereading – a celebration, really – comes from “A Suspect Captivity of the Fisher King,” a lecture delivered in 1988 by Les Murray and collected in The Paperbark Tree: Selected Prose (Carcanet, 1992):

“Any true work of art is inexhaustible in its suggestions, its implications and its recoveries of freshness; the potentials for commentary on it and interpretation of it are therefore infinite. This is a form of infinite regress, but probably only becomes questionable if taxpayers are being asked to fund it.”

One reliable test of any work is memorability. Do we remember it, even memorize it? Not often, but always happily. The present is a very small place, a place of diminished accomplishment and minimal expectations. Our wealth is in the past. No book is good or worth reading simply because it is old (or new), but because it is good and someone thought enough of it to pass it along.

`The Fidelity of Things'

Not a title in which one would expect to find appropriately deployed allusions to Eugenio Montale and Zbigniew Herbert, among others: Healing Richard Nixon: A Doctor’s Memoir by Dr. John C. Lungren (University of Kentucky Press, 2003). Like many readers, I navigate tributaries of bookish interest flowing into and out of the Mississippi of Literature. Among them is Nixon, the president elected one week after my sixteenth birthday. Few public figures have so often recalled Shakespeare’s heroes and the crippling severity of their flaws. He is our Coriolanus, our Othello, and, like them, never less than baffling and intriguing.

Lungren, who wrote the book with the aid of his son, John C. Lungren Jr., was the Nixon family physician from 1952. Among the epigraphs the doctor gives his memoir is a line borrowed from Nixon’s first book, Six Crises (1962): “But I have found that leaders are subject to all the human frailties . . .” In his preface, Dr. Lungren reproduces a letter from Nixon commenting on an early draft of the book’s foreword: “I would suggest only one small change. The reference to Lear would be understood only by a few Shakespeare scholars. Job—might be a better name. More people read the Bible than read Shakespeare (I hope!)” And the doctor in the same preface quotes Hamlet’s words to Horatio -- “report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied” – before adding: “To the unsatisfied I will report the unadorned Nixon as I knew him: impassioned, guarded, intellectual, introverted, disciplined, emotional, brilliant, deeply religious, and tragic.”

In his preface, the younger Lungren reports he and his father agreed on observations regarding biography made by Richard Holmes in Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage (1996): “. . . it began to pose the largest, imaginative questions: how well can we know our fellow human beings, how far can we learn from someone else’s struggles about the condition of our own, what do the intimate circumstance of one particular life tell us about human nature in general?” Any honest person can see in Nixon a reflection of his own ambition, peevishness, cunning and hunger for revenge. After Nixon’s death in 1994, Lungren composes a sort of eulogy for his friend:

“Unsettled, I thought of the lemon trees that Nixon’s father had planted in Yorba Linda [Nixon’s birthplace in California, in 1913], a grove of trees next to the home Frank Nixon built from a catalogue kit for his family from which Hannah Nixon picked the bitter-sweet fruit for her beloved son Richard and his brothers. In Yorba Linda, the lemon trees no longer exist, but their memory remains as `trumpets of gold,’ portending salvation.”

The quoted passage is from Montale’s “The Lemon Trees” (trans. William Arrowsmith, Cuttlefish Bones, 1992):

“But the illusion dies, time returns us

to noisy cities where the sky is only

patches of blue, high up, between the cornices.

Rain wearies the ground; over the buildings

winter's tedium thickens.

Light grows niggardly, the soul bitter.

And, one day, through a gate ajar,

among the trees in a courtyard,

we see the yellows of the lemon trees;

and the heart’s ice thaws,

and songs pelt

into the breast

and trumpets of gold pour forth

epiphanies of Light!”

In the book’s final paragraph, recounting Nixon’s near-fatal bout of phlebitis just months after his resignation in 1974, Lungren writes: “While caring for Nixon’s crisis of body I witnessed his crisis of soul, the deep moral ordeal and upheaval that returned him to `the fidelity of things.’” The quoted phrase is from the final stanza of Zbigniew Herbert’s “Stool” (trans. Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott, Selected Poems, 1968):

“how to express to you my gratitude wonder

you come always to the call of the eye

with great immobility explaining by dumb-signs

to a sorry intellect: we are genuine—

At last the fidelity of things opens our eyes.”