Tag: Robert Lowell

By heart in the park

(Philip Wilson Steer, Dover Coast: York Art Gallery)

Another last warm and sunny afternoon of autumn. How many more can there be? With the Librarian in the office for a pretty full day, so not available for the lunchtime stroll, I walk alone in the park and succumb to the temptation to recall (and recite) the handful of poems that, at one time or another, I’ve committed to memory. Committed they may have been but seem, for the most part, to have escaped or at least to be out on parole.

Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ is worse than shaky and, in its current state, Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ would probably not detain her for a moment. A bit of Pound, a bit of Yeats and a fragment of Elizabeth Bishop all hold steady, while a couple of others improve with work, which necessitates keeping a wary eye open – and an ear, given the increasing tendency of people to rush up behind you on bicycles or accursed electric scooters. Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ (dedicated to Bishop) yields a little to pressure:

Nautilus Island’s hermit heiress still
something something
her sheep still graze above the sea

Two men, walking briskly but not quite briskly enough, so staying almost exactly the same distance behind me, fairly close and, worse, very gradually nearing. . .

Her farmer
Is first selectman in our village;
she’s in her dotage.

We’re sailing now. Ah:

Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

(Lowell and Bishop in Brazil, 1962. Photo: Vassar College Library via the New Criterion)

But then there’s some confusion in the order of half-remembered stanzas, though I have most of the mother skunk’s activities in the final one. Move on to surer ground, anyway, the much-learned, almost-all recollected ‘Bagpipe Music’.

Though here a slight pause for the woman standing with her dog at the top of a slope below the play area. Is it a Pointer? We’ve seen it more than once before. Similar shape, similar attitude, its attention fixed on something in the grass near the foot of a tree, that can only be a squirrel. Looking it up later, I see that it’s a Vizsla, also known as a Hungarian Pointer. I stroll past it, resisting the impulse to give it some advice: you may be quick but you won’t win, they climb, you don’t. We’ve seen some close shaves for squirrels in the past but they always seem to evade dogs’ jaws. And ‘Bagpipe Music’? Pretty good, in fact. A slight hiccup over the penultimate stanza but both MacNeice and myself ending strongly:

It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.

Now distractions range from the two old ladies intent on feeding a squirrel by hand (‘Come on, dear, see what I’ve got’ – Fleas, soon enough, I suspect) to the fellow with the ponytail and curious blue-green leggings intent on kicking a very small ball across the grass, and who crosses my path again half an hour later in a different and distant part of the park; and a murder of crows, around thirty in total, spread right across and down a broad grassy slope to the cycle path that runs along beneath the outspread branches of several wild pear trees. The fruits fall partly onto the earthy slopes beyond and partly onto the cycle path itself, one missed my right ear by inches one day last week. Walking along that path now before climbing sharply to my left, I see a dozen crows rooting among the fallen pears, though some turn to stare at me as I approach. ‘Are you auditioning for that nice Mister Hitchcock?’ I ask. One crow, not to be put off by a mere human, lingers to stick its beak straight through a pear before flying up to the branch above. Knowing how clever corvids are, I watch to see how it goes about extricating beak from fruit. It thrusts the pear into a narrow fork of branches which holds it in a tight embrace, withdraws the beak and starts tucking in. I whistle my sincere appreciation. That Lowellian mother skunk, I recall,

    jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Why is it so hard these days? No answers on a postcard, please. At school, everyone learned poems by heart and some people never lost the habit. I recalled an aside of the Reverend Kilvert: ‘I thought of William Wordsworth the poet who often used to come and stay at this house with blind Mr. Monkhouse who had nearly all his poems off by heart.’[1] Eric Gill’s father and one of Gill’s teachers, named Mr Catt, were great admirers of Tennyson. Gill himself also learned much of it by heart, being particularly fond of ‘the passage about the routine of rural agriculture:

As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe and lops the glades’[2]

This is from stanza CX of Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H., the initials those of Tennyson’s beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died in Vienna in 1833. Born in 1811, he was eighteen months younger than Tennyson. They had met at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1828. Tennyson seems to have begun this long poem very soon after hearing of Hallam’s death, though it was not published until 1850, and then anonymously. Edward Fitzgerald—translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam—wrote to the poet’s elder brother Frederick Tennyson (15 August 1850): ‘Alfred has also published his Elegiacs on A. Hallam: these sell greatly: and will, I fear, raise a host of Elegiac scribblers.’[3]

But it is not only poetry that the heroes of yesteryear committed to memory in large chunks – some mastered prose in a similar way, which always seems to me somehow an even more impressive achievement, though I accept that actors, having to learn their lines, sometimes comprising tremendously long speeches or monologues, would not necessarily find it so. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford would swap pages of Flaubert or Maupassant, while James Joyce ‘knew by heart whole pages of Flaubert, Newman, de Quincey, E. Quinet, A. J. Balfour and of many others.’[4] And, while Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was apparently one of Patrick White’s favourite novels (Joyce, Faulkner and Edith Wharton were also admirers), he knew Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph ‘practically off by heart.’[5]

‘Heart’ is another of those words with a great many friends, the compounds running over several columns of the dictionary: in one’s mouth or boots or the right place; open, shut, taken; worn on the sleeve; piercing, rending, sore and sick. It has its reasons and is, in many contexts, simply mysterious, as the author of ‘Dover Beach’ wrote:

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us – to know
Whence our lives comes and where they go.[6]

I briefly consider this last poem as a candidate but coming in at around a hundred lines, it may be a stretch too far for me. Sonnets are a handy length, though . . .

Notes

[1] Francis Kilvert, entry for 27 April 1870, Kilvert’s Diary, edited by William Plomer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938, reissued 1969), I, 119.

[2] Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), 26.

[3] The Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, edited by Alfred McKinley Terhune and Annabelle Burdick Terhune, four volumes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), I, 676.

[4] Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ and other writings, enlarged edition (1934; London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 181. Edgar Quinet was a French historian; by A. J. Balfour is meant, presumably, the British Prime Minister (1902-1905) – who also published works of philosophy.

[5] David Marr, Patrick White: A Life (London: Vintage, 1992), 85.

[6] Matthew Arnold, ‘The Buried Life’, Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, edited by A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 114.

Milady Millay: or, Edna, come over here.

Sorting-Poetry-Bks

(Sorting out poetry books on the mistaken assumption that they can be fitted into the space available in such a way that the ones I want will always be at the front. . .but no Millay in any case)

‘I have just finished two volumes of letters—’, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her friends Kit and Ilse Barker in the autumn of 1953, ‘Hart Crane’s and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s and I don’t know which is more depressing. I suppose his is, it was all over quicker—but she isn’t quite so narcissistic and has some sense of humour, at least.’[1] A couple of months later, writing to Robert Lowell, Bishop agreed with Elizabeth Hardwick about ‘poor E St. V Millay’, in Hardwick’s review of letters by Millay, Hart Crane and Sherwood Anderson in the Partisan Review, ‘Heavens she suffered. But I also suffered reading Hart Crane’.[2]

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950). I suspect that, while her name may be widely familiar to readers of poetry, she’s not actually read all that much now; maybe more so in the United States, where she used to be extremely popular. Perhaps the name conjures up a particular kind of poetry; or appeals to a particular kind of reader.

Millay

(That name: seven syllables, with a saint thrown in. I thought at one point I remembered her name being shoehorned into the lyrics of a song I’d heard but now suspect that I’m thinking of an old song lyric of my own, which managed to incorporate the name of blues and boogie-woogie pianist Champion Jack Dupree, the nickname derived from his boxing days when he fought more than a hundred bouts.)

In her long letter to Lowell of 4-5 April 1962, Bishop wrote: ‘I remember reciting that parody on E St. V Millay to you—“I want to be drowned in the deep sea water (?) I want my body to bump the pier. / Neptune is calling his wayward daughter: / ‘Edna, come over here!’” I asked Dwight Macdonald [Parodies, 1960] why he hadn’t put it in his parody book and he thought it was “dated”, I think he said.’[3]

The question mark is justified since Bishop was quoting from memory and didn’t have the first and last lines of Samuel Hoffenstein’s ‘Miss Millay Says Something Too’ exactly right:

I want to drown in good-salt water,
I want my body to bump the pier;
Neptune is calling his wayward daughter,
Crying ‘Edna, come over here!’

(See http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-love-song-of-samuel-hoffenstein.html )

A good many histories and surveys of the period bypass Millay altogether, though Cary Nelson sets her beside Claude McKay when claiming that the ‘centrality of revolutionary change in traditional forms’ is ‘especially clear in the transformation’ that the two poets ‘worked in the sonnet.’[4]

Millay-2

The sonnet, yes. Here’s ‘Sonnet xlii’:

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Millay has eight poems in F. O. Matthiessen’s The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950); in David Lehman’s 2006 The Oxford Book of American Poetry, she has six. In Geoffrey Moore’s The Penguin Book of American Verse (revised edition, 1983), she’s down to just two, the 1923 sonnet just quoted and ‘Sonnet cv’ (1931):

Hearing your words and not a word among them
Tuned to my liking, on a salty day
When inland woods were pushed by winds that flung them
Hissing to leeward like a ton of spray,
I thought how off Matinicus the tide
Came pounding in, came running through the Gut,
While from the Rock the warning whistle cried,
And children whimpered, and the doors blew shut;
There in the autumn when the men go forth,
With slapping skirts the island women stand
In gardens stripped and scattered, peering north,
With dahlia tubers dripping from the hand:
The wind of their endurance, driving south,
Flattened your words against your speaking mouth.

No marked modernist experimentation or pioneering divergences; but real skill and an ear well-tuned to that subtle boundary where the effective, well-spaced deployment of alliteration and assonance tips or slips into droning or hammering. The wind is truly driving in from the sea in this poem and not simply in the words that explicitly tell you so.

Millay—or the generally accepted valuation of Millay—seems to have made a later generation of women poets a little uneasy, especially those wanting to explore their own lives and histories in a franker, less inhibited way. Of course, there were—are?—large and lazy assumptions about what ‘women’s poetry’ was and was not. Robert Lowell, in conversation with Ian Hamilton, would name only four women who ‘stand with our best men’: Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath.[5]

lowell-bishop-1962

Lowell is, of course, often cited—and almost as often damned—for initiating, to a large extent, the ‘confessional’ mode. When Bishop wrote to him in March 1972, expressing her deep concerns about Lowell having used and, crucially, changed letters from Elizabeth Hardwick, she added, ‘In general, I deplore the “confessional”—however, when you wrote LIFE STUDIES perhaps it was a necessary movement, and it helped make poetry more real, fresh and immediate. But now—ye gods—anything goes, and I am so sick of poems about the students’ mothers & fathers and sex-lives and so on. All that can be done—but at the same time one surely should have a feeling that one can trust the writer—not to distort, tell lies, etc.’[6]

Lowell himself was not always comfortable with the work of poets said to be influenced by him, including Anne Sexton—and Sylvia Plath, who readily acknowledged the importance of Lowell’s Life Studies in what she viewed as a ‘breakthrough into very serious, very personal emotional experience, which I feel has been partly taboo.’[7] Plath wrote to her mother in 1956, ‘Ted [Hughes] says he never read poems by a woman like mine; they are strong and full and rich—not quailing and whining like [Sara] Teasdale or simple lyrics like Millay’.[8]

In that same conversation with Ian Hamilton, asked about Anne Sexton, Lowell answered carefully that he knew Sexton well: ‘It would be a test to say what I thought of her.’ But he added, ‘She is Edna Millay after Snodgrass’. ‘After Snodgrass’ meant after—perhaps chronologically but also in the style of—that poet’s 1959 collection, Heart’s Needle: Snodgrass was an acknowledged influence on Lowell’s own move towards a freer and more personal poetry.[9] But ‘Edna Millay’ – alas, alas. Sexton specifically expressed a ‘secret fear’ of being ‘a reincarnation’ of Millay, a poet she considered ‘soggily sentimental’.[10]

‘Soggily sentimental’, though? Some of it may well be, I’ve not ventured that far; best to tread carefully and be selective. Still, you could say that of a great many others, more often than not.

Death devours all lovely things:
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness,—presently
Every bed is narrow.

 
References

[1] Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: The Selected Letters, edited by Robert Giroux (London: Pimlico, 1996), 272.

[2] Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 148.

[3] Words in Air , 402.

[4] Cary Nelson, ‘Modern American Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, edited by Walter Kalaidjian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 78.

[5] ‘A Conversation with Ian Hamilton’ (1971), in Robert Lowell, Collected Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 287.

[6] Words in Air, 708-709.

[7] Sylvia Plath to a British Council interviewer, quoted by A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), 38.

[8] Sylvia Plath, Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963, selected and edited with a commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 244.

[9] Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 97-99.

[10] Quoted by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The War of the Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 206.