An intense lament, where the
grief at losing a friend (Delmore Schwartz) strips away the joys and rewards and
nobility and even the decency of being alive. The speaker reduces himself and
everyone else to a number of pretty ugly images: “the act of an aged whore,” “the
leavings of a hag,” Marcus Aurelius’s pronouncement that “All that is foul
smell & blood in a bag.” Finally: “The world is lunatic.” “He flung to
pieces and they hit the floor.”
Well, it’s kind of melodramatic,
but I won’t push that judgement too hard. An emotional poem is often a snapshot,
an artifact that fixes in time something that otherwise would go fleeting away.
A poem is also an exercise, word play and word puzzlement, even when it’s
addressing something that is undeniably hurtful. And clearly, the death of
Schwartz affected the poet on a deep level. There’s nothing wrong with that.
At the end, there is a reference
to DS 1—“Once in a sycamore I was glad / all at the top, and I sang.” Here, he
remembers this incident again: “High in the summer branches the poet sang.” But
it follows with: “Hís throat ached, and he could sing no
more.” Then: “All ears closed.” There threatens to be no more singing.
The irony is that the poem (the
song) falls to the page anyway; he sings about not being able to sing. It may
be a posing in grief, or it may be that the grief is real and shuts the poet
down on one level, but on another he keeps writing in the same way that his
heart continues beating: Perhaps this is not a matter of volition, writing. It’s
a physiological mode of being, the brain putting out poems awake like it puts
out dreams asleep, a necessary aspect of its functioning. It dreams and it
sings automatically. I’m going with that. I think mockingbirds choose their
songs with a certain volition too; I think they make aesthetic choices about
whom they’ll imitate, based on their tastes and their values and their
assessment of the territorial competition for which their songs are weaponry.
They also sing because there is no choice but to sing. Their hearts beat and
their throats make song. Because they’re birds.
A mockingbird used to sing on our
chimney, and the acoustic peculiarities of the house and chimney amplified the
song and broadcast it like a PA system speaker out of the fireplace and through
the whole house. It was a lovely way to come awake on Saturday mornings. For the
bird, it was all serious business. Songs never have a single meaning.
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