#284

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfcvRowR884 [A reading. No text link available.]

Part of the reason that we now have the 10^th Dream Song in a row about the preparation and the voyage to Ireland is that B. was in fairly sad shape, as he admits, “wrecked”, and a Dream Song poem was the only form he cared to write in, maybe even the only one he was able to write in. It was what he could do. This is essentially a verse journal entry, and like a journal, it records some daily observations, and some feelings about them. But a poem is always more than a journal entry, it’s a work of art as well with structural resonances that go beyond the literal. So, there’s a reason that the poem begins with the reference to the retired surgeon he met on board: “The hand I shook will operate no more / after forty years of cutting.” This incident resonates because the surgeon, after a lifetime of doing his work, is done with what made him what he was professionally. His work was to be the cutting edge, so to speak, of this aspect of the medical establishment. But you never do that alone. Once you leave that profession, it sails on without you and that’s pretty much it. You get your gold watch, a pat on the back, and sincere best wishes from your colleagues, and you’re done. You don’t operate part time and you don’t work outside of the vast supporting system of engineers, scientists, academics, technicians, and assistants that all have to come together to perform something so complicated as an operation. So here are the retired surgeon and the poet who is also feeling himself sail off into the sunset of retirement, as it were. This is followed immediately by “We admire / the blossoms of youth / on the tall English boys.” Then after a look out to sea, where “The sun roars on the sea today,” back to a simple, “The old are fat.” Then back to the boys: “These handsome raucous ones are said to be Rhodes scholars.” The contrast between the fat retired old ones and the young raucous scholars couldn’t be more apparent. It’s made more poignant by the lingering knowledge that B. had once been young and adventurous, forward-looking on a similar voyage thirty Falls earlier, raucous and ambitious. Now, he’s an accomplished wreck.

There is one saving moment: “Henry is one of the three passengers doing any work.” You can’t operate on an ocean liner, but you can write, the work he’s always done. No one knows who he is, nor cares, but he works because he has to. It’s what he does. Except when he declines into “Now he lies in the golden sun & eats.” You can’t work 12 hours a day! The “golden sun” recalls the metaphoric sunset of retirement, and eating is the activity that sustains you but in this case also makes you fat, like the other old. When you’re raucous and young, you burn it off. When you’re supine and retired, you fatten. All the fun & games, the new faces, meaningless things that take up passengers’ time on an ocean liner, are depressing because they’re so pointless. Time fillers. He knows it, and this knowledge leads to a heavy heart.

It’s the middle of the ocean. There’s much of the ocean behind, and Ireland, and Europe, “the land of art,” still lies far ahead. He’s suspended in a moment between the activity, the economic and literary and political battles of his life behind, with the new set of struggles and triumphs to come. His retirement looms, but he hasn’t quite retired his pen yet like the surgeon retired his scalpel. But because he has this week of travel, he sits, and waits, and thinks about the paradoxical predicament of leaving the political activity of career behind and heading deeper into the artistic future that sustain that activity. You have to be part politician to be an artist, but you can’t be only a politician. So you leave the scene in order to feed the justification for your presence on the scene. But this middle ground, this ocean nowhere, is filled with “chats & dances, / trivial triumphs, defeats.” Inconsequential and meaningless for now.