#302

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The poem begins with a familiar line: “Cold & golden lay the high heroine / in a wilderness of bears.” Who the bears are gets pinned down in lines 7-8: After looking around (back in the States) and realizing “This place is theirs,” Henry had decided “I will not live here / among my thugs.” The bears are thugs, but they’re his thugs, i.e., I think, his fellow countrymen. So, “Lo, and he went away / to Dublin’s fair city.” Yes he did. “There he met at once two ladies dear / with problems, problems. Henry could not say / like their parish priest ‘Pray’.” Well, no, he can’t tell them that, can he? He’s not a true believer, not from what gets established in the work. Orders to pray from a priest would still have currency and influence in Ireland, but Henry is candid enough to realize that could never be his mode, at least not yet. “He immersed himself in their disabled fates / the catafalque above all for instance T—’s / and others bound to come.” Hard to say who the two ladies are, but it does seem likely they’re real people. A “catafalque” is the support for the coffin in an elaborate funeral, so the ladies seem rich or influential, and probably elderly. You often meet people like that at literary gatherings.

So, we know he had run from the bears in a dream, and the dream significance of the bears seems restated here: They’re thuggish American Philistines, well worth running from. The poem ends with a kind of ironic joke: “The White House invitation came today, / three weeks after the reception, hey, / Henry not being at home.” A White House invitation marks the very pinnacle of American recognition, our answer to tea with the Queen. But he doesn’t even hear about it until three weeks after the fact, having run from the high heroine’s cohort of slavering bears.

The poem is meant to elicit an ironic chuckle, I think. Figures. Having run from home, he misses out on a high-honored accolade from home. The bears he so fears wanted to put a crown on him! Figures.

Even though he missed out due to the slow, ship-bound mail service, the invitation is still worth mentioning as testament to the recognition he is so invested in attracting.