#334

Thrums up from nowhere a distinguisht wail,

the griefs of all his grievous friends, and his,

startling Ballsbridge,

our sedate suburb, the capital of What Is,

a late September fly          goes by, learned & frail,

and Cemetery Ridge

glares down the years of losses to this end

that the note from my bank this morning was stampt with

    Sir Roger Casement,

no ‘Sir,’ just the portrait & years:

about whom Yeats was so wrong

This distinguished & sensitive man lived in the grip

of a homosexual obsession, even the ‘tools’ of native policemen

excited him.

Yeats knew nothing about life: it was all symbols

& Wordsworthian egotism: Yeats on Cemetery Ridge

would not have been scared, like you & me,

he would have been, before           the bullet that was his,

studying the movements of the birds,

said disappointed & amazed Henry.

Sir Roger Casement was a well-known human rights activist turned Irish revolutionary who was hanged by the British in 1916 for his involvement in the Easter Rising. The presence of Casement’s so-called “Black Diaries” sealed his fate: They were written in secret by Casement and detailed his activities as a very active but closeted homosexual. When the Brits got hold of them, they made the contents known to a number of public figures and activists, which caused them to back away from defending Casement and pressing for some measure of clemency toward him. It was a nasty and underhanded thing for the Brits to do, but this was a nasty and underhanded situation in the first place, which included a threat of bloody revolution and more than a few hangings in response, so it all figures. There was widespread suspicion that the Black Diaries were forgeries, foisted by the British on the Irish to condemn Casement in the public’s eye on grounds that had nothing to do with revolution but that effectively condemned him to hang. So went the power of homophobia in Anglo-Irish society in the early twentieth century. Yeats wrote a poem entitled “Roger Casement”  accusing the British of smearing Casement’s reputation with a conspiracy in order to eliminate him.

In the end, though, this is a poem about Yeats and B.’s evolving attitude toward the great poet that for so long has engaged with his image of what a poet is and can be. But it’s set up with two allusions to the violence of modern political events: Cemetery Ridge, the terrible scene of the climax of the Battle of Gettysburg, and Casement, who was hanged for his homosexuality as much as for his revolutionary activity. Not happy stuff. The wail Henry hears in the poem’s opening, to which he adds his own figurative wail, are apt and appropriate responses to the state of humanity. It’s hard to read the line about a fly going by and not think of Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died,” the fly in that poem actually arising unexpectedly as a harbinger of death itself by the end of the poem. So there are two or probably three allusions to death right off the bat here. It all still is used to situate the mention of Yeats: Yeats didn’t get what happened to Casement. In defending the man’s “honor” against accusations of homosexuality, Yeats let an orthodox bigotry blind him to the real life of the gay man he meant to defend. He didn’t get it. B. often lets bigotry have the last word in The Dream Songs—the minstrel business is very dicey, he betrays the misogyny that lurks beneath a broadcast and indulged sexual appetite, and the couple times he tries to identify with Jews’ victimization in the Holocaust rings as a bit insulting. But here, I actually think his attitude toward homosexuality is more than just tolerant, it’s accepting. Casement was who he was, and he was a great man. Why do we have to defend him against his sexuality?

I have to take exception to one thing: Wordsworth was more than egotism incarnate, thank you very much.  I love Wordsworth’s work. It’s high Romantic, but it’s also earthy. If the Wordsworthian self often arises in the work as the central perceiving presence, much like with Walt Whitman, who on Earth is John Berryman to criticize that? But he does it, pretty brazenly. Either he’s being a flat-out hypocrite—my initial reaction—or something else is happening. In a sense I begin to suspect something is continuing that I first got a glimpse of in DS 331: Something is changing. Something is growing. Here it takes the form of something like an empathy that hadn’t been there before, and now that it’s coming on, he calls out Yeats on not demonstrating something that he hasn’t demonstrated much of until just this second either. B. was capable of a political repugnance against inhuman political systems, but it was from a fairly broad perspective. And, he’s hardly a stone cold sociopath on an interpersonal level. There are lots of moments of human contact and warmth, all over the place actually. But in the end, the writer of The Dream Songs up to this point is a bit of a narcissist, which only means that he was more interested in his own self-directed interests and his own self-involved and often self-inflicted suffering than he was in the life of personal individual suffering all around him, except, as I say, in a rather abstracted political sense—coolly if miserably repulsed by the bureaucratic stupidity behind so many of the world’s ills. There are exceptions. For sure, though, he was disgusted at the broadest levels at the entrenched societal racism shot through American life. At Gettysburg, we can certainly surmise that B. would have been afraid, of course, but also furious at the fucking monstrous insanity of the proceedings, more than a hundred thousand beautiful young men shooting and stabbing and blowing each other to pieces in atavistic fury over whether or not it is morally permissible to own slaves of African descent. Why would he have felt this way? Broadly, politically, he would of course find it repugnant. But I also think he’s tuning in to the personal tragedy of it, multiplied by 100,000. Each soldier had his story, his mother, and his farm or town, his hopes for the future. The accusation is that Yeats wouldn’t have noticed any of that, simply because his wasn’t a sensibility attuned to such things. He was too wrapped up in effete abstractions about life, and his defense of Casement was another statement arising from a sensibility of effete abstractions. It was about defending Casement’s abstract honor against accusations of a debased sexuality. I think Henry’s suffering has had an effect on him, and it is causing him to question one of his guiding lights. I do not accept that Wordsworth was a mere egotist, but that pronouncement leads to another that’s more important: That Yeats was an egotist as well. There is often something ethereal, weird and abstracted about Yeats, so I won’t argue, but the only thing at issue for now is what B. thought. I don’t think he’s being hypocritical. I think he’s starting to get it. I think the reason is that he’s beginning to question his own substantial egotism.

#333

[No online link available.]

Sometimes the juxtapositions in the poems seem arbitrary, and I’m more than suspicious that they’re the product too often of the kind of wafting arrival of happenstance thought breezes that gust normally through anyone’s head, and that circulated randomly through the poet’s head, but that here were captured and pinned in published verse like a mounted row of airy butterflies. Sometimes, no examination of the relationships of the poems’ parts need go further than that. Sometimes, at any rate. Not always, of course. Some of these poems are much more deeply considered and artful. Which is this?

This particular poem has two parts. The subject of the first: Songs have been sent out, which will surprise some of the journals and publishers receiving them, even though they had asked for them. “Henry’s listeners / make up a gallant few.” While this whole tack right off strikes me as rather meta, self-absorbed and pointless—the poem is talking about the collection it’s an element of—it’s not as if we’re not used to that kind of thing by now, we gallant few. And then there’s that bit about the poems as “babies” and how they probably sound like Viet Cong to all the rest not of the gallant few. There are some tropes, assumptions and allusions that could be unpacked there, I suppose. Artistic production as akin to childbirth, the effect of those “babies” like Viet Cong, i.e., sneaking enemies, on the uncomprehending preponderance of poetical initiates who aren’t publicly crowing over Dream Songs. But, we’re reading them, so that’s not us. There’s a turn into the second part of the poem, about a rainstorm battering his roses. Do these two parts relate, or have they just been tossed into the same box? Here’s a box: Inside, you’ll find a candy thermometer and a child’s wooden toy block stamped with the letter “F”. Go ahead: Turn that into a poem. Here’s another box: A candle that smells like cranberries, and a hammer. Is just the juxtaposition enough? They’re in the same box, there must be a reason, it must mean something. An experienced reader/critic can work up any number of possible relationships and run with them. Possibly even discerning something out of unconscious psychological associations that the artist himself isn’t aware of. Well, maybe toys and candy can be read as references to childhood. Of course: It’s a poem about childhood. Hammers and candles are both ways of transforming energy, so this one is a poem about energy transfer. Run with it, but it’s all made up by the critic, unfortunately, if the juxtapositions are random. In my examples I deliberately started with elements that seemed disjunctive. If you’re creative, you can usually come up with some way to associate them. The poet puts those colliding elements out there and watches the response or not—amused, bewildered, or contemptuous. B. pretty rudely farted on the whole process once, which I think ought to be read as a gesture of contempt.

To see if the two sections relate on some deliberately meaningful level, or if they’re just rattling around in the same container, I think we need to look at the turn:

                                                Henry’s listeners

            make up a gallant few,

            as I have said before: bring nearer the lamp,

            we’ll find them out, with lightning, in the torrents

            that are merely Henry’s due

            and are good to the land: merciful rain

            beats back and forth, completing the destruction of his roses.

From there he circles the house, finding no other damage except to the roses, which are ruined, and are only his because he’s renting the house anyway. Poem over.

The only thing immediately connecting the two parts of the poem are allusions to light: Bring nearer the lamp to find out who the gallant few are, presumably because we can read a list of them or their responses or something like that, and then “with lightning”, other flashes of light. It’s hard to read by lightning, but the flashes are full of light, and they’re dramatic enough. The transition from lamp to lightning is unexpected and immediate, seamless, and it leads to what pretty much has to be a metaphor: the storm’s “torrents” that are “Henry’s due.” What are they? I can come up with an idea, but I’m only partially sure that I’m not making it up. Because the torrents, that are Henry’s due, are good to the land—leaving metaphor partially behind and moving into a description of rain, but also maintaining the metaphor at the same time, it looks to be something like money or recognition, things good for the speaker of the poem, and things which he has earned and deserves. They’re his due. So the rain does this double duty in the poem: It’s storming outside, which is partially destructive but mainly good for the land, and it’s also a metaphor for something, possibly the good things that can come from publishing poems and fostering a reputation. Henry then is the tenor of the metaphor and earth is the vehicle. The storm wrecks things too, flowers like individual poems, something like that. The storm of attention brought on by the success of the poems overall can fray or wither them individually.

So, do the two halves of the poem somehow reinforce or relate to or support each other? Sort of. Probably. It’s probably the case that it was storming when the poem was written, and quite likely the poet’s roses were quite literally battered by that. But that in itself doesn’t matter so much. What matters more is if that can be made into a symbol, the vehicle of a metaphor, or some poetical something along those lines. It takes a stretch to make that happen for a reader with this poem, I think, and if it was meant to, the relationship depends on some pretty vague and subtle associations. This poet probably felt those associations. I think he didn’t work very hard to help the reader find them, but maybe I’m being too demanding. Their presence together in the poem forces us to make the connection if we are gallant enough to stick with it. Does the poem “work”? Depends on how demanding one is for crystalline technique. I began thinking it doesn’t work. With hard work on my part, I’ve come to this: Probably there is a metaphoric relationship between the two parts of the poem. It’s not easy, and it’s not clear, though. The choice in this reading of the poem comes down to “subtle” or “sloppy.” Take your pick.

#332

[No online link necessary.]

Looks like a voyage, back to New York and the publishers there waiting, with a manuscript so bulky it won’t fit in the big Spanish briefcase. Half is stuffed into another bag. Okay. And now here is a couplet, from this poem, with the first line being possibly the laziest line of poetry John Berryman, poet, ever wrote: “Packing is an India’s women’s / I wonder every time how I manage it.” That’s quite awful, actually, on a number of counts. This thing is making me sleepy. Then onto a ship (he likes ships). I can feel the ship rolling and dipping in slow motion, with a distant somnolent vibration from the engines way down below. There are strangers one meets on board, including on this voyage “the little man from Cambridge with the little beard / padding about alone barefoot with a little book.” “Little” being repeated three times makes the man seem kind of diminutive to me. Obviously he didn’t make a big impression. Then there was the French woman, Yvette Choinais, whom he met right near the end (“swung with”—this was still the 60s) on the penultimate day. Shoot! They could have talked the whole way across the Atlantic, lazing in a pair of sunny deck chairs, chastely chatting about many fascinating things including why she wasn’t married at twenty-seven. That’s about it. The last stanza rhymes, but the others don’t. Honestly? A small, not-unpleasant diary entry. Lax and relaxed, lazy and dozy. Likely should have been culled from that bulky manuscript, but wasn’t. I think this is here only because it’s a poem in which  there is little angst, hardly any regret, no drinking, little about decrepit aging, and no ruminations on death whatsoever. That wouldn’t be remarkable, except, well, you know, it is remarkable. In context, that is. The work is done and the whole dull voyage is suffused in a blithe, listless contentment. Sail on, Henry. The ship probably won’t sink. Just don’t lose that manuscript.