The scholar Dodson writes about this poem, “Henry’s act is
to sing his Songs. But other than his songs, when has Henry been in the ‘ranks
of giving men’? Here is Henry in his true realm: at war with the one dearest to
him, ambivalent about his success and the subsequent fame, aware of his bad
habits, and fearful of the loss of his Muse’s guidance and his own lack of
manhood” (147). That sums it up pretty succinctly.
“He clapped his hand to both ears”
is the characteristic gesture of the twentieth century man, I’m afraid, with
the wars, the Depression, the Holocaust, the specter of nuclear weapons,
environmental degradation, corporate rapaciousness. I grew up in the sentimental
consumerist eddy of 1960s prosperity, which prompted me to develop an optimistic
take on life, but even that was marred by the Cold War and Vietnam, the
disturbance of resistance to the Civil Rights movement, the terrible
assassinations of the 60s, even consumerism itself, while showering many of us
with a panoply of stuff, has degraded us spiritually and all sorts of other
ways. So you clap your hands over your ears to try and shut it out. But it’s
not all coming from the outside is the problem. Human being can’t help but
internalize the pressures of their universe. B. claims over and over that the
suicide(murder) of his father is the root source of his anxiety. Well, his
father’s anxiety, depression and instability was the result of his caving to
economic and social pressures that were too much for him. Wars kill and maim us
often enough, directly, but they sicken us too, in myriad ways. So through arcane
psychological convolutions, B. ends up a fully screaming twentieth century man
with his hands clapped over his ears. I heap blame on him all the time, or else
try to work toward empathy in light of the struggles of the addict, but his mess
is also very much a product of his global moment. If he’s at war with his wife,
one might venture that she’s really at
war with something much vaster than the man, of which he is merely its agent
and representative. I make the same mistake with him all the time, but the
individual man is all you get to work with. In the end he stands there looking
at you, not understanding it himself, saying please don’t frown at me. I can’t
change this. I’m not powerful enough to change it. All I can do is sing Songs
that bear witness to the sweeping evil that uses me as a conduit and bubbles up
through and out of my soul like burning swamp gas. It casts an infernal light,
but it’s light.
I feel sorry for her. All she wanted, I have to think, was a
man as a husband. The war he writes of is really her insisting that he show
himself. Who wants to be hitched to some incarnation of global societal
jaundice? Be a man, is all. But it just seems that the man was never there, and
yet a terrible greatness from beyond the man asserted itself through him and he
sang it. I guess I see the initial attraction, but I also see how that might eventually
wear off. Then, war asserts itself. All this terrible struggle, inside and out.
"I’m not, he cried, what I appears."
ReplyDeleteExcept that he was, and I think B knew that.