#378

The beating of a horse fouled Nietszche’s avatar,

thereafter never said he one sane word,

Henry is not like that

but the fear.

They’re treading on toes notoriously tender.

The sudden sun sprang out

I gave the woman & her child ten shillings,

I can’t bear beggars at my door, and I

cannot bear at my door

the miserable, accusing me, and sore

back to my own country would I go

transparent, through the sky.

From fearful heart into an ice-cold pool,

Texas Falls in Vermont: delicious tremor.

Let’s have that again.

No, that will not return. Henry, the Lord of beauty,

is cashing in his problems

The violent winds in my gardens front & back

have driven away my birds

Perhaps to make amends for my snarky dismissal of literary critics in my response to DS 376, it will help today to turn to them. According to Paul Mariani, B.’s biographer, DS 378 is a meditation on or a response to (he calls it a “rewriting of”) Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem, “Spelt from Sibyl’sLeaves.” This is a difficult poem to untangle, but another critic (Ellis) helps. She claims that,

Hopkins is not merely expressing his own love of dappled things, his sorrow at their passing. He is evoking these same feelings in the reader as strongly as possible in order to make the more sharply this poem’s whole point: if we go through life, through this world, as we go through the octave, blind to its warning, seeing only its beauty, regretting only that beauty’s transience, we will come wholly unprepared to the final Judgment and the eternal rack of torment. (Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Language of Mystery, 183)

(This passage is quoted in Samuel Fisher Dodson’s book, Berryman's Henry: Living at the Intersection of Need and Art, p.36.) Dodson follows by saying,

Ellis points out that Sibyl’s message is not spoken openly but spelt out in the leaves of nature. Berryman’s Song finds nature “fouled” and the modern message a statement of madness from “Nietzsche’s avatar,” who is possibly Hitler or Heidegger. Either way, the fear of insanity and death is deep in Henry….Henry is not willing to accept his collective guilt in humanity’s woes. (36)

Nietzsche’s seeing someone cruelly beating a horse is famous as the moment that triggered his mental breakdown. According to B., as I read it, the image is a metaphor for humanity’s treatment of nature (more to the point, I think, Western civilization’s treatment of nature). Nature is “fouled,” and once he suddenly understood the relationship between civilization and nature, Nietzsche never recovered. Humanity’s woes fell full upon him. It was actually the moment of a terrible breakthrough in understanding that we’ve cut ourselves off from the root of our being and our salvation. “Henry is not like that” indeed, but he does carry the fear around. My take on the modernist burden of fear (of course, of course…) is that whether we understand its origin or not, our separation from nature is the cause. Nietzsche responded simply with despair. Indigenous peoples have done better at maintaining their complex philosophical connection with nature—which for sure has its own sources of different kinds of fears—but they’ve avoided that wholesale cultural separation that societies in the West have had to deal with. We’re in the opening stages now of re-forging or healing those connections, but there’s a long distance to cover to make our collective way back. For Nietzsche, that healing was too far over the horizon; despair, nihilism and madness were the most fitting responses available to him.

Okay, so we know who Henry’s not—he’s no shaman, no earth mother, not a nature boy. “Henry is not like that” means also that unlike Nietzsche, his personal separation from nature is not going to matter to him all that much. It drove Nietzsche crazy. Henry, not so much. Who is he, then? “Henry, the Lord of beauty / is cashing in his problems.” “Lord of beauty” is pure sarcasm, but the second part is a frank statement of his particular brand of clear-eyed nihilism. Since it all hurts anyway, might as well make something out of it. The other side of that, though, is to keep it hurting, because we’re onto something here! There’s a kind of (postmodern) art to be made of this! B. knew, and expresses elsewhere in unambiguous terms, that he knows the bargain he struck. He has given it Faustian overtones. Here, he recognizes what he’s done as violence: “The violent winds in my gardens front & back / have driven away my birds.” “My birds” really means his connection with an inspiriting, healing nature—which he has rejected. While not mentioning Faust’s bargain per se, he’s done it before and that hangs over this poem. He knows what he’s done, and he’s aware of the consequences.

Why does one give a beggar at the door some change? It might be because you recognize the humanity in that person, and through the inspiration of empathy, wish to help alleviate her suffering. Riiight… Or it may be that you can’t bear the self-imposed accusation that you don’t care about her or the world she sprang from. You’re not such a jerk on the surface, in other words, but deeper down you still don’t care about her or her damn humanity. In that case, you give out ten shillings to exile her from your life and alleviate the tension she triggers. For the beggar, it amounts to the same thing, but it was never about the beggar. Poets might write to celebrate the divine inspiration, the relationships and the solace that life in the world offers, or they may cash in on their pain through writing about it. Either way: Art. No matter why you gave the woman ten shillings, you gave her ten shillings. But for the giver, the different motivations impose different meanings on the act, and those meanings are finally what matter.

Hopkins is saying in his poem that we need to look through nature’s beauty—we might call it nature’s prettiness if we don’t see any deeper—to something more substantial, more spiritual. Pretty is pleasing, but it’s shallow. All of this stuff—seeing into nature and into the humanity of beggars, writing to celebrate—are means of acknowledging that there is a spirit in the world and that we need to embrace that spirit to give life meaning. You don’t beat the horse because it won’t let you control it, which amounts to a refusal to accept its horsey personhood, you communicate with its horsey self and work together toward a mutually supportive agreement.

Mariani claims that toward the end of his life, Berryman came to see Hopkins as more important a figure than Yeats, because Hopkins leads readers to experience the divine that he finds in nature. His poems positively spill over with it. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats, the modernist, rejects all of that, rejecting what is tied to a mere dying animal and embracing the gold and gold enameling of some clever, birdlike singing automaton contraption as his immortal ideal. If Berryman made his way eventually to Hopkins and some acceptance of what the priest/poet stood for, we only see him just opening to the possibility in The Dream Songs. Here, he drives away beggar and bird alike, and he likely thinks (thought) the existential despair that might come from seeing someone beat a horse wouldn’t have touched him. But his existential despair is ultimately the same; he just doesn’t get it. He’s even farther away from the void that triggers the despair than Nietzsche was, so he’s no Nietzsche. More importantly, he’s certainly no Hopkins, not yet anyway. But there is a dawning glimmer of spiritual self-realization around this poem, like a halo of mist around a streetlight, that I think makes it one of the key segments of the Dream Song cycle. He's given a tentative nod toward reintegration with what Nietzsche was convinced was lost. In the end, though, Henry remains lost too. He’s not going to bring himself yet to embrace what he seems to be at least starting to acknowledge the presence of.