On Grief and Reason: Essays

Why, you may ask, don't I make a similar crackpot suggestion to the President of the country of which I am a citizen? Because he is not a writer; and when he is a reader, he often reads trash. Because cowboys believe in law, and reduce democracy to people's equality before it: i.e., to the well-policed prairie. Whereas what I suggest to you is equal­ity before culture. You should decide which deal is better for your people, which book it is better to throw at them. If I were you, though, I'd start with your own library, be­cause apparently it wasn't in law school that you learned about moral imperatives.

Yours sincerely,

Joseph Brodsky

On Grief and Reason

i

I should tell you that what follows is a spinoff of a seminar given four years ago at the College International de Philos- ophie, in Paris. Hence a certain breeziness to the pace; hence, too, the paucity of biographical material—irrelevant, in my view, to the analysis of a work of art in general, and particularly where a foreign audience is concerned. In any case, the pronoun "you" in these pages stands for those ignorant of or poorly acquainted with the lyrical and narrative strengths of the poetry of Robert Frost. But, first, some basics.

Robert Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963, at the age of eighty-eight. One marriage, six children; fairly strapped when young; farming, and, later, teaching jobs in various schools. Not much traveling until late in his life; he mostly resided on the East Coast, in New England. If bi­ography accounts for poetry, this one should have resulted in none. Yct he published nine books of poems; the second one, North of Boston, which came out when he was forty, made him famous. That was in 1914-

After that, his sailing was a bit smoother. But literary fame is not exactly popularity. As it happens, it took the Second World War to bring Frost's work to the general public's notice. In 1943, the Council on Books in Wartime distributed fifty thousand copies of Frost's "Come In" to United States troops stationed overseas, as a morale-builder. By 1955, his Selected Poems was in its fourth edition, and one could speak of his poetry's having acquired national standing.

It did. In the course of nearly five decades following the publication of North of Boston, Frost reaped every pos­sible reward and honor an American poet can get; shortly before Frost's death, John Kennedy invited him to read a poem at the Inauguration ceremony. Along with recognition naturally came a great deal of envy and resentment, a sub­stantial contribution to which emerged from the pen of Frost's own biographer. And yet both the adulation and re­sentment had one thing in common: a nearly total miscon­ception of what Frost was all about.

He is generally regarded as the poet of the countryside, of rural settings—as a folksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentle­man farmer, generally of positive disposition. In short, as American as apple pie. To be fair, he greatly enhanced this notion by projecting precisely this image of himself in nu­merous public appearances and interviews throughout his career. I suppose it wasn't that difficult for him to do, for he had those qualities in him as well. He was indeed a quint­essential American poet; it is up to us, however, to find out what that quintessence is made of, and what the term "Amer­ican" means as applied to poetry and, perhaps, in general.

In 1959, at a banquet thrown in New York on the oc­casion ofRobert Frost's eighty-fifth birthday, the most prom­inent literary critic at that time, Lionel Trilling, rose and, goblet in hand, declared that Robert Frost was "a terrifying poet." That, of course, caused a certain stir, but the epithet was well chosen.

Now, I want you to make the distinction here between terrifying and tragic. Tragedy, as you know, is always afait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of his o^ negative potential—with his sense of what he is capable of. And it is the latter that was Frost's forte, not the former. In other words, his posture is radically different from the Continental tradition of the poet as tragic hero. And that difference alone makes him— for want of a better term—American.

On the surface, he looks very positively predisposed toward his surroundings—particularly toward nature. His fluency, indeed, his "being versed in country things" alone can produce this impression. However, there is a difference between the way a European perceives nature and the way an American does. Addressing this difference, W. H. Auden, in his short essay on Frost (perhaps the best thing on the poet), suggests something to the effect that when a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either friends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. Ifhe encounters a tree, it's a tree made familiar by history, to which it's been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, laying down this or that law—some­thing of that sort. A tree stands there rustling, as it were, with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, our man, refreshed but unchanged by that encounter, returns to his inn or cottage, finds his friends or family absolutely intact, and proceeds to have a good, merry time. Whereas when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up. Ba­sically, it's epidermis meeting bark. Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock or terror.

Now, this is obviously a romantic caricature, but it ac­centuates the features, and that's what I am after here. In any case, the second point could be safely billed as the gist of Robert Frost's nature poetry. Nature for this poet is nei­ther friend nor foe, nor is it the backdrop for human drama; it is this poet's terrifying self-portrait. And now I am going to start with one of his poems, which appears in the 1942 volume A Witness Tree. I am about to put forth my views and opinions about his lines without any concern for aca­demic objectivity, and some of these views will be pretty dark. All I can say in my defense is (a) that I do like this poet enormously and I am going to try to sell him to you as he is, and (b) that some of that darkness is not entirely mine: it is his lines' sediment that has darkened my mind; in other words, I got it from him.

II

COME IN

As I came to the edge of the woods, Thrush music—hark! Now if it was dusk outside, Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird By sleight of wing To better its perch for the night, Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun That had died in the west Still lived for one song more In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark Thrush music went— Almost like a call to come in To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars: I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, _ And I hadn't been.

Let's look at "Come In." A short poem in short meter— actually, a combination of trimeter with dimeter, anapest with iamb. The stuff of ballads, which by and large are all about gore and comeuppance. So, up to a certain point, is this poem. The meter hints as much. What are we dealing with here? A walk in the woods? A stroll through nature? Something that poets usually do? (And if yes, by the way, then why?) "Come In" is one of many poems written by Frost about such strolls. Think of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Acquainted with the Night," "Desert Places," "Away!," and so forth. Or else think of Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush," with which this poem has a distinct affinity. Hardy was also very fond of lonely strolls, except most of his had a tendency to wind up in a graveyard—since England was settled long ago, and more thickly, I guess.

To begin with, we again have a thrush. And a bird, as you know, is very often a bard, since, technically speaking, both sing. So as we proceed we should bear in mind that our poet may be delegating certain aspects of his psyche to the bird. Actually, I firmly believe that these two birds are related. The difference is only that it takes Hardy sixteen lines to introduce his in a poem, whereas Frost gets down to business in the second line. On the whole, this is indicative of the difference between the Americans and the British— I mean in poetry. Because of a greater cultural heritage, a greater set of references, it usually takes much longer for a Briton to set a poem in motion. The sense of echo is stronger in his ear, and thus he flexes his muscle and demonstrates his facility before he gets down to his subject. Normally, that sort of routine results in a poem's being as big on ex­position as on the actual message: in long-windedness, ifyou will—though, depending on who is doing the job, this is not necessarily a shortcoming.

Now, let's do it line by line. "As I came to the edge of the woods" is a fairly simple, informative job, stating the subject and setting the meter. An innocent line, on the sur­face, wouldn't you say? Well, it is, save for "the woods." "The woods" makes one suspicious, and, with that, "the edge" does, too. Poetry is a dame with a huge pedigree, and every word comes practically barnacled with allusions and associations. Since the fourteenth century, the woods have given off a very strong smell of selva oscura, and you may recall what that selva led the author of The Divine Comedy into. In any case, when a twentieth-century poet starts a poem with finding himself at the edge of the woods there is a reasonable element of danger—or, at least, a faint sug­gestion of it. The edge, in its very self, is sufficiently sharp.

Maybe not; maybe our suspicions are unfounded, maybe we are just paranoid and are reading too much into this line. Let's go to the next one, and we shall see:

As I came to the edge of the woods, Thrush music—hark!

Looks like we've goofed. What could be more innocuous than this antiquated, Victorian-sounding, fairy-tale-like "hark"? A bird is singing—listen! "Hark" truly belongs in a Hardy poem, or in a ballad; better yet, in a jingle. It suggests a level of diction at which nothing untoward could be con­veyed. The poem promises to proceed in a comforting, me­lodious way. That's what you're thinking, anyway, after hearing "hark": that you're going to have some sort of de­scription of the music made by the thrush—that you are getting into familiar territory.

But that was a setup, as the following two lines show. It was but an exposition, crammed by Frost into two lines. Abruptly, in a fairly indecorous, matter-of-fact, non- melodious, and non-Victorian way, the diction and the reg­ister shift:

Now if it was dusk outside, Inside it was dark.

It's "now" that does this job of leaving very little room for any fancy. What's more, you realize that the "hark" rhymes with "dark." And that that "dark" is the condition of "inside," which could allude not only to the woods, since the comma sets that "inside" into sharp opposition to the third line's "outside," and since the opposition is given you in the fourth line, which makes it a more drastic statement. Not to mention that this opposition is but the matter of substitution of just two letters: ofputting ar instead of us between d and k. The vowel sound remains essentially the same. What we've got here is the difference in just one consonant.

There is a slight choking air in the fourth line. That has to do with its distribution of stresses, different from the first dimeter. The stanza contracts, as it were, toward its end, and the caesura after "inside" only underscores that "in­side" 's isolation. Now, while I am offering you this delib­erately slanted reading of this poem, I'd like to urge you to pay very close attention to its every letter, every caesura, if only because it deals with a bird, and a bird's trills are a matter of pauses and, if you will, characters. Being predom­inantly monosyllabic, English is highly suitable for this par­roting job, and the shorter the meter, the greater the pressure upon every letter, every caesura, every comma. At any rate, that "dark" literally renders the "woods" as la selva oscura.

With the memory of what that dark wood was entry to, let's approach the next stanza:

Too dark in the woods for a bird By sleight of wing To better its perch for the night, Though it still could sing.

What do you think is happening here? A British or a Continental—or, for that matter, a properly American— innocent would still reply that it is about a bird singing in the evening, and that it is a nice tune. Interestingly, he would be right, and it is on this sort of rightness that Frost's reputation rests. In fact, though, this stanza, in particular, is extremely dark. One could argue that the poem considers something rather unpleasant, quite possibly a suicide. Or, if not suicide—well, death. And, if not necessarily death, then—at least, in this stanza—the notion of the afterlife.

In "Too dark in the woods for a bird," a bird, alias bard, scrutinizes "the woods" and finds them too dark. "Too" here echoes—no! harks back to—Dante's opening lines in The Divine Comedy: our bird/bard's assessment of that selva dif­fers from the great Italian's. To put it plainly, the afterlife is darker for Frost than it is for Dante. The question is why, and the answer is either because he disbelieves in the whole thing or because his notion of himself makes him, in his mind, slated for damnation. Nothing in his power can im­prove his eventual standing, and I'd venture that "sleight of wing" could be regarded as a reference to last rites. Above all, this poem is about being old and pondering what is next. "To better its perch for the night" has to do with the pos­sibility of being assigned elsewhere, not just to hell—the night here being that of eternity. The only thing the bird/ bard has to show for himself is that it/he "still could sing."

"The woods" are "too dark" for a bird because a bird is too far gone at being a bird. No motion of its soul, alias "sleight of wing," can improve its eventual fate in these "woods." Whose woods these are I think we know: one of their branches is where a bird is to end up anyway, and a "perch" gives a sense of these woods' being well structured: it is an enclosure—a sort of chicken coop, if you will. Thus, our bird is doomed; no last-minute conversion ("sleight" is a conjuring term) is feasible, if only because a bard is too old for any quick motion of the hand. Yet, old though he is, he still can sing.

And in the third stanza you have that bird singing: you have the song itself, the last one. It is a tremendously ex­pansive gesture. Look at how every word here postpones the next one. "The last"—caesura—"of the light"— caesura—"of the sun"—line break, which is a big caesura —"That had died"—caesura—"in the west." Our bird/bard traces the last of the light to its vanished source. You almost hear in this line the good old "Shenandoah," the song of going West. Delay and postponement are palpable here.

''The last" is not finite, and "of the light" is not finite, and "of the sun" is not. What's more, "that had died" itself is not finite, though it should have been. Even "in the west" isn't. What we've got here is the song of lingering: of light, oflife. You almost see the finger pointing out the source and then, in the broad circular motion of the last two lines, returning to the speaker in "Still lived"—caesura—"for one song more"—line break—"In a thrush's breast." Between "The last" and "breast" our poet covers an extraordinary distance: the width of the continent, if you will. Mter all, he describes the light, which is still upon him, the opposite of the darkness of the woods. The breast is, after all, the source of any song, and you almost see here not so much a thrush as a robin; anyhow, a bird singing at sunset: it lingers on the bird's breast.

And here, in the opening lines of the fourth stanza, is where the bird and the bard part ways. "Far in the pillared dark I Thrush music went." The key word here is "pillared," of course: it suggests a cathedral interior—a church, in any case. In other words, our thrush flies into the woods, and you hear his music from within, "almost like a call to come in I To the dark and lament." If you want, you may replace "lament" with "repent": the effect will be practically the same. What's being described here is one of the choices before our old bard this evening: the choice he does not make. The thrush has chosen that "sleight of wing" after all. It is bettering its perch for the night; it accepts its fate, for lament is acceptance. You could plunge yourselfhere into a maze of ecclesiastical distinctions—Frost's essential Prot­estantism, etc. I'd advise against it, since a stoic posture befits believers and agnostics alike; in this line of work, it is practically inescapable. On the whole, references (religious ones especially) are not to be shrunk to inferences.

"But no, I was out for stars" is Frost's usual deceptive maneuver, projecting his positive sensibility: lines like that are what earned him his reputation. If he was indeed "out for stars," why didn't he mention that before? Why did he write the whole poem about something else? But this line is here not solely to deceive you. It is here to deceive—or, rather, to quell—himself. This whole stanza is. Unless we read this line as the poet's general statement about his pres­ence in this world—in the romantic key, that is, as a line about his general metaphysical appetite, not to be quenched by this little one-night agony.

I would not come in.

I meant not even if asked,

And I hadn't been.

There is too much jocular vehemence in these lines for us to take them at face value, although we should not omit this option, either. The man is shielding himself from his own insights, and he gets grammatically as well as syllabically assertive and less idiomatic—especially in the second line, "I would not come in," which could be easily truncated into "I won't come in." "I meant not even if asked" comes off with a menacing resoluteness, which could amount to a state­ment of his agnosticism were it not for the last line's all too clever qualifier: "And I hadn't been."This is indeed a sleight of hand.

Or else you can treat this stanza and, with it, the whole poem as Frost's humble footnote or postscript to Dante's Commedia, which ends with "stars"—as his acknowledg­ment of possessing either a lesser belief or a lesser gift. The poet here refuses an invitation into darkness; moreover, he questions the very call: "Almost like a call to come in . . . " One shouldn't make heavy weather of Frost's affinity with Dante, but here and there it's palpable, especially in the poems dealing with dark nights of the soul—for instance, in "Acquainted with the Night." Unlike a number of his illus­trious contemporaries, Frost never wears his learning on his sleeve—mainly because it is in his bloodstream. So "I meant not even if asked" could be read not only as his refusal to make a meal of his dreadful apprehension but also as a ref­erence to his stylistic choice in ruling out a major form. Be that as it may, one thing is clear: without Dante's Commedia, this poem wouldn't have existed.

Still, should you choose to read "Come In" as a nature poem, you are perfectly welcome to it. I suggest, though, that you take a longer look at the title. The twenty lines of the poem constitute, as it were, the title's translation. And in this translation, I am afraid, the expression "come in" means "die."

III

While in "Come In" we have Frost at his lyrical best, in "Home Burial" we have him at his narrative best. Actually, "Home Burial" is not a narrative; it is an eclogue. Or, more exactly, it is a pastoral—except that it is a very dark one. Insofar as it tells a story, it is, of course, a narrative; the means of that story's transportation, though, is dialogue, and it is the means of transportation that defines a genre. In­vented by Theocritus in his idylls, refined by Virgil in the poems he called eclogues or bucolics, the pastoral is essen­tially an exchange between two or more characters in a rural setting, returning often to that perennial subject, love. Since the English and French word "pastoral" is overburdened with happy connotations, and since Frost is closer to Virgil than to Theocritus, and not only chronologically, let's follow Virgil and call this poem an eclogue. The rural setting is here, and so are the two characters: a farmer and his wife, who may qualify as a shepherd and a shepherdess, except that it is two thousand years later. So is their subject: love, two thousand years later.

To make a long story short, Frost is a very Virgilian poet. By that, I mean the Virgil of the Bucolics and the Georgics, not the Virgil of the Aeneid. To begin with, the young Frost did a considerable amount of farming—as well as a lot of writing. The posture of gentleman farmer wasn't all posture. As a matter of fact, until the end of his days he kept buying farms. By the time he died, he had owned, if I am not mistaken, four farms in Vermont and New Hamp­shire. He knew something about living off the land—not less, in any case, than Virgil, who must have been a disas­trous farmer, tojudge by the agricultural advice he dispenses in the Georgics.

With few exceptions, American poetry is essentially Virgilian, which is to say contemplative. That is, if you take four Roman poets of the Augustan period, Propertius, Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, as the standard representatives of the four known humors (Propertius' choleric intensity, Ovid's sanguine couplings, Virgil's phlegmatic musings, Horace's melancholic equipoise), then American poetry—indeed, po­etry in English in general—strikes you as being by and large ofVirgilian or Horatian denomination. (Consider the bulk of Wallace Stevens's soliloquies, or the late, American Auden.) Yet Frost's affinity with Virgil is not so much temperamental as technical. Apart from frequent recourse to disguise (or mask) and the opportunity for distancing oneself that an in­vented character offers to the poet, Frost and Virgil have in common a tendency to hide the real subject matter of their dialogues under the monotonous, opaque sheen oftheir respective pentameters and hexameters. A poet of extraor­dinary probing and anxiety, the Virgil of the Eclogues and the Georgics is commonly taken for a bard of love and

country pleasures, just like the author of North of Boston.

To this it should be added that Virgil in Frost comes to you obscured by Wordsworth and Browning. "Filtered" is perhaps a better word, and Browning's dramatic mono­logue is quite a filter, engulfing the dramatic situation in solid Victorian ambivalence and uncertainty. Frost's dark pastorals are dramatic also, not only in the sense of the intensity of the characters' interplay but above all in the sense that they are indeed theatrical. It is a kind of theater in which the author plays all the roles, including those of stage designer, director, ballet master, etc. It's he who turns the lights off, and sometimes he is the audience also.

That stands to reason. For Theocritus' idylls, like nearly all Augustan poetry, in their own right are but a compression of Greek drama. In "Home Burial" we have an arena reduced to a staircase, with its Hitchcockian banister. The opening line tells you as much about the actors' positions as about their roles: those of the hunter and his prey. Or, as you'll see later, of Pygmalion and Galatea, except that in this case the sculptor turns his living model into stone. In the final analysis, "Home Burial" is a love poem, and if only on these grounds it qualifies as a pastoral.

But let's examine this line and a half:

He saw her from the bottom of the stairs Before she saw him.

Frost could have stopped right here. It is already a poem, it is already a drama. Imagine this line and a half sitting on the pagj all by itself, in minimalist fashion. It's an extremely loaded scene—or, better yet, a frame. You've got an enclosure, the house, with two individuals at cross— no, diverse—purposes. He's at the bottom of the stairs;

she's at the top. He's looking up at her; she, for all we know thus far, doesn't register his presence at all. Also, you've got to remember that it's in black and white. The staircase di­viding them suggests a hierarchy of significances. It is a pedestal with her atop (at least, in his eyes) and him at the bottom (in our eyes and, eventually, in hers). The angle is sharp. Place yourself here in either position—better in his —and you'll see what I mean. Imagine yourself observing, watching somebody, or imagine yourself being watched. Imagine yourself interpreting someone's movements—or immobility—unbeknownst to that person. That's what turns you into a hunter, or into Pygmalion.

Let me press this Pygmalion business a bit further. Scrutiny and interpretation are the gist of any intense human interplay, and of love in particular. They are also the most powerful source ofliterature: of fiction (which is by and large about betrayal) and, above all, of lyric poetry, where one is trying to figure out the beloved and what makes her/him tick. And this figuring out brings us back to the Pygmalion business quite literally, since the more you chisel out and the more you penetrate the character, the more you put your model on a pedestal. An enclosure—be it a house, a studio, a page—intensifies this pedestal aspect enormously. And, depending on your industry and on the model's ability to cooperate, this process results either in a masterpiece or in a disaster. In "Home Burial" it results in both. For every Galatea is ultimately a Pygmalion's self-projection. On the other hand, art doesn't imitate life but infects it.

So let's watch the deportment of the model:

She was starting down, Looking back over her shoulder at some fear. She took a doubtful step and then undid it To raise herself and look again.

On the literal level, on the level of straight narra­tive, we have the heroine beginning to descend the steps with her head turned to us in profile, her glance lingering on some frightful sight. She hesitates and interrupts her descent, her eyes still trained, presumably, on the same sight: neither on the steps nor on the man at the bottom. But you are aware of yet another level present here, aren't you?

Let's leave that level as yet unnamed. Each piece of information in this narrative comes to you in an isolated manner, within a pentameter line. The isolation job is done by white margins framing, as it were, the whole scene, like the silence of the house; and the lines themselves are the staircase. Basically, what you get here is a succession of frames. "She was starting down" is one frame. "Looking back over her shoulder at some fear" is another; in fact, it is a close-up, a profile—you see her facial expression. "She took a doubtful step and then undid it" is a third: again a close- up—the feet. ''To raise herself and look again" is a fourth— full figure.

But this is a ballet, too. There is a minimum of two pas de deux here, conveyed to you with a wonderful euphonic, almost alliterative precision. I mean the ds in this line, in "doubtful" and in "undid it," although the fs matter also. "Undid it" is particularly good, because you sense the spring in that step. And that profile in its opposition to the move­ment of the body—the very formula of a dramatic heroine —is straight out of a ballet as well.

But the real faux pas de deux starts with "He spoke I Advancing toward her." For the next twenty-five lines, a conversation occurs on the stairs. The man climbs them as he speaks, negotiating mechanically and verbally what sep­arates them. "Advancing" bespeaks self-consciousness and apprehensiveness. The tension grows with the growing prox­imity. However, the mechanical and, by implication, phys­ical proximity is more easily attained than the verbal—i.e., the mental—and that's what the poem is all about. " 'What is it you see I From up there always?—for I want to know' " is very much a Pygmalion question, addressed to the model on the pedestal: atop the staircase. His fascination is not with what he sees but with what he imagines it conceals— what he has placed there. He invests her with mystery and then rushes to uncloak it: this rapacity is always Pyg­malion's double bind. It is as though the sculptor found himself puzzled by the facial expression of his model: she "sees" what he does not "see." So he has to climb to the pedestal himself, to put himself in her position. In the po­sition of "up there always"—of topographical (vis-a-vis the house) and psychological advantage, where he put her him­self. It is the latter, the psychological advantage of the cre­ation, that disturbs the creator, as the emphatic " 'for I want to know' " shows.

The model refuses to cooperate. In the next frame ("She turned and sank upon her skirts at that"), followed by the close-up of "And her face changed from terrified to dull," you get that lack of cooperation plain. Yet the lack of co­operation here is cooperation. The less you cooperate, the more you are a Galatea. For we have to bear in mind that the woman's psychological advantage is in the man's self- projection. He ascribes it to her. So by turning him down she only enhances his fantasy. In this sense, by refusing to cooperate she plays along. That's basically her whole game here. The more he climbs, the greater is that advantage; he pushes her into it, as it were, with every step.

Still, he is climbing: in "he said to gain time" he does, and also in

"What is it you see?"

Mounting until she cowered under him.

"I will find out now—you must tell me, dear."

The most important word here is the verb "see," which we encounter for the second time. In the next nine lines, it will be used four more times. We'll get to that in a minute. But first let's deal with this "mounting" line and the next. It's a masterly job here. With "mounting," the poet kills two birds at once, for "mounting" describes both the climb and the climber. And the climber looms even larger, because the woman "cowers"—i.e., shrinks under him. Remember that she looks "at some fear." "Mounting" versus "cowered" gives you the contrast, then, between their respective frames, with the implicit danger contained in his largeness. In any case, her alternative to fear is not comfort. And the resoluteness of" 'I will find out now' " echoes the superior physical mass, not alleviated by the cajoling "dear" that follows a remark —" 'you must tell me' "—that is both imperative and con­scious of this contrast.

She, in her place, refused him any help,

With the least stiffening of her neck and silence.

She let him look, sure that he wouldn't see,

Blind creature; and awhile he didn't see.

But at last he murmured, "Oh," and again, "Oh."

"What is it—what?" she said.

"Just that I see."

"You don't," she challenged. "Tell me what it is."

"The wonder is I didn't see at once."

And now we come to this verb "see." Within fifteen lines it's been used six times. Every experienced poet knows how risky it is to use the same word several times within a short space. The risk is that of tautology. So what is it that Frost is after here? I think he is after precisely that: tautol­ogy. More accurately, nonsemantic utterance. Which you get, for instance, in " 'Oh,' and again, 'Oh.' " Frost had a theory about what he called "sentence-sounds." It had to do with his observation that the sound, the tonality, of human locution is as semantic as actual words. For instance, you overhear two people conversing behind a closed door, in a room. You don't hear the words, yet you know the general drift of their dialogue; in fact, you may pretty accurately figure out its substance. In other words, the tune matters more than fhe lyrics, which are, so to speak, replaceable or redundant. Anyway, the repetition of this or that word lib­erates the tune, makes it more audible. By the same token, such repetition liberates the mind—rids you of the notion presented by the word. (This is the old Zen technique, of course, but, come to think of it, finding it in an American poem makes you wonder whether philosophical principles don't spring from texts rather than the other way around.)

The six "see"s here do precisely that. They exclaim rather than explain. It could be "see," it could be "Oh," it could be "yes," it could be any monosyllabic word. The idea is to explode the verb from within, for the content of the actual observation defeats the process of observation, its means, and the very observer. The effect that Frost tries to create is the inadequacy of response when you automatically repeat the first word that comes to your tongue. "Seeing" here is simply reeling from the unnameable. The least seeing our hero does is in " 'Just that I see,' " for by this time the verb, having already been used four times, is robbed of its "observing" and "understanding" meaning (not to mention the fact—draining the word even further of content—that we readers are ourselves still in the dark, still don't know what there is to see out that window). By now, it is just sound, denoting an animal response rather than a rational one.

This sort of explosion of bona-fide words into pure, nonsemantic sounds will occur several times in the course of this poem. Another happens very soon, ten lines later. Characteristically, these explosions occur whenever the play­ers find themselves in close physical proximity. They are the verbal—or, better yet, the audial—equivalents of a hiatus. Frost directs them with tremendous consistency, suggesting his characters' profound (at least, prior to this scene) incom­patibility. "Home Burial" is, in fact, the study of that, and on the literal level the tragedy it describes is the characters' comeuppance for violating each other's territorial and mental imperatives by having a child. Now that the child is lost, the imperatives play themselves out with vehemence: they claim their own.

IV

By standing next to the woman, the man acquires her vantage point. Because he is larger than she, and also because this is his house (as line 23 shows), where he has lived, presum­ably, most ofhis life, he must, one imagines, bend somewhat to put his eyes on her line of vision. Now they are next to each other, in an almost intimate proximity, on the threshold of their bedroom, atop the stairs. The bedroom has a window; a window has a view. And here Frost produces the most stunning simile of this poem, and perhaps ofhis entire career:

"The wonder is I didn't see at once.

I never noticed it from here before.

I must be wonted to it—that's the reason. The little graveyard where my people are! So small the window frames the whole of it. Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it? There are three stones of slate and one of marble, Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight On the sidehill. We haven't to mind those. But I understand: it is not the stones, But the child's mound—"

" 'The little graveyard where my people are!' " gener­ates an air of endearment, and it's with this air that " 'So small the window frames the whole of it' " starts, only to tumble itself into " 'Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?' " The Key word here is "frames," because it doubles as the window's actual frame and as a picture on a bedroom wall. The window hangs, as it were, on the bedroom wall like a picture, and that picture depicts a graveyard. "De­picting," though, means reducing to the size of a picture. Imagine having that in your bedroom. In the next line, though, the graveyard is restored to its actual size and, for that reason, equated with the bedroom. This equation is as much psychological as it is spatial. Inadvertently, the man blurts out the summary of the marriage (foreshadowed in the grim pun of the title). And, equally inadvertently, the "is it?" invites the woman to agree with this summary, almost implying her complicity.

As if that were not enough, the next two lines, with their stones of slate and marble, proceed to reinforce the simile, equating the graveyard with the made-up bed, with its pentametrically arranged pillows and cushions—popu­lated by a family of small, inanimate children: "Broad- shouldered little slabs." This is Pygmalion unbound, on a rampage. What we have here is the man's intrusion into the woman's mind, a violation of her mental imperative—if you will, an ossification of it. And then this ossifying hand— petrifying, actually—stretches toward what's still raw, pal­pably as well as in her mind:

"But I understand: it is not the stones, But the child's mound—"

It's not that the contrast between the stones and the mound is too stark, though it is; it is his ability—or, rather, his attempt—to articulate it that she finds unbearable. For, should he succeed, should he find the words to articulate her mental anguish, the mound will join the stones in the "picture," will become a slab itself, will become a pillow of their bed. Moreover, this will amount to the total penetration of her inner sanctum: that of her mind. And he is getting there:

"Don't, don't, don't,

don't," she cried.

She withdrew, shrinking from beneath his arm That rested on the banister, and slid downstairs; And turned on him with such a daunting look, He said twice over before he knew himself: "Can't a man speak of his own child he's lost?"

The poem is gathering its dark force. Four "don't"s are that nonsemantic explosion, resulting in hiatus. We are so much in the story line now—up to the eyebrows—that we may forget that thb is still a ballet, still a succession offrames, still an artifice, stage-managed by the poet. In fact, we are about to take sides with our characters, aren't we? Well, I suggest we pull ourselves out of this by our eyebrows and think for a moment about what it all tells us about our poet. Imagine, for instance, that the story line has been drawn from experience—from, say, the loss of a firstborn. What does all that you've read thus far tell you about the author, about his sensibility? How much he is absorbed by the story and—what's more crucial—to what degree he is free from it?

Were this a seminar, I'd wait for your answers. Since it is not, I've got to answer this question myself. And the answer is: He is very free. Dangerously so. The very ability to utilize—to play with—this sort of material suggests an extremely wide margin of detachment. The ability to turn this material into a blank-verse, pentameter monotone adds another degree to that detachment. To observe a relation between a family graveyard and a bedroom's four-poster— still another. Added up, they amount to a considerable de­gree of detachment. A degree that dooms human interplay, that makes communication impossible, for communication requires an equal. This is very much the predicament of Pygmalion vis-a-vis his model. So it's not that the story the poem tells is autobiographical but that the poem is the au­thor's self-portrait. That is why one abhors literary biog­raphy—because it is reductive. That is why I am resisting issuing you with actual data on Frost.

Where does he go, you may ask, with all that detach­ment? The answer is: into utter autonomy. It is from there that he observes similarities among unlike things, it is from there that he imitates the vernacular. Would you like to meet Mr. Frost? Then read his poems, nothing else; oth­erwise, you are in for criticism from below. Would you like to be him? Would you like to become Robert Frost? Perhaps one should be advised against such aspirations. For a sen­sibility like this, there is very little hope of real human con­geniality, or conjugality either; and, actually, there is very little romantic dirt on him—of the sort normally indicative of such hope.

This is not necessarily a digression, but let's get back to the lines. Remember the hiatus, and what causes it, and remember that this is an artifice. Actually, the author himself reminds you of it with

She withdrew, shrinking from beneath his arm That rested on the banister, and slid downstairs.

It is still a ballet, you see, and the stage direction is incorporated into the text. The most telling detail here is the banister. Why does the author put it here? First, to reintroduce the staircase, which we might by now have for­gotten about, stunned by the business of ruining the bed­room. But, secondly, the banister prefigures her sliding downstairs, since every child uses banisters for sliding down. "And turned on him with such a daunting look" is another stage direction.

He said twice over before he knew himself: "Can't a man speak of his own child he's lost?"

Now, this is a remarkably good line. It has a distinctly vernacular, almost proverbial air. And the author is definitely aware of how good it is. So, both trying to underscore its effectiveness and to obscure his awareness of it, he empha­sizes the unwittingness of this utterance: "He said twice over before he knew himself." On the literal, narrative level, we have the man stunned by the woman's gaze, the daunting look, and groping for words. Frost was awfully good with those formulaic, quasi-proverbial one-liners. "For to be so­cial is to be forgiving" (in "The Star-Splitter"), or "The best way out is always through" ("A Servant to Servants"), for example. And a few lines later you are going to get yet another one. They are mostly pentametric; iambic penta­meter is very congenial to that sort of job.

This whole section of the poem, from " 'Don't, don't, don't, don't' " on, obviously has some sexual connotations, of her turning the man down. That's what the story of Pyg­malion and his model is all about. On the literal level, "Home Burial" evolves along similar "hard to get" lines. However, I don't think that Frost, for all his autonomy, was conscious of that. (After all, "North of Boston" shows no acquaintance with Freudian terminology.) And, if he was not, this sort of approach on our part is invalid. Nevertheless, we should bear some of it in mind as we are embarking on the bulk of this poem: _

"Not you!—Oh, where's my hat? Oh, I don't need it!

I must get out of here. I must get air.—

I don't know rightly whether any man can."

"Amy! Don't go to someone else this time.

Listen to me. I won't come down the stairs."

He sat and fixed his chin between his fists.

"There's something I should like to ask you, dear."

"You don't know how to ask it."

"Help me, then."

Her fingers moved the latch for all reply.

v

\Vhat we've got here is the desire to escape: not so much the man as the enclosure of the place, not to mention the subject of their exchange. Yet the resolution is incomplete, as the fidgeting with the hat shows, since the execution of this desire will be counterproductive for the model as far as being the subject of explication goes. May I go so far as to suggest that that would mean a loss of advantage, not to mention that it would be the end of the poem? In fact, it does end with precisely that, with her exit. The literal level will get into conflict, or fusion, with the metaphorical. Hence " 'I don't know rightly whether any man can,' " which fuses both these levels, forcing the poem to proceed; you don't know any longer who is the horse here, who is the cart. I doubt whether the poet himself knew that at this point. The fusion's result is the release of a certain force, which sub­ordinates his pen, and the best it can do is keep both strands—literal and metaphorical—in check.

We learn the heroine's name, and that this sort of dis­course had its precedents, with nearly identical results. Given the fact that we know the way the poem ends, we may judge—well, we may imagine—the character of those occasions. The scene in "Home Burial" is but a repetition. By this token, the poem doesn't so much inform us about their life as replace it. We also learn, from " 'Don't go to someone else this time,' " about a mixture of jealousy and sense of shame felt by at least one of them. And we learn, from " 'I won't come down the stairs' " and from "He sat and fixed his chin between his fists," about the fear of vio­lence present in their physical proximity. The latter line is a wonderful embodiment of stasis, very much in the fashion of Rodin's Penseur, albeit with two fists, which is a very telling self-referential detail, since the forceful application of fist to chin is what results in a knockout.

The main thing here, though, is the reintroduction of the stairs. Not only the literal stairs but the steps in "he sat," too. From now on, the entire dialogue occurs on the stairs, though they have become the scene of an impasse rather than a passage. No physical steps are taken. Instead, we have their verbal, or oral, substitute. The ballet ends, yield­ing to the verbal advance and retreat, which is heralded by " 'There's something I should like to ask you, dear.' " Note again the air of cajoling, colored this time with the recog­nition of its futility in "dear." Note also the last semblance of actual interplay in " 'You don't know how to ask it.' 'Help me, then' "—this last knocking on the door, or, better yet, on the wall. Note "Her fingers moved the latch for all reply," because this feint of trying for the door is the last physical movement, the last theatrical or cinematic gesture in the poem, saveone more latch-trying.

"My words are nearly always an offense. I don't know how to speak of anything So as to please you. But I might be taught, I should suppose. I can't say I see how. A man must partly give up being a man With womenfolk. We could have some arrangement By which I'd bind myself to keep hands off Anything special you're a-mind to name. Though I don't like such things 'twixt those that love. Two that don't love can't live together without them. But two that do can't live together with them." She moved the latch a little.

The speaker's hectic mental pacing is fully counterbal­anced by his immobility. If this is a ballet, it is a mental one. In fact, it's very much like fencing: not with an opponent or a shadow but with one's self. The lines are constantly taking a step forward and then undoing it. ("She took a doubtful step and then undid it.") The main technical device here is enjambment, which physically resembles descending the stairs. In fact, this back-and-forth, this give-and-take almost gives you a sense of being short ofbreath. Until, that is, the release that is coming with the formulaic, folksy " 'A man must partly give up being a man I With womenfolk.' "

After this release, you get three lines of more evenly paced verse, almost a tribute to iambic pentameter's pro­clivity for coherence, ending with the pentametrically trium­phant " 'Though I don't like such things 'twixt those that love.' " And here our poet makes another not so subdued dash toward the proverbial: " 'Two that don't love can't live together without them. I But two that do can't live together with them' "—though this comes off as a bit cumbersome, and not entirely convincing.

Frost partly senses that: hence "She moved the latch a little." But that's only one explanation. The whole point of this qualifier-burdened monologue is the explication of its addressee. The man is groping for understanding. He real­izes that in order to understand he's got to surrender—if not suspend entirely—his rationality. In other words, he descends. But this is really running down stairs that lead upward. And, partly from rapidly approaching the end of his wits, partly out of purely rhetorical inertia, he summons here the notion oflove. In other words, this quasi-proverbial two- liner about love is a rational argument, and that, of course, is not enough for its addressee.

For the more she is explicated, the more remote she gets: the higher her pedestal grows (which is perhaps of specific importance to her now that she is do^stairs). It's not grief that drives her out of the house but the dread of being explicated, as well as of the explicator himself. She wants to stay impenetrable and won't accept anything short of his complete surrender. And he is well on the way to it:

"Don't—don't go.

Don't carry it to someone else this time.

Tell me about it if it's something human."

The last is the most stunning, most tragic line, in my view, in the entire poem. It amounts practically to the hero­ine's ultimate victory—i.e., to the aforementioned rational surrender on the part of the explicator. For all its colloquial air, it promotes her mental operations to supernatural status, thus acknowledging infinity—ushered into her mind by the child's death—as his rival. Against this he is powerless, since her access to that infinity, her absorption by and commerce with it, is backed in his eyes by the whole mythology of the opposite sex—by the whole notion of the alternative being impressed upon him by her at this point rather thoroughly. That's what he is losing her to by staying rational. It is a shrill, almost hysterical line, admitting the man's limitations and momentarily bringing the whole discourse to a plane of regard that the heroine could be at home on—the one she perhaps seeks. But only momentarily. He can't proceed at this level, and succumbs to pleading:

"Let me into your grief. I'm not so much Unlike other folks as your standing there Apart would make me out. Give me my chance. I do think, though, you overdo it a little. What was it brought you up to think it the thing To take your mother-loss of a first child So inconsolably—in the face of love. You'd think his memory might be satisfied—"

He tumbles down, as it were, from the hysterical height of " 'Tell me about it if it's something human.' " But this tumble, this mental knocking about the metrically lapsing stairs, restores him to rationality, with all its attendant qual­ifiers. That brings him rather close to the heart of the matter—to her taking her " 'mother-loss of a first child I So inconsolably' "—and he evokes the catchall notion of love again, this time somewhat more convincingly, though still tinged with a rhetorical flourish: " 'in the face oflove.' " The very word—"love"—undermines its emotional reality, reducing the sentiment to its utilitarian application: as a means of overcoming tragedy. However, overcoming trag­edy deprives its victim of the status of hero or heroine. This, combined with the resentment over the explicator's lowering of his explication's plane of regard, results in the heroine's interruption of " 'You'd think his memory might be satis­fied—' " with " 'There you go sneering now!' " It's Galatea's self-defense, the defense against the further application of the chiseling instrument to her already attained features.

Because of its absorbing story line, there is a strong temptation to bill "Home Burial" as a tragedy of incom- municability, a poem about the failure oflanguage; and many have succumbed to this temptation. In fact, it is just the reverse: it is a tragedy of communication, for communica­tion's logical end is the violation of your interlocutor's mental imperative. This is a poem about language's terrifying suc­cess, for language, in the final analysis, is alien to the sen­timents it articulates. No one is more aware of that than a poet; and if "Home Burial" is autobiographical, it is so in the first place by revealing Frost's grasp of the collision be­tween his metier and his emotions. To drive this point home, may I suggest that you compare the actual sentiment you may feel toward an individual in your company and the word "love." A poet is dvomed to resort to words. So is the speaker in "Home Burial." Hence, their overlapping in this poem; hence, too, its autobiographical reputation.

But let us take it a step further. The poet here should be identified not with one character but with both. He is the man here, all right, but he is the woman also. Thus you've got a clash not just of two sensibilities but of two languages. Sensibilities may merge—say, in the act oflove; languages can't. Sensibilities may result in a child; languages won't. And, now that the child is dead, what's left is two totally autonomous languages, two non-overlapping systems of verbalization. In short: words. His versus hers, and hers are fewer. This makes her enigmatic. Enigmas are subject to explication, which they resist—in her case, with all she's got. His job, or, more exactly, the job of his language, is, therefore, the explication ofher language, or, more exactly, her reticence. Which, when it comes to human interplay, is a recipe for disaster. When it comes to a poem, an enormous challenge.

Small wonder, then, that this "dark pastoral" grows darker with every line; it proceeds by aggravation, reflecting not so much the complexity of the author's mind as words' own appetite for disaster. For the more you push reticence, the greater it gets, having nothing to fall back upon but itself. The enigma thus grows bigger. It's like Napoleon invading Russia and finding that it goes beyond the Urals. Small won­der that this "dark pastoral" of ours has no choice but to proceed by aggravation, for the poet's mind plays both the invading army and the territory; in the end, he can't take sides. It is a sense of the incomprehensible vastness of what lies ahead, defeating not only the notion of conquest but the very sense of progress, that informs both " 'Tell me about it if it's something human' " and the lines that follow " 'There you go sneering now!' ":

"I'm not, I'm not!

You make me angry. I'll come down to you.

God, what a woman!"

A language invading reticence gets no trophy here, save the echo of its own words. All it has to show for its efforts is a good old line that brought it nowhere before:

"And it's come to this, A man can't speak of his own child that's dead."

It, too, falls back on itself. A stalemate.

It's broken by the woman. More exactly, her reticence is broken. Which could be regarded by the male character as success, were it not for what she surrenders. Which is not so much an offensive as a negation of all the man stands for.

"You can't because you don't know how to speak.

If you had any feelings, you that dug

With your own hand—how could you?—his little grave;

I saw you from that very window there,

Making the gravel leap and leap in air,

Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly

And roll back down the mound beside the hole.

I thought, Who is that man? I didn't know you.

And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs

To look again, and still your spade kept lifting.

Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice

Out in the kitchen, and I don't know why,

But I went near to see with my own eyes.

You could sit there with the stains on your shoes

Of the fresh earth from your own baby's grave

And talk about your everyday concerns.

You had stood the spade up against the wall

Outside there in the entry, for I saw it."

"I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.

I'm cursed. God, if I don't believe I'm cursed."

This is the voice of a very foreign territory indeed: a foreign language. It is a view of the man from a distance he can't possibly fathom, since it is proportionate to the fre­quency with which the heroine creeps up and down the stairs. Which, in its own right, is proportionate to the leaps of his gravel in the course of his digging the grave. Whatever the ratio, it is not in favor ofhis actual or mental steps toward her on that staircase. Nor in his favor is the rationale behind her creeping up and down the stairs while he is digging. Presumably, there is nobody else around to do the job. (That they lost their firstborn suggests that they are fairly young and thus not very well off.) Presumably also, by performing this menial task, and by doing it in a particularly mechanical way—as a remarkably skillful mimetic job in the pentameter here indicates (or as is charged by the heroine)—the man is quelling, or controlling, his grief; that is, his movements, unlike the heroine's, are functional.

In short, this is futility's view of utility. For obvious reasons, this view is usually precise and rich in judgment: " 'If you had any feelings,' " and " 'Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly I And roll back down the mound beside the hole.' " Depending on the length of observa­tion—and the description of digging runs here for nine lines—this view may result, as it does here, in a sensation of utter disparity between the observer and the observed: " 'I thought, Who is that man? I didn't know you.' " For observation, you see, results in nothing, while digging pro­duces at least a mound, or a hole. Whose mental equivalent in the observer is also, as it were, a grave. Or, rather, a fusion of the man and his purpose, not to mention his in­strument. What futility and Frost's pentameter register here above all is rhythm. The heroine observes an inanimate ma­chine. The man in her eye is a gravedigger, and thus her alternative.

Now, the sight of our alternative is always unwelcome, not to say threatening. The closer your view of it, the sharper your general sense of guilt and of a deserved comeuppance. In the mind of a woman who has lost her child, that sense may be fairly sharp. Add to that her inability to translate her grief into any useful action, save a highly agitated creeping up and down, as well as the recognition—and subsequent glorification—of that inability. And add a cross-purpose cor­respondence between her movements and his: between her steps and his spade. What do you think it would result in? And remember that she is in his house, that this is the graveyard where his people are. And that he is a gravedigger.

"Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice Out in the kitchen, and I don't know why, But I went near to see with my own eyes."

Note this "and I don't know why," for here she unwittingly drifts toward her own projection. All that she needs now is to check that projection with her own eyes. That is, she wants to make her mental picture physical:

"You could sit there with the stains on your shoes Of the fresh earth from your own baby's grave And talk about your everyday concerns. You had stood the spade up against the wall Outside there in the entry, for I saw it."

So what do you think she sees with her own eyes, and what does that sight prove? What does the frame contain this time? What does she have a close-up of? I am afraid she sees a murder weapon: she sees a blade. The fresh earth stains either on the shoes or on his spade make the spade's edge shine: make it into a blade. And does earth "stain," how­ever fresh? Her very choice of noun, denoting liquid, sug­gests—accuses—blood. What should our man have done? Should he have taken his shoes offbefore entering the house? Perhaps. Perhaps he should have left his spade outside, too. But he is a farmer, and acts like one—presumably out of fatigue. So he brings in his instrument—in her eyes, the instrument of death. And the same goes for his shoes, and it goes for the rest of the man. A gravedigger is equated here, if you will, with the reaper. And there are only the two of them in this house.

The iost awful bit is "for I saw it," because it empha­sizes the perceived symbolism of that spade left standing against the wall outside there in the entry: for future use. Or as a guard. Or as an unwitting memento mori. At the same time, "for I saw it" conveys the capriciousness of her perception and the triumph of somebody who cannot be fooled, the triumph of catching the enemy. It is futility in full bloom, engulfing and absorbing utility into its shadow.

"I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.

I'm cursed. God, if I don't believe I'm cursed."

This is practically a nonverbal recognition of defeat, coming in the form of a typical Frostian understatement, studded with tautological monosyllables quickly abandoning their se­mantic functions. Our Napoleon or Pygmalion is completely routed by his creation, who still keeps pressing on.

"I can repeat the very words you were saying:

'Three foggy mornings and one rainy day

Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.'

Think of it, talk like that at such a time!

What had how long it takes a birch to rot

To do with what was in the darkened parlor?"

Now, this is where our poem effectively ends. The rest is simply denouement, in which our heroine goes rambling on in an increasingly incoherent fashion about death, the world being evil, uncaring friends, and feeling alone. It is a rather hysterical monologue, whose only function, in terms of the story line, is to struggle toward a release for what has been pent up in her mind. It does not, and in the end she resorts to the door, as though only landscape were proportionate to her mental state and thus could be of solace.

And, quite possibly, it is. A conflict within an enclo­sure—a house, say—normally deteriorates into tragedy, be­cause the rectangularity of the place itself puts a higher premium on reason, offering emotion only a straitjacket. Thus in the house the man is the master not only because the house is his but because—within the context of the poem—rationality is his. In a landscape, "Home Burial' "s dialogue would have run a different course; in a landscape, the man would be the loser. The drama would perhaps be even greater, for it's one thing when the house sides with a character, and another when the elements do so. In any case, that's why she is trying for the door.

So let's get back to the five lines that precede the denouement—to this business of rotting birches. "Three foggy mornings and one rainy day I Will rot the best birch fence a man can build," our farmer is quoted as saying, sitting there in the kitchen, clods of fresh earth on his shoes and the spade standing up there in the entry. One may ascribe this phrase again to his fatigue and to the next task in store for him: building a little fence around the new grave. How­ever, since this is not a public but a family graveyard, the fence he mentioned might indeed be one of his everyday concerns, something else he has to deal with. And presum­ably he mentions it to take his mind off what he has just finished doing. Still, for all his effort, the mind is not entirely taken, as the verb "rot" indicates: the line contains the shadow of the hidden comparison—if a fence rots so quickly in the damp air, how quickly will a little coffin rot in earth damp enough to leave "stains" on his shoes? But the heroine once again resists the encompassing gambits of language— metaphor, irony, litotes—and goes straight for the literal meaning, the absolute. And that's what she jumps on in " 'What had how long it takes a birch to rot I To do with what was in the darkened parlor?' " What is remarkable here is how diverse their treatment of the notion of rotting is. While he is talking about a "birch fence," which is a clear deflection, not to mention a reference to something above the ground, she zeroes in on "what was in the darkened parlor." It's understandable that, being a mother, she con­centrates—that Frost makes her concentrate—on the dead child. Yet her way of referring to it is highly roundabout, even euphemistic: "what was in." Not to mention that she refers to her dead child as a "what," not a "who." We don't learn his name, and for all we know, he didn't have much of a life after his birth. And then you should note her ref­erence to the grave: "the darkened parlor."

Now, with "darkened parlor," the poet finishes his por­trait of the heroine. We have to bear in mind that this is a rural setting, that the heroine lives in "his" house—i.e., that she came here from without. Because of its proximity to rot, this darkened parlor, for all its colloquial currency, sounds noticeably oblique, not to say arch. To the modern ear it has an almost Victorian ring, suggesting a difference of sensi­bilities bordering on class distinction.

I think you will agree that this is not a European poem.

Not French, not Italian, not German, not even British. I also can assure you that it is not Russian at all. And, in terms of what American poetry is like today, it is not American, either. It's Frost's own, and he has been dead for over a quarter of a century now. Small wonder, then, that one rambles on about his lines at such length, and in strange places, though he no doubt would wince at being introduced to a French audience by a Russian. On the other hand, he was no stranger to incongruity.

So what was it that he was after in this, his very own poem? He was, I think, after grief and reason, which, while poison to each other, are language's most efficient fuel—or, if you will, poetry's indelible ink. Frost's reliance on them here and elsewhere almost gives you the sense that his dipping into this ink pot had to do with the hope of re­ducing the level of its contents; you detect a sort of vested interest on his part. Yet the more one dips into it, the more it brims with this black essence of existence, and the more one's mind, like one's fingers, gets soiled by this liquid. For the more there is of grief, the more there is of reason. As much as one may be tempted to take sides in "Home Burial," the presence of the narrator here rules this out, for while the characters stand, respectively, for reason and for grief, the narrator stands for their fusion. To put it differently, while the characters' actual union disintegrates, the story, as it were, marries grief to reason, since the bond of the narrative here supersedes the individual dynamics— well, at least for the reader. Perhaps for the author as well. The poem, in other words, plays fate.

I suppose it is this sort of marriage that Frost was after, or perhaps the other way around. Many years ago, on a flight from New York to Detroit, I chanced upon an essay by the poet's daughter printed in the American Airlines in-flight magazine. In that essay Lesley Frost says that her father and her mother were co-valedictorians at the high school they both attended. While she doesn't recall the topic of her father's speech on that occasion, she remembers what she was toldwas her mother's. It was called something like "Con­versation as a Force in Life" (or "the Living Force"). If, as I hope, someday you find a copy of North of Boston and read it, you'll realize that Elinor White's topic is, in a nutshell, the main structural device of that collection, for most of the poems in North of Boston are dialogues—are conversations. In this sense, we are dealing here—in "Home Burial," as elsewhere in North of Boston—with love poetry, or, if you will, with poetry of obsession: not that of a man with a woman so much as that of an argument with a counterargument— of a voice with a voice. That goes for monologues as well, actually, since a monologue is one's argument with oneself; take, for instance, "To be or not to be ..." That's why poets so often resort to writing plays. In the end, of course, it was not the dialogue that Robert Frost was after but the other way around, if only because by themselves two voices amount to little. Fused, they set in motion something that, for want of a better term, we may just as well call "life." This is why "Home Burial" ends with a dash, not with a period.

HOME BURIAL

He saw her from the bottom of the stairs Before she saw him. She was starting down, Looking back over her shoulder at some fear. She took a doubtful step and then undid it To raise herself and look again. He spoke Advancing toward her: "What is it you see

From up there always?—for I want to know."

She turned and sank upon her skirts at that,

And her face changed from terrified to dull.

He said to gain time: "What is it you see?"

Mounting until she cowered under him.

"I will find out now—you must tell me, dear."

She, in her place, refused him any help,

With the least stiffening of her neck and silence.

She let him look, sure that he wouldn't see,

Blind creature; and awhile he didn't see.

But at last he murmured, "Oh," and again, "Oh."

"What is it—what?" she said.

"Just that I see." "You don't," she challenged. "Tell me what it is."

"The wonder is I didn't see at once. I never noticed it from here before. I must be wonted to it—that's the reason. The little graveyard where my people are! So small the window frames the whole of it. Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it? There are three stones of slate and one of marble, Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight On the sidehill. We haven't to mind those. But I understand: it is not the stones, But the child's mound—"

"Don't, don't, don't,

don't," she cried.

She withdrew, shrinking from beneath his arm That rested on the banister, and slid downstairs; And turned on him with such a daunting look,

He said twice over before he knew himself: "Can't a man speak of his own child he's lost?"

"Not you!—Oh, where's my hat? Oh, I don't need it! I must get out of here. I must get air.— I don't know rightly whether any man can."

"Amy! Don't go to someone else this time. Listen to me. I won't come down the stairs." He sat and fixed his chin between his fists. "There's something I should like to ask you, dear."

"You don't know how to ask it."

"Help me, then."

Her fingers moved the latch for all reply.

"My words are nearly always an offense.

I don't know how to speak of anything

So as to please you. But I might be taught,

I should suppose. I can't say I see how.

A man must partly give up being a man

With womenfolk. We could have some arrangement

By which I'd bind myself to keep hands off

Anything special you're a-mind to name.

Though I don't like such things 'twixt those that love.

Two that don't love can't live together without them.

But two that do can't live together with them."

She moved the latch a little. "Don't—don't go.

Don't carry it to someone else this time.

Tell me about it if it's something human.

Let me into your grief. I'm not so much

Unlike other folks as your standing there

Apart would make me out. Give me my chance. I do think, though, you overdo it a little. What was it brought you up to think it the thing To take your mother-loss of a first child So inconsolably—in the face of love. You'd think his memory might be satisfied—"

"There you go sneering now!"

"I'm not, I'm not! You make me angry. I'll come down to you. God, what a woman! And it's come to this, A man can't speak of his own child that's dead."

"You can't because you don't know how to speak.

If you had any feelings, you that dug

With your own hand—how could you?—his little grave;

I saw you from that very window there,

Making the gravel leap and leap in air,

Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly

And roll back down the mound beside the hole.

I thought, Who is that man? I didn't know you.

And I crept do\vn the stairs and up the stairs

To look again, and still your spade kept lifting.

Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice

Out in the kitchen, and I don't know why,

But I went near to see with my own eyes.

You could sit there with the stains on your shoes

Of the fresh earth from your own baby's grave

And talk about your everyday concerns.

You had stood the spade up against the wall

Outside there in the entry, for I saw it."

"I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed. I'm cursed. God, if I don't believe I'm cursed."

"I can repeat the very words you were saying: 'Three foggy mornings and one rainy day Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.' Think of it, talk like that at such a time! What had how long it takes a birch to rot To do with what was in the darkened parlor? You couldn't care! The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all No, from the time when one is sick to death, One is alone, and he dies more alone. Friends make pretense of following to the grave, But before one is in it, their minds are turned And making the best of their way back to life And living people, and things they understand. But the world's evil. I won't have grief so If I can change it. Oh, I won't. I won't!"

"There, you have said it all and you feel better. You won't go now. You're crying. Close the door. The heart's gone out of it: why keep it up? Amy! There's someone coming down the road!"

"You—oh, you think the talk is all. I must go— Somewhere out of this house. How can I make you—"

"If—you—do!" She was opening the door wider. "Where do you mean to go? First tell me that. I'll follow and bring you back by force. I will!—"

If this poem is dark, darker still is the mind of its maker, who plays all three roles: the man, the woman, and the narrator. Their equal reality, taken separately or together, is still inferior to that of the poem's author, since "Home Burial" is but one poem among many. The price of his au­tonomy is, ofcourse, in its coloration, and perhaps what you ultimately get out of this poem is not its story but the vision of its ultimately autonomous maker. The characters and the narrator are, as it were, pushing the author out of any hu­manly palatable context: he stands outside, denied re-entry, perhaps not coveting it at all. This is the dialogue's—alias the Life Force's—doing. And this particular posture, this utter autonomy, strikes me as utterly American. Hence this poet's monotone, his pentametric drawl: a signal from a far- distant station. One may liken him to a spacecraft that, as the downward pull of gravity weakens, finds itself nonethe­less in the grip of a different gravitational force: outward. The fuel, though, is still the same: grief and reason. The only thing that conspires against this metaphor of mine is that American spacecraft usually return.

1994

Homage to Marcus Aurelius

I

While antiquity exists for us, we, for antiquity, do not. We never did, and we never will. This rather peculiar state of affairs makes our take on antiquity somewhat invalid. Chron­ologically and, I am afraid, genetically speaking, the distance between us is too immense to imply any causality: we look at antiquity as if out of nowhere. Our vantage point is similar to that of an adjacent galaxy's view of ourselves; it boils down, at best, to a solipsistic fantasy, to a vision. We shouldn't claim more, since nothing is less repeatable than our highly perishable cellular mix. What would an ancient Roman, were he to wake up today, recognize? A cloud on high, blue waves, a woodpile, the horizontality of the bed, the verticality of the wall—but no one by face, even if those he encountered were stark naked. Finding himself in our midst, he at best would have a sensation similar to that of a moon landing, i.e., not knowing what is before him: the future, or the distant past? a landscape or a ruin? These things, after all, have great similarity. Unless, of course, he saw a horseman.

II

The twentieth is perhaps the first century that looks at this statue of a horseman with slight bewilderment. Ours is the century of the automobile, and our kings and presidents drive, or else they are driven. We don't see many horsemen around, save at equestrian shows or races. One exception is perhaps the British consort, Prince Philip, as well as his daughter, Princess Anne. But that has to do not even so much with their royal station as with the name "Philip," which is of Greek origin and means philo-hippoi: lover of horses. It is so much so that Her Royal Highness was married—until recently—to Captain Mark Phillips of the Royal Guards, an accomplished steeplechaser himself. You may even add to that Prince Charles, the heir to the British crown, an avid polo player. But that would be it. You don't see leaders of democracies or, for that matter, the few available tyrannies, mounted. Not even military commanders receiving parades, of which these days there are fewer and fewer. Horsemen have left our precincts almost entirely. To be sure, we still have our mounted police; and there is perhaps no greater Schadenfreude for a New Yorker than to watch one of these Lochinvars in the saddle issuing a trafc ticket to an illegally parked car while his hackney is sniffing at the victim's hood. But when we erect monuments to our leaders and public heroes these days, there are only two feet resting on the pediment. Well, too bad, since a horse used to symbolize quite a lot: empires, virility, nature. Actually, there is a whole etiquette of equestrian statuary, as when a horse, for instance, rears up under the rider, it means that the latter died in battle. If all of its four hooves rest on the pediment, that suggests he died in his four-poster. If one leg is lifted high up in the air, then the implication is that he died of battle-related wounds; if not so high up, that he lived long enough, trotting, as it were, through his existence. You can't do that with a car. Besides, a car, even a Rolls, doesn't bespeak one's uniqueness, nor does it elevate one above the crowd the way a horse does. Roman emperors in particular used to be depicted on horseback not in order to commem­orate their preferred mode of transportation but precisely to convey their superiority: their belonging, often by birth, to the equestrian class. In the parlance of the time, "equestrian" presumably meant "high up" or "highborn." An equus, in other words, in addition to carrying an actual rider, was saddled with a lot of allusions. Above all, it could represent the past, if only because it represented the animal king- dom—and that's where the past came from. Maybe this is what Caligula had in mind after all when he introduced his horse to the Senate. Since antiquity seems to have made this connection already. Since it had far more truck with the past than with the future.

III

What the past and the future have in common is our imag­ination, which conjures them. And our imagination is rooted in our eschatological dread: the dread of thinking that we are without precedence or consequence. The stronger that dread, the more detailed our notion of antiquity or of utopia. Sometimes—actually, all too often—they overlap, as when antiquity appears' to possess an ideal order and abundance of virtues, or when the inhabitants of our utopias stroll through their marble well-governed cities clad in togas. Mar­ble is, to be sure, the perennial building material of our antiquity and utopia alike. On the whole, the color white permeates our imagination all the way through its extreme ends, when its version of the past or the future takes a metaphysical or religious turn. Paradise is white, so are an­cient Greece and Rome. This predilection is not so much an alternative to the darkness of our fancy's source as a metaphor for our ignorance, or simply a reflection of the material our fancy normally employs for its flight: paper. A crumpled paper ball on its way to the wastebasket could easily be taken for a splinter of a civilization, especially with your glasses off.

IV

I first saw this bronze horseman indeed through a windshield of a taxi some twenty years ago, almost in a previous incar­nation. I'd just landed in Rome for the first time, and was on my way to the hotel, where a distant acquaintance of mine had made a reservation. The hotel bore a very un- Roman name: it was called Bolivar. Something equestrian was already in the air, since the great libertador is normally depicted atop his rearing horse. Did he die in battle? I couldn't remember. Presently we were stuck in the evening traffic, in what looked like a cross between a railroad station's square and the end of a soccer game. I wanted to ask the driver how far we had to go, but my Italian was good only for "Where are we?" "Piazza Venezia," he blurted, nodding to the left. "Campidoglio," a nod to the right. And with another nod: "Marco Aurelio," followed by what was no doubt an energetic reference to the traffic. I looked to the right. "Marco Aurelio," I repeated to myself, and felt as if two thousand years were collapsing, dissolving in my mouth thanks to the Italian's familiar form of this Emperor's name. Which always had for me an epic, indeed imperial, sway, sounding like a caesura-studded, thundering announcement by history's own majordomo: Marcus!—caesura—Aurelius! The Roman! Emperor! Marcus! Aurelius! This is how I knew him in high school, where the majordomo was our o^ stumpy Sarah Isaakovna, a very Jewish and very resigned lady in her fifties, who taught us history. Yet for all her resignation, when it came to uttering the names of Roman emperors, she'd straighten up, assuming an attitude of gran­deur, and practically shout, well above our heads, into the peeling-off stucco of the classroom wall adorned with its portrait of Stalin: Caius Julius Caesar! Caesar Octavian Au­gustus! Caesar Tiberius! Caesar Vespasianus Flavius! The Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius! And then—Marcus Au- relius! It was as though the names were bigger than she herself, as though they were swelling up from inside to be released into a far greater space than her own body or, for that matter, the room, the country, the times themselves could contain. She reveled in those odd-sounding foreign names, in their unpredictable succession of vowels and con­sonants, and that was, frankly, contagious. A child loves this sort of thing: strange words, strange sounds, and that's why, I suppose, history is best taught in childhood. At the age of twelve one may not grasp the intrigue, but a strange sound suggests an alternative reality. "Marcus Aurelius" certainly did to me, and that reality proved to be quite vast: larger, in fact, than that Emperor's own. Now apparently came time to domesticate that reality; which is why, I suppose, I was in Rome. "Marco Aurelio, eh?" I said to myself, and turned to the driver: "Where?" He pointed to the top of a huge waterfall of marble steps leading uphill, now right in front of us, and as the car sharply swerved to gain some minuscule advantage in the sea of traffic, I momentarily beheld a floodlit pair of horse's ears, a bearded head, and a protruding arm. Then the sea swallowed us up. Half an hour later, at the entrance to the Bolivar, my valet pack in one hand, my money in another, I asked the driver in a sudden surge of fraternity and gratitude—after all, he was the first person I had spoken with in Rome and he had also brought me to my hotel and didn't even overcharge me, or so it seemed—his name. "Marco," he said, and drove off.

v

The most definitive feature of antiquity is our absence. The more available its debris and the longer you stare at it, the more you are denied entry. Marble negates you particularly well, though bronze and papyri don't fall too far behind. Reaching us intact or in fragments, these things strike us, of course, with their durability and tempt us to assemble them, fragments especially, into a coherent whole, but they were not meant to reach us. They were, and still are, for themselves. For man's appetite for the future is as limited as his own ability to consume time, or as grammar, this first casualty of every discourse on the subject of the hereafter, shows. At best, these marbles, bronzes, and papyri were meant to outlast their subjects and their makers, but not themselves. Their existence was functional, which is to say, of limited purpose. Time is no jigsaw puzzle, because it is made up of perishing pieces. And though perhaps objects- inspired, the idea of the afterlife wasn't an option until quite late. Anyhow, what is before us are the leftovers of necessity or vanity, i.e., ofconsiderations always nearsighted. Nothing exists for the future's sake; and the ancients couldn't in nature regard themselves as the ancients. Nor should we bill our­selves as their tomorrow. We won't be admitted into antiq­uity: it being well inhabited—in fact, overpopulated—as it was. There are no vacancies. No point in busting your knuckles against marble.

VI

If we find the lives of Roman emperors highly absorbing, it is because we are highly self-absorbed creatures. To say the least, we regard ourselves as the centers of our own uni­verses, varying to be sure in width, but universes nonethe­less, and as such having centers. The difference between an empire and a family, a network offriends, a web of romantic entanglements, a field of expertise, etc., is a difference in volume, not in structure. Also, because the Caesars are so much removed from us in time, the complexity of their pre­dicament appears to be graspable, shrunk, as it were, by the perspective of two millennia to almost a fairy-tale scale, with its wonders_ and its naivete. Our address books are their empires, especially after hours. One reads Suetonius or Ae- lius or, for that matter, Psellus, for archetypes even if all one runs is a bike shop or a household of two. Somehow it is easier to identify with a Caesar than with a consul, or praetor, or lictor, or slave, even though that is what one's actual station in the modern reality corresponds to. This has nothing to do with self-aggrandizement or aspirations but is due to the understandable attraction of king-size (so to speak), clear-cut versions of compromised virtue, vice, or self-delusion rather than their fuzzy, inarticulate originals next door or, for that matter, in the mirror. That's why, perhaps, one looks at their likenesses, at the marbles es­pecially. For in the end, a human oval can accommodate only so much. You can't have more than two eyes or less than one mouth; surrealism wasn't yet invented and African masks were not yet in vogue. (Or maybe the Romans clung so much to Greek standards precisely because they were.) So in the end you are bound to recognize yourself in one of them. For there is no Caesar without a bust, as there is no swan without a reflection. Clean-shaven, bearded, bald, or well coiffed, they all return a vacant, pupil-free, marble stare, pretty much like that of a passport photo or the mug shot of a criminal. You won't know what they have been up to; and putting these faces to their stories is what, perhaps, makes them indeed archetypal. It also moves them some­what closer to us, since, being depicted fairly often, they, no doubt, must also have developed a degree of detachment vis-a-vis their physical reality. In any case, to them a bust or a statue was indeed what a photograph is to us, and the most "photographed" person would obviously be a Caesar. There were, of course, others: their wives, senators, consuls, praetors, great athletes or beauties, actors and orators. On the whole, though, judging by what has survived, men were chiseled more often than women, which presumably reflects who controlled the purse as much as the society's ethos. By either standard, a Caesar would be a winner. In the Capi- toline Museum you can shuffle for hours through chambers filled up practically to the rafters with rows and rows of marble portraits of Caesars, emperors, dictators, augusti hoarded there from all over what used to be the place they ran. The longer one stayed on the job, the more numerous would be one's "photographs." One would be depicted in one's youth, maturity, decrepitude; sometimes the distance between one's busts is no more, it would seem, than a couple of years. It appears that marble portraiture was an industry and, with its calibrations of decay, something of a mortuary one; the rooms strike you in the end as not unlike a library housing an encyclopedia of beheading. It is hard to "read," though, because marble is notoriously blank. In a sense, what it also has in common with photography—or, more accu­rately, with what photographs used to be—is that it is lit­erally monochrome. For one thing, it renders everyone blond. Whereas in their real lives, some of the models—

Caesars' wives, to say the least, since many of them came from Asia Minor—were not. Yet one is almost grateful to marble for its lack of pigmentation, the way one is grateful to a black-and-white photograph, for it unleashes one's fan­tasy, one's intuition, so that viewing becomes an act of com­plicity: like reading.

VII

And there are ways of turning viewing into reading. When I was a boy I used to frequent a big museum in my home­town. It had a vast collection of Greek and Roman marbles, not to mention those by Canova and Thorvaldsen. I'd noticed that, depending on the time of day as well as the season, those carved features would wear different expressions, and I wondered what they would look like after hours. But the museum closed at 6 p.m., presumably because the marbles were not accustomed to electricity. I couldn't do much about that. In general, one can't do much about statues anyway. One can circle around them, squint at them from different angles; but that's that. With busts, though, one can go a bit further, as I discovered inadvertently. One day, staring at the little white face of some early Roman fanciulla, I lifted my hand, presumably to smooth my hair, and thus ob­structed the single source of light coming to her from the ceiling. At once her facial expression changed. I moved my hand a bit to the side: it changed again. I began moving both my arms rather frantically, casting each time a different shadow upon her features: the face came to life. Eventually, of course, I was interrupted by the shrieks of the guard. He ran toward me, but looking at his screaming face, I thought it less animated than that of a little marble girl from B.C.

viii

Of all Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius gets the best press. Historians love him, and so do philosophers. It is to the latter, though, that Marcus Aurelius owes his good standing to this day, since this discipline proved to be more durable than the Roman Empire or the aspects of one's statecraft in it. Actually, historians should be perhaps less enthusiastic about him than they are, because a couple of times he came very close to depriving them of their subject, particularly by designating his son, the really moronic Commodus, to be his heir. But historians are a sturdy lot; they've digested things much harder than Commodus' idea of renaming Rome after himself. They could live with—as well as live in— Commodiopolis and research the history of the Commodian empire. As for philosophers, they were, and some still are, enamored of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations perhaps not so much for the depth of its probing as for the respectability the discipline itself gained in the royal embrace. Politics is far more often the pursuit of philosophers than philosophy is the sideline of kings. Besides, for Marcus Aurelius, phi­losophy was a lot more than a sideline: it was, as we'd say today, a therapy, or, as Boethius put it later, a consolation. He wasn't a great philosopher, nor was he a visionary; not even a sage; his Meditations is at once a melancholy and repetitive book. The Stoic doctrine at the time had become a doctrine indeed, and though he did write in Greek, he is no match for Epictetus. Most likely a Roman emperor was drawn to this kind oflanguage out of respect for the doctrine's origins, and also perhaps out of nostalgia, in order not to forget the language of civilized discourse; the language, after all, of his youth and pursuits more noble perhaps than those at hand. Add to that, if you will, possible considerations of secrecy, and the benefit of detachment: the purpose and the method of the discipline itself, enhanced here by the very means of expression. Not to mention that his reign simply happened to coincide with a substantial revival of Greek culture in Rome, the first Renaissance, if you will, owing no doubt to the long era of considerable stability historians dubbed the "Pax Romana." And historians love Marcus Au- relius precisely because he was the last guardian ofthat Pax. Because his reign effectively and neatly concluded a period of Roman history lasting nearly two centuries that began with Augustus and, to all intents and purposes, ended with our man. They love him because he is the end of the line, and a very coherent one at that: which, for historians, is a luxury. Marcus was a highly conscientious ruler; perhaps because he was appointed to the job—not anointed; because he was adopted into the dynasty, not born to it. And both historians and philosophers love him precisely for carrying out so well the commission for which he thought himself ill suited, and was in fact reluctant to accept. To them, his predicament presumably echoes in some fashion their own: he is, as it were, a model for those who have to go in this life against their calling. In any case, the Roman Empire gained a lot more from his dual loyalty to duty and philosophy than did the Stoic doctrine (which, in its own turn, comes with Marcus to the end of its own line: to ethics). So much so that it's been maintained, often vigorously, that this sort of inner split is a good recipe for ruling. That it's better if one's spiritual yearnings have their own outlet and don't interfere too much with one's actions. This is what the whole philosopher-king business is all about, isn't it? When your metaphysics get short shrift. As for Marcus, however, he dreaded this pros­pect from the very beginning, dreaded being summoned to Hadrian's court, for all its comforts and bright perspectives. Perhaps precisely because of those; as a true product of the Greek doctrine, all he aspired to was "the camp-bed and skin coverlet." Philosophy for him was a manner of dressing as much as it was a manner of discourse: the texture of existence, not just a mental pursuit. Picture him as a Bud­dhist monk, then; you won't be much off target, since the "way oflife" was the essence ofStoicism as well; emphatically so, we may add. The young Marcus must have been appre­hensive of the royal adoption for more reasons than Hadrian's sexual predilections: it meant a wardrobe as different as the accompanying mental diet. That he went for it had to do, one imagines, less with royal pressure than with our man's own misgivings about his intellectual fortitude: apparently it's easier to be a king than a philosopher. Anyhow, it came to pass, and here's a monument. The good question, though, is: To whom? To a philosopher? Or to a king? To both? Perhaps to neither.

IX

A monument is by and large a vertical affair, a symbolic departure from the general horizontality of existence, an antithesis to spatial monotony. A monument never actually departs from this horizontality—well, nothing does—but rather rests upon it, punctuating it at the same time like an exclamation mark. In principle, a monument is a contradic­tion. In this way, it resembles its most frequent subject: a human being, equally endowed with vertical and horizontal properties, but eventually settling for the latter. The dura­bility of the material a monument is usually made of—mar­ble, bronze, increasingly cast-iron, and now even concrete —highlights the contradictory nature of the undertaking even further, especially if a monument's subject is a great battle, a revolution, or a natural disaster—i.e., an event that took a great toll and was momentary. Yet even if the subject is an abstract ideal or the consequence of a momentous event, there is a detectable clash of time frames and notions of viability, not to mention textures. Perhaps given the mate­rial's aspiration for permanence, the best subject for a mon­ument is indeed destruction. Zadkin's statue of bombed-out Rotterdam immediately comes to mind: its verticality is func­tional, since it points at the catastrophe's very source. Also, what could be more horizontal than the Netherlands? And it occurs to one that the monument owes its genealogy to great planes, to the idea of something being seen from afar—whether in a spatial or a temporal sense. That it is of nomadic origin, for at least in a temporal sense we are all nomads. A man as aware of the futility of all human endeavor as our philosopher-king would be, of course, the first to object to bejng turned into a public statue. On the other hand, twenty years of what appears to have been practically nonstop frontier combat, taking him all over the place, ef­fectively turned him into a nomad. Besides, here's his horse.

X

The Eternal City is a city of hills, though. Of seven of them, actually. Some are natural, some artificial, but negotiating them is an ordeal in any case, especially on foot and especially in summer, although the adjacent seasons' temperatures don't fall too far behind. Add to that the Emperor's rather precarious health; add to that its not getting any better with age. Hence, a horse. The monument sitting at the top of the Capitoline actually fills up the vacuum left by Marcus' actual mounted figure, which, some two thousand years ago, oc­cupied that space quite frequently, not to say routinely. On the way to the Forum, as the saying goes. Actually, on his way from it. Were it not for Michelangelo's pedestal, the monument would be a footprint. Better yet, a hoofprint. The Romans, superstitious like all Italians, maintain that when the bronze Marcus hits the ground, the end of the world will occur. Whatever the origin of this superstition, it stands to reason if one bears in mind that Marcus' motto was Equa­nimity. The word suggests balance, composure under pres­sure, evenness of mental disposition; literally: equation of the animus, i.e., keeping the soul—and thus the world—in check. Give this formula of the Stoic posture a possible mis­spelling and you'll get the monument's definition: Equi- nimity. The horseman tilts, though, somewhat, as if leaning toward his subjects, and his hand is stretched out in a gesture that is a cross between a greeting and a blessing. So much so that for a while some insisted that this was not Marcus Aurelius but Constantine, who converted Rome to Christi­anity. For that, however, the horseman's face is too serene, too free of zeal or ardor, too uninvolved. It is the face of detachment, not of love—and detachment is precisely what Christianity never could manage. No, this is no Constantine, and no Christian. The face is devoid of any sentiment; it is a postscript to passions, and the lowered corners ofthe mouth bespeak the lack of illusion. Had there been a smile, you could think perhaps of the Buddha; but the Stoics knew too much about physics to toy with the finality of human exis­tence in any fashion. The face shines with the bronze's orig­inal gold, but the hair and the beard have oxidized and turned green, the way one turns gray. All thought aspires to the condition of metal; and the bronze denies you any entry, including interpretation or touch. What you've got here, then, is detachment per se. And out ofthis detachment the Emperor leans toward you slightly, extending his right hand either to greet you or to bless you—which is to say, acknowledge your presence. For where he is, there is no you, and vice versa. The left hand theoretically holds the reins, which are either missing now or were never there in the first place: a horse would obey this rider no matter what.

Especially if it represented Nature. For he represents Rea­son. The face is clearly of the Antonine dynasty, though he wasn't born into it but adopted. The hair, the beard, the somewhat bulging eyes and slightly apoplectic posture are those of his stepfather turned father-in-law and his very own son. Small wonder that it is so hard to tell the three of them apart among the Ostia marbles. But, as we know nowadays, a period's fashion may easily beat the genes. Remember the Beatles. Besides, he revered Antoninus Pius enough to em­ulate him in a variety of ways; his appearance could be simply that attitude's spin-off. Also, the sculptor, being a contem­porary, might have wished to convey the sense ofcontinuum perceived by the historians of the stepfather's and the step­son's reigns:_a sense that Marcus himself, needless to say, sought to create. Or else the sculptor just tried to produce a generic portrait of the era, of the perfect ruler, and what we've got here is the fusion of the two best emperors the realm had had since the murder of Domitian—the way he did the horse, whose identity we don't ponder. In all prob­ability, however, this is the author of the Meditations him­self: the face and the torso slightly tilted toward his subjects fit extremely well the text of that melancholy book, which itselfleans somewhat toward the reality of human existence, in the attitude not so much of a judge as of an umpire. In this sense this monument is a statue to a statue: it's hard to picture a Stoic in motion.

XI

The Eternal City resembles a gigantic old brain that long ago gave up any interest in the world—it being too graspable a proposition—and settled for its own crevasses and folds. Negotiating their narrows, where even a thought about your­self is too cumbersome, or their expanses, where the concept of the universe itself appears puny, you feel like a worn-out needle shuffling the grooves of a vast record—to the center and back—extracting with your soles the tune that the days of yore hum to the present. This is the real His Master's Voice for you, and it turns your heart into a dog. History is not a discipline but something that is not yours—which is the main definition of beauty. Hence, the sentiment, for it is not going to love you back. It is a one-way affair, and you recognize its platonic nature in this city instantly. The closer you get to the object of your desire, the more marble or bronze it gets, as the natives' fabled profiles scatter around like animated coins escaped from some broken terra-cotta jar. It is as though here time puts, between bedsheets and mattress, its own carbon paper—since time mints as much as it types. The moment you leave the Bolivar or the equally smelly yet cheaper Nerva, you hit Foro Trajano with its triumphant column tightly wrapped in conquered Dacians and soaring like a mast above the marble ice floe of broken pillars, capitals, and cornices. Now this is the domain ofstray cats, reduced lions in this city of reduced Christians. The huge white slabs and blocks are too unwieldy and random to arrange them in a semblance of order or to drag them away. They are left here to absorb the sun, or to represent "antiquity." In a sense they do; their ill-matching shapes are a democracy, this place is still a forum. And on his way from it, just across the road, beyond pines and cypresses, atop the Capitoline Hill, stands the man who made the fusion of republic and imperial rule probable. He has no company: virtue, like a malady, alienates. For a split second, it is still a.d. 176 or thereabouts, and the brain ponders the world.

XII

Marcus was a good ruler and a lonely man. In his line of work, loneliness, of course, comes with the territory; but he was lonelier than most. Meditations gives you a greater taste of that than his correspondence; yet it is just a taste. The meal had many courses and was pretty heavy. To begin with, he knew that his life had been subverted. For the ancients, philosophy wasn't a by-product of life but the other way around, and Stoicism was particularly exacting. Perhaps we should momentarily dispense here with the very word "philosophy," for Stoicism, its Roman version especially, shouldn't be characterized as love for knowledge. It was, rather, a lifelong experiment in endurance, and a man was his own guinea pig: he was not a probing instrument, he was an answering instrument. By the time of Marcus, the doc­trine's knowledge was to be lived rather than loved. Its ma­terialist monism, its cosmogony, its logic, and its criterion of truth (the perception that irresistibly compels the subject to assent to it as true) were already in place, and for a phi­losopher, life's purpose was to prove the validity of this knowledge by applying it to reality till the end of his days. In other words, a Stoic's life was a study in ethics, since ethics buys nothing except osmosis. And Marcus knew that his experiment was interrupted, or qualified, to a degree he himself wouldn't be able to comprehend; worse still, that his findings—provided there were any—could have no ap­plication. He believed Plato, but not to this extent. At any rate, he would be the first to square the common good with individual unhappiness, and that's what Meditations is per­haps all about: a postscript to the Republic. He knew that as a philosopher he was finished: that concentration was out, that all he could hope for was some time for sporadic con­templation. That the best his life would amount to would be a few glimpses of eternity, a true surmise now and then. He accepted that, for the sake of the common good no doubt, but hence Meditations' overriding melancholy or, if you will, pessimism—all the more deep because the man definitely suspected that there was rather more to the story. Medita­tions is thus a patchy book, nurtured by interference. It is a disjointed, rambling internal monologue, with occasional flashes of pedantry as well as of genius. It shows you what he might have been rather than what he was: his vector, rather than an attained destination. It appears to have been jotted down amid the hubbub and babel of this or that mil­itary campaign, successful as they might have been—by the campfire, indeed, and the soldier's cloak played the Stoic philosopher's body coverlet. In other words, it was done in spite of—or, if you will, against—history, of which his des­tiny was trying to make him a part. A pessimist he perhaps was, but certainly not a determinist. That's why he was a good ruler, why the mixture of republic and imperial rule under him didn't look like a sham. (One may even argue that the larger democracies of the modern world show an increasing preference for his formula. Good examples are contagious, too; but virtue, as we said, alienates. Not to mention that time, wasting its carbon paper on subjects, seems to have very little left for rulers.) To say the least, he was a good caretaker: he didn't lose what he inherited; and if the empire under him didn't expand, it was just as well; as Augustus said, "Enough is enough." For somebody in charge ofan entity so vast and for so long (practically thirty- three years, from a.d. 147, when his father-in-law con­ferred upon him the powers of emperorship, to his death in a.d. 181 near the would-be Vienna), he has surprisingly little blood on his hands. He would rather pardon than punish those who rebelled against him; those who fought him, he would rather subdue than destroy. The laws he made ben­efited the most powerless: widows, slaves, juniors, although it must be said that he was the first to introduce the double standard in prosecuting criminal offenses by members of the Senate (the office of special prosecutor was his invention). He used the state's purse sparingly and, being abstemious himself, tried to encourage this in others. On several occa­sions, when the empire needed money, he sold imperial jewels rather than hit his subjects up for new taxes. Nor did he build anything extravagant, no Pantheon or Colosseum. In the first place, because those already existed; second, because his sojourn in Egypt was quite brief and he didn't go beyond Alexandria, unlike Agrippa and unlike Titus and Hadrian, to have his mind fired up by the gigantic, desert- fitting scale of Egyptian edifices. Besides, he didn't like cir- cenze that much, and when he had to attend a show, he is reported to have read or written or been briefed during the performance. It was he, however, who introduced to the Roman Circus the safety net for acrobats.

XIII

Antiquity is above all a visual concept, generated by objects whose age escapes definition. The Latin anticum is essen­tially a more drastic term for "old," deriving from the equally Latin ante, which means "before," and used to be applied presumably to things Greek. "Beforishness," then. As for the Greeks themselves, their arche denotes beginning or genesis, the moment when something occurs for the first time. "Firstness," then? Herein, in any case, lies a substan­tial distinction between the Romans and the Greeks—a dis­tinction owing its existence partly to the Greeks having fewer objects at their disposal to fathom the provenance of, partly to their general predilection for dwelling on origins. The former, in fact, may very well be an explanation for the latter, since next to archaeology there is only geology. As for our own version ofantiquity, it eagerly swallows both the Greeks and the Romans, yet, if worse comes to worse, might cite the Latin precedent in its defense. Antiquity to us is a vast chronological jumble, filled with historical, mythical, and divine beings, interrelated among themselves by marble and also because a high percentage of the depicted mortals claim divine descendance or were deified. This last aspect, re­sulting in the practically identical scant attire of those mar­bles and in the confusion on our part of attributing fragments (did this splintered arm belong to a mortal or to a deity?), is worth noticing. The blurring ofdistinctions between mor­tals and deities was habitual with the ancients, with the Roman Caesars in particular. While the Greeks on the whole were interested in lineage, the Romans were after promo­tion. The target, however, was the same: Celestial Mansions, yet vanity or boosting the ruler's authority played a rather small part in this. The whole point of identifying with the gods lies not so much in the notion of their omniscience as in the sense that their extreme carnality is fully matched by the extremes of their detachment. To begin with, a ruler's own margin of detachment would make him identify with a god (carnality, of course, would be Nero or Caligula's short­cut). By acquiring a statue, he'd boost that margin consid­erably, and it's best if it's done in the course of one's lifetime, since marble reduces both the expectations of the subjects and the model's own willingness to deviate from manifest perfection. It sets one free, as it were, and freedom is the province of deities. Putting it very broadly, the marble and mental vista that we call antiquity is a great repository of shed and shredded skins, a landscape after the departure, if you will; a mask offreedom, a jumble of discarded boosters.

XIV

If Marcus indeed hated anything, and was proscriptive about it, that was gladiatorial show. Some say it was because he detested blood sports, so vulgar and non-Greek, because siding with a team would be for him the beginning of par­tiality. Others insist that it had to do with his wife, Faustina, who, for all her thirteen children—only six survived—was remarkably promiscuous for an empress. Among her nu­merous affairs, these others single out a particular gladiator who, they claim, was the real father of Commodus. But nature works in mysterious ways; an apple often rolls far from the tree, especially if that tree grows on a slope. Com­modus was both a rotten apple and its slope. Actually, as far as the imperial fortunes were concerned, he was a precipice. And perhaps an inability to grasp nature's mysterious ways was the source of Faustina's reputation (though if Marcus had it against the gladiators because of Faustina, he should have proscribed also against sailors, pantomime actors, gen­erals, and so forth). Marcus himself would make light of this. Once, approached with these rumors and the suggestion that he get rid of her, he retorted: "If we send our wife away, we must give back her dowry, too." The dowry here was the empire itself, since Faustina was the daughter of Antoninus Pius. On the whole, he stood by her unswervingly and, judging by the honors he bestowed upon her when she died, perhaps even loved her. She was, it appears, one of those heavy main courses whose taste you barely sample in the Meditations. In general, Caesar's wife is beyond reproach and suspicion. And perhaps precisely in order to uphold this attitude as well as to save Faustina's reputation Marcus de­parted from the nearly two-century-old tradition of selecting an heir to the throne and passed the crown to what he thus asserted to be his own flesh and blood. At any rate, it was

Faustina's. Apparently his reverence for his father-in-law was enormous and he simply couldn't believe that someone in whose veins ran the blood of the Antonines could be all that bad. Or perhaps he regarded Faustina as a force of nature; and nature for a Stoic philosopher was the ultimate authority. If anything, nature taught him indifference and a sense of proportion; otherwise his life would have been pure hell; Meditations strings out solipsism like glacial debris. Toward the wrong and atrocious, Marcus was not so much forgiving as dismissive. Which is to say that he was impartial rather than just and that his impartiality was the product not of his mind's fairness but of his mind's appetite for the infinite; in particular, for impartiality's own limits. This would stun his subjects no less than it does his historians, for history is the domain of the partial. And as his subjects chided Marcus for his attitude toward gladiatorial shows, historians jumped on him for his persecution of Christians. It is unclear, of course, how much Marcus was informed about the Christian creed, but it is easy to imagine him finding its metaphysics myopic and its ethics detestable. From a Stoic point of view, a god with whom you trade in virtue to obtain eternal favors wouldn't be worth a prayer. For somebody like Marcus, virtue's value lay precisely in its being a gamble, not an investment. Intellectually, to say the least, he had very little reason to favor the Christians; still less could he do so as a ruler, faced at the time with wars, plague, uprisings—and a disobedient minority. Besides, he didn't introduce new laws against the Christians; those of Hadrian, and those of Trajan before him, were quite enough. It is obvious that, following his beloved Epictetus, Marcus regarded a philos­opher, i.e., himself, as the missionary of Divine Providence to mankind, i.e., to his own subjects. You are welcome to quibble with his notion of it; one thing is quite clear, though: it was far more open-ended than the Christian version. Blessed are the partial, for they shall inherit the earth.

Take white, ocher, and blue; add to that a bit of green and a lot of geometry. You'll get the formula time has picked for its backdrop in these parts, since it is not without vanity, especially once it assumes the shape of history or of an in­dividual. It does so out of its prurient interest in finality, in its reductive ability, if you will, for which it has numerous guises, including the human brain or the human eye. So you shouldn't be surprised, especially if you were born here, to find yourself one day surrounded by the white-cum-ocher, trapezoid square with the white-cum-blue trapeze overhead. The former is human-made (actually, by Michelangelo), the latter is heaven-made, and you may recognize it more read­ily. However, neither is of use to you, since you are green: the shade of oxidized bronze. And if the cumulus white in the oxygen blue overhead is still preferable to the balus­trade's marble calves and well-tanned Tiburtine chests be­low, it is because clouds remind you ofyour native antiquity: because they are the future of any architecture. Well, you've been around for nearly two thousand years, and you ought to know. Perhaps they, the clouds, are indeed the only true antiquity there is, if only because among them you are not a bronze.

Ave, Caesar. How do you feel now, among barbarians? For we are barbarians to you, if only because we speak neither Greek nor Latin. We are also afraid of death far more than you ever were, and our herd instinct is stronger than the one for self-preservation. Sound familiar? Maybe it's our numbers, Caesar, or maybe it's the number of our goods. We sure feel that by dying we stand to lose far more than you ever had, empire or no empire. To you, if I remember correctly, birth was an entrance, death an exit, life a little island in the ocean of particles. To us, you see, it's all a bit more melodramatic. What spooks us, I guess, is that an entrance is always guarded, whereas an exit isn't. We can't conceive of dwindling into particles again: after hoarding so many goods, that's unpalatable. Status's inertia, I guess, or fear of the elemental freedom. Be that as it may, Caesar, you are among barbarians. We are your true Parthians, Mar- comanni, and Quadi, because nobody came in your stead, and we inhabit the earth. Some of us go even further, barging into your antiquity, supplying you with definitions. You can't respond, can't bless, can't greet or quell us with your out­stretched right hand—the hand whose fingers still remem­ber scribbling your Meditations. If that book hasn't civilized us, what will? Perhaps they billed you as the Philosopher- King precisely to dodge its spell by underscoring your uniqueness. For theoretically what's unique isn't valid, Cae­sar, and you were unique. Still, you were no philosopher- king—you'd be the first to wince at this label. You were what the mixture of power and inquiry made you: a postscript to both, a uniquely autonomous entity, almost to the point of pathology. Hence your emphasis on ethics, for supreme power exempts one from the moral norm practically by def­inition, and so does supreme knowledge. You got both for the price of one, Caesar; that's why you had to be so bloody ethical. You wrote an entire book to keep your soul in check, to steel yourself for daily conduct. But was it really ethics that you were after, Caesar? Wasn't it your extraordinary appetite for the infinite that drove you to the most minute self-scrutiny, since you considered yourself a fragment, no matter how tiny, of the Whole, of the Universe—and the Universe, you maintained, changes constantly. So whom were you checking, Marcus? Whose morality did you try and, for all I know, manage to prove? Small wonder, then, that you are not surprised to find yourself now among the barbarians; small wonder that you always were far less afraid of them than of yourself—since you were afraid of yourself far more than of death. "Reflect that the chief source of all evils to man," says Epictetus, "as well as of baseness and cowardice, is not death but the fear of death." But you knew also that no man owns his future—or, for that matter, his past. That all one stands to lose by dying is the day when it happens—the day's remaining part, to be precise—and in time's eye, still less. The true pupil of Zeno, weren't you? At any rate, you wouldn't allow the prospect of nonbeing to color your being, Universe or no Universe. The eventual dance of particles, you held, should have no bearing on the animated body, not to mention on its reason. You were an island, Caesar, or at least your ethics were, an island in the primordial and—pardon the expression—postmordial ocean of free atoms. And your statue just marks the place on the map of the species' history where this island once stood: uninhabited, before submerging. The waves of doctrine and of creed—of the Stoic doctrine and the Christian creed— have closed over your head, claiming you as their own At­lantis. The truth, though, is that you never were either's. You were just one of the best men that ever lived, and you were obsessed with your duty because you were obsessed with virtue. Because it's harder to master than the alternative and because, if the universal design had been evil, the world would not exist. Some will point out no doubt that the doc­trine and the creed came before and after you, but it's not history that defines the good. To be sure, time, conscious of its monotony, calls forth men to tell its yesterday from its tomorrow. You, Caesar, were good because you didn't.

XVII

I saw him for the last time a few years ago, on a wet winter night, in the company of a stray Dalmatian. I was returning by taxi to my hotel after one of the most disastrous evenings in my entire life. The next morning I was leaving Rome for the States. I was drunk. The traffic moved with the speed one wishes for one's funeral. At the foot of the Capitol I asked the driver to stop, paid, and got out of the car. The hotel was not far away and I guess I intended to continue on foot; instead, I climbed the hill. It was raining, not terribly hard but enough to turn the floodlights of the square—nay! trapeze—into fizzing-off Alka-Seltzer pellets. I hid myself under the conservatory's arcade and looked around. The square was absolutely empty and the rain was taking a crash course in geometry. Presently I discovered I was not alone: a middle-sized Dalmatian appeared out of nowhere and qui­etly sat down a couple offeet away. Its sudden presence was so oddly comforting that momentarily I felt like offering it one of my cigarettes. I guess this had to do with the pattern of its spots; the dog's hide was the only place in the whole piazza free ofhuman intervention. For a while we both stared at the horseman's statue. "The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now molds the figure of a horse, then melting this down uses the material for a tree, next for a man, next for something else; and each of these things subsists for a very short time. Yet it is no hard­ship for a box to be broken up, as it was none for it to be nailed together." This is what a boy memorized at the age of fifteen and remembered thirty-five years later. Still, this horse didn't melt down, nor did this man. Apparently the universal nature was satisfied with this version of its sub­stance and cast it in bronze. And suddenly—presumably because of the rain and the rhythmic pattern of Michelan­gelo's pilasters and arches—all got blurred, and against that blur, the shining statue, devoid of any geometry, seemed to be moving. Not at great speed, and not out of this place; but enough for the Dalmatian to leave my side and follow the bronze progress.

XVIII

As absorbing as Roman antiquity appears to be, perhaps we should be a bit more careful with our retrospective proclivity. What if man-made chronology is but a self-fulfilling fallacy, a means of obscuring the backwardness of one's own intel­ligence? What if it's just a way of justifying the snail's pace of the species' evolution? And what if the very notion of such evolution is a lie? Ultimately, what if this good old sense of history is just the dormant majority's self-defense against the alert minority? What if our concept of antiquity, for example, is but the switching off of an alarm clock? Let's take this horseman and his book. To begin with, Meditations wasn't written in the second century A. D., if only because its author wasn't going by the Christian calendar. In fact, the time of its composition is of no relevance, since its subject is pre­cisely ethics. Unless, of course, humanity takes a special pride in having wasted fifteen centuries before Marcus' in­sights were reiterated by Spinoza. Maybe we are just better at counting than at thinking, or else we mistake the former for the latter? Why is it that we are always so interested in knowing when truth was uttered for the first time? Isn't this sort of archaeology in itself an indication that we are living a lie? In any case, if Meditations is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins. If only because we believe that ethics has the future. Well, perhaps our retrospective ability should indeed be reined in somewhat, lest it become all-consuming. For ifnothing else, ethics is the criterion ofthe present—perhaps the only one there is, since it turns every yesterday and tomorrow into now. It is precisely that sort of arrow that at every moment of its flight is immobile. Meditations is no existential manual and it wasn't written for posterity. Nor should we, for that matter, be interested in the identity of its author or promote him to the rank of philosopher-king: ethics is an equalizer; thus the author here is Everyman. His concept of duty cannot be attributed to his royal overdose of it, because he wasn't the only emperor around; neither can his resignation of the imperial origin, because one is able to empathize with it quite readily. Nor can we put it down to his philosophic training—and for the same reasons: there were too many philosophers apart from Marcus, and on the other hand, most of us are not Stoics. What if his sense of duty and his resignation were, in the first place, products of his individual temperament, of the melancholic disposition, ifone wants to be precise; combined perhaps with the man's aging? There are, after all, only four known humors; so at least the melancholies among us can take this book to heart and skip the bit about the historical perspective nobody pos­sesses anyhow. As for the sanguinics, cholerics, and phleg- matics, they, too, perhaps should admit that the melancholic version of ethics is accommodating enough for them to mar­vel at its pedigree and chronology. Perhaps short of com­pulsory Stoic indoctrination, society may profit by making a detectable melancholic streak a prerequisite for anyone as­piring to rule it. To this extent, a democracy can afford what an empire could. And on top of that, one shouldn't call the Stoic acceptance of the perceptible reality resignation. Se­renity would be more apt, given the ratio between man and the subjects of his attention, or—as the case may be—vice versa. A grain of sand can't resign itself to the desert; and perhaps what's ultimately good about melancholies is that they seldom get hysterical. By and large, they are quite reasonable, and, "what is reasonable," as Marcus once said, "is consequently social." Did he say this in Greek, to fit your idea of antiquity?

XIX

Of all Roman poets, Marcus knew best and preferred Seneca. Partly because Seneca, too, was of Spanish origin, sickly, and a great statesman; mainly, of course, because he was a Stoic. As for Catullus, Marcus would find him no doubt too hot and choleric. Ovid for him would be licentious and ex­cessively ingenious, Virgil too heavy-handed and perhaps even servile, Propertius too obsessive and passionate. Hor­ace? Horace would seem to be the most congenial author for Marcus, what with his equipoise and attachment to the Greek monody. Yet perhaps our Emperor thought him too quirky, or too diverse and unsteady as well: in short, too much of a poet. In any case, there is almost no trace of Horace in Meditations, nor for that matter of the greatest among the Latins, Lucretius—another you would think a natural choice for Marcus. But then perhaps a Stoic didn't want to be depressed by an Epicurean. On the whole, Mar­cus seems to have been far more fluent in Greek literature, preferring dramatists and philosophers to poets of course, though snatches from Homer, Agathon, and Menander crop up in his book quite frequently. Come to think of it, if any­thing makes antiquity a coherent concept, it is the volume of its literature. The library of someone like Marcus would contain a hundred or so authors; another hundred perhaps would be hearsay, a rumor. Those were the good old days indeed: antiquity or no antiquity. And even that rumored writing would be limited to two languages: Greek and Latin. If you were he, if you were a Roman emperor, would you in the evening, to take your mind off your cares, read a Latin author if you had a choice? Even if he was Horace? No; too close for comfort. You'd pick up a Greek—because that's what you'd never be. Because a Greek, especially a philos­opher, is in your eyes a more genuine item than yourself, since he knew no Latin. If only because of that, he was less a relativist than you, who consider yourself practically a mon­grel. So if he were a Stoic, you must take heed. You even may go so far as to take up a stylus yourself. Otherwise you might not fit into someone's notion of antiquity.

XX

A stray Dalmatian trotting behind the bronze horseman hears something strange, sounding somewhat familiar but muffled by rain. He accelerates slightly and, having over­taken the statue, lifts up his muzzle, hoping to grasp what's coming out of the horseman's mouth. In theory it should be easy for him, since his Dalmatia was the birthplace of so many Caesars. He recognizes the language but fails to make out the accent:

Take heed not to be transformed into Caesar, not to be dipped in purple dye; for it does happen. Keep yourself therefore simple, go pure, grave, unaffected, the friend of justice, religious, kind, affectionate, strong for your proper work. Wrestle to continue to be the man that Philosophy wished to make you. Reverence the gods, save men . . .

Let not the future trouble you, for you will come to it, if come you must, bearing with you the same reason which you are using now to meet the present.

All things are the same: familiar in experience, transient in time, sordid in their material; all now such as in the days of those whom we have buried.

To leave the company of men is nothing to fear, if gods exist; for they would not involve you in ill ...

To turn against anything that comes to pass is a separation from nature.

Men have come into the world for the sake of one another. Either instruct them, then, or bear with them.

The universe is change, life is opinion.

Run always the short road, and nature's road is short.

As are your repeated imaginations, so will your mind be, for the soul is dyed by its imaginations.

Love that to which you go back, and don't return toPhilosophy as to a schoolmaster, but as a man to the sponge and slave, as another to a poultice, another to fomentation . . .

The mind of the Whole is social.

The noblest kind of retribution is not to become like your enemy.

What doesn't benefit the hive is no benefit to the bee.

On Pain: what we cannot bear removes us from life; what lasts can be borne. The understanding, too, preserves its own tran­quillity by abstraction, and the governing self does not grow worse;

but it is for the parts which are injured by pain, if they can, to declare it.

There are three relations. One is to what surrounds you. One to the divine cause from which all things come to pass for all. One to those who live at the same time with you.

Accept without pride, relinquish without struggle.

And then there was nothing else, save the sound of rain crashing on Michelangelo's flagstones. The Dalmatian darted across the square like a piece of unearthed marble. He was heading no doubt for antiquity, and carried in his ears his master's—the statue's—voice:

To acquaint yourself with these things for a hundred years, or for three, is the same.

1994

A Cat's Meow

I

I dearly wish I could begin this monologue from afar, or at least preface it with a bunch of disclaimers. However, this dog's ability to learn new tricks is inferior to its tendency to forget old ones. So let me try to cut straight to the bone.

Many things have changed on this dog's watch; but I believe that a study ofphenomena is still valid and ofinterest only as long as it is being conducted from without. The view from within is inevitably distorted and of parochial conse­quence, its claims to documentary status notwithstanding. A good example is madness: the view of the physician is of greater import than that of his patient.

Theoretically, the same should apply to "creativity"; except that the nature of this phenomenon rules out the possibility of a vantage point for studying it. Here, the very process ofobservation renders the observer, to put it mildly, inferior to the phenomenon he observes, whether he is po­sitioned without or within the phenomenon. In a manner of

Delivered at a symposium organized by the Foundation for Creativity and Lead­ership and held in Zenoott, Switzerland, in January 1995.

speaking, the report of the physician here is as invalid as the patient's own ravings.

The lesser commenting upon the greater has, of course, a certain humbling appeal, and at our end of the galaxy we are quite accustomed to this sort ofprocedure. I hope, there­fore, that my reluctance to objectify creativity bespeaks not a lack of humility on my part but precisely the absence of a vantage point enabling me to pronounce anything of value on the subject.

I don't qualify as a physician; as a patient I am too much of a basket case to be taken seriously. Besides, I detest the very term "creativity," and some of this detestation rubs off on the phenomenon this term appears to denote. Even if I were able to shut down the voice of my senses revolting against it, my utterance on the subject would amount at best to a cat's attempt to catch its own tail. An absorbing en­deavor, to be sure; but then perhaps I should be meowing.

Given the solipsistic nature of any human inquiry, that would be as honest a response to the notion of creativity as you can get. Seen from the outside, creativity is the object of fascination or envy; seen from within, it is an unending exercise in uncertainty and a tremendous school for inse­curity. In either case, a meow or some other incoherent sound is the most adequate response whenever the notion of creativity is invoked.

Let me, therefore, get rid ofthe panting or bated breath that accompanies this term, which is to say, let me get rid of the term altogether. Webster's Collegiate Dictionary de­fines creativity as the ability to create, so let me stick to this definition. This way, perhaps, at least one of us will know what he is talking about, although not entirely.

The trouble begins with "create," which is, I believe, an exalted version of the verb "to make," and the same good old Webster's offers us "to bring into existence." The exal­tation here has to do presumably with our ability to distin­guish between familiar and unprecedented results of one's making. The familiar, thus, is made; the unfamiliar, or un­precedented, is created.

Now, no honest craftsman or maker knows in the process of working whether he is making or creating. He may be overtaken with this or that incoherent emotion at a certain stage of the process, he may even have an inkling that he is manufacturing something qualitatively new or unique, but the first, the second, and the last reality for him is the work itself, the very process of working. The process takes prec­edence over its result, if only because the latter is impossible without the former.

The emergence of something qualitatively new is a mat­ter of chance. Hence there is no visual distinction between a maker and a beholder, between an artist and his public. At a reception, the former may st<>nd out in the crowd at best by virtue of his longer hair or sartorial extravagance, but nowadays the reverse may be true as well. In any case, at the completion of the work, a maker may mingle with beholders and even assume their perspective on his work and employ their vocabulary. It is unlikely, however, that upon returning to his study, studio, or, for that matter, lab, he would attempt to rechristen his tools.

One says "I make" rather than "I create." This choice of verb reflects not only humility but the distinction between the guild and the market, for the distinction between making and creating can be made only retroactively, by the beholder. Beholders are essentially consumers, and that's why a sculptor seldom buys another sculptor's works. Any discourse on creativity, no matter how ^alytical it may turn out to be, is therefore a market discourse. One artist's recognition of another's genius is essentially a recognition of the power of chance and perhaps of the

other's industry in producing occasions for chance to invade.

This, I hope, takes care of the "make" part ofWebster's definition. Let's address the "ability" part. The notion of abil­ity comes from experience. Theoretically, the greater one's experience, the more secure one may feel in one's ability. In reality (in art and, I would think, science), experience and the accompanying expertise are the maker's worst enemies.

The more successful you've been, the more uncertain you are, when embarking on a new project, of the result. Say, the greater the masterpiece you just produced, the smaller the likelihood of your repeating the feat tomorrow. In other words: the more questionable your ability becomes. The very notion ofability acquires in your mind a permanent question mark, and gradually one begins to regard one's work as a nonstop effort to erase that mark. This is especially true among those engaged in literature, particularly in poetry, which, unlike other arts, is bound to make detectable sense.

But even adorned with an exclamation mark, ability is not guaranteed to spawn masterpieces each time it is applied. We all know plenty of uniquely endowed artists and scien­tists who produce little of consequence. Dry spells, writer's blocks, and fallow stretches are the companions ofpractically every known genius, all lamenting about them bitterly, as do much lesser lights. Often a gallery signs up an artist, or an institution a scientist, only to learn how slim the pickings may get.

In other words, ability is not reducible either to skill or to an individual's energy, much less the congeniality ofone's surroundings, one's financial predicament, or one's milieu. Had it been otherwise, we would have had by now a far greater volume of masterpieces on our hands than is the case. In short, the ratio of those engaged throughout just this century in art and science to the appreciable results is such that one is tempted to equate ability with chance.

Well, it looks as if chance inhabits both parts of Web­ster's definition of creativity rather cozily. It is so much so that it occurs to me that perhaps the term "creativity" de­notes not so much an aspect of human agency as the property of the material to which this agency now and then is applied; that perhaps the ugliness of the term is, after all, justified, since it bespeaks the pliable or malleable aspects ofinanimate matter. Perhaps the One who dealt with that matter first is not called the Creator for nothing. Hence, creativity.

Considering Webster's definition, a qualifier is perhaps in order. Denoting a certain unidentified resistance, "the ability to make" perhaps should be accompanied by a so­bering "war on chance." A good question is, of course, what comes first—the material or its maker? For all our professed humility, at our end of the galaxy the answer is obvious and resounds with hubris. The other—and a much better question—is, whose chance are we talking about here, the maker's or the material's?

Neither hubris nor humility will be of much help here. Perhaps in trying to answer this question, we have to jettison the notion of virtue altogether. But then we always have been tempted to do just that. So let's seize this opportunity: not for the sake of scientific inquiry so much as for Webster's reputation.

But I am afraid we need a footnote.

II

Because human beings are finite, their system of causality is linear, which is to say, self-referential. The same goes for their notion of chance, since chance is not cause-free; it is but a moment of interference by another system of causality, however aberrant its pattern, in our own. The very existence of the term, not to mention a variety of epithets accompa­nying it (for instance, "blind"), shows that our concepts of order and chance are both essentially anthropomorphic.

Had the area of human inquiry been limited to the animal kingdom, that would be fine. However, it's manifestly not so; it's much larger and, on top of that, a human being insists on knowing the truth. The notion of truth, in its own right, is also anthropomorphic and presupposes, on the part of the inquiry's subject—i.e., the world—a withholding of the story, if not outright deception.

Hence a variety of scientific disciplines probing the uni­verse in the most minute manner, the intensity of which— especially of their language—could be likened to torture. In any case, if the truth about things has not been attained thus far, we should put this down to the world's extraordinary resilience rather than to a lack of effort. The other expla­nation, of course, is truth's absence; an absence that we don't accept because of its drastic consequences for our ethics.

Ethics—or, to put it less grandly but perhaps more pointedly, pure and simple eschatology—as the vehicle of science? Perhaps; at any rate, what human inquiry indeed boils down to is the animate interrogating the inanimate. Small wonder that the results are inconclusive; smaller won­der still that the methods and the language we employ in the process more and more resemble the matter at hand itself.

Ideally, perhaps, the animate and the inanimate should swap places. That, of course, would be to the liking of the dispassionate scientist, who places such a premium on ob­jectivity. Alas, this is not likely to happen, as the inanimate doesn't seem to show any interest in the animate: the world is not interested in its humans. Unless, of course, we ascribe to the world divine provenance, which, for several millennia now, we've failed to demonstrate.

If the truth about things indeed exists, then, given our status as the world's latecomers, that truth is bound to be nonhuman. It is bound to cancel out our notions of causality, aberrant or not, as well as those ofchance. The same applies to our surmises as to the world's provenance, be it divine, molecular, or both: the viability of a concept depends on the viability of its carriers.

Which is to say that our inquiry is essentially a highly solipsistic endeavor. For the only opportunity available for the animate to swap places with the inanimate is the former's physical end: when man joins, as it were, matter.

Still, one can stretch matters somewhat by imagining that it is not the inanimate which is under the animate's investigation but the other way around. This rings a certain metaphysical bell, and not so faintly. Of course, it's difficult to build either science or a religion on such a foundation. Still, the possibility shouldn't be ruled out, if only because this option allows our notion of causality to survive intact. Not to mention that of chance.

What sort of interest could the infinite take in the finite? To see how the latter might modify its ethics? But ethics as such contains its opposite. To tax human eschatology further? But the results will be quite predictable. Why would the infinite keep an eye on the finite?

Perhaps out of the infinite's nostalgia for its own finite past, if it ever had one? In order to see how the poor old finite is still faring against overwhelming odds? How close the finite may come to comprehending, with its microscopes, telescopes, and all, with its observatories' and churches' domes, those odds' enormity?

And what would the infinite's response be, should the finite prove itself capable of revealing the infinite's secrets? What course of action might the infinite take, given that its repertoire is limited to the choice between being punitive or benevolent? And since benevolence is something we are less familiar with, what form might it assume?

If it is, let's say, some version oflife eternal, a paradise, a utopia where nothing ever ends, what should be done, for instance, about those who never make it there? And if it were possible for us to resurrect them, what would happen to our notion of causality, not to mention chance? Or maybe the opportunity to resurrect them, an opportunity for the living to meet the dead, is what chance is all about? And isn't the finite's chance to become infinite synonymous with the animate becoming inanimate? Is that a promotion?

Or perhaps the inanimate appears to be so only to the eye of the finite? And if there is indeed no difference, save a few secrets thus far not revealed, where, once they get revealed, are we all to dwell? Would we be able to shift from the infinite to the finite and back, if we had a choice? What would the means of transportation between the two be? An injection, perhaps? And once we lose the distinction between the finite and the infinite, would we care where we are? Wouldn't that be, to say the least, the end of science, not to mention religion?

Have you been influenced by Wittgenstein? asks the reader.

Acknowledging the solipsistic nature of human inquiry shouldn't, of course, result in prohibitive legislation limiting that inquiry's scope. It won't work: no law based on the recognition of human shortcomings does. Furthermore, ev­ery legislator, especially an unacknowledged one, should be, in turn, aware all the time of the equally solipsistic nature of the very law he is trying to push.

Still, it would be both prudent and fruitful to admit that all our conclusions about the world outside, including those about its provenance, are but reflections, or better yet ar­ticulations, of our physical selves.

For what constitutes a discovery or, more broadly, truth as such, is our recognition of it. Presented with an obser­vation or a conclusion backed by evidence, we exclaim, "Yes, that's true!" In other words, we recognize something that has been offered to our scrutiny as our own. Recognition, after all, is an identification of the reality within with the reality without: an admission of the latter into the former. However, in order to be admitted into the inner sanctum (say, the mind), the guest should possess at least some struc­tural characteristics similar to those of the host.

This, ofcourse, is what explains the considerable success of all manner of microcosmic research, with all those cells and particles echoing nicely our own self-esteem. Yet, hu­mility aside, when a grateful guest eventually reciprocates by inviting his gracious host over to his place, the latteroften finds himself quite comfortable in those theoretically strange quarters and occasionally even benefits from a sojourn in the village of Applied Sciences, emerging from it now with a jar of penicillin, now with a tankful of gravity-spurning fuel.

In other words, in order to recognize anything, you've got to have something to recognize it with, something that will do the recognizing. The faculty that we believe does the recognizing job on our behalf is our brain. Yet the brain is not an autonomous entity: it functions only in concert with the rest of our physiological system. What's more, we are quite cognizant of our brain's ability not only to absorb con­cepts as regards the outside world but to generate them as well; we are also cognizant of that ability's relative depen­dence on, say, our motor or metabolic functions.

This is enough to suspect a certain parity between the inquirer and the subject of the inquiry, and suspicion is often the mother of truth. That, at any rate, is enough to suggest a perceptible resemblance between what's getting discov­ered and the discoverer's own cellular makeup. Now that, of course, stands to reason, if only because we are very much of this world—at least according to the admission of our own evolutionary theory.

Small wonder, then, that we are capable of discovering or discerning certain truths about it. This wonder is so small that it occurs to one that "discovery" is quite possibly a misnomer, and so are "recognition," "admission," "identi­fication," etc.

It occurs to one that what we habitually bill as our discoveries are but the projections ofwhat we contain within upon the outside. That the physical reality of the world/ nature/you-name-it is but a screen—or, if you like, a wall— with our own structural imperatives and irregularities writ large or small upon it. That the outside is a blackboard or a sounding board for our ideas and inklings about our own largely incomprehensible tissue.

That, in the final analysis, a human being doesn't so much obtain knowledge from the outside as secrete it from within. That human inquiry is a closed-circuit system, where no Supreme Being or alternative system of intelligence can break in. Were they to, they wouldn't be welcome, if only because He, or it, would become one of us, and we have had enough of our kind.

They had better stay in the realm of probability, in the province of chance. Besides, as one of them said, "My king­dom is not of this world." No matter how scandalous prob­ability's reputation is, it won't thrust either one of them into our midst, because probability is not suicidal. Inhabiting our minds for want of a better seat, it surely won't try to destroy its only habitat. And if infinity indeed has us for its audience, probability will certainly try its best to present infinity as a moral perspective, especially with a view to our eventually entering it.

To that end, it may even send in a messiah, since left to our own devices we have a pretty rough time with the ethics of even our manifestly limited existence. As chance might have it, this messiah may assume any guise, and not necessarily the guise of human likeness. He may, for in­stance, appear in the form of some scientific idea, in the shape of some microbiological breakthrough predicating in­dividual salvation on a universal chain reaction that would require safety for all in order to achieve eternity for one, and vice versa.

Stranger things have happened. In any case, whatever it is that makes life safer or gives it hope of extension should be regarded as being of supernatural origin, because nature is neither friendly nor hope-inspiring. On the other hand, between science and creeds, one is perhaps better off with science, because creeds have proven too divisive.

All I am trying to suggest is that, chances are, a new messiah, should he really emerge, is likely to know a bit more about nuclear physics or microbiology—and about vi­rology in particular—than we do today. That knowledge, of course, is bound to be of greater use for us here than in the life everlasting, but for the moment, we may still settle for less.

Actually, this could be a good test for probability, for chance in particular, since the linear system ofcausality takes us straight into extinction. Let's see whether chance is in­deed an independent notion. Let's see whether it is some­thing more than just bumping into a movie star in a suburban bar or winning the lottery. Of course, this depends on how much one wins: a big win may come close to personal salvation.

But have you been influenced by Wittgenstein, per­severes the reader.

No, not by Wittgenstein, I reply. Just by Frankenstein.

End of footnote.

iii

So if we are a part of the natural world (as our cellular makeup suggests), if the animate is an aspect of the inanimate, then chance pertaining to a maker pertains to matter. Perhaps Webster's "ability to create" is nothing more (or less) than matter's attempts to articulate itself. Since a maker (and with him the whole human species) is an infinitesimal speck of matter, the latter's attempts at articulation must be few and far between. Their infrequency is proportionate to the avail­ability of adequate mouthpieces, whose adequacy, i.e., the readiness to perceive an unhuman truth, is known in our parlance as genius. This infrequency is thus the mother of chance.

Now, matter, I believe, comes to articulate itself through human science or human art presumably only under some kind of duress. This may sound like an anthropo­morphic fantasy, but our cellular makeup entitles us to this sort of indulgence. Matter's fatigue, its thinning out, or its oversaturation with time are, among a host of other less and more fathomable processes, what further enunciates chance and what is registered by the lab's instruments or by the no less sensitive pen of the lyric poet. In either case, what you get is the ripple effect.

In this sense, the ability to make is a passive ability: a grain of sand's response to the horizon. For it is the sense of an opened horizon that impresses us in a work of art or a scientific breakthrough, isn't it? Anything less than that qual­ifies not for the unique but for the familiar. The ability to make, in other words, depends on the horizon and not on one's resolve, ambition, or training. To analyze this ability only from our end of the story is therefore erroneous and not terribly rewarding.

"Creativity" is what a vast beach remarks when a grain of sand is swept away by the ocean. If this sounds too tragic or too grand for you, it means only that you are too far back in the dunes. An artist's or a scientist's notion of luck or chance reflects essentially his proximity to the water or, if you will, to matter.

One can increase one's proximity to it in principle by will; in reality, though, it happens nearly always inadver­tently. No amount ofresearch or ofcaffeine, calories, alcohol, or tobacco consumed can position that grain of sand suffi­ciently close to the breakers. It all depends on the breakers themselves, i.e., on matter's own timing, which is solely responsible for the erosion of its so-called beach. Hence all this loose talk about divine intervention, breakthroughs, and so forth. Whose breakthrough?

If poetry fares somewhat better in this context, it is because language is, in a manner ofspeaking, the inanimate's first line of information about itself released to the animate. To put it perhaps less polemically, language is a diluted aspect of matter. By manipulating it into a harmony or, for that matter, disharmony, a poet—by and large unwittingly —negotiates himself into the domain of pure matter—or, if you will, of pure time—faster than can be done in any other line ofwork. A poem—and above all a poem with a recurrent stanzaic design—almost inevitably develops a centrifugal force whose ever-widening radius lands the poet far beyond his initial destination.

It is precisely the unpredictability of the place of one's arrival, as well perhaps as one's eventual gratitude, that makes a poet regard his ability "to make" as a passive ability. The vastness of what lies ahead rules out the possibility of any other attitude toward one's regular or irregular proce­dure; it certainly rules out the notion of creativity. There is no creativity vis-a-vis that which instills terror.

Wooing the Inanimate

Four Poems by Thomas^ Hardy

I

A decade or so ago, a prominent English critic, reviewing in an American magazine a collection of poems by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, remarked that that poet's popularity in Britain, in its academic circles particularly, is indicative of the English public's stolid reading tastes, and that for all the prolonged physical presence of Messieurs Eliot and Pound on British soil, modernism never took root in En­gland. The latter part ofhis remark (certainly not the former, since in that country—not to mention that milieu—where everyone wishes the other worse off, malice amounts to an insurance policy) got me interested, for it sounded both wist­ful and convincing.

Shortly afterward, I had the opportunity to meet that critic in person, and although one shouldn't talk shop at the dinner table, I asked him why he thinks modernism fared so poorly in his country. He replied that the generation ofpoets which could have wrought the decisive change was wiped out

Delivered to the students enrolled in "Subject Matter in Modern Lyric Poetry" at Mount Holyoke College, fall 1994.

in the Great War. I found this answer a bit too mechanistic, considering the nature of the medium, too Marxist, if you will—subordinating literature too much to history. But then the man was a critic, and that's what critics do.

I thought that there must have been another expla­nation—if not for the fate of modernism on that side of the Atlantic, then for the apparent viability of formal verse there at the present time. Surely there are plenty of reasons for that, obvious enough to discard the issue altogether. The sheer pleasure of writing or reading a memorable line would be one; the purely linguistic logic of, and need for, meter and rhyme is another. But nowadays one's mind is condi­tioned to operate circuitously, and at the time, I thought only that a good rhyme is what in the end saves poetry from becoming a demographic phenomenon. At the time, my thoughts went to Thomas Hardy.

Perhaps I wasn't thinking so circuitously, after all, or at least not yet. Perhaps the expression "Great War" triggered some­thing in my memory, and I remembered Thomas Hardy's "After two thousand years of Mass / We got as far as poi­son gas." In that case, my thinking was still straight. Or was it perhaps the term "modernism" that triggered those thoughts. In that case ... A citizen of a democracy shouldn't be alarmed, of course, to find himselfbelonging to a minority; though he might get irritable. If a century can be compared to a political system, a significant portion of this one's cultural climate could well qualify as a tyranny: that of modernism. Or, to put it more accurately, of what sailed under that pennant. And perhaps my thoughts went to Hardy because at about that time—a decade ago—he habitually began to be billed as a "pre-modernist."

As definitions go, "pre-modernist" is a reasonably flat­tering one, since it implies that the so defined has paved the road to our just and happy—stylistically speaking—times. The drawback, though, is that it pensions an author off squarely into the past, offering all the fringe benefits of schol­arly interest, of course, but robbing him in effect of rele­vance. The past tense is his equivalent of a silver watch.

No orthodoxy, especially not a new one, is capable of honest hindsight, and modernism is no exception. While modernism itself presumably benefits from applying this ep­ithet to Thomas Hardy, he, I am afraid, does not. In either case, this definition misleads, for Hardy's poetic output, I daresay, has not so much foreshadowed as overshot, and by an awfully wide margin at that, the development of modern poetry. Had T. S. Eliot, for instance, at the time he read Laforgue, read Thomas Hardy instead (as I believe Robert Frost did), the history of poetry in English in this century, or to say the least its present, might be somewhat more absorbing. For one thing, where Eliot needs a handful of dust to perceive terror, for Hardy, as he shows in "Shelley's Skylark," a pinch is enough.

II

All this no doubt sounds to you a touch too polemical. On top of that, you may wonder whom it is that the man in front ofyou is arguing with. True, the literature on Thomas Hardy the poet is fairly negligible. There are two or three full- length studies; they are essentially doctoral-dissertations- turned-books. There are also two or three biographies of the man, including one he penned himself, though it bears his wife's name on the cover. They are worth reading, especially the last if you believe—as I expect you do—that the artist's life holds the key for the understanding of his work. If you believe the opposite, you won't lose much by giving them a miss, since we are here to address his work.

I am arguing, I suppose, against seeing this poet through the prism of those who came in his stead. First, because, in most cases, those who came in his stead were operating in relative or absolute ignorance of Hardy the poet's exis­tence—on this side of the Atlantic particularly. The very dearth of literature about Hardy the poet is both that ig­norance's proof and its present echo. Second, because, on the whole, there is little point in reviewing the larger through the prism of the smaller, however vociferous and numerous; our discipline is no astronomy. Mainly, however, because the presence of Hardy the novelist impairs one's eyesight from the threshold, and no critic I know of can resist the temptation to hitch the prose writer to the poet, with the inevitable diminution of the poems as a consequence—if only because the critic's own medium isn't verse.

So to a critic, the prospect of dealing with Hardy's work should look quite messy. To begin with, if one's life holds the key to one's work, as received wisdom claims, then, in Hardy's case, the question is: Which work? Is this or that mishap reflected in this novel, or in that poem, and why not in both? And if a novel, what then is a poem for? And vice versa? Especially since there are about nine novels and roughly a thousand poems in his corpus. Which of these is, should you wax Freudian, a form of sublimation? And how come one keeps sublimating up to the ripe age of eighty- eight, for Hardy kept writing poems to the very end (his last, tenth collection came out posthumously)? And should one really draw a line between novelist and poet, or isn't it better to lump them together, echoing Mother Nature?

I say, let's separate them. At any rate, that's what we are going to do in this room. To make a long story short, a poet shouldn't be viewed through any prism other than that of his poems. Besides, technically speaking, Thomas Hardy was a novelist for twenty-six years only. And since he wrote poetry alongside his novels, one could argue that he was a poet for sixty years in a row. To say the least, for the last thirty years of his life; after Jude the Obscure—his last and, in my view, his greatest novel—received unfavorable notices, he quit fiction altogether and concentrated on poetry. That alone—the thirty years of verse writing—should be enough to qualify him for the status of a poet. After all, thirty years in this field is an average length for one's career, not to mention life.

So let's give Mother Nature short shrift. Let's deal with the poet's poems. Or, to put it differently, let's bear in mind that human artifice is as organic as any natural masterpiece, which, if we are to believe our naturalists, is also a product of tremendous selection. You see, there are roughly two ways of being natural in this world. One is to strip down to one's un- derthings, or beyond, and get exposed, as it were, to the ele­ments. That would be, say, a Lawrentian approach, adopted in the second halfofthis century by many a scribbling dimwit —in our parts, I regret to inform you, especially. The other approach is best exemplified by the following four-liner, writ­ten by the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam:

Rome is but nature's twin, which has reflected Rome. We see its civic might, the signs of its decorum in the transparent air, the firmament's blue dome, the colonnades of groves and in the meadow's forum.

Mandelstam is a Russian, as I said. Yet this quatrain comes in handy because oddly enough it has more to do with Thomas Hardy than anything by D. H. Lawrence, a Brit.

Anyway, at the moment I'd like to go with you through several poems by Mr. Hardy, which by now I hope you have memorized. We'll go through them line by line, so that, apart from whetting your appetite for this poet, you'll be able to see the process of selection that occurs in the course of composition, and that echoes and—if you don't mind my saying so—outshines the similar process described in the Origin of Species, if only because the latter's net result is us, not Mr. Hardy's poems. So let me succumb to the per­fectly Darwinian, logical as well as chronological temptation to address the poems belonging to the aforementioned thirty- year period, i.e., to the poems written by Thomas Hardy in the second part of his career, which also means in our cen- tun-. this way, we leave the novelist behind.

III

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and died in 1928. His father was a stonemason and could not afl'ord to support him in a scholarly career, apprenticing him instead to a local church architect. He studied Greek and Latin classics on his own, however, and wrote in his off-hours until the success of Far from the Madding Crowd allowed him to quit the job at the age of thirty-four. Thus, his literary career, which started in 1871, allows itself to be fairly neatly divided into two almost even parts: into the Victorian and modern periods, since Queen Victoria conveniently dies in 1901. Bearing in mind that both terms are but catchwords, we'll never­theless use them for reasons of economy, in order to save ourselves some breath. \Ve shouldn't scrutinize the obvious; as regards our poet, the word "Victorian" catches in partic­ular Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, both Rossettis, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Tennyson of course, and. conceivably, Gerard Manley Hopkins and A. E. Housman. To these you might add Charles Darwin himself, Carlyle, Disraeli, John Stuart Mill, Ruskin, Samuel Butler, Walter Pater. But let's stop here: that should give you the general idea of the mental and stlistic parameters—or pressures—pertinent at the time for our poet. Let's leave

Cardinal Newman out of it, because our man was a biological determinist and agnostic; let's also leave out the Bronte sis­ters, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, and other fiction writers, because they mattered to Mr. Hardy when he was one of them but not, for instance, when he set out to write "The Darkling Thrush," which is our first poem.

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter's dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffied plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.

Now, although this thirty-two-line job is Thomas Hardy's most anthologized poem, it is not exactly the most typical of him, being extremely fluent. And that's why perhaps it's so frequently anthologized; although, save for one line in it, it could have been written by practically anyone of talent and, well, insight. These properties are not so rare in English poetry, at the turn of the century especially. It is a very fluent, very lucid poem; its texture is smooth and its structure is conservative enough to hark back to the ballad; its argu­ment is clear and well sustained. In other words, there is very little here of vintage Hardy; and now is as good a time as any to tell you what vintage Hardy is like.

Vintage Hardy is a poet who, according to his own ad­mission, "abhorred the smooth line." That would sound perverse were it not for six centuries of verse writing pre­dating his, and were it not for somebody like Tennyson breathing down his neck. Come to think of it, his attitude wasn't very dissimilar from that of Hopkins, and the ways they went about it were, I daresay, not that different, either. At any rate, Thomas Hardy is indeed by and large the poet of a very crammed, overstressed line, filled with clashing consonants, yawning vowels; of an extremely crabby syntax and awkward, cumbersome phrasing aggravated by his seem­ingly indiscriminate vocabulary; of eye/ear/mind-boggling stanzaic designs unprecedented in their never-repeating patterns.

So why push him on us? you may ask. Because all this was deliberate and, in the light of what transpired in the English poetry of the rest of this century, quite prophetic. To begin with, the intended awkwardness of Hardy's lines wasn't just the natural striving of a new poet toward a distinct diction, although it played that role, too. Nor should this roughness of surface be seen only as a rebellion against the tonal loftiness and polish ofthe post-Romantics. In fact, these properties of the post-Romantics are quite admirable, and the whole thesis that Hardy, or anyone else for that matter, "rebelled against" them should be taken with a grain of salt, if taken at all. I think there is another, more down-to-earth as well as more metaphysical explanation for Hardy's stylistic idiom, which in itself was both down-to-earth and meta­physical.

Well, metaphysics is always down-to-earth, isn't it? The more down-to-earth it is, the more metaphysical it gets, for the things of this world and their interplay are metaphysics' last frontier: they are the language in which matter manifests itself. And the syntax of this language is very crabby indeed. Be that as it may, what Hardy was really after in his verse was, I think, the effect of verisimilitude, the sense of ve­racity, or, if you will, of authenticity in his speech. The more awkward, he presumably thought, the more true it sounds. Or, at least, the less artful, the more true. Here, perhaps, we should recall that he was also a novelist—though I hope we bring this up for the last time. And novelists think of such things, don't they? Or let's put it a bit more dramati­cally: he was the kind of man who would think of such things and that's what made him a novelist. However, the man who became a novelist was, before and after that, a poet.

And here we come close to something crucial for our understanding of Hardy the poet; to our sense of what kind of man he was or, more exactly, what kind of mind he had. For the moment, I am afraid, you have to take my assessment for granted; but I hope that within the next half hour it will be borne out by his lines. So here we go: Thomas Hardy, I think, was an extraordinarily perceptive and cunning man. I say "cunning" here without negative connotations, but per­haps I should say For he indeed plots his poems: not like novels, but precisely as poems. In other words, he knows from the threshold what a poem is, what it should be like; he has a certain idea of what his lines should add up to. Nearly every one of his works can be fairly neatly dis­sected into exposition/argument/denouement, not so much because they were actually structured that way as because structuring was instinctive to Hardy. It comes, as it were, from within the man and reflects not so much his familiarity with the contemporary poetic scene as—as is often the case with autodidacts—his reading of the Greek and Roman classics.

The strength of this structuring instinct in him also ex­plains why Hardy never progressed as a stylist, why his manner never changed. Save for the subject matter, his early poems might sit very comfortably in his late collections, and vice versa, and he was rather cavalier with his dates and attributions. His strongest faculty, moreover, was not the ear but the eye, and the poems existed for him, I believe, more as printed than as spoken matter; had he read them aloud, he himselfwould have stumbled, but I doubt he would have felt embarrassed and attempted improvements. To put it differently, the real seat of poetry for him was in his mind/ No matter how public some ofhis poems seem, they amount to mental pictures of public address rather than ask for actual delivery. Even the most lyrical of his pieces are essentially mental gestures toward what we know as lyricism in poetry, and they stick to paper more readily than they move your lips. It's hard to imagine Mr. Hardy mouthing his lines into a microphone; but then, I believe, microphones hadn't yet been invented.

So why push him on you, you may persist. Because pre­cisely this voicelessness, this audial neutrality, if you will, and this predominance of the rational over emotional im­mediacy turn Hardy into a prophetic figure in English po­etry: that's what its future liked. In an odd way, his poems have the feeling of being detached from themselves, of not so much being poems as maintaining the appearance ofbeing poems. Herein lies a new aesthetics, an aesthetics insisting on art's conventions not for the sake of emphasis or self- assertion but the other way around: as a sort of camouflage, for better merging with the background against which art exists. Such aesthetics expand art's domain and allow it to land a better punch when and where it's least expected. This is where modernism goofed, but let's let bygones be bygones.

You shouldn't conclude, though, because of what I've told you, that Hardy is heady stuff. As a matter of fact, his verse is entirely devoid of any hermetic arcana. What's unique about him is, of course, his extraordinary appetite for the infinite, and it appears that, rather than hampering it, the constraints of convention only whet it more. But that's what constraints do to a normal, i.e., not self-centered, in­telligence; and the infinite is poetry's standard turf. Other than that, Hardy the poet is a reasonably easy proposition; you don't need any special philosophical warm-up to appre­ciate him. You may even call him a realist, because his verse captures an enormous amount of the physical and psycho­logical reality of the time he lived in, of what is loosely called Victorian England.

And yet you wouldn't call him Victorian. Far more than his actual chronology, the aforesaid appetite for the infinite makes him escape this and, for that matter, any definition save that of a poet. Of a man who's got to tell you something about your life no matter where and when he lived his. Except that with Hardy, when you say "poet" you see not a dashing raconteur or a tubercular youth feverishly scrib­bling in the haze and heat of inspiration but a clear-eyed, increasingly crusty man, bald and of medium height, with a mustache and an aquiline profile, carefully plotting his re­morseless, if awkward lines upstairs in his studio, occasion­ally laughing at the achieved results.

I push him on you in no small part because of that laugh­ter. To me,'he casts a very modern figure, and not only be­cause his lines contain a higher percentage ofexistential truth than his contemporaries', but because of these lines' unmis­takable self-awareness. It is as though his poems say to you: Yes, we remember that we are artifacts, so we are not trying to seduce you with our truth; actually, we don't mind sound­ing a bit quaint. If nevertheless, boys and girls, you find this poet hard going, if his diction appears to you antiquated, keep in mind that the problem may be with you rather than with the author. There is no such thing as antiquated diction, there are only reduced vocabularies. That's why, for example, there is no Shakespeare nowadays on Broadway; apparently the modem audience has more trouble with the bard's diction than the folks at the Globe had. That's progress for you, then; and there is nothing sillier than retrospection from the point of view of progress. And now, off to "The Darkling Thrush."

IV

"The Darkling Thrush" is, of course, a turn-of-the-century poem. But suppose we didn't look at the date beneath it;

suppose we opened a book and read it cold. People normally don't look at the dates beneath poems; on top of that, Hardy, as I said, wasn't all that systematic about dating his work. Imagine, then, reading it cold and catching the date only in the end. What would you say it's all about?

You'd say it's a nature poem, a description of a land­scape. On a cold gray winter day a man strolls through a landscape, you would say; he stops and takes in the view. It's a picture ofdesolation enlivened by the sudden chirping of a bird, and that lifts his spirits. That's what you would say, and you would be right; moreover, that's what the author wants you to think; why, he practically insists on the ordi­nariness of the scene.

Why? Because he wants you eventually to learn that a new century, a new era—anything new—starts on a gray day, when your spirits are low and there is nothing eye- arresting in sight. That in the beginning there is a gray day, and not exactly a Word. (In about six years you'll be able to check whether or not he was right.) For a turn-of-the-century poem, "The Darkling Thrush" is remarkably unemphatic and devoid of millenarian hoopla. It is so much so that it almost argues against its own chronology; it makes you wonder whether the date wasn't put below the poem afterward, with the benefit of hindsight. And knowing him, one can easily imagine this, for the benefit of hindsight was Hardy's strong suit.

Be that as it may, let's go on with this nature poem, let's fall into his trap. It all starts with "coppice" in the first line. The precision in the naming of this particular type of growth calls the reader's—especially a modern one's—at- tention to itself, implying the centrality of natural phenom­ena to the speaker's mind as well as his affinity with them. It also creates an odd sense of security at the poem's opening, since a man familiar with the names of thickets, hedges, and plants can't, almost by definition, be fierce or, in any case, dangerous. That is, the voice we are hearing in the first line is that of nature's ally, and this nature, his diction implies, is by and large human-friendly. Besides, he is leaning on that coppice gate, and a leaning posture seldom bodes even mental aggression; if anything, it's rather receptive. Not to mention that the "coppice gate" itself suggests a nature rea­sonably civilized, accustomed, almost of its own accord, to human traffic.

The "spectre-gray" in the second line might perhaps put us on alert, were it not for the run-of-the-mill alternation of tetrameters with trimeters, with their balladlike, folk-tune echo, which plays down the ghostliness of "spectre" to the point that we hear "spectrum" more than "spectre," and our mind wanders to the realm of colors rather than homeless souls. What we get out of this line is the sense of controlled melancholy, all the more so since it establishes the poem's meter. "Gray," sitting here in the rhyming position, releases, as it were, the two e's of "spectre" into a sort of exhaling sigh. What we hear is a wistful eih, which, together with the hyphen here, turns "shade" into a tint.

The next two lines, "And Winter's dregs made desolate/ The weakening eye of day," clinch, in the same breath, the quatrain pattern which is going to be sustained throughout this thirty-two-line poem and tell you, I am afraid, something about this poet's general view of humanity, or at least of its habitats. The distance between that weakening eye of day, which is presumably the sun, and those winter dregs makes the latter hug, as it were, the ground and take on "Winter' "s implied white or, as the case may be, gray color. I have the distinct feeling that our poet beholds here village dwellings, that we have here a view of a valley, harking back to the old trope of the human spectacle distressing the planets. The dregs, of course, are nothing but residue, what's left when the good stuff has been drunk out of the cup. On top of that, the "Winter's dregs" conjunction gives you a sense of a poet resolutely exiting Georgian diction and standing with both feet in the twentieth century.

Well, at least with one foot, as befits a poem written at the turn of the century. One of the additional pleasures of reading Hardy is observing the constant two-step of the con­temporary (which is to say, traditional) and his own (which is to say, modern) diction. Rubbing these things against one another in a poem is how the future invades the present and, for that matter, the past to which the language has grown accustomed. In Hardy, this friction of stylistic tenses is palpable to the point of making you feel that he makes no meal of any, particularly his own, modern, stylistic mode. A really novel, breakthrough line can easily be followed by a succession of jobs so antiquated you may forget their an­tecedent altogether. Take, for instance, the second quatrain of the first stanza in "The Darkling Thrush":

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires.

The relatively advanced imagery of the first line (similar, in fact, to the opening passage in Frost's "Woodpile") quickly deteriorates here into a fin-de-siecle simile that even at the time of this poem's composition would have given off a stale air of pastiche. Why doesn't our poet strive here for fresher diction, why is he settling for obviously Victorian—even Wordsworthian—tropes, why doesn't he try to get ahead of his time—something he is clearly capable of?

First, because poetry is not a rat race yet. Second, be­cause at the moment, the poem is at the stage of exposition.

The exposition of a poem is the most peculiar part, since at this point poets by and large don't know which way the poem will go. Hence, expositions tend to be long, with English poets especially, and in the nineteenth century in particular. On the whole, that side of the Atlantic they have a greater set of references, while over here we've got to look mainly after ourselves. Add to this the pure pleasure of verse writ­ing, of working all sorts of echoes into your texture, and you'll realize that the notion of somebody being "ahead of his time," for all its complimentary ring, is essentially the benefit ofhindsight. In the second quatrain ofthe first stanza, Hardy is squarely behind his time, and he doesn't mind this in the least.

In fact, he loves it. The chief echo here is of the ballad, a term derived from ballare, to dance. This is one of the cornerstones of Hardy's poetics. Somebody should calculate the percentage of ballad-based meters in this poet's output; it may easily pass fifty. The explanation for this is not so much young Thomas Hardy's habit of playing the fiddle at country fairs as the English ballad's proclivity for gore and comeuppance, its inherent air of danse macabre. The chief attraction ofballad tunes is precisely their dancing—playful, if you insist—denomination, which proclaims from the threshold its artifice. A ballad—and, by extension, a ballad- based meter—announces to the reader: Look, I am not en­tirely for real; and poetry is too old an art not to use this opportunity for displaying self-awareness. So the prevalence of this sort of tune, in other words, simply coincides—"over­laps" is a better verb—in Hardy with the agnostic's world- view, justifying along the way an old turn of phrase ("haunted nigh") or a trite rhyme ("lyres'V'fires"), except that "lyres" should alert us to the self-referential aspect of the poem.

And as that aspect goes, the next stanza is full of it. It is a fusion of exposition and statement of theme. The end of a century is presented here as the death of a man lying, as it were, in state. To appreciate this treatment better, we have to bear in mind Thomas Hardy's other trade: that of ecclesiastical architect. In that respect, he undertakes here something quite remarkable when he puts the corpse of time into the church of the elements. What makes this undertak­ing congenial to him in the first place is the fact that the century's sixty years are his own. In a sense, he owns both the edifice and a large portion of its contents. This dual affinity stems not only from the given landscape at the given season but also from his practiced self-deprecation, all the more convincing in a sixty-year-old.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I.

That he had some twenty-eight years to go (in the course of which, at the age of seventy-four, he remarried) is of no consequence, as he couldn't be aware of such a prospect. An inquisitive eye may even zero in on "shrunken" and perceive a euphemistic job in that "pulse of germ and birth." That would be both reductive and irrelevant, however, since the mental gesture of this quatrain is far grander and more resolute than any personal lament. It ends with "I," and the gaping caesura after "fervourless" gives this "as I" terrific singularity.

Now the exposition is over, and had the poem stopped here, we'd still have a good piece, the kind of sketch from nature with which the body of many a poet's work swells. For many poems, specifically those that have nature as their subject, are essentially extended expositions fallen short of their objective; sidetracked, as it were, by the pleasure of the attained texture.

Nothing of the sort ever happens in Hardy. He seems always to know what he is after, and pleasure for him is nei­ther a principle nor a valid consideration in verse. He is not big on sonority and orchestrates his lines rather poorly, until it comes to the punch line of the poem, or to the main point the poem is trying to score. That's why his expositions are not particularly mellifluous; if they are—as is the case in "The Darkling Thrush"—it is more by fluke than by intent. With Hardy, the main adventure of a poem is always toward its end. By and large, he gives you the impression that verse for him is but the means of transportation, justified and perhaps even hallowed only by the poem's destination. His ear is sel­dom better'than his eye, but both are inferior to his mind, which subordinates them to its purposes, at times harshly.

So what we've got by now is a picture of utter desolation, of a man and a landscape locked in their respective mori- bundity. The next stanza offers a key:

At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small

In blast-beruffled plume Has chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom.

This is a treasure trove of a stanza for anyone interested in Hardy. Let's take its story line at face value and see what our poet is up to. He is up to showing you an exit out of the previous stanza's dead end. Dead ends can be exited only upward or by backing out. "Arose" and "overhead" tell you the route our poet chooses. He goes for a full-scale elevation here; in fact, for an epiphany, for a complete takeoff with clear-cut ecclesiastical connotations. But what is remarkable about this takeoff is the self-consciousness accompanying the lyrical release of "In a full-hearted evensong/Of joy illim- ited." This self-consciousness is apparent in the dactylic un­dercutting you detect in both "evensong" and "illimited": these words come to you prefaced by a caesura and as though exhaled; as though these lines that begin as assertions dis­sipate in his throat into qualifiers.

This reflects not so much the understandable difficulty an agnostic may have with ecclesiastical vocabulary as Har­dy's true humility. In other words, the takeoff of belief is checked here by the gravity of the speaker's reservations as to his right to use these means of elevation. "An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,/In blast-beruffled plume" is, of course, Hardy's self-portrait. Famous for his aquiline profile, with a tuft of hair hovering above his bald pate, he had indeed a birdlike appearance—in his old age espe­cially, judging by the available photographs. ("Gaunt" is his pet word, a signature really, if only because it is so un- Georgian.)

At any rate, the bird here, in addition to behaving like a bard, has his visual characteristics also. This is our poet's ticket into its sentiments, which yields one of the greatest lines in English poetry of the twentieth century.

It turns out that an aged thrush of not particularly fetch­ing appearance

Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom.

Speaking of choices, "fling" can't be beaten here. Given the implied visual similarity between bird and bard, this two- liner bespeaking a posture toward reality of the one does the same for another. And if one had to define the philosophy underlying this posture, one would end up no doubt oscil­lating madly between epicurianism and stoicism. Blissfully, for us terminology is not the most pressing issue. Far more pressing is the need to absorb this two-liner into our system, say, for the dark time of the year.

Had the poem stopped here, we would have an ex­traordinary piece of moral instruction; they are few and far between in poetry but they still do exist. Besides, the su­periority ofthe animal kingdom (birds in particular) in poetry is taken for granted. In fact, the notion of that superiority is one of poetry's most distinctive trappings. What is quite remarkable about "The Darkling Thrush" is that the poet goes practically against this notion, which he himself has bought and is trying to resell in the process of the poem. What's more, by doing this, he almost goes against his most successful lines ever. What is he hoping for? What is he driven by?

Hard to tell, except that perhaps he does not recognize his own success, and what blinds him to it is his metaphysical appetite. Another explanation for why he goes for the fourth stanza here is that appetite's close relative: the sense of sym­metry. Those who write formal verse will always prefer four eight-line stanzas to three, and we shouldn't forget the ec­clesiastical architect in Hardy. Quatrains could be likened to euphonic building blocks. As such they tend to generate an order that is most satisfactory when it can be divided by four. The sixteen-line exposition naturally—for our poet's mind, ear, and eye—calls for at minimum the same number of lines for the rest.

To put it less idiosyncratically, the stanzaic pattern em­ployed in a poem determines its length as much as—if not more than—its story line. "So little cause for carolings/Of such ecstatic sound" is no less a denouement than the eu­phonic imperative created by the preceding twenty-four lines, requiring resolution. A poem's length, in other words, is its breath. The first stanza inhales, the second exhales, the third stanza inhales . . . Guess what you need a fourth stanza for? To complete the cycle.

Remember that this is a poem about looking into the future. As such, it has to be balanced. Our man, poet though he is, is not a utopian; nor can he permit himself the posture of a prophet, or that of a visionary. The subject itself, by definition, is too pregnant with imprecision; so what's re­quired of the poet here is sobriety, regardless of whether he is pessimistic or optimistic by temperament. Hence the ab­solutely remarkable linguistic content of the fourth stanza, with its fusion of legalese ("cause . . . Was written") with modernist detachment ("on terrestrial things") and the quaintly archaic ("Afar or nigh around").

"So little cause for carolings/Of such ecstatic sound/Was written on terrestrial things" betrays not so much the unique bloody-mindedness of our poet as his impartiality to any level of diction he resorts to in a poem. There is something fright- eningly democratic in Hardy's whole approach to poetics, and it can be summed up as "so long as it works."

Note the elegiac opening of this stanza, all the more poi­gnant in tone because of the "growing gloom" a line before. The pitch is still climbing up, we are still after an elevation, after an exit from our cul-de-sac. "So little cause" [caesura] "for carolings/Ofsuch ecstatic"—caesura—"sound . . ." "Ec­static" carries an exclamation, and so, after the caesura, does "sound."

Vocally, this is the highest point in the stanza; even "whereof he knew/And I was unaware" is several notes— notches—lower. And yet even at this highest point, the poet, we realize, holds his voice in check, because "carolings/Of such ecstatic sound" are what "a full-hearted evensong" comes down to; which is to say, the evaluation of the bird's voice has undergone a demotion, with ecclesiastical diction being supplanted, as it were, by lay parlance. And then comes this terrific "Was written on terrestrial things," whose detachment from any particularity bespeaks presumably the vantage point either of the "weakening eye of day" or, to say the least, of the bird itself, and that's why we have the archaic—which is to say, impersonal—"Afar or nigh around."

The unparticularity and impersonality, however, belong to neither, -but rather to their fusion, the crucible being the poet's mind or, if you will, the language itself. Let's dwell on this extraordinary line—"Was written on terres­trial things"—a bit longer, for it crept into this turn-of-the- century poem out of where no poet had ever been before.

The conjunction "terrestrial things" suggests a detach­ment whose nature is not exactly human. The point of view attained here through the proximity of two abstract notions is, strictly speaking, inanimate. The only evidence of human manufacture is that it is indeed being "written"; and it gives you a sense that language is capable of arrangements that reduce a human being to, at best, the function of a scribe. That it is language that utilizes a human being, not the other way around. That language flows into the human domain from the realm of nonhuman truths and dependencies, that it is ultimately the voice ofinanimate matter, and that poetry just registers now and then its ripple effect.

I am far from suggesting that this is what Thomas Hardy was after in this line. Rather, it was what this line was after in Thomas Hardy, and he responded. And as though he was somewhat perplexed by what escaped from under his pen, he tried to domesticate it by resorting to familiarly Victorian diction in "Afar or nigh around." Yet the diction of this conjunction was destined to become the diction of twentieth- century poetry, more and more. It is only two or three decades from "terrestrial things" to Auden's "necessary mur­der" and "artificial wilderness." For its "terrestrial things" line alone, "The Darkling Thrush" is a turn-of-the-century poem.

And the fact that Hardy responded to the inanimate voice of this conjunction had to do obviously with his being well prepared to heed this sort of thing, not only by his agnosticism (which might be enough), but by practically any poem's vector upward, by its gravitation toward epiphany. In principle, a poem goes down the page as much as it goes up in spirit, and ''The Darkling Thrush" adheres to this principle closely. On this course, irrationality is not an ob­stacle, and the ballad's tetrameters and trimeters bespeak a considerable familiarity with irrationality: