That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.
What brings our author to this "blessed Hope" is above all the centrifugal momentum developed by the amassment of thirty alternating tetrameters and trimeters, requiring either vocal or mental resolution, or both. In this sense, this turn- of-the-century poem is very much about itself, about its composition which—by happy coincidence—gravitates toward its finale the way the century does. A poem, in fact, offers a century its own, not necessarily rational, version of the future, thereby making the century possible. Against all odds, against the absence of "cause."
And the century—which is soon to be over—has gallantly paid this poem back, as we see in this classroom. In any case, as prophecies go, "The Darkling Thrush" has proved to be more sober and accurate than, let's say, "The Second Coming," by W. B. Yeats. A thrush proved a more reliable source than a falcon; perhaps because this thrush showed up for Mr. Hardy some twenty years earlier. Perhaps because monotony is more in tune with time's own idiom than a shriek.
So if "The Darkling Thrush" is a poem about nature, it is so only by half, since both bard and bird are that nature's effects, and only one of them is, to put it coarsely, hopeful. It is, rathet, a poem about two perceptions of the same reality, and as such it is clearly a philosophical lyric. There is no hierarchy here between hope and hopelessness, distributed in the poem with notable evenhandedness—cer- tainly not between their carriers, as our thrush, I am tempted to point out, is not "aged" for nothing. It's been around, and its "blessed Hope" is as valid as the absence thereof. The last line's caesura isolating "unaware" is eloquent enough to muffle out regret and bring to the last word an air ofassertion. After all, the "blessed Hope" is that for the future; that's why the last word here is spoken by reason.
v
Twelve years later—but still before the Irish bard's beast set out for Bethlehem—the British passenger liner Titanic sank on her maiden voyage in the mid-Atlantic after colliding with an iceberg. Over 1,500 lives were lost. That was presumably the first of many disasters the century ushered in by Thomas Hardy's thrush became famous for.
"The Convergence of the Twain" was written barely two weeks after the catastrophe; it was published shortly afterward, on May 14. The Titanic was lost on April 14. In other words, the raging controversy over the cause of the disaster, the court case against the company, the shocking survivors' accounts, etc.—all those things were still ahead at the time of this poem's composition. The poem thus amounts to a visceral response on the part of our poet; what's more, the first time it was printed, it was accompanied by a headnote saying "Improvised on the Loss of the Titanic."
So, what chord did this disaster strike in Mr. Hardy? "The Convergence of the Twain" is habitually billed by the critical profession either as the poet's condemnation of modern man's self-delusion of technological omnipotence or as the song of his vainglory's and excessive luxury's comeuppance. To be sure, the poem is both. The Titanic itself was a marvel of both modern shipbuilding and ostentatiousness. However, no less than in the ship, our poet seems to be interested in the iceberg. And it is the iceberg's generic— triangular—shape that informs the poem's stanzaic design. So does "A Shape of Ice" 's inanimate nature vis-a-vis the poem's content.
At the same time, it should be noted, the triangular shape suggests the ship: by alluding to the standard representation of a sail. Also, given our poet's architectural past, this shape could connote for him an ecclesiastical edifice or a pyramid. (After all, every tragedy presents a riddle.) In verse, the foundation of such a pyramid would be hexameter, whose caesura divides its six feet into even threes: practically the longest meter available, and one Mr. Hardy was particularly fond of, perhaps because he taught himself Greek.
Although his fondness for figurative verse (which comes to us from Greek poetry of the Alexandrian period) shouldn't be overstated, his enterprise with stanzaic patterns was great enough to make him sufficiently self-conscious about the visual dimension of his poems to make such a move. In any case, the stanzaic design of"The Convergence of the Twain" is clearly deliberate, as two trimeters and one hexameter (normally conveyed in English precisely by two trimeters— also the convergence of a twain) show, held together by the triple rhyme.
i
In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
II
Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
I I I
Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
IV
Jewels in joy designed To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
v
Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the gilded gear And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"
Well: while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate For her—so gaily great— A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
VIII
And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history,
Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event,
XI
Till the Spinner of the Years Said "Now!" And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
This is your bona fide occasional poem in the form of a public address. In fact, it is an oration; it gives you the feeling that it should be spoken from a pulpit. The opening line—"In a solitude of the sea"—is extraordinarily spacious, both vocally and visually, suggesting the width of the sea's horizon and that degree of elemental autonomy which is capable of perceiving its own solitude.
But if the opening line scans the vast surface, the second line—"Deep from human vanity"—takes you farther away from the human sphere, straight into the heart of this utterly isolated element. In fact, the second line is an invitation for the underwater journey which is what the first half of the poem—a lengthy exposition again!—amounts to. Toward the end of the third line, the reader is well along on a veritable scuba-diving expedition.
Trimeters are a tricky proposition. They may be rewarding euphonically, but they naturally constrain the content. At the outset ofthe poem they help our poet to establish his tonality; but he is anxious to get on with the business of the poem. For this, he gets the third, quite capacious hex- ametric line, in which he proceeds indeed in a very businesslike, bloody-minded fashion:
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches .she.
The first half of this line is remarkable for its pileup of stresses, no less than for what it ushers in: the rhetorical, abstract construct which is, on top of that, also capitalized.
Now, the Pride of Life is of course linked syntactically to human vanity, but this helps matters little because (a) human vanity is not capitalized, and (b) it is still more coherent and familiar a concept than the Pride of Life. Furthermore, the two n's in "that planned her" give you a sense of a truly jammed, bottleneck-type diction, befitting an editorial more than a poem.
No poet in his right mind would try to cram all this into half a line: it is barely utterable. On the other hand, as we've noted, there were no mikes. Actually, "And the Pride of Life that planned her," though menaced by its mechanical scansion, can be delivered out loud, to the effect of somewhat unwarranted emphasis; the effort, however, will be obvious. The question is, why does Thomas Hardy do this? And the answer is, because he is confident that the image of the ship resting at the bottom of the sea and the triple rhyme will bail this stanza out.
"Stilly couches she" is indeed a wonderful counterbalance to the unwieldy pileup of stresses ushering it in. The two Is—a "liquid" consonant—in "stilly" almost convey the gently rocking body of the ship. As for the rhyme, it clinches the femininity of the ship, already emphasized by the verb "couches." For the purposes of the poem, this suggestion is indeed timely.
What does our poet's deportment in this stanza and, above all, in its third line tell us about him? That he is a very calculating fellow (at least he counts his stresses). Also, that his pen is driven less by a sense ofharmony than by his central idea, and that his triple rhyme is a euphonic necessity second and a structural device first. As rhymes go, what we've got in this stanza is no great shakes. The best that can be said about it is that it is highly functional and reverberates the wonderful fifteenth-century poem sometimes attributed to Dunbar:
In what estate so ever I be Timor mortis conturbat me . . . "All Christian people, behold and see: This world is but a vanity And replete with necessity. Timor mortis conturbat me. "
It's quite possible that these lines indeed set "The Convergence of the Twain" in motion, because it is a poem above all about vanity and necessity, as well, of course, as about fear of death. However, what perturbs the seventy-two-year- old Thomas Hardy in his poem is precisely necessity.
Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
We are indeed on an underwater journey here, and although the rhymes are not getting any better (we encounter our old friend "lyres"), this stanza is striking because of its visual content. We are clearly in the engine room, and the entire machinery is seen quiveringly refracted by water. The word that really stars in this stanza is "salamandrine." Apart from its mythological and metallurgical connotations, this four- syllable-long, lizardlike epithet marvelously evokes the quivering motion of the element directly opposite to water: fire. Extinguished, yet sustained, as it were, by refractions.
"Cold" in "Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres" underscores this transformation; but on the whole, the line is extremely interesting because it arguably contains a hidden metaphor of the very process of composing this poem. On the surface—or, rather, underneath it—we have the movement of the waves approaching the shore (or a bay, or a cove), which looks like the hom of a lyre. Breakers, then, are its played strings. The verb "thrid," being the archaic (or dialect) form of "thread," while conveying the weaving of the sound and meaning from line to line, eu- phonically also evokes the triangularity of the stanzaic design, which is a triplet. In other words, with the progression from "fire" to "cold" we get here to an artifice that suggests artistic self-consciousness in general and, given the treatment a great tragedy receives in this poem, Hardy's in particular. For, to put it bluntly, "The Convergence of the Twain" is devoid of the "hot" feelings that might seem appropriate, given the volume ofhuman loss. This is an entirely unsentimental job, and in the second stanza our poet reveals somewhat (most likely unwittingly) the way it's done.
Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
This is where, I believe, the poem's reputation for social criticism comes from. It is there, of course, but that's the least of it. The Titanic was indeed a floating palace. The ballroom, casino, and cabins themselves were built to redefine luxury on the grandest scale, their decor was lavish. To convey this, the poet uses the verb "to glass," which both doubles the opulence and betrays its one-dimensionality: it is glass-deep. However, in the scene Mr. Hardy paints here, he is concerned less, I think, with debunking the rich than with the discrepancy between the intent and the outcome. The sea-worm crawling over the mirror stands in not for the essence of capitalism but for "the opulent" 's opposite.
The succession of negative epithets qualifying that sea- worm tells us quite a lot about Mr. Hardy himself. For in order to know the value of a negative epithet, one should always try applying it to oneself first. Being a poet, not to mention a novelist, Thomas Hardy would have done that more than once. Therefore, the succession of negative epithets here could and should be perceived as reflecting his hierarchy of human wrongs, the gravest being the last on the list. And the last on this list, sitting above all in the rhyming position, is "indifferent." This renders "grotesque, slimed, dumb" as lesser evils. At least from the point of view of this poet, they are; and one can't help thinking that the gravity "indifferent" is burdened with in this context is perhaps self-referential.
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
Perhaps this is as good a time as any to point to the cinematic, frame-by-frame procedure our poet resorts to here, and the fact that he is doing this in 1912, long before film became a daily—well, nightly—reality. I believe I've said someplace that it was poetry that invented the technique of montage, not Eisenstein. A vertical arrangement of identical stanzas on the page is a film. A couple of years ago a salvaging company trying to raise the Titanic showed its footage of the ship on TV; it was remarkably close to the matter at hand. Their emphasis was obviously on the contents of the ship's vault, which among other things might have contained a manuscript of Joseph Conrad's most recent novel, which was sent by the author to his American publisher with the ship, since it was to be the speediest mail carrier, among other virtues. The camera circled in the vault area incessantly, attracted by the smell of its riches, but to no avail. Thomas Hardy does a far better job.
"Jewels in joy designed" practically glitters with its j's and s's. So again does, with its swishing and hissing s's, the next line. Yet the most fascinating use of alliteration is on display in the third line, where the ravished, sensuous mind goes flat, as all the line's /'s crackle and burst in "sparkles," turning the jewels in "b/eared and b/ack and b/ind" into so many released bubbles rising to the line's end. The alliteration is literally undoing itself in front of our eyes.
It is more rewarding to admire the poet's ingenuity here than to read into this line a sermon on the ephemeral and destructive nature of riches. Even if the latter were his concern, the emphasis would be on the paradox itself rather than the social commentary. Had Thomas Hardy been fifty years younger at the time of the composition of "The Convergence of the Twain," he perhaps might have sharpened the social edge of the poem a bit more, though even this is doubtful. As it was, he was seventy-two years old, fairly well off himself; and among the 1,500 souls lost when the Titanic went down, two were his personal acquaintances. However, on his underwater journey, he is not looking for them either.
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"
"Gaze at the gilded gear" has obviously crept into the second line of this stanza by pure alliterative inertia (the author presumably had other word combinations to consider working up the last stanza, and this is just one of the spin-offs), which serves to recapitulate the ship's ostentatiousness. Fish are seen here as if through a porthole, hence the magnifying- glass effect dilating the fish eyes and making them moonlike. Of much greater consequence, however, is this stanza's third line, which concludes the exposition and serves as the springboard for the poem's main business.
"And query: 'What does this vaingloriousness down here?' " is not only a rhetorical turn setting up the rest of the poem to provide the answer to the question posed by the line. It is first of all the recapturing of the oratorical posture, somewhat diluted by the lengthy exposition. To achieve that, the poet heightens his diction here, by combining the legalese of "'query" with the clearly ecclesiastical "vaingloriousness." The latter's five-syllable-long hulk mar- velously evokes the cumbersomeness of the ship at the sea's bottom. Apart from this, though, both the legalese and the ecclesiastical clearly point to a stylistic shift and a change of the whole discourse's plane of regard.
Well: while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate For her—so gaily great— A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
Now, "Well" here both disarms and signals a regrouping. It's a colloquial conceit, designed both to put the audience a bit off guard—should "vaingloriousness" have put it on alert—and to pump some extra air into the speaker's lungs as he embarks on a lengthy, extremely loaded period. Resembling somewhat the speech mannerisms of our fortieth President, "Well" here indicates that the movie part of the poem is over and now the discourse begins in earnest. It appears that the subject, after all, is not submarine fauna but Mr. Hardy's—as well as poetry's very own, ever since the days of Lucretius—concept of causality.
"Well: while was fashioning/This creature of cleaving wing" informs the public—syntactically, above all—that we are beginning from afar. More important, the subordinate clause preceding the Immanent Will statement exploits to the hilt the ship's gender designation in our language. We've got three words here with increasingly feminine connotations, whose proximity to each other adds up to an impression of deliberate emphasis. "Fashioning" could have been a fairly neutral reference to shipbuilding were it not qualified by "this creature," with its overtones of particular fondness, and were "this creature" itself not side-lit by "cleaving." There is more of"cleavage" in "cleaving" than of "cleaver," which, while denoting the movement of the ship's prow through the water, also echoes a type of sail with its whiteness, resembling a blade. In any case, the conjunction of "cleaving wing"—and "wing" itselfespecially, sitting here in the rhyming position—pitches the line sufficiently high for Mr. Hardy to usher in a notion central to his entire mental operation, that of"The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything."
Hexameter gives this notion's skeptical grandeur full play. The caesura separates the formula from the qualifier in the most natural way, letting us fully appreciate the almost thundering reverberations of consonants in "Immanent Will," as well as the resolute assertiveness "that stirs and urges everything." The latter is all the more impressive thanks to the reserve in the line's dactyls—which borders, in fact, on hesitation—detectable in "everything." Third in the stanza, this line is burdened with the inertia of resolution, and gives you a feeling the entire poem has been written for the sake of this statement.
Why? Because if one could speak of Mr. Hardy's philosophical outlook (if one can speak about a poet's philosophy at all, since, given the omniscient nature of language alone, such discourse is doomed to be reductive by definition), one would have to admit that the notion of Immanent Will was paramount to it. Now, it all harks back to Schopenhauer, with whom the sooner you get acquainted the better—not so much for Mr. Hardy's sake as for your own. Schopenhauer will save you quite a trip; more exactly, his notion of the Will, which he introduced in his The World as Will and Idea, will. Every philosophical system, you see, can easily be charged with being essentially a solipsistic, if not downright anthropomorphic, endeavor. By and large they all are, precisely because they are systems and thus imply a varying—usually quite high—degree of rationality of overall design. Schopenhauer escapes this charge with his Will, which is his term for tlie phenomenal world's inner essence; better yet, for a ubiquitous nonrational force and its blind, striving power operating in the world. Its operations are devoid of ultimate purpose or design and are not many a philosopher's incarnations of rational or moral order. In the end, of course, this notion can also be charged with being a human self-projection. Yet it can defend itself better than others with its horrific, meaningless omniscience, permeating all forms of struggle for existence but voiced (from Schopenhauer's point of view, presumably only echoed) by poetry alone. Small wonder that Thomas Hardy, with his appetite for the infinite and the inanimate, zeroed in on this notion; small wonder that he capitalizes it in this line, for whose sake one may think the entire poem was written.
It wasn't:
Prepared a sinister mate
For her—so gaily great— A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
For if you give four stars to that line, how are you to rank "A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate"? Or, for that matter, "a sinister mate"? As conjunctions go, it is so far ahead of 1912! It's straight out of Auden. Lines like that are invasions of the future into the present, they are whiffs of the Immanent Will themselves. The choice of "mate" is absolutely marvelous, since apart from alluding to "shipmate," it again underscores the ship's femininity, sharpened even further by the next trimeter: "For her—so gaily great—"
What we are getting here, with increasing clarity, is not so much collision as a metaphor for romantic union as the other way around: the union as a metaphor for the collision. The femininity of the ship and the masculinity of the iceberg are clearly established. Except that it is not exactly the iceberg. The real mark of our poet's genius is in his offering a circumlocution: "A Shape of Ice." Its menacing power is directly proportionate to the reader's ability to fashion that shape according to his own imagination's negative potential. In other words, this circumlocution—actually, its letter a alone—insinuates the reader into the poem as an active participant.
Practically the same job is performed by "for the time far and dissociate." Now, "far" as an epithet attached to time is commonplace; any poet could do it. But it takes Hardy to use in verse the utterly unpoetic "dissociate." This is the benefit of the general stylistic nonchalance of his we commented on earlier. There are no good, bad, or neutral words for this poet: they are either functional or not. This could be put down, of course, to his experience with prose, were it not for his frequently stated abhorrence of the smooth, "jewelled line."
And "dissociate" is about as unglittering as it is functional. It bespeaks not only the Immanent Will's farsightedness but time's own disjointed nature: not in the Shakespearean but in the purely metaphysical—which is to say, highly perceptible, tactile, mundane—sense. The latter is what makes any member of the audience identify with the disaster's participants, placing him or her within time's atomizing domain. What ultimately saves "dissociate," of course, is its being rhymed, with the attendant aspect of resolution moreover, in the third, hexametric line.
Actually, in the last two stanzas, the rhymes get better and better: engaging and unpredictable. To appreciate "dissociate" fully, perhaps, one should try reading the stanza's rhymes vertically, column-wise. One would end up with "mate—great—dissociate." This is enough to give one a shudder, and this is far from being gratuitous, since the succession clearly emerged in the poet's mind before the stanza was finished. In fact, this succession was precisely what allowed him to finish the stanza, and to do it the way he did.
And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue In shado\v' silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
And so it emerges that we are dealing with the betrothed. With the feminine smart ship engaged early on to a Shape of Ice. A construction to nature. Almost a brunette to a blonde. Something was growing in Plymouth docks toward that which was growing "In shadowy silent distance" somewhere in the North Atlantic. The hushed, conspiratorial "shadowy silent distance" underscores the secretive, intimate character of this information, and the stresses falling almost mechanically on each word in this stanza sort of echo time's measured pace—the pace of this maid's and her mate's advancement toward one another. For it is that pace that makes the encounter inevitable, not the pair's individual features.
What also makes their approach inexorable is the excess of rhyme in this stanza. "Grew" creeps into the third line, making this triplet contain four rhymes. That could be regarded, of course, as a cheap effect, were it not for the rhyme's sound. "Grew—hue—too" has, as a euphonic referent, the word "you," and the second "grew" triggers the reader's realization of his/her involvement in the story, and not as its addressee only.
Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history . . .
In the euphonic context of the last four stanzas, "Alien" comes as an exclamation, its wide-open vowels being like the last cry of the doomed before submitting to the unavoidable. It's like "not guilty" on the scaffold, or "I don't love him" before the altar: pale face turned to the public. And the altar it is, for "welding" as well as "history" in the third line sound like homonyms for "wedding" and "destiny." So "No mortal eye could see" is not so much the poet's bragging about being privy to the workings of causality as the voice of a Father Lorenzo.
Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event . . .
Again, no poet in his right mind, unless his is Gerard Manley Hopkins's, would stud a line with stresses in such a hammering manner. And not even Hopkins would dare to use in verse "anon" like this. Is this our old friend Mr. Hardy's abhorrence of the smooth line, reaching here a degree of perversity? Or a further attempt to obscure, with this Middle English equivalent of"at once," a "mortal eye" 's ability to see what he, the poet, sees? An elongation of the perspective? Going for those coincident paths of origin? His only concession to the standard view of the disaster? Or just a heightening of the pitch, the way "august" does, in view of the poem's finale, to pave the way for the Immanent Will's saying its piece:
Till the Spinner of the Years Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
"Everything" that the Immanent Will "stirs and urges" presumably includes time. Hence the Immanent Will's new billing: "Spinner of the Years." This is a bit too personified for the abstract notion's abstract good, but we may put this down to the ecclesiastical architect's inertia in Hardy. He--comes uncomfortably close here to equating the meaningless with the malevolent, whereas Schopenhauer pushes precisely the blind mechanistic—which is to say, nonhuman—nature of that Will, whose presence is recognized by all forms of existence, both animate and inanimate, through stress, conflict, tension, and, as in the case at hand, through disaster.
This, in the final analysis, is what lies behind his poetry's quite ubiquitous predilection for the dramatic anecdote. The nonhumanity of the ultimate truth about the phenomenal world fires up his imagination the way female beauty does many a Lothario's. A biological determinist, on the one hand, he eagerly, as it were, embraces Schopenhauer's notion not only because it amounts in his mind to the source of completely unpredictable and otherwise unaccountable occurrences (unifying thus the "far and dissociate") but also, one suspects, to account for his own "indifference."
You could bill him as a rational irrationalist, of course, but that would be a mistake, since the concept of Immanent Will is not irrational. No, quite the contrary. It is highly uncomfortable, not to say menacing, perhaps; but that is a different matter altogether. Discomfort shouldn't be equated with irrationality any more than rationality with comfort. Still, this is the wrong place for nit-picking. One thing is clear: the Immanent Will for our poet has the status of Supreme Entity, bordering on that ofPrime Mover. Fittingly, then, it speaks in monosyllables; fittingly, also, it says, "Now."
The most fitting word in this last stanza, however, is, of course, "consummation," since the collision occurred at night. With "consummation" we have the marital union trope seen, as it were, to the end. "Jars," with its allusion to broken earthenware, is more this trope's residue than its enhancement. It is a stunning verb here, making the two hemispheres, which the "maiden" voyage of the Titanic was supposed to connect, into two clashing convex receptacles. It looks as if it was precisely the notion of "maiden" that struck the chord of our poet's "lyre" first.
VI
The question is why, and the answer arrives in the form of a cycle of poems written by Mr. Hardy a year after ''The Convergence of the Twain," the famous Poems of 1912-13. As we are about to embark on discussing one of them, let's bear in mind that the feminine ship was lost and that the masculine Shape of Ice survived the encounter. That the remarkable lack ofsentimentality, warranted in principle by both the genre and the subject of the poem, could be attributed to our poet's inability to identify here with the loser, if only because of the ship's gender.
Poems of 1912-13 was occasioned by the poet's loss of his wife of thirty-eight years, Emma Lavinia Gifford, who died on November 27, 1912, eight months after the Titanic disaster. Twenty-one pieces in all, these poems amount to the Shape of Ice's meltdown.
To make a long story short, the marriage was long and unhappy enough to give "The Convergence of the Twain" its central metaphor. It was also sufficiently solid to make at least one of its participants regard himself as a plaything of the Immanent Will, and, as such playthings go, a cold one. Had Emma Hardy outlived her husband, this poem would stand as a remarkable, albeit oblique, monument to the morose equilibrium of their dissociate lives, to the low temperature of the poet's heart.
The sudden death of Emma Hardy shattered this equilibrium. In a manner of speaking, the Shape of Ice suddenly found itself on its very own. In another manner of speaking, Poems of ipi2-23 is essentially this Iceberg's lament for the vanished ship. As such, it is a meticulous reconstruction of the casualty; the by-product, naturally, of an excruciating self-examination rather than a metaphysical quest for the tragedy's origins. After all, no casualty can be redeemed by exposing its causality.
That's why this cycle is essentially retrospective. To make a long story still shorter, its heroine is not Emma Hardy, the wife, but precisely Emma Lavinia Gifford, the bride: a maiden. The poems look at her through the dim prism of thirty-eight years of marriage, through the foggy hard crystal of Emma Hardy herself. If this cycle has a hero, it is the past with its happiness or, to put it a bit more accurately, with its promise of happiness.
As human predicaments go, the story is sufficiently common. As a subject for elegiac poetry, the loss of the beloved is common as well. What makes Poems of 1912-13 slightly unusual at the outset is not only the age of the poet and his heroine but the sheer number of poems and their formal variety. A characteristic feature with elegies occasioned by someone's demise is their tonal, to say the least, metric uniformity. In the case of this cycle, however, we have a remarkable metric diversity, which points to the possibility that craftsmanship was a no lesser issue for the poet here than the issue itself.
A psychological explanation for this variety might be, of course, that it has to do with our poet's grief searching for an adequate form of expression. Still, the formal intricacy of the twenty-one attempts made in that direction suggests a greater pressure behind this cycle than pure grief or, for that matter, any single sentiment. So let us take a look at perhaps the least stanzaically enterprising among these poems and try to find out what's going on.
YOUR LAST DRIVE
Here by the moorway you returned,
And saw the borough lights ahead
That lit your face—all undiscerned
To be in a week the face of the dead,
And you told of the charm of that haloed view
That never again would beam on you.
And on your left you passed the spot Where eight days later you were to lie, And be spoken of as one who was not; Beholding it with a heedless eye As alien from you, though under its tree You soon would halt everlastingly.
I drove not with you . . . Yet had I sat At your side that eve I should not have seen That the countenance I was glancing at Had a last-time look in the flickering sheen,
Nor have read the writing upon your face, "I go hence soon to my resting-place;
"You may miss me then. But I shall not know How many times you visit me there, Or what your thoughts are, or if you go There never at all. And I shall not care. Should you censure me I shall take no heed, And even your praises no more shall need."
True: never you'll know. And you will not mind. But shall I then slight you because of such? Dear ghost, in the past did you ever find The thought "What profit," move me much? Yel' abides the fact, indeed, the same,— You are past love, praise, indifference, blame.
"Your Last Drive" is the second in the cycle and, according to the date underneath, was written less than a month after Emma Hardy's death, i.e., when the shock of her departure was very fresh. Ostensibly an evocation of her returning home in the evening from a routine outing that proved to be her last, the poem for its first two stanzas appears to explore the paradox of the interplay between motion and stasis. The carriage carrying the heroine past the place where she shortly will be buried seems to arrest the poet's imagination as a metaphor either of mobility's myopic vision of immobility or of space's disregard for either. In any case, the mental input in these stanzas is somewhat larger than the sentimental one, though the latter comes first.
More accurately, the poem strays from the emotional into the rational, and rather quickly so. In this sense, it is indeed vintage Hardy, for the trend is seldom the reverse with him. Besides, every poem is a means of transportation by definition, and this one is only more so, since metrically at least it is about a means of transportation. With its iambic tetrameter and the shifting caesura that makes its fifth line slide into an anapest, its stanza wonderfully conveys the tilting movement of a horse-driven carriage, and the closing couplets mimic its arrival. As is inevitable with Hardy, this pattern is sustained throughout the poem.
We first see the features of the cycle's heroine lit—most likely dimly—by "the borough lights ahead." The lighting here is more cinematic than poetic; nor does the word "borough" heighten the diction much—something you would expect when it comes to the heroine's appearance. Instead, a line and a half are expended on stressing—literally, and with a touch of tautological relish—her lack of awareness of the impending transformation into being "the face of the dead." In effect, her features are absent; and the only explanation for our poet's not grabbing this opportunity to depict them is the prospect of the cycle already existing in his head (although no poet is ever sure of his ability to produce the next poem). What's present of her, however, in this stanza is her speech, echoed in "And you told of the charm of that haloed view." One hears in this line her "It's charming," and conceivably, "Such a halo!" as she was by all accounts a churchgoing woman.
The second stanza sticks to the "moorway" topography no less than to the chronology of events. Apparently the heroine's outing occurred one week—perhaps slightly less —before she died, and she was interred on the eighth day at this place, apparently to her left as she drove home by the moorway. Such literalness may owe here to the poet's deliberately reining in his emotion, and "spot" suggests a conscious deflation. It is certainly in keeping with the notion of a carriage trundling along, supported, as it were, by leaf-springs of tetrameters. Yet knowing Hardy's appetite for detail, for the mundane, one may as well assume that no special effort was applied here and no special significance was sought. He simply registers the pedestrian manner in which an absurdly drastic change has taken place.
Hence the next line, which is the highest point in this stanza. In "And be spoken of as one who was not," one detects the sense not so much of loss or unbearable absence as that of all-consuming negation. "One who was not" is too resolute for comfort or, for that matter, for discomfort, and negation of an individual is what death is all about. Therefore, "Beholding it with a heedless eye/As alien from you" is not a scolding but rather an admission of the appropriate response. With ". . . though under its tree/You soon would halt everlastingly" the carriage and the exposition part of the poem indeed come to a halt.
Essentially, the central theme of these two stanzas is their heroine's lack of any inkling or premonition of her approaching end. This could be perceived as a remarkable expectation indeed, were it not for her age. Besides, although throughout the cycle the poet insists on the suddenness of Emma Hardy's demise, it's obvious from other sources that she was afflicted with several ailments, including a mental disorder. But presumably there was something about her that made him convinced ofher durability; perhaps that had to do with his notion of himself as the Immanent Will's plaything.
And although many would regard the third stanza's opening as heralding the theme of guilt and remorse that the same many would detect in the whole cycle, "I drove not with you" is just a restatement of that premonition's requirement; worse comes to worse, of his probable failure
v
Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the gilded gear And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"
Well: while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate For her—so gaily great— A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history,
Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event,
"I go hence soon to my resting-place;
"You may miss me then. But I shall not know How many times you visit me there, Or what your thoughts are, of if you go There never at all. And I shall not care. Should you censure me I shall take no heed, And even your praises no more shall need."
And here is our heroine, verbatim. Because of the deftly blended tenses, this is a voice from beyond the grave as much as from the past. And it is relentless. With every next sentence, she takes away what she has given a sentence before. And what she gives and takes is obviously his humanity. This way she reveals herself to be indeed a good match for her poet. There is a strong echo of marital argument in these lines, the intensity of which overcomes completely the list- lessness of the verse. It gets much louder here and drowns the sound ofthe carriage wheels on the cobblestones. To say the least, dead, Emma Hardy is capable of invading her poet's future to the point of making him defend himself.
What we have in this stanza is essentially an apparition. And although the cycle's epigraph—"Traces of an old flame"—is taken from Virgil, this particular passage bears a very close resemblance, both in pitch and substance—to the famous elegy by Sextus Propertius, from his "Cynthia Mono- biblos." The last two lines in this stanza, in any case, sound like a good translation of Cynthia's final plea: "And as for your poems in my honor, burn them, burn them!"
The only escape from such negation is into the future, and that's the route our poet takes: "True: never you'll know." That future, however, should be fairly distant, since its foreseeable part, the poet's present, is already occupied. Hence, "And you will not mind" and "But shall I then slight you because of such?" Still, with that escape comes—in this last stanza's first line especially—a piercing recognition of the ultimate parting, of the growing distance. Characteristically, Hardy handles this line with terrific reserve, allowing only a sigh to escape in the caesura and a slight elevation of pitch in "mind." Yet the suppressed lyricism bursts into the open and claims its o^ in "Dear ghost."
He indeed addresses an apparition, but one that's free of any ecclesiastical dimension. This is not a particularly mellifluous form of address, which alone convinces one of its literalness. He is not searching here for a tactful alternative. (What could there be instead? The meter, allotting him here only two syllables, rules out "Dear Emma"; what then, "Dear friend"?) A ghost she is, and not because she is dead, but because though less than a physical reality she is far more than just a memory: she is an entity he can address, a presence—or absence—he is familiar with. It's not the inertia of marriage but of time itself—thirty-eight years of it—that solidifies into a substance: what may be, he feels, only hardened by his future, which is but another increment of time.
Hence, "Dear ghost." Thus designated, she can almost be touched. Or else "ghost" is the ultimate in detachment. And for somebody who ran the whole gamut of attitudes available to one human being vis-a-vis another, from pure love to total indifference—"ghost" offers one more possibility, if you will, a postscript, a sum total. "Dear ghost" is uttered here indeed with an air of discovery and of summary, which is what, in fact, the poem offers two lines later: "Yet abides the fact, indeed, the same,—/You are past love, praise, indifference, blame." This describes not only the condition of a ghost but also a new attitude attained by the poet —an attitude that permeates the cycle of Poems 1912-13 and without which that cycle wouldn't be possible.
This finale's enumeration of attitudes is tactically similar to "The Convergence of the Twain" 's "grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent." Yet while it is propelled by similar self- deprecating logic, it adds up not to the reductive ("choose one") precision of analysis but to an extraordinary emotional summary that redefines the genre of funeral elegy no less than that of love poetry itself. Immediate as the former, "Your Last Drive" amounts, on account of its finale, to a much-delayed postscript, rarely encountered in poetry, to what love amounts to. Such a summary is obviously the minimal requirement for engaging a ghost in a dialogue, and the last line has an engaging, indeed somewhat flirtatious air. Our old man is wooing the inanimate.
VII
Every poet learns from his own breakthroughs, and Hardy, with his professed tendency to "'exact a full look at the worst," seems to profit in, and from, Poems of 1912-13 enormously. For all its riches of detail and topographical reference, the cycle has an oddly universal, almost impersonal quality, since it deals with the extremes of the emotional spectrum. "A full look at the worst" is well matched by a full look at the best, with very short shrift given to the mean. It is as though a book were being riffled through from the end to the beginning before being shelved.
It never got shelved. A rationalist more than an emotionalist, Hardy, of course, saw the cycle as an opportunity to rectify what many and in part he himself regarded as a lyrical deficiency in his poetry. And true enough, Poems of 1912-13 does constitute a considerable departure from his pattern of graveyard musing, grand on metaphysics and yet usually rather bland sentimentally. That's what accounts for the cycle's enterprising stanzaic architecture, but above all for its zeroing in on the initial stage of his marital union: on meeting a maiden.
In theory, that encounter ensures an upsurge of positive sentiment, and at times it does. But it was so long ago that the optic ofintro- and retrospection often proves insufficient. As such it gets unwittingly replaced by the lens habitually employed by our poet for pondering his beloved infinities, Immanent Wills, and all, exacting a full look at the worst.
It seems he's got no other instruments anyway: whenever faced with a choice between a moving or a drastic utterance, he normally goes for the latter. This may be attributed to certain aspects of Mr. Hardy's character or temperament; a more appropriate attribution would be to the metier itself.
For poetry for Thomas Hardy was above all a tool of cognition. His correspondence as well as his prefaces to various editions of his work are full of disclaimers of a poet's status; they often emphasize the diaristic, commentary role his poetry had for him. I think this can be taken at face value. We should bear in mind also that the man was an autodidact, and autodidacts are always more interested in the essence of what they are learning than its actual data. When it comes to poetry, this boils down to an emphasis on revelatory capacity, often at the expense of harmony.
To be sure, Hardy went to extraordinary lengths to master harmony, and his craftsmanship often borders on the exemplary. Still, it is just craftsmanship. He is no genius at harmony; his lines seldom sing. The music available in his poems is a mental music, and as such it is absolutely unique. The main distinction of Thomas Hardy's verse is that its formal aspects—rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc.—are precisely the aspects standing in attendance to the driving force of his thought. In other words, they seldom generate that force; their main job is to usher in an idea and not to obstruct its progress.
I suppose if asked what he values more in a poem—the insight or the texture—he would cringe, but ultimately he would give the autodidact's reply: the insight. This is, then, the criterion by which one is to judge his work, and this cycle in particular. It is the extension of human insight that he sought in this study of the extremes of estrangement and attachment, rather than pure self-expression. In this sense, this pre-modernist was without peer. In this- sense also, his poems are indeed a true reflection of the metier itself, whose operational mode, too, is the fusion of the rational and the intuitive. It could be said, however, that he turned the tables somewhat: he was intuitive about his work's substance; as for his verse's formal aspects, he was excessively rational.
For that he paid dearly. A good example of this could be his "In the Moonlight," written a couple of years later but in a sense belonging to Poems of 1912-13—if not necessarily thematically, then by virtue of its psychological vector.
"O lonely workman, standing there In a dream, why do you stare and stare At her grave, as no other grave there were?
"If your great gaunt eyes so importune Her soul by the shine of this corpse-cold moon Maybe you'll raise her phantom soon!"
"Why, fool, it is what I would rather see
Than all the living folk there be;
But alas, there is no such joy for me!"
"Ah—she was one you loved, no doubt, Through good and evil, through rain and drought, And when she passed, all your sun went out?"
"Nay: she was the woman I did not love, Whom all the others were ranked above, Whom during her life I thought nothing of."
Like an extremely high percentage of Hardy's verse, the poem seems to hark back to the folk ballad, with its use of dialogue and its element of social commentary. The mock romantic opening and the nagging lapidary tone of triplets —not to mention the poem's very title—suggest a polemical aspect to "In the Moonlight" when viewed within the contemporary poetic discourse. The poem is obviously a "variation on a theme" frequent enough in Hardy's own work in the first place.
The overtones of social commentary, usually fairly sharp in a ballad, are somewhat muted here, though not entirely. Rather, they are subordinated to the psychological thrust of the poem. It is extremely shrewd of the poet to make precisely a "workman," and not the urbane, sneering passerby the carrier of the loaded, terrifying insight revealed in the last stanza. For normally a crisis-ridden conscience in literature is the property of the educated classes. Here, however, it is an uncouth, almost plebeian "workman" who weighs in with at once the most menacing and the most tragic admission Hardy's verse ever made.
Yet although the syntax here is fairly clear, the meter sustained, and the psychology powerful, the poem's texture undermines its mental achievement with its triple rhyme, warranted neither by the story line nor, what's worse, its own quality. In short, the job is expert but not particularly rewarding. We get the poem's vector, not its target. But as far as the truth about the human heart is concerned, this vector may be enough. That's what the poet, one imagines, has told himself on this and on many other occasions. For the full look at the worst blinds you to your own appearance.
VIII
Blissfully, Hardy lived long enough not to be trapped by either his achievements or his failures. Therefore, we may concentrate on his achievements, perhaps with an additional sense of their humanity or, if you will, independent of it. Here's one of them, a poem called "Afterwards." It was written somewhere around 1917, when quite a lot of people all over the place were busy doing each other in and when our poet was sevent'-seven years old.
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, "He was a man who used to notice such things"?
If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think, "To him this must have been a familiar sight."
If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm.
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone."
If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees, Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more, "He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?
And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings, Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom, "He hears it not now, but used to notice such things"?
These twenty hexametric lines are the glory of English poetry, and they owe all that they've got precisely to hexameter. The good question is to what does hexameter itself owe its appearance here, and the answer is so that the old man can breathe more easily. Hexameter is here not for its epic or by the same classical token elegiac connotations but for its trimeter-long, inhale-exhale properties. On the subconscious level, this comfort translates into the availability of time, into a generous margin. Hexameter, if you will, is a moment stretched, and with every next word Thomas Hardy in "Afterwards" stretches it even further.
The conceit in this poem is fairly simple: while considering his immanent passing, the poet produces cameo representations of each one of the four seasons as his departure's probable backdrop. Remarkably well served by its title and free of the emotional investment usually accompanying a poet when such prospects are entertained, the poem proceeds at a pace of melancholy meditation—which is what Mr. Hardy, one imagines, wanted it to be. It appears, however, that somewhere along the way the poem escaped his control and things began to occur in it not according to the initial plan. In other words, art has overtaken craft.
But first things first, and the first season here is spring, which is ushered in with an awkward, almost creaking septuagenarian elegance: no sooner does May get in than it is hit by a stress. This is all the more noticeable after the indeed highly arch and creaking "When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay," with its wonderfully hissing confluence of sibilants toward the end of the line. "Tremulous stay" is a splendid conjunction, evocative, one would imagine, of the poet's very voice at this stage, and thus setting the tone for the rest of the poem.
Of course, we have to bear in mind that we are viewing the whole thing through the prism of the modern, late- twentieth-century idiom in poetry. What seems arch and antiquated through this lens wouldn't necessarily have produced the same effect at the time. When it comes to generating circumlocutions, death has no equals, and at the Last Judgment it could cite them in its defense. And as such circumlocutions go, "When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay" is wonderful if only because it shows a poet more concerned with his diction than with the prospect he describes. There is a peace in this line, not least because the stressed words here are two and three syllables long; the unstressed syllables play the rest of these words down with the air of a postscript or an afterthought.
Actually, the stretching ofthe hexameter—i.e., time— and filling it up begins with "tremulous stay." But things really get busy once the stress hits "May" in the second line, which consists solely ofmonosyllables. Euphonically, the net result in the second line is an impression that Mr. Hardy's spring is more rich in leaf than any August. Psychologically, however, one has the sense of piling-up qualifiers spilling well into the third line, with its hyphenated, Homer-like epithets. The overall sensation (embodied in the future per- feet tense) is that of time slowed down, stalled by its every second, for that's what monosyllabic words are: uttered—or printed—seconds.
"The best eye for natural detail," enthused Yvor Winters about Thomas Hardy. And we, of course, can admire this eye sharp enough to liken the reverse side of a leaf to newly spun silk—but only at the expense of praising the ear. As you read these lines out loud, you stumble through the second, and you've got to mumble fast through the first half of the third. And it occurs to you that the poet has stuffed these lines with so much natural detail not for its own sake but for reasons of metric vacancy.
The truth, of course, is that it's both: that's your real natural detail: the ratio of, say, a leaf to the amount of space in a line. It may fit, and then it may not. This is the way a poet learns the value of that leaf as well as of those available stresses. And it is to alleviate the syllabic density of the preceding line that Mr. Hardy produces the almost trochaic "Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk" qualifier, not out of attachment to this leaf and this particular sensation. Had he been attached to them, he'd have moved them to the rhyming position, or in any case out of the tonal limbo where you find them.
Still, technically speaking, this line and a half do show off what Mr. Winters appreciates so much about our poet. And our poet himself is cognizant of trotting out natural detail here, and polishing it up a bit on top of that. And this is what enables him to wrap it up with the colloquial " 'He was a man who used to notice such things.' " This understatement, nicely counterbalancing the opening line's ramshackle grandeur, is what he was perhaps after in the first place. It's highly quotable, so he attributes it to the neighbors, clearing the line of the charge of self-consciousness, let alone ofbeing an autoepitaph.
There is no way for me to prove this—though there is also no way to refute it—but I think the first and last lines, "When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay" and " 'He was a man who used to notice such things,' " existed long before "Afterwards" was conceived, independently. Natural detail got in between them by chance, because it provided a rhyme (not a very spectacular one, so it needed a qualifier). Once there, it gave the poet a stanza, and with that came the pattern for the rest of the poem.
One indication of this is the uncertainty of the season in the next stanza. I'd suggest it's autumn, since the stanzas after deal respectively \\ith summer and winter; and the leafless thorn seems fallow and chilled. This succession is slightly odd in Hardy, who is a superb plotter and who, you might think, would be one to handle the seasons in the traditional, orderly manner. That said, however, the second stanza is a work of unique beauty.
It all starts \\ith yet another confluence of sibilants in "eyelid's soundless blink." Again, proving and refuting may be a problem, but I tend to think that "an eyelid's soundless blink" is a reference to Petrarch's "One life is shorter than an eyelid's blink"; "Afterwards," as we know, is a poem about one's demise.
But even if we abandon the first line with its splendid caesura followed by those two rustling s's between "eyelid's" and "soundless," ending with two more s's, we've got plenty here. First, we have this very cinematographic, slow-motion passage of "The dewfall-hawk" that "comes crossing the shades to alight ..." And we have to pay attention to his choice of the word "shades," considering our subject. And if we do, we may further wonder about this "dewfall-hawk," about its "dewfall" bit especially. What, we may ask, does this "dewfall," following an eyelid's blink and preceding "shade," try to do here, and is it, perhaps, a well-buried tear? And don't we hear in "to alight/Upon the wind-warped upland thorn" a reined-in or overpowered emotion?
Perhaps we don't. Perhaps all we hear is a pileup of stresses, at best evoking through their "up/warp/up" sound the clapping of wind-pestered shrubs. Against such a backdrop, an impersonal, unreacting "gazer" would be an apt way to describe the onlooker, stripped of any human characteristics, reduced to eyesight. "Gazer" is fitting, since he observes our speaker's absence and thus can't be described in detail: probability can't be terribly particular. Similarly the hawk, batting its wings like eyelids through "the shades," is moving through the same absence. The refrainlike "To him this must have been a familiar sight" is all the more poignant because it cuts both ways: the hawk's flight here is as real as it is posthumous.
On the whole, the beauty of"Afterwards" is that everything in it is multiplied by two.
The next stanza considers, I believe, the summer, and the opening line overwhelms you with its tactility in "mothy and warm," all the more palpable because it is isolated by a very bravely shifted caesura. Yet speaking of bravery, it should be noted that only a very healthy person can ponder the nocturnal blackness of the moment of his demise with such equipoise as we find in "If I pass during some nocturnal blackness ..." Not to mention more cavalier treatment of the caesura. The only mark of possible alarm here is the "some" before "nocturnal blackness." On the other hand, "some" is one of those readily available bricks a poet uses to save his meter.
Be that as it may, the real winner in this stanza is obviously "When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn"—and within the line itself it is, ofcourse, "furtively." The rest is slightly less animated and certainly less interesting, since our poet is clearly bent on endearing himself to the public with his animal-kingdom sympathies. That's quite unnecessary, since, given the subject, the reader is on his side as it is. Also, if one wanted to be really hard-nosed here, one could query whether that hedgehog was indeed in harm's way. At this stage, however, nobody wants to quibble. But the poet himself seems to be aware of the insufficiency of the material here; so he saddles his hexameter with three additional syllables ("One may say")— partly because the awkwardness of speech, he believes, suggests geniality, partly to stretch the dying man's time—or the time he is remembered.
It is in the fourth, winter stanza that the poem confronts absence in earnest.
If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees, Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?
To begin with, being "stilled at last" includes within its euphemistic reach the author taking leave of the poem, as well as the poem's previous stanza growing silent. This way the audience, more numerous than "the neighbors," "a gazer," or "one," is ushered here into the text and asked to play the role of "Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees." This is an extraordinary line; the natural detail here is positively terrifying and practically prefigures Robert Frost. For winter indeed sees more "heavens," since in winter trees are naked and the air is clear. If these heavens are full- starred, it, winter, sees more stars. The line is an apotheosis of absence, yet Mr. Hardy seeks to aggravate it further with "Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more." " 'Rise" imparts to the presumably cold features of the "stilled at last" the temperature of the moon.
Behind all this there is, of course, an old trope about the souls of the dead residing on stars. Still, the optical literalness of this rendition is blinding. Apparently when you see a winter sky you see Thomas Hardy. That's the kind of mystery he had an eye for, in his lifetime.
He had an eye for something closer to the ground, too. As you read "Afterwards," you begin to notice the higher and higher position in the lines of each stanza of those who are to comment on him. From the bottom in the first, they climb to the top in the fifth. This could be a coincidence with anyone other than Hardy. We also have to watch their progression from "the neighbours" to "a gazer" to "one" to "they" to "any." None of these designations is particular, let alone endearing. Well, who are these people?
Before we get to that, let's learn something about "any" and what he expects from them.
And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings, Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom, "He hears it not now, but used to notice such things"?
There is no particular season here, which means it's any time. It's any backdrop also, presumably a countryside, with a church in the fields, and its bell tolling. The observation described in the second and third lines is lovely but too common for our poet to claim any distinction for making it. It's his ability to describe it that "any" might refer to by saying in his absence, "He hears it not now, but used to notice such things." Also, "such things" is a sound: interrupted by wind yet returning anew. An interrupted but resuming sound could be regarded here, at the end of this autoelegy, as a self-referential metaphor, and not because the sound in question is that of a bell tolling for Thomas Hardy.
It is so because an interrupted yet resuming sound is, in fact, a metaphor for poetry: for a succession of poems emerging from under the same pen, for a succession of stanzas within one poem. It is a metaphor for "Afterwards" itself, with all its peregrination of stresses and suddenly halting caesuras. In this sense, the bell of quittance never stops— not Mr. Hardy's, anyway. And it doesn't stop as long as his "neighbors," "gazers," "one," "they," and "any" are us.
IX
Extraordinary claims for a dead poet are best made on the basis of his entire oeuvre; as we are perusing only some of Thomas Hardy's work, we may dodge the temptation. Suffice it to say that he is one of the very few poets who, under minimal scrutiny, easily escape the past. What helps his escape is obviously the content of his poems: they are simply extraordinarily interesting to read. And to reread, since their texture is very often pleasure-resistant. That was his whole gamble, and he won.
Out of the past there is only one route, and it takes you into the present. However, Hardy's poetry is not a very comfortable presence here. He is seldom taught, still less read. First, with respect to content at least, he simply overshadows the bulk of poetry's subsequent achievement: a comparison renders too many a modern giant a simpleton. As for the general readership, his thirst for the inanimate comes off as unappealing and disconcerting. Rather than the general public's mental health, this bespeaks its mental diet.
As he escapes the past, and sits awkwardly in the present, one trains one's eye on the future as perhaps his more appropriate niche. It is possible, although the technological and demographic watershed we are witnessing would seem to obliterate any foresight or fantasy based on our own relatively coherent experience. Still, it is possible, and not only because the triumphant Immanent Will might decide to acknowledge, at the peak of its glory, its early champion.
It is possible because Thomas Hardy's poetry makes considerable inroads into what is the target of all cognition: inanimate matter. Our species embarked on this quest long ago, rightly suspecting that we share our own cellular mix- up with the stuff, and that should the truth about the world exist, it's bound to be nonhuman. Hardy is not an exception. What is exceptional about him, however, is the relentless- ness of his pursuit, in the course of which his poems began to acquire certain impersonal traits of his very subject, especially tonally. That could be regarded, of course, as camouflage, like wearing fatigues in the trenches.
Or like a new line offashion that set a trend in English poetry in this century: the dispassionate posture became practically the norm, indifference a trope. Still, these were just side effects; I daresay he went after the inanimate—not for its jugular, since it has none, but for its diction.
Come to think of it, the expression "matter-of-fact" could well apply to his idiom, except that the emphasis would be on matter. His poems very often sound as if matter has acquired the power of speech as yet another aspect of its human disguise. Perhaps this was indeed the case with Thomas Hardy. But then it's only natural, because as somebody—most likely it was I—once said, language is the inanimate s first line of information about itself, released to the animate. Or, to put it more accurately, language is a diluted aspect of matter.
It is perhaps because his poems almost invariably (once they exceed sixteen lines) either display the inanimate's touch or else keep an eye on it that the future may carve for him a somewhat larger niche than he occupies in the present. To paraphrase "Afterwards" somewhat, he used to notice un- human things; hence his "eye for natural detail," and numerous tombstone musings. Whether the future will be able to comprehend the laws governing matter better than it has done thus far remains to be seen. But it doesn't seem to have much choice in acknowledging a greater degree of human affinity with the inanimate than literature and philosophical thought have been insisting on.
This is what enables one to see in a crystal ball unfamiliar multitudes in odd attire making a run on the Scribner's edition of Hardy's Collected Works or the Penguin Selected.
Ninety Years Later
i
Written in 1904, "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes," by Rainer Maria Rilke, makes one wonder whether the greatest work of the century wasn't done ninety years ago. At the moment of its composition, its German author was twenty-nine years old and leading a rather peripatetic life that brought him first to Rome, where the poem was started, and, later the same year, to Sweden, where it was finished. We should say no more about the circumstances of its emergence, for the simple reason that what this poem adds up to can't be squared with any experience.
To be sure, "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" is as much a flight from biography as it is from geography. Of Sweden there is at best the diffused, gray, somber light enveloping the entire scene. Of Italy there is still less, save the frequently made claim that it was a bas relief in the Museo Nazionale in Naples depicting the poem's three characters that set Rilke's pen in motion.
The reliefdoes exist, and that claim could be valid, but, one would think, of self-defeating consequence. For the copies of this particular marble are innumerable, as are this myth's vastly various other renditions. The only way for us to hook said relief with the poem and the poet's personal circumstances would be to come up with proof that our poet recognized, for instance, a physiognomic resemblance between the relief's female figure and either his sculptress wife, at the time estranged, or better yet his great love, Lou Andreas-Salome, estranged from him at that time as well. Yet we possess practically no evidence on that score. And even had that evidence been in abundance, it would be of no use. For a particular union, or its dissolution, is of interest only so far as it avoids metaphor. Once metaphor is introduced, it steals the show. Besides, the features of all the relief's characters appear too general—as befits a mythological subject treated for the past three millennia in every art form with relentless frequency—for any particular allusion.
Estrangement, on the other hand, is everyone's forte, and estrangement is what this poem, in part, is about. It is to this part in particular that the poem owes its perennial appeal; all the more so because it deals with the essence of that sentiment rather than with the personalized version specific to our poet's predicament. On the whole, what lies at the core of "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" is a common enough locution which formulates that essence and goes approximately like this: "If you leave, I'll die." What our poet, technically speaking, has done in this poem is simply cross all the way over to the far end of this formula. That's why we find ourselves at the outset of "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" squarely in the netherworld.
I I
As conceits go, a journey to the netherworld is about as ur as is the first traveler to undertake it: Orpheus, the ur-poet.
Which is to say that this conceit rivals in age literature as such, or perhaps even predates it.
For all the obvious attractions of a round-trip story, the origins of this conceit are not literary at all. They have to do, I believe, with the fear of being buried alive, sufficiently common even in our own time but, one imagines, quite rampant in days of yore, with their sweeping epidemics— particularly those of cholera.
As fears go, this one undoubtedly is a product of mass society—of a society in any case where the ratio between the mass and its individual members results in the former's relative disregard for the latter's actual end. In the days of yore such a ratio would be provided chiefly by an urban setting or perhaps by a military camp—fertile ground for epidemics and literature (oral or not) alike, since, in order to spread, both require human amassment.
It is suitable, then, that the subject of the earliest works of literature known to us is the military campaign. Several of them incorporate various versions of the myth of descent into the netherworld, with the subsequent return of the hero. That has to do as much with the underlying mori- bundity of any human endeavor, warfare in particular, as with the congeniality of such a myth—with its equivalent of a happy end—to a narrative suggesting the loss of life on a mass scale.
I I I
The notion of the netherworld as a ramified, subway-like underground structure derives in all likelihood from the (practically identical) limestone landscapes of Asia Minor and the northern Peloponnesus, rich in what used to serve as both a prehistoric and a historic human habitat: in caves.
The kingdom of Hades is essentially an echo of the pre- urban past, as the intricacy of the netherworld's topography suggests, and the most probable place of this notion's origin is ancient Cappadocia. (In our own civilization, the most audible echo of a cave, with all its otherworldly implications, is obviously a cathedral.) Any given cluster of Cappadocian caves might indeed have housed a population similar in size to that of a small modern township or big village, with the most privileged occupying presumably the spaces closer to fresh air and the rest more and more remote. Often, the caves meander for hundreds of meters into the rock.
It seems that the least accessible among them were used by the inhabitants for storage and as burial grounds. When a dweller in such a community died, he would be taken to the most remote end of the cave network, laid there, and the entrance to his resting place would be barred with a stone. With such a start, the imagination wouldn't have to work too hard to conceive of the caves' patterns' continuation farther into the porous limestone. On the whole, finality ushers in the idea of infi nity more readily than the other way around.
IV
Some three thousand years of that imagination's steady work later, it's natural to liken the netherworld's domain to an abandoned mine. The opening lines of "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" bespeak the degree of our fluency with the notion of the kingdom of the dead, whose familiarity somewhat wore off or fell into disuse because of more pressing matters:
That was the strange unfathomed mine of souls. And they, like silent veins of silver ore, were winding through its darkness . . .
"Strange" serves here as an invitation to suspend the rational approach to the story, and the translator's amplification of wunderlich, as "unfathomed" suggests both the mental and the physical depth of the place we find ourselves in. These epithets qualify the only tangible noun the poem's opening line contains, which is "mine." However, whatever tangibility there is to speak of is blown away with another qualifier: "of souls."
As the netherworld's depictions and definitions go, a "mine of souls" is extremely effective, because "souls" here, meaning in the first place simply "the dead," carries with it also both its pagan and its Christian connotations. The netherworld thus is both a storage and a source of supplies. This warehouse aspect of the kingdom of the dead fuses the two metaphysics available to us, resulting, whether from pressure, shortage of oxygen, or high temperature, in the next line's "silver ore. "
Such oxidation is a product of neither chemistry nor alchemy but of cultural metabolism, most immediately detectable in language; and nothing shows this better than "silver."
v
Museo Nazionale or no Museo Nazionale, this "silver" comes, as it were, from Naples, from another cave heading into the netherworld, about ten miles west of the city. This cave, which had about a hundred openings, was the dwelling place of the Sibyl of Cumae, whom Virgil's Aeneas consults about his descent into the kingdom of the dead, which he undertakes in Book VI of the Aeneid, to see his father. The Sibyl warns Aeneas about various difficulties attendant on this enterprise, chief among them breaking the Golden
Bough off a golden tree he will encounter along the way. Presenting this bough to Persephone, the Queen of Hades, is his only way to secure admission to her dark realm.
Now the Golden Bough, as well as its tree, obviously stands in for underground deposits of golden ore. Hence the difficulty ofbreaking it off, which is the difficulty of extracting a whole vein of ore from the rock. Unwittingly, or consciously trying to avoid imitating Virgil, Rilke changes the metal and, with it, the color of the scene, aspiring evidently to a somewhat more monochromatic rendition of Persephone's domain. With this change, of course, comes also a change in the trade value of his "ore," which is souls, suggesting both their plenitude and the narrator's own unemphatic posture. "Silver," in short, comes from the Sibyl via Virgil. This is what that metabolism is all about; but we've just scratched the surface.
VI
We'll do better than that, I hope, though we are dealing with this German poem in an English translation. Well, actually, precisely because of that. Translation is the father of civilization, and as translations go, this is a particularly good one. It's taken from Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Works, Volume II: Poetry, published in 1976 by the Hogarth Press in London.
It was done by J. B. Leishman. What makes it particularly good is, in the first place, of course, Rilke himself. Rilke was a poet of simple words and by and large of regular meters. As for the latter, it was so much the case with him that only twice in the course ofhis roughly thirty-year career as a poet did he seek to break away from meter-and-rhyme constraints in a decisive manner. The first time he did it is in the 1907 collection called Neue Gedichte (New Poems), in the cycle of five poems treating—to put it superficially— themes related to Greek antiquity. The second attempt, spanning with intervals the years 1915 to 1923, comprises what came to be known as his Duino Elegies. Breathtaking though these elegies are, one has the feeling that our poet got more freedom there than he bargained for. The five pieces from Neue Gedichte are a different matter, and "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" is one of them.
It is an iambic pentameter job done in blank verse: something that the English language feels quite comfortable with. Second, it is a straight-out narrative poem, with its exposition, development, and denouement fairly clearly defined. From the translator's point of view, this is not a language-driven but rather a story-driven proposition, and that sort of thing makes translators happy, for with a poem like this, accuracy becomes synonymous with felicity.
Leishman's performance is all the more admirable because he seems to regularize his pentameter to a greater degree than the German original offers. This brings the poem into a metric mold familiar to English readers, enabling them to observe the author's line-by-line achievements in greater confidence. Many a subsequent effort—and in the past three decades translating Rilke has become practically a fad—is marred either by attempts to produce stress for stress a metrical equivalency of the original or to subordinate this poem to the vagaries of vers libre. Whether this shows the translators' appetite for authenticity or for being comme il faut in the current poetic idiom, the distinct feature of their aspirations (often sharply argued in prefaces) is that they were not the author's. In Leishman'scase, though, we clearly deal with the translator's surrender of his ego to the reader's comfort; that's how a poem ceases to be foreign. And here it is, in its entirety.
VII
О R P H E US. E U R Y D I C E . H E R M E S
That was the strange unfathomed mine of souls. And they, like silent veins of silver ore, were winding through its darkness. Between roots welled up the blood that flows on to mankind, like blocks of heavy porphyry in the darkness. Else there was nothing red.
But there were rocks
and ghostly forests. Bridges over voidness
and that immense, gray, unreflecting pool
that hung above its so far distant bed
like a gray rainy sky above the landscape.
And between meadows, soft and full of patience,
appeared the pale strip of the single pathway,
like a long line of linen laid to bleach.
And on this single pathway they approached.
In front the slender man in the blue mantle, gazing in dumb impatience straight before him. His steps devoured the way in mighty chunks they did not pause to chew; his hands were hanging, heavy and clenched, out of the falling folds, no longer conscious of the lightsome lyre, the lyre which had grown into his left like twines of rose into a branch of olive. It seemed as though his senses were divided: for, while his sight ran like a dog before him, turned round, came back, and stood, time and again, distant and waiting, at the path's next turn,
his hearing lagged behind him like a smell.
It seemed to him at times as though it stretched
back to the progress of those other two
who should be following up this whole ascent.
Then once more there was nothing else behind him
but his climb's echo and his mantle's wind.
He, though, assured himself they still were coming;
said it aloud and heard it die away.
They still were coming, only they were two
that trod with fearful lightness. If he durst
but once look back (if only looking back
were not undoing of this whole enterprise
still to be done), he could not fail to see them,
the two light-footers, following him in silence:
The god of faring and of distant message, the traveling-hood over his shining eyes, the slender wand held out before his body, the wings around his ankles lightly beating, and in his left hand, as entrusted, her.
She, so belov'd, that from a single lyre
more mourning rose than from all women-mourners—
that a whole world of mourning rose, wherein
all things were once more present: wood and vale
and road and hamlet, field and stream and beast—
and that around this world of mourning turned,
even as around the other earth, a sun
and a whole silent heaven full of stars,
a heaven of mourning with disfigured stars—
she, so beloved.
But hand in hand now with that god she walked, her paces circumscribed by lengthy shroudings,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
Wrapt in herself, like one whose time is near,
she thought not of the man who went before them,
nor of the road ascending into life.
Wrapt in herself she wandered. And her deadness
was filling her like fullness.
Full as a fruit with sweetness and with darkness
was she with her great death, which was so new
that for the time she could take nothing in.
She had attained a new virginity
and was intangible; her sex had closed
like a young flower at the approach of evening,
and her pale hands had grown so disaccustomed
to being -a wife that even the slim god's
endlessly gentle contact as he led her
disturbed her like a too great intimacy.
Even now she was no longer that blond woman who'd sometimes echoed in the poet's poems, no longer the broad couch's scent and island, nor yonder man's possession any longer.
She was already loosened like long hair, and given far and wide like fallen rain, and dealt out like a manifold supply.
She was already root.
And when, abruptly,
the god had halted her and, with an anguished outcry, outspoke the words: He has turned round!— she took in nothing, and said softly: Who?
But in the distance, dark in the bright exit, someone or other stood, whose countenance was indistinguishable. Stood and saw how, on a strip of pathway between meadows, with sorrow in his look, the god of message turned silently to go behind the figure already going back by that same pathway, its paces circumscribed by lengthy shroudings, uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
VIII
The poem has the quality of an uneasy dream, in which you gain something extremely valuable, only to lose it the very next moment. Within the limitation of one's sleeping time, and perhaps precisely because of that, such dreams are excruciatingly convincing in their details; a poem is also limited, by definition. Both imply compression, except that a poem, being a conscious act, is not a paraphrase or a metaphor for reality but a reality itself.
For all the recent popularity of the subconscious, our dependence on the conscious is still greater. If responsibilities begin in dreams, as Delmore Schwartz once put it, poems are where they are ultimately articulated and fulfilled. For while it's silly to suggest a hierarchy among various realities, it can be argued that all reality aspires to the condition of a poem: if only for reasons of economy.
This economy is art's ultimate raison d'etre, and all its history is the history of its means of compression and condensation. In poetry, it is language, itself a highly condensed version of reality. In short, a poem generates rather than reflects. So if a poem addresses a mythological subject, this amounts to a reality scrutinizing its own history, or, if you will, to an effect putting a magnifying glass to its cause and getting blinded by it.
"Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" is exactly that, as much as it is the author's self-portrait with that glass in hand, and one learns from this poem a lot more about him than any life of him will offer. What he is looking at is what made him; but he who does the looking is far more palpable, for you can look at something only from the outside. That's the difference between a dream and a poem for you. Say, the reality was language's, the economy was his.
IX
And the first example of that economy is the title. Titles are a quite difficult affair: they run so many risks. Of being didactic, overly emphatic, banal, ornate, or coy. This one eludes any definition and has the air of a caption underneath a photograph or a painting—or, for that matter, a bas relief.
And presumably it was intended as such. This would suit the purpose of a poem treating a Greek myth very well, proclaiming the subject matter and nothing else. Which is what this title does. It states the theme and is free of any emotional investment.
Except that we do not know whether the title preceded the composition of the poem or was thought up afterward. One is tempted, naturally, to assume the former, given the largely dispassionate tone throughout the poem. In other words, the title offers the reader a cue.
Well, so far, so good, and one may only marvel at the remarkable shrewdness of a twenty-nine-year-old putting full stops after each name here to avoid any semblance of melodrama. As on Greek vases, one thinks, and marvels at his intelligence again. But then one looks at the title and notices that something is missing. Did I say "after each name"?
There is no full stop after Hermes, and he is the last. Why?
Because he is a god, and punctuation is the province of mortals. To say the least, a period after a god's name won't do, because gods are eternal and can't be curbed. Hermes, "the god of faring and of distant message," least of all.
The use of divinity in poetry has its own etiquette, which goes at least as far back as the medieval period, and Dante, for instance, advised against rhyming anything in the Christian pantheon with low-level nouns. Rilke, as it were, takes this etiquette a dot further, pairing Orpheus and Eurydice in their finality but leaving the god literally open-ended. As far as giving cues is concerned, this is a superbly emblematic job; one almost wishes it were a typo. But then it would be divine intervention.
X
This blend of matter-of-factness and open-endedness is what constitutes the diction of the poem. Nothing could be more suitable for retelling a myth, which is to say that the choice of diction was as much Rilke's own achievement as it was the product of this myth's previous renditions—say, from the Georgics onward. It's those innumerable previous versions that push our poet into the flight from any flourish, into adopting this dispassionate timbre tinged now and then with a note of somber wistfulness, equally befitting the age and the tenor of his story.
What is more Rilke's own is, in the opening lines of the poem, the use of color. Its bleached pastel tones of gray, of opaque porphyry, all the way down to Orpheus' own blue mantle are straight out of the Worpswede-soft bed of Northern expressionism, with its subdued, washed-out sheets wrinkled by the pre-Raphaelite-cum-Art-Nouveau aesthetic idiom of the turn of the century.
That was the strange unfathomed mine of souls. And they, like .silent veins of silver ore, were winding through its darkness. Between roots welled up the blood that flows on to mankind, like blocks of heavy porphyry in the darkness. Else there was nothing red.
But there were rocks
and ghostly forests. Bridges over voidness and that immense, gray, unreflecting pool that hung above its so far distant bed like a gray rainy sky above the landscape. And between meadows, soft and full of patience, appeared the pale strip of the single pathway, like a long line of linen laid to bleach.
Now this is the exposition; so, naturally, the emphasis on color is substantial. You may count up to two "grays," a couple of "darknesses," three "reds." Add to that the "ghostly" of the forests and the "pale" of the pathway—as belonging to the same monochrome-gravitating family of epithets, since the source of light is withdrawn.
This is a scene devoid of any sharp color. If anything stands out, it is the souls' "veins of silver ore," whose glitter also amounts to an animated version of gray at best. "Rocks" project a further absence of color, another degree of gray perhaps, especially being preceded by the spectrum- thwarting "Else there was nothing red."
It is an anticlimactic palette, fashionable at the time, that Rilke uses here, obviously running the risk of turning the poem into a period piece. Having read thus far, we learn at least what kind of art was inspiring for him, and we may wriggle our modern noses at this dated aesthetic idiom: at best, it's somewhere between Odilon Redon and Edvard Munch.
XI
Yet for all his slaving as a secretary for Rodin, for all his tremendous sentiment for Cezanne, for all his immersion in the artistic milieu, he was a stranger to the visual arts, and his taste for them was incidental. A poet is always a concep- tualist rather than a colorist, and having read thus far, we realize that his eye in the quoted passage is subordinate to his imagination, or, to put it more accurately, to his mind. For while we can trace the application ofcolor in these lines to a certain period in European painting, the spatial construction of
Bridges over voidness and that immense, gray, unreflecting pool that hung above its so far distant bed like a gray rainy sky above the landscape
has no detectable origin. Save, perhaps, a standard textbook figure of a river (or lake) in profile in a high-school geometry lesson. Or both.
For "Bridges over voidness" echoes an arc chalked upon a blackboard. Similarly, "and that immense, gray, unreflecting pooVthat hung above its so far distant bed" evokes a horizontal line drawn on the same blackboard and supplemented with a semicircle underneath joining that line's two ends. Add to this "like a gray rainy sky above the landscape," which is yet another semicircle arching over that horizontal line, and what you get is the figure of a sphere with its diameter within it.
XII
Rilke's poems are brimming and bristling with such depictions of things-in-themselves, in Neue Gedichte particularly. Take, for instance, his famous "Panther," with its "dance of forces around their center." He does this sort of thing with relish, sometimes gratuitously, just at a rhyme's suggestion. Yet arbitrariness in poetry is a better architect, because it supplies a poem's structure with its climate.
Here, of course, this sketch of a sphere fits rather well into the notion of his subterranean landscape's utter autonomy. It performs nearly the same function as his use of "porphyry," with its strictly geological connotations. What's more interesting, however, is the psychological mechanism behind this drawing full circle, and I believe that in this iambic pentameter blank-verse job, the equivalence of the two semicircles is the echo of the rhyme principle—of, to put it rudely, the inertia of pairing and/or equating one thing with another—whose application this particular poem was meant to eschew.
It does; but the rhyme principle makes itselffelt through this poem like a muscle through a shirt. A poet is a con- ceptualist if only because his mind is conditioned by the properties of his means, and nothing makes you connect heretofore disparate things and notions like rhyme. These connections are often unique or singular enough to create a sense of their result's autonomy. Furthermore, the longer our poet is at it, at generating or dealing with autonomous entities, the more the notion of autonomy rubs off on his own psychological makeup, his sense of himself.
This line of thinking may take us, of course, straight into Rilke's biography, but that's hardly necessary, since biography will avail us much less than the verse itself. For the shuttling and oscillating of verse, fueled by that rhyme principle while questioning conceptual consonance, offers a far greater mental and emotional reach than any romantic endeavor. That's why one settles for a literary career in the first place.
Underneath the exposition's alternative landscape, with all it contains, including the perfect sphere, runs, like a painter's signature, the wonderfully meandering "pale strip of the single pathway/like a long line oflinen laid to bleach," whose alliterative beauty should be credited, no doubt, to its English translator, J. B. Leishman.
This is a remarkably good circumlocution for an untrav- eled road, which, we learn a line before, is the only one in this alternative, wholly autonomous world just created by the poet. This is not the only such creation in this poem; more are to come, and they, retroactively, will explain to us the poet's appetite for self-contained scenes. But this is indeed an exposition, and Rilke proceeds here as a good stage designer setting the scene for the movement of his characters.
So last comes the pathway, a meandering horizontal line "between meadows, soft and full of patience," i.e., accustomed to the absence of movement but implicitly waiting for it: like us.
Landscapes, after all, are to be inhabited; the ones sporting a road, in any case, are. In other words, now the poem ceases to be a painting and becomes a story: now he can start moving his figures.
And on this single pathway they approached.
In front the slender man in the blue mantle, gazing in dumb impatience straight before him.
His steps devoured the way in mighty chunks
they did not pause to chew; his hands were hanging,
heavy and clenched, out of the falling folds,
no longer conscious of the lightsome lyre,
the lyre which had grown into his left
like twines of rose into a branch of olive.
It seemed as though his senses were divided:
for, while his sight ran like a dog before him,
turned round, came back, and stood, time and again,
distant and waiting, at the path's next turn,
his hearing lagged behind him like a smell.
It seemed to him at times as though it stretched
back to the progress of those other two
who should be following up this whole ascent.
Then once more there was nothing else behind him
but his climb's echo and his mantle's wind.
He, though, assured himself they still were coming;
said it aloud and heard it die away.
They still were coming, only they were two
that trod with fearful lightness. If he durst
but once look back (if only looking back
were not undoing of this whole enterprise
still to be done), he could not fail to see them,
the two light-footers, following him in silence . . .
"The slender man in the blue mantle" is obviously Orpheus himself. We should be interested in this depiction for a variety of reasons, above all because if there is anyone in this poem to tell us about its author, it is Orpheus. First, because he is a poet. Second, because in the context ofthis myth, he is a suffering party. Third, because he also has to imagine what is going on. Among the three, the emergence of some semblance ofthe author's self-portrait is inevitable.
All the same, we shouldn't lose sight of the narrator,
for it is he who gave us this exposition. It's the narrator who provided the poem with its deadpan title, thus gaining our confidence as regards the rest. It's his version of the myth we are dealing with, not Orpheus'. In other words, Rilke and the poet shouldn't overlap in our minds completely, if only because no two poets are alike.
Still, if our Orpheus is only an aspect of our author, that's already of sufficient interest to us, because through his portrayal of our ur-poet we can espy the great German's own vantage point and what—as he stands at that point— he envies or disdains in the figure of Orpheus. Who knows, perhaps the whole purpose of this poem for its author was in sorting these things out.
So as tempting as this might be, we should avoid fusing in our minds the author and his character. It's more difficult, of course, for us to resist this temptation than it was for Rilke himself, for whom total identification with Orpheus would be just plain unseemly. Hence his rather hard look at the legendary bard from Thrace. We should attempt to follow suit as we look at them both.
XV
". . . the slender man in the blue mantle" gives you very little, save the complexion and perhaps the height. "Blue" doesn't seem to denote anything in particular; it simply makes the figure more visible against the colorless background.
"Gazing in dumb impatience straight before him" is a bit more loaded and appears unflattering. Although Orpheus is understandably anxious to get it over with, the author's choice of psychological detail is quite telling. Theoretically, there must have been some other options: Orpheus' joy at regaining his beloved wife, for instance. However, by selecting ostensibly negative characterization, the author achieves two goals. First, he distances himselffrom Orpheus. Second, "impatience" underscores the fact that we are dealing with a figure in motion: with human movements in the domain of gods. This couldn't be otherwise, since in our visual habits we are to the ancients what their gods are to us. And equally inevitable is the failure of Orpheus' mission, as human movements in divine precincts are doomed from the threshold: theyare subject to a difi'erent clock. Sub specie aeternitatis, any human movement would appear a bit too choleric and impatient. Come to think of it, Rilke's rendition of the myth, removed as he is in time from antiquity, is in itself the product of that eternity's small part.
But like a germ that each spring shoots up a new leaf, a myth engenders its mouthpiece century after century in every culture. So Rilke's poem is not so much a rendition of the myth as its growth. For all the differences between the human and divine time patterns—a difference which is at the core of this myth—the poem is still the story of a mortal told by a mortal. A god perhaps would present Orpheus in a harsher light than Rilke—since, to the gods, Orpheus is just a trespasser. If he is to be clocked at all, it's just to time his expulsion, and the gods' epithets for Orpheus' movements would be, no doubt, tinged with Schadenfreude.
"Dumb impatience" is an utterly human characterization; it has an air of personal reminiscence, of hindsight, if you will, of belated regret. Airs of that kind abound in this poem, imparting to Rilke's retelling of this myth an aspect of recollection. But myths have no other seat in men save memory; and a myth whose subject is loss only more so. What makes this sort of myth memorable is one's own experience of a similar nature. When you talk of loss you are on home ground, antiquity or no antiquity. Let's jump the hurdle, then, and let's equate myth with memory; this way we'll spare ourselves likening the life of our psyche to the vegetable kingdom; this way we might get some explanation for myth's haunting powers over ourselves and of the detectable regularity of their recurrence in every culture.
For the source of memory's potency (often overshadowing our very reality) is a sense of unfinished business, of interruption. The same, it must be noted, lies behind the concept of history. Memory is essentially a continuation of that business—be that the life of your mistress or affairs of some nation—by different means. Partly because we learn about myths in our childhood, partly because they belong to antiquity, they are an integral part of our private past. And toward our past we are normally either judgmental or nostalgic, for we are not bossed around any longer by those beloveds or by those gods. Hence, the sway of myths over us; hence their blurring effect upon our own private record; hence, to say the least, the invasion of self-referential diction and imagery into the poem at hand. "Dumb impatience" is a good example, since self-referential diction, by definition, is bound to be unflattering.
Now, this is the beginning of a poem dealing with a mythological subject, and Rilke elects to play here by the rules of antiquity, stressing the one-dimensionality of mythological characters. On the whole, the representational pattern in myths boils down to the man-is-his-purpose principle (athlete runs, god strikes, warrior fights, and so forth), whereupon everyone is defined by his action. This is so not because the ancients were unwitting Sartreans but because everyone was then depicted in profile. A vase, or for that matter a bas relief, accommodates ambiguity rather poorly.
So if Orpheus is presented here by the author as being single-minded, it is pretty much in tune with the treatment of the human figure in the art of Greek antiquity: because on this "single pathway" we see him in profile. Whether deliberately or not (which is in the final analysis of no consequence, although one is tempted to credit the poet with more rather than with less), Rilke rules out any nuance. That's why we, accustomed as we are to multifarious, indeed stereoscopic representations of the human figure, find the first characterization of Orpheus unflattering.
XVI
Because things are not getting any better with "His steps devoured the way in mighty chunks/they did not pause to chew ..." let's say here something really corny. Let's say that our poet operates in these lines like an archaeologist removing the sediment ofcenturies from his find, layer by layer. So the first thing he sees about the figure is that it's in motion, and that's what he registers. The cleaner the find gets, the more psychological detail emerges. Having debased ourselves with this corny simile, let's address those devouring steps.
XVII
"To devour" denotes a ravenous manner of eating and generally pertains to animals. The author resorts to this simile not only to describe the speed of Orpheus' movements but also to imply the source of that speed. The reference here is clearly to Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the entrance to Hades—as well as the exit from it, we must add, since it's one and the same gate. Orpheus, as we have him here, is on his way back to life from Hades, which is to say that he has seen that monstrous animal just recently and must feel terrified. So the speed of his movements owes as much to his desire to bring his beloved wife back to life as quickly as possible as to the desire to put as much distance as possible between himself and that dog.
By employing this verb in describing Orpheus' manner
of movement, the author suggests that the terror of Cerberus turns the ur-poet himself into a sort of animal, i.e., makes him unthinking. "His steps devoured the way in mighty chunks/they did not pause to chew ..." is a remarkable job, if only because it implies the true reason behind our hero's failing in his mission, as well as the meaning of the divine taboo forbidding one to look back: don't fall prey to terror. Which is to say, don't accelerate.
Again, there is no reason for us to believe that the author set out to decipher the myth's main provision as he embarked on the poem. Most likely this came out intuitively, in the process of composition, after his pen drew out "devoured" —a common-enough intensification of diction. And then it suddenly jelled: speed and terror, Orpheus and Cerberus. Most likely the connection just flashed into his mind and determined the subsequent treatment of our ur-poet.
XVIII
For Orpheus appears to be literally dogged by fear. Four lines and a half later—lines that theoretically put a bit of distance between Orpheus and that fear's source—the dog overtakes him to the point of becoming practically his own physical aspect:
It seemed as though his senses were divided: for, while his sight ran like a dog before him, turned round, came back, and stood, time and again, distant and waiting, at the path's next turn, his hearing lagged behind him like a smell.
What we are given in this simile is essentially the domestication of fear. Now our archaeologist has removed the last layer of soil from his find, and we see Orpheus' state of mind, which appears to be quite frantic. His sight's shuttling back and forth, however faithfully it serves him, compromises both his progress and his destination. Yet the little doggy seems to be doing far more running here than we initially realize, for Orpheus' hearing lagging behind him like a smell is yet another deployment of the same dog simile.
Now, quite apart from what these lines accomplish in portraying Orpheus' mental state, the mechanics behind their coupling of his senses (of sight and hearing) is of great significance itself. And attributing this to the poet's rhyming muscle showing won't tell us the whole story.
For the-rest of the story has to do with the nature of verse as such, and for that we have to go somewhat back in time. At the moment let me point out to you the remarkably mimetic fluency of the lines we are dealing with. This fluency, you would agree, is directly proportionate to our doggy's ability to shuttle back and forth. To use I. A. Rich- ards's terms, this little quadruped is indeed a vehicle here.
However, the danger with a successful metaphor lies precisely in the vehicle's ability to absorb the tenor entirely (or the other way around, which happens less often) and confuse the author—not to mention the reader—as to what is being qualified by what. And if the vehicle is a quadruped, it swallows the tenor real fast.
But now let's go somewhat back in time.
Well, not too far: to approximately the first millennium B.C., and if you insist on a precise location, to that millennium's seventh century.
The standard mode of ecriture (written language) in that particular century in Greek was called "boustrophedon." Boustrophedon literally means "ox way" and denotes the kind of writing which is similar to plowing a field, when a furrow reaching the end of that field turns and goes in the opposite direction. In writing, this amounts to a line running from left to right and, upon reaching the margin, turning and running from right to left, and so on. Most ofwriting in Greek at the time was done in this, I daresay, oxonian fashion, and one only wonders whether the term "boustrophe- don" was contemporaneous with the phenomenon, or coined post-factum, or even in anticipation? For definitions normally bespeak the presence of an alternative.
Boustrophedon had a minimum of two: the Hebrew and the Sumerian ways of writing. The Hebrew went, as it still does, from right to left. As for the Sumerian cuneiform, it went pretty much the way we are doing things now: from left to right. It s not that a civilization is exactly shopping around for a way to deploy its written language; but the existence of the term reveals a recognized distinction, and a very loaded one.
Hebrew's right-to-left procedure (available to the Greeks via the Phoenicians) could be traced, I suppose, to stone carving, i.e., to the process in which the carver holds the stylus in his left hand and the mallet in the right. In other words, the origins of this written language were not exactly in writing: moving this way, an ancient scribe would inevitably smudge his work with his sleeve or his elbow. A Sumerian (available to the Greeks, alas, directly), on the other hand, relying on clay rather than stone for his narrative or documentation, could press his wedge into the soft surface as easily as he could use a pen (or whatever he would have instead) on the papyri or parchment. The other hand in this case would be the right one.
The Greek boustrophedon, with its shuttle-like movement, suggests the absence of sufficient physical obstacles to the scribe's progress. In other words, its procedure doesn't seem to be motivated by the nature of available writing material. It is so nonchalant in its treading back and forth that it looks almost decorative and brings to mind the lettering on Greek ceramics, with its pictorial and ornamental freedom. It's quite possible that precisely ceramics gave rise to Greek written language, since pictographs normally precede ideograms. We must also bear in mind that, unlike the Hebrew or Sumerian, Greek was the language of an archipelago civilization, and heaving boulders was not the best way to communicate between islands.
Ultimately, because ceramics employ paint, it's safe to assume that written language—lettering, actually—did likewise. Hence its fluency and the knack for continuing regardless of limits. All right, says a sentence hitting the edge of its ceramic tablet, I'll just turn and proceed with what I've got to say to the available surface—for it's most likely that both lettering and images, not to mention ornament, were executed by the same hand.
In other words, the very material used in Greek writing at the time, as well as its relative fragility, suggests the fairly immediate and frequent character of the procedure. In this sense alone, the Greek written language, boustrophedon or no boustrophedon, was much more an ecriture than similar processes in Hebrew or Sumerian, and presumably evolved faster than the other two. To say the least, the relatively short history of boustrophedon and its status as an archaeological curiosity testifies to that evolution's pace. And as a part of that evolution, the emergence of poetry in Greek owes quite a lot to this archaeological curiosity, for it is difficult not to recognize in boustrophedon—at least visu- ally—a precursor of verse.
For "verse," which comes from the Latin versus, means "tum." Of direction, of one thing into another: left, right, U-; of thesis into antithesis, metamorphosis, juxtaposition, paradox, metaphor, if you will, especially successful metaphor; ultimately, rhyme, when two things sound the same but their meanings diverge.
It all comes from the Latin versus. And in a sense this whole poem, as well as the very myth of Orpheus, is one large verse, because it is about turning. Or should we say it's about a U-tum within a U-tum, for it's about Orpheus turning his back on his trip back from Hades? And that divine taboo was as sound as your traffic regulations?
Perhaps. One thing we can be confident about, though, is that the division of Orpheus' senses and its simile owes first to the medium itself, which is verse, and the poet's imagination, which is conditioned by that medium. And that this simile's movement itself conveys extremely well the medium's own progress, being perhaps the best imitation by a dog of ox-ways on record.
It seemed to him at times as though it stretched
back to the progress of those other two
who should be following up this whole ascent.
Then once more there was nothing else behind him
but his climb's echo and his mantle's wind.
He, though, assured himself they still were coming;
said it aloud and heard it die away.
They still were coming, only they were two
that trod with fearful lightness. If he durst
but once look back (if only looking back
were not undoing of this whole enterprise still to be done), he could not fail to see them, the to light-footers, following him in silence . . .
If one could speak of Rilke's emotional investment in his depiction of Orpheus—and our poet has done everything within his power from the title on to avoid any semblance of sentiment for his hero—it is in these lines that one may detect it. That's not surprising, since these lines deal with the extremes of self-awareness: something every poet is familiar with because of the nature of his enterprise, and something he can't detach himself from, as hard as he may try.
This passage, wonderful as it is in its psychological accuracy, warrants no particular comment save the small matter dealt with-by the author in parentheses. Taken as a whole, though, these lines indeed represent a slight shift in the narrator's attitude toward the figure of the ur-poet: there is an air of reluctant sympathy here, although Rilke is doing everything to keep his sentiments in check, including the aforesaid matter in parentheses.
Or should we say, perhaps, matter of parentheses? Because this parenthetical matter is the most audacious job pulled off by any poet dealing with this sort of material in the history of our civilization.
What Mr. Rilke puts here in the parentheses, as a matter of some secondary or tertiary importance, is the main provision of the myth—nay, the very premise of the myth— nay again, the myth itself. For the entire story of Orpheus' descent into the netherworld to bring back his wife and of his unsuccessful return revolves precisely around the Olympians' taboo and his violating it. A good half of world poetry is about this taboo! Well, even if it's one-tenth, say from Virgil to Goethe, making a huge meal precisely of this taboo! And Rilke gives it such short shrift. Why?
Because he is a modern poet who sees everything as psychological conflict? Or is it because of all those exalted ornate jobs done before him, and his wanting to sound different—say, deadpan? Does he really perceive Orpheus as a severely fatigued, perplexed creature, saddled with one more problem to solve, working his way out of Hades, with the main condition of the deal stashed away at the back ofhis mind? Or is this something to do with that rhyming inertia and boustrophedon again?
Well, what's modern here is not the poet but the reader, consideration for whose attention span prompts the poet to issue this reminder. Also, since the relevance of the whole story for this reader is not exactly a given, this business-like parenthetical reminder may do some good. For parenthesis is the typographical equivalent of the back of one's mind: the true seat of civilization in modern man.
So the smaller the shrift, the easier the reader's—not the poet's—identification with the poet's hero lubricated further by having been thrown into the midst of the situation, as though it were happening this week, with a minimum of alienating archaic features. The irony—and "if only looking back/were not undoing of this whole enterprise/still to be done" is highly ironical in its stumbling, prose-like cadence and cumbersome enjambments—also helps. Moreover, these lines are just the last brushstrokes completing the depiction of the ur-poet's appearance—not ofhis substance, which comes six lines later— so the more mortal he looks, the better for what lies ahead.
But does our poet know what lies ahead? He certainly knows the ropes of the story—and so, especially after the reminder, does the reader. So he knows that there are two more figures to be introduced and moved through the poem. He also knows that the means of their transportation is blank verse, and that he has to keep the iambic pentameter under tight control, for it has a tendency to march to its own music, occasionally bursting into song. He knows that thus far he has managed to hold the poem to the key given by the title and rein the meter in pretty well, but after forty lines any meter acquires a certain critical mass that presses for vocal release, for a lyrical resolution. So the question is, where is he to let his meter sing, especially since his story, being a tragic one, presents him with constant opportunities? For instance, here, in the first line of the passage introducing Hermes, the pentameter is about to get out from under the poet's dispassionate control:
The god of faring and of distant message, the traveling-hood over his shining eyes, the slender wand held out before his body, the wings around his ankles lightly beating, and in his left hand, as entrusted, her.
The pitch rises here as much because of the subject's elevated nature as because of the open-endedness of "faring," propped up by the caesura and followed with the spacious "distant message." Both designations are far more suggestive than they are precise; one registers their vowels rather than their meaning. Connected by a preposition which is supposed to link them, they end up qualifying their respective vagueness and limitlessness as notions. In other words, one hears here the meter itself rather than the mental properties of what it deploys, which are eroded, washed out by the meter's own flow. There is quite a lot of "airing" in "faring," and the "distant message" expands to "distant passage." But then poetry has always been a melic art, especially in Orpheus' time, and it is, after all, Orpheus' vision of Hermes that we get here, so we may let our meter go. Anyhow, the English here is as inviting as "Den Gott des Ganges und der weiten Botschaft."
Well, not yet. There may well be other opportunities warranting song more than this one. And the poet knows this not only because he knows the plot and that Eurydice's turn in the poem, for instance, is coming up. He knows this because of the accumulation we mentioned a while ago of the meter's critical mass: the longer he keeps it in check, the greater will be its vocal explosion.
So for the moment it's back to the business-like, matter- of-fact tonality of"the traveling-hood over his shining eyes," although with this poet the matter-of-fact approach is extraordinarily rich.
Hermes' eyes are described as "shining" not simply because we are in the netherworld with its absence of light and color and the hood's shadow makes his eyes more prominent. No, it's because Hermes is a god, and his eyes shine with—as Rilke's contemporary, the great Greek poet Con- stantine Cavafy, put it about one of those Greek gods—"the joy of being immortal in his eyes."
"Shining" is, of course, a standard epithet for "eyes"; however, neither Orpheus' nor, as we shall see shortly, Eurydice's —which would be most appropriate—eyes are referred to in this manner. Moreover, this is the first epithet with positive connotations to appear in the thus far opaque body of the poem. So it's not stylistic inertia that lies behind this adjective, although the remainder of Hermes' description proceeds indeed along very traditional lines for that god's representation:
the slender wand held out before his body, the wings around his ankles lightly beating . . .
The only interesting things about these lines is the second appearance in the poem of "slender," perhaps not the most evocative choice in this case and making you think that, at the moment of the poem's composition, it was one of our poet's pet words. But then, he was twenty-nine years old, so his attachment to this epithet is perhaps understandable.
The wings around Hermes' ankles are, of course, as standard a detail of his attire as the lyre is of Orpheus'. That they are "lightly beating" denotes the slow pace at which the god moves, as Orpheus' hands hanging "heavy and clenched, out of the falling folds,/no longer conscious of the lightsome lyre,/the lyre which had grown into his left/like twines of rose into a branch of olive" denote the opposite: the speed with which he moves as well as where he moves, both excluding the use of his instrument to the point of turning it into a decorative detail, a motif, worthy of adorning some classical'cornice.
Yet two lines later, it is all going to change.
XXV
Given human utterance's vocal properties, the most puzzling aspect of our ecriture is its horizontality. Whether it runs from right to left or vice versa, all that it is armed with to convey numerous tonal modulations is the exclamation point and question mark. Comma, semicolon, colon, dash, parentheses, period—all these things punctuate the linear, which is to say horizontal, version of our verbal existence. In the end, we buy this form of representation of our speech to the point of imparting to our utterances a certain mental, to say the least, tonal equivalent of horizontality, billing it now as equipoise, now as logic. Come to think of it, virtue is horizontal.
This stands to reason, for so is the ground underfoot. Yet when it comes to our speech, one may find oneselffeeling envious of Chinese characters, with their vertical arrangement: our voice darts in all directions; or else one may long for a pictogram over an ideogram. For late as we are in our happy process of evolution, we are short of means of conveying on paper tonal changes, shifts in emphasis, and the like. The graphics of our phonetic alphabets are far from being sufficient; typographic tricks such as line breaks or blank intervals between words fail as a system of notation and are plain wasteful.
It took ecriture so long to emerge not necessarily because the ancients were slow-witted but due to the anticipated inadequacy of ecriture to human speech. The potency of myths has to do perhaps precisely with their oral and vocal precedence over the written. Every record is reductive by definition. Ecriture is essentially a footprint—which I believe is the beginning of ecriture—left by a dangerous or benevolent but elsewhere-bound body in the sand.
So two thousand years later (two thousand six hundred, to be precise, since the first mention of Orpheus took place in the sixth century B.C.) our poet, by using structured verse—structured precisely to highlight the euphonic (i.e., vocal) properties ofwritten words and the caesuras that separate them—returns, as it were, this myth to its pre-ecrifure vocal origins. Vocally speaking, Rilke's poem and the ancient myth are one. More exactly, their euphonic difference equals nil. Which is what he is to show two lines later.
XXVI
Two lines below, Eurydice is introduced, and the vocal explosion goes off:
and in his left hand, as entrusted, her.
She, so belov'd, that from a single lyre
more mourning rose than from all women-mourners—
that a whole world of mourning rose, wherein all things were once more present: wood and vale and road and hamlet, field and stream and beast— and that around this world of mourning turned, even as around the other earth, a sun and a whole silent heaven full of stars, a heaven of mourning with disfigured stars— she, so beloved.
The lyre motif erupts here into full-blown singing. What triggers this is not even Eurydice herself but the epithet "belov'd." And what we get here is not her portrait but the ultimate characterization of Orpheus, which comes extremely close to being the author's self-portrait, or, at any rate, the desc-ription of his metier.
This passage is very similar to the autonomous sphere we encountered at the poem's beginning, except in this case we have, as it were, a universe—also, if you will, a sphere, though not static but in the process of expansion. At the center of this universe we find a lyre, initially engaged in a mimetic reproduction of reality but subsequently increasing its reach, sort oflike the traditional depiction of sound waves emitted by an antenna.
This, I daresay, is very much a formula for Rilke's own art, not to mention his vision of himself. The quoted passage echoes very closely the 1898 entry in his diary in which he, twenty-three years old and reasonably low on self-esteem, ponders restructuring himselfinto a semblance ofa demiurge omnipresent at every layer of his creations and traceable to the center: "There will be nothing outside this solitary figure [i.e., himself], for trees and hills, clouds and waves will only be symbols of those realities which he finds within himself."
A rather exalted vision, perhaps, to go by, but surely
transferrable, and, when applied to Orpheus, a fitting one. What matters is not so much the ownership or authorship of the emerging universe but its constantly widening radius; for its provenance (the lyre) is less important than its truly astronomical destination.
And the astronomy here, it must be noted, is very appropriately far from being heliocentric. It's deliberately epi- cyclic or, better yet, egocentric, since it's an Orphic, vocal astronomy, an astronomy of imagination and mourning. Hence its disfigured—refracted by tears—stars. Which, apparently, constitute the outer end of his cosmos.
But what I think is crucial for our understanding ofRilke is that these ever-widening concentric circles of sound bespeak a unique metaphysical appetite, to satisfy which he is capable of detaching his imagination from any reality, including that ofhimself, and proceeding autonomously within a mental equivalent of the galaxy or, with luck, beyond it. Herein lies the greatness of this poet; herein, too, lies the recipe for losing anything humanly attained—which is what presumably attracted him to the myth of Orpheus and Eu- rydice in the first place. Mter all, Orpheus was known specifically for his ability to move the inhabitants of the Celestial Mansions with his singing.
Which is to say that our author's notion of the world was free of any definable creed, since for him mimesis precedes genesis. Which is also to say that the origin of this centrifugal force enabling him to overcome gravitational pull to any center was that of verse itself. In a rhymed poem with a sustained stanzaic design this happens earlier. In an iambic pentameter blank-verse poem, it takes roughly forty or fifty lines. That is, if it occurs at all. It's simply that after covering such a distance, verse gets tired of its rhymelessness and wants to avenge it. Especially upon hearing the word Geliebte.
XXVH
This efl'ectively completes the portrait of Orpheus, son of Apollo and the Muse Calliope, husband of Eurydice. Here and there a few touches will be added, but on the whole, here he is, the bard from Thrace whose singing was so enrapturing that rivers would slow down and mountains would shift their places to hear his song more clearly. A man who loved his wife so much that when she suddenly died he went, lyre in hand, all the way to Hades to bring her back, and who even after failing in this mission kept mourning her and proved unsusceptible to the wiles of the Maenads with their understandable designs on him. Angry, they killed him and dismembered his body and threw it into the sea. His head drifted away and ended up at the island of Lesbos, where it was buried. His lyre drifted much farther away and became a constellation.
We see him at a point in his mythic career which promises to be high but ends up very low. And we see him depicted with, for all we can tell, unflattering sobriety: a terrified, self-absorbed man of genius, alone on a single, not much traveled pathway, concerned no doubt about making it to the exit. Were it not for the set piece about his mourning, we wouldn't believe him much capable of loving; perhaps we would not wish him success either.
For why should we empathize with him? Less highborn and less gifted than he is, we never will be exempt from the law of nature. With us, the journey to Hades is a one-way trip. What can we possibly learn from his story? That a lyre takes one farther than a plow or a hammer and anvil? That we should emulate geniuses and heroes? That perhaps audacity is what does it? For what if not sheer audacity was it that made him undertake this pilgrimage? And where does that audacity come from? Apollo's genes, or Calliope's? From his lyre, whose sound, not to mention its echo, travels farther than the man himself? Or is this belief that he may return from no matter where he goes simply a spin-off from too much boustrophedon reading? Or does that audacity come perhaps from the Greeks' instinctive realization that loving is essentially a oneway street, and that mourning is its continuation? In the pre- ecriture culture, one could arrive at this realization rather easily.
XXVIII
And now it's time to move the third figure:
But hand in hand now with that god she walked,
her paces circumscribed by lengthy shroudings,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
Wrapt in herself, like one whose time is near,
she thought not of the man who went before them,
nor of the road ascending into life.
Wrapt in herself she wandered. And her deadness
was filling her like fullness.
Full as a fruit with sweetness and with darkness
was she with her great death, which was so new
that for the time she could take nothing in.
Here she goes, Eurydice, Orpheus' wife, who died of snakebite, fleeing from the pursuit of Aristaeus (also sired by Apollo and thus her husband's half brother). Now she moves very slowly: like somebody just woken up, or else like a statue, whose marble "lengthy shroudings" interfere with her small steps.
Her appearance in the poem presents the author with a number of problems. The first among them is the necessity of changing the pitch, especially after the vocal outburst of the preceding passage about Orpheus' mourning, to a more lyrical one, as she is a woman. This is partly accomplished by the repetition of "she, so beloved," which comes off as a choked wail.
More important, her arrival calls for the author's altering his entire posture in the poem, that of manly restraint fit for dealing with the figure of Orpheus—whose place the narrator may occasionally occupy—being unseemly (at least in Rilke's time) vis-a-vis a female heroine, and one who is dead at that. The narrative, in other words, will be infused with a substantial portion of eulogizing and elegiac tonality, if not wholly subverted by them.
This is so much so that "uncertain, gentle, and without impatience" sounds more like the author's inner monologue, like a set of commands he issues to himself on embarking on the description of Eurydice, than like an account of this statue's progress. Clearly a certitude—or a definitive attitude, at any rate—displayed by the poet in the Orpheus part of the poem is lacking: our poet is groping here. But, then, she is dead.
And to describe the state of death is the tallest order in this line of work. This is so in no small part because of the number and quality of the jobs already done in this, shall we say, vein. Also, because of the general affinity of poetry with this subject, if only because every poem, in its own right, gravitates toward a finale.
Rilke chooses, assuming that the process is at least in part conscious, a tactic we may expect from him: he presents Eurydice as an utterly autonomous entity. The only distinction is that instead of the centrifugal procedure employed in the portrayal of Orpheus—who was, for the poem's intents and purposes, after all alive—he goes here for the centripetal one.
XXIX
And the centripetal treatment starts, naturally, at the outer limits of an autonomous entity. For Eurydice, it's the shroud. Hence the first word of her description, "wrapt"; Rilke, to his great credit, proceeds not by unwrapping his heroine but by following the shroud itself to the entity's center.
"Thought not of the man who went before them" approaches the mental, subjective layers of herself, going, as it were, from the more outer ones to the more inner and, in a manner of speaking, more warm, since time is more abstract a notion than man. She is defined by these notions, but she is not them: she fills them up.
And what fills her up is her death. The underlying metaphor of the next four lines is that of a vessel defined by its contents rather than by its o^ shape and design. The cum- bersomeness, or, more accurately, bulkiness of that shape ushers in the oblique but nonetheless extremely palpable imagery of pregnancy highlighting the richness and myste- riousness of Eurydice's new state, as well as its alienating aspect of total withdrawal. Naturally, "one whose time is near" comes off loaded with grief translated into the guilt of surviving, or, to put it more accurately, of responsibility for perceiving death from the outside, for filling up, as it were, the beloved with that perception.
This is Rilke at his best. He is a poet of isolation, and isolating the subject is his forte. Give him a subject and he will tum it immediately into an object, take it out of its context, and go for its core, inhabiting it with his extraordinary erudition, intuitions, and instinct for allusion. The net result is that the subject becomes his, colonized by the intensity of his attention and imagination. Death, somebody else's especially, certainly warrants this approach.
XXX
Notice, for instance, that there is not a word about the heroine's physical beauty—which is something to expect when a dead woman, and the wife of Orpheus at that, is being eulogized. Yet there is this line, "She had attained a new virginity," which accomplishes a lot more than reams of the most imaginative praise. Apart from being, like the above allusion to pregnancy, one more take on the notion of Eu- rydice's total alienation from her poet, this is obviously a reference to Venus, the goddess of love, endowed like many a goddess with the enviable (by some) capacity for self- renewing virginity—a capacity that had much less to do with the value the ancients placed on virginity as such than with their notion of divine exemption from the standard principles of causality binding mortals.
Be that as it might have been, the underlying meaning of this line is that our heroine even in death resembles Venus. This is, of course, the highest compliment one can possibly be paid, because what comes to your mind first is beauty synonymous with the goddess, thanks to her numerous depictions; her miraculous properties, including her regaining virginity after each sexual encounter with a god or a mortal, you recall later if at all.
Still, our poet here seems to be after something larger than imaginative compliments per se, since that could have been accomplished by the just quoted line. The line, however, ends not with a period but with a line break, after which we read "and was intangible." Naturally, one shouldn't read too much into lines, especially translated ones; but beyond this wonderfully evocative, very much fin-de-siecle qualifier lies a kind of equation between a mortal and a goddess which the latter could regard only as a backhanded compliment.
Of course, being a product of a later civilization, and a German on top of that, our poet can't avoid making a bit of heavy weather ofEros and Thanatos once he sees an opening. So the suggestion that, to the goddess, the outcome of a sexual encounter is never anything other than le petit mort can be put down to that. Yet what appears dramatic to a mortal, to the immortals, whose metier is infinity, may be less so, if not downright attractive. And the equation of love and death is presumably one of those things.
So in the end Venus perhaps wouldn't be much disturbed to be used as a vehicle to Eurydice's tenor. What's more, the goddess might be the first to appreciate the poet's resolution to drive the whole notion of existence, of being, inside: for that's what divinity in the final analysis is all about. So his stressing the heroine's corporeality, indeed her carnality, seals the vessel further off, practically promoting Eurydice to divine status, and infinity to sensual pleasure.
XXXI
That the narrator's and Orpheus' perspective on Eurydice diverge here is beside the point. To Orpheus, Eurydice's death is a pure loss that he wants to reverse. To the narrator, it is his and her gain, which he wants to extend.
A seeker of autonomy for his objects, Rilke certainly couldn't fail to detect this property in either his notion of death or that of love. What makes him equate them is their common rejection of the previous state. To wit, of life or of indifference. The clearest manifestation of that rejection is, of course, oblivion, and this is what our poet zeroes in on here with understandable gusto:
her sex had closed like a young flower at the approach of evening, and her pale hands had grown so disaccustomed to being a wife that even the slim god's endlessly gentle contact as he led her disturbed her like a too great intimacy.
For oblivion is obviously the first cry of infinity. One gets here the sense that Rilke is stealing Eurydice from Orpheus to a far greater degree than the myth itself calls for. In particular, he rules out even Hermes as a possible object of Orpheus' envy or jealousy, which is to say that her infinity might exclude the entire Greek pantheon. One thing is certain: our poet is far more interested in the forces pulling the heroine away from life than in those that might bring her back to it. In this, however, he doesn't contradict the myth but extends its vector.
XXXII
The question is, who uses whom—Rilke the myth, or the myth Rilke? Myths are essentially a revelatory genre. They deal in the interplay of gods and mortals or, to put it a bit more bluntly, of infinities with finalities. Normally the confines of the story are such that they leave a poet very little room for maneuvering the plot line, reducing him to the role of a mouthpiece. Faced with that and with his public's assumed prior knowledge of the story, a poet tries to excel in his lines. The better the myth is known, the tougher the poet's job.
As we said before, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice
is a very popular one, tried by an extraordinary number of hands. To embark on rendering it anew, one should have a compelling reason indeed. Yet the compelling reason (whatever it might be), in order to be felt as such, itself must have something to do with both finalities and infinities. In other words, the compelling reason is itself myth's relative.
Whatever it was that possessed Rilke in 1904 to undertake a rendering of this myth, it is not reducible to personal anguish or sexual anxiety, as some of his modem critics would have it, since those things are manifestly finite. What plays to a big audience in, say, Berkeley wouldn't ruffle the ink pot of the twenty-nine-year-old German poet in 1904, however much such things might happen to trigger a particular insight or—more likely—might themselves be the by-product of that insight's effects. Whatever it was that possessed him to write this poem must have had an aspect of myth, a sense of infinity.
XXXIII
Now, a poet arrives at this sense fastest by employing metrical verse, since meters are a means of restructuring time. This is so because every syllable has a temporal value. A line of iambic pentameter, for instance, is an equivalent of five seconds, though it could be read faster, especially if not out loud. A poet, however, always reads what he has written out loud. The meanings of words and their acoustics are saddled in his mind, therefore, with duration. Or, if you will, the other way around. In any case, a line of pentameter means five seconds spent differently from any other five seconds, including those of the next pentameter line.
This goes for any other meter, and a poet's sense of infinity is temporal rather than spatial practically by default. But few other meters are capable of generating the dispassionate monotone of blank verse, all the more perceptible, in Rilke's case, after a decade of practically nonstop rhyming. Quite apart from alluding to the poetry of Greco-Roman antiquity, habitually rendered in blank verse, this meter must have smelled to Rilke in 1904 of pure time, simply because it promised him neutrality of tone and freedom from the emphasis inevitable in rhymed verse. So up to a certain point in Eurydice's detachment from her previous state one discerns an echo ofthe poet's attitude to his previous diction, for she is neutral and free of emphasis. This is about as autobiographical as it gets.
XXXIV
Even now she was no longer that blond woman who'd sometimes echoed in the poet's poems, no longer the broad couch's scent and island, nor yonder man's possession any longer.
Or as self-referential as it gets. Because the above four lines certainly suggest a personal perspective. It is marked not so much by the physical distance from which Eurydice is observed as by the mental one from which she is, and used to be, perceived. In other words, now, as then, she is being objectified, and the sensuality of this object owes all to its surface. And though it would be best to attribute this perspective to Orpheus' shielding thus Rilke from feminist critics, the vantage point here is unmistakably the narrator's. Its clearest indication is "the broad couch's scent and island," objectifying and literally isolating the heroine. But even "that blond woman" would suffice, since the ur-poet's wife was bound to be dark-haired.
On the other hand, verisimilitude and fear of anachronism are the least relevant concerns in rendering a myth: its time frame overshoots both archaeology and utopia. Besides, here, toward the end of the poem, all the author aims at is a heightening of the pitch and a softening of the focus. The latter is certainly in keeping with Orpheus' own: Eurydice, if seen at all, is to be seen from afar.
XXXV
And here we are given by Rilke the greatest sequence of three similes in the entire history of poetry, and these deal precisely with going out of focus. More exactly, they deal with retreating into infinity. But first of all they deal with each other:
She was already loosened like long hair, and given far and wide like fallen rain, and dealt out like a manifold supply.
The hair, presumably still blond, gets loosened, presumably for the night, connoting presumably the eternal one; and its strands, presumably turning grayish, become a rain, obscuring with its hairlike lines the horizon, to the point of replacing it with a distant plenitude.
In principle, this is the same type of job that gave you the sphere at the beginning of the poem and the concentric layers of Orpheus' universe-spinning lyre in the middle, except that this time a geometric pattern is replaced by plain penciling. This vision of one's ultimate dissipation has no equal. To say the least, the line "and given far and wide like fallen rain" doesn't. Now, this is, ofcourse, a spatial rendition of infinity; but that's how infinity, temporal by definition, tends to introduce itself to mortals: it practically has no other choice.
Therefore it can be depicted only at our end, which is to say, the netherworld's. Rilke, to his immense credit, manages to elongate the perspective: the above lines suggest Hades' open-endedness, its fanning out, if you will, and into a utopian rather than an archaeological dimension at that.
Well, an organic one, to say the least. Seizing on the notion of "supply," our poet finishes his description of the heroine in the next line—"She was already root"—by firmly planting her in his "mine of souls," between those roots where "welled up the blood that flows on to mankind." This signals the poem's return to its plot line.
XXXVI
For now the explication of the characters is finished. Now they can interact. We know, however, what's going to happen, and if we are continuing to read this poem, it is for two reasons. First, because the poet has told us to whom it is going to happen; second, because we want to know why.
Myth, as we've said before, is a revelatory genre, because myths illuminate the forces that, to put it crassly, control human destiny. The gods and heroes inhabiting them are essentially those forces' sometimes more, sometimes less tangible stand-ins or figureheads. No matter how stereoscopic or palpable a poet renders them, the job may remain in the end decorative, especially if he is obsessed with perfecting the details or if he identifies himself with one or several characters in the story, in which case it turns into a podme a clef. In this case the poet imparts to the forces his characters represent an imbalance alien to their own logic or volatility. To put it bluntly, his becomes an inside story. \Vhereas the forces' is an outside one. As we've seen, Rilke shields himself from too close an affinity with Orpheus right from the outset. Thus, the risk he runs is that of concentrating on the detail, particularly in Eurydice's case. Luckily, the details here are of a metaphysical nature and, if only because of that, resist elaboration. In short, his lack of partiality vis-a-vis his material resembles that of the forces themselves. Combined with the built-in unpredictability of verse's every next word, this amounts nearly to his affinity, not to say parity, with those forces. In any case, it makes him available to their self-expression, alias revelation, and he is not one to miss it.
XXXVII
The first opportunity emerges right now, offered by the plot. And yet it is precisely the plot, with its need for conclusion and denouement, that sidetracks him.
And when, abruptly,
the god had halted her and, with an anguished outcry, outspoke the words: He has turned round!— she took in nothing, and said softly: Who?
This is a stunning scene. The monosyllabic "who" is oblivion's own voice, an ultimate exhaling. Because forces, divine powers, abstract energies, etc. , tend to operate in monosyllables; that's one way of recognizing them in everyday reality.
Our poet could have easily arrested the revelatory moment had the poem been a rhymed one. Since he had blank verse on his hands, however, he was denied the euphonic finality provided by rhyme and had to let this vastness compressed into the one vowel of "'who" go.
Remember that Orpheus' turning is the pivotal moment of the myth. Remember that verse means "turn." Remember, above all, that "Do not tum" was the divine taboo. Applied to Orpheus it means, "In the netherworld, don't behave like a poet." Or, for that matter, like verse. He does, however, since he can't help it, since verse is his second nature—perhaps his first. Therefore he turns and, boustro- phedon or no boustrophedon, his mind and his eyesight go back, violating the taboo. The price of that is Eurydice's "Who?"
In English, in any case, this could be rhymed.
XXXVIII
And had it been rhymed, the poem might well have stopped here. With the effect ofeuphonic finality and the vocal equivalent of distant menace contained in the oo.
It continues, however, not only because it is in blank verse, in German, and for compositional reasons requiring a denouement—though these could be enough. It continues because Rilke has two more things up his sleeve. One of them is highly personal, the other is the myth's own.
First, the personal; and here we are entering the murky domain of surmise. To begin with, "she took in nothing, and said softly: Who?" is modeled, I believe, on the poet's personal experience of, shall we say, romantic alienation. In fact, the entire poem could be construed as a metaphor for romantic estrangement between two participants in an affair, with the initiative belonging to the woman and the desire to restore things to normal to the man, who would naturally be the author's alter ego.
The arguments against such an interpretation are numerous; some of them have been mentioned here, including the dread of self-aggrandizement manifested in our author. Nonetheless, such an interpretation shouldn't be ruled out entirely, precisely because of his awareness of such a possibility, or else because the possibility of an affair gone bad on his part shouldn't be ruled out.
So having imagined that the level of personal reference is present here, we should take the next logical step and imagine a particular context and psychological significance informing the heroine's utterance in the poem.
That's not too difficult. Put yourself into any rejected lover's shoes and imagine yourself, say, on a rainy night passing after a protracted hiatus the all-too-familiar entrance of your beloved's house, stopping, and pressing the bell. And imagine the voice coming over, say, an intercom, inquiring who is there, and imagine yourself replying something like, "It's me, John." And imagine the voice, familiar to you in its slightest modulation, returning to you with a soft, colorless "Who?"
You would assume then not so much that you'd been entirely forgotten as that you'd been replaced. This is the worst possible interpretation of "Who?" in your current situation, and you may go for it. Whether you're right is a different matter. But if eventually you find yourself writing a poem about alienation or the worst possible thing a human being can encounter, for instance, death, you might draw on this experience of being replaced to add, so to speak, local color. All the more so because, being replaced, you seldom know by whom.
XXXIX
This is what might or might not have been behind this line, which cost Rilke an insight into the nature of the forces running the Orpheus-Eurydice hiatus. It took him seven more lines to get to the myth's own story, but it was worth waiting for.
The myth's own story is like this: Orpheus and Eurydice seem to be pulled in opposite directions by conflicting forces: he, to life; she, to death.
Which is to say, he is claimed by finality while she is by infinity.
Ostensibly, there is a semblance of parity between the two, with life showing perhaps some edge over death, for the latter allows the former to make an inroad into death's domain. Or it may be the other way around and Pluto and Persephone allow Orpheus to enter Hades to collect his wife and bring her back to life precisely because they are confident that he is going to fail. Perhaps even the taboo they issue, forbidding him to turn and look back, reflects their apprehension that Orpheus may find their realm too seductive to return to life, and they don't want to offend their fellow god Apollo by claiming his son before his time.
Ultimately, of course, it appears that the force that controls Eurydice is stronger than the one that controls Orpheus. This stands to reason, for one remains dead longer than one may be alive. And it follows that infinity yields nothing to finality—save perhaps in verse—for, being categories of time, neither can change. And it also follows that these categories use mortals not so much to manifest their forces' presence or power as to mark the boundaries of their respective domains.
XL
All this is pretty absorbing, no doubt, but in the final analysis it doesn't explain how or, for that matter, why the divine taboo works. For that, it turns out, the myth needs a poet, and it's this myth's great fortune that it finds Rainer Maria Rilke.
Here is the poem's final part, which tells you about the mechanism of that taboo as well as who is using whom: a poet a myth, or a myth a poet:
But in the distance, dark in the bright exit, someone or other stood, whose countenance was indistinguishable. Stood and saw how, on a strip of pathway between meadows, with sorrow in his look, the god of message turned silently to go behind the figure already going back by that same pathway, its paces circumscribed by lengthy shroudings, uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
Now, the "bright exit" is obviously the exit from Hades into life, and the "someone or other" who is standing there, and whose "countenance" is "indistinguishable," is Orpheus. He is "someone or other" for two reasons: because he is of no relevance to Eurydice and because he is just a silhouette for Hermes, the god, who looks at Orpheus standing on the threshold of life from the dark depth of the netherworld.
In other words, Hermes at this point is still facing in the same direction as he did before, throughout the poem. Whereas Orpheus, as we've been told, has turned. As to Eurydice . . . and here comes the greatest job of the entire poem.
"Stood and saw," says the narrator, emphasizing by the change of tense in the verb "to stand" Orpheus' regret and acknowledgment of failure. But what he sees is truly remarkable. For he sees the god turning, but only now, to follow "behind the figure/already going back ..." Which is to say that Eurydice has turned also. Which is to say, the god is the last to turn.
And the question is, when did Eurydice turn? And the answer is "already," and what it boils down to is that Orpheus and Eurydice turned simultaneously.
Our poet, in other words, has synchronized their movements, telling us thereby that the forces controlling finality and infinity themselves are controlled from a certain—let's call it panel, and that this control panel is, on top of that, automatic.
Our next question is, presumably, a soft "Who?"
XLI
The Greeks certainly would know the answer and say, Chronos, since he is the one to whom all myths point anyway. At the moment, though, he is beyond our concern or, for that matter, reach. We should stop here, where roughly six hundred seconds, or ten minutes, of this poem written ninety years ago leave us.
It is not_a bad place, though it is only a finality. Except that we don't see it as such—perhaps because we don't wish to identify with Orpheus, rejected and failed. We see it rather as an infinity, and we even would prefer to identify with Eurydice, because it's easier to identify with beauty, especially dissipating and "given far and wide like fallen rain."
These, however, are the extremes. What makes the place where we are left by this poem indeed attractive is that while we are here, we have the chance to identify with its author, Rainer Maria Rilke, wherever he is.
Toro, Sweden 1994
Letter to Horace
My dear Horace,
If what Suetonius tells us about your lining your bedroom walls with mirrors to enjoy coitus from every angle is true, you may find this letter a bit dull. On the other hand, you may be entertained by its coming to you from a part of the world whose existence you never suspected, and some two thousand years after your death, at that. Not bad for a reflection, is it?
You were almost fifty-seven, I believe, when you died in 8 B.C., though you weren't aware of either C. Himself or a new millennium coming. As for myself, I am fifty-four now; my own millennium, too, has only a few years to run. Whatever new order of things the future has in store, I anticipate none of it either. So we may talk, I suppose, man to man, Horace. And I may as well begin with a locker-room kind of story.
Last night I was in bed rereading your Odes, and I bumped into that one to your fellow poet Rufus Valgius in which you are trying to convince him not to grieve so much over the loss of his son (according to some) or his lover (according to others). You proceed for a couple of stanzas with your exempla, telling him that So-and-so lost this person and Such-and-such another, and then you suggest to Rufus that he, as a kind of self-therapy, get engaged in praising Augustus' new triumphs. You mention several recent conquests, among them grabbing some space from the Scythians.
Actually, that must have been the Geloni; but it doesn't matter. Funny, I hadn't noticed this ode before. My people—well, in a manner of speaking—aren't mentioned that often by great poets of Roman antiquity. The Greeks are a different matter, since they rubbed shoulders with us quite a bit. But even with them we don't fare that well. A few bits in Homer (of which Strabo makes such a meal afterward!), a dozen lines in Aeschylus, not much more in Euripides. Passing references, basically; but nomads don't deserve any better. Of the Romans, I used to think, it was only poor Ovid who paid us any heed; but then he had no choice. There is practically nothing about us in Virgil, not to mention Catullus or Propertius, not to mention Lucretius. And now, lo and behold, a crumb from your table.
Perhaps, I said to myself, if I scratch him hard enough, I may find a reference to the part of the world I find myself in now. Who knows, he might have had a fantasy, a vision. In this line of work that happens.
But you never were a visionary. Quirky, unpredictable, yes—but not a visionary. To advise a grief-stricken fellow to change his tune and sing Caesar's victories—this you could do; but to imagine another land and another heaven—well, for that one should turn, I guess, to Ovid. Or wait for another millennium. On the whole, you Latin poets were bigger on reflection and rumination than on conjecture. I suppose because the empire was large enough as it was to strain one's own imagination.
So there I was, lying across my unkempt bed, in this unimaginable (for you) place, on a cold February night, some two thousand years later. The only thing I had in common with you, I thought, was the latitude and, of course, the little volume of your Collected, in Russian translations. At the time you wrote all this, you see, we didn't have a language. We weren't even we; we were Geloni, Getae, Budini, etc.: just bubbles in our own future gene pool. So two thousand years were not for nothing, after all. Now we can read you in our own highly inflected language, with its famous gutta-percha syntax suiting the translation of the likes of you marvelously.
Still, I am writing this to you in a language with whose alphabet you are more familiar. A lot more, I should add, than I am. Cyrillic, I am afraid, would only bewilder you even further, though you no doubt would recognize the Greek characters. Of course the distance between us is too large to worry about increasing it—or, for that matter, about trying to shrink it. But the sight of Latin letters may be of some comfort to you, no matter how bewildering their use may look.
So I was lying atop my bed with the little volume of your Cannina. The heat was on, but the cold night outside was winning. It is a small, two-storied wooden affair I live in here, and my bedroom is upstairs. As I looked at the ceiling, I could almost see cold seeping through my gambrel roof: a sort of anti-haze. No mirrors here. At a certain age one doesn't care for one's own reflection, company or no company; especially if no. That's why I wonder whether Suetonius tells the truth. Although I imagine you would be pretty sanguine about that as well. Your famous equipoise! Besides, for all this latitudinal identity, in Rome it never gets that cold. A couple of thousand years ago the climate perhaps was different; your lines, though, bear no witness to that. Anyhow, I was getting sleepy.
And I remembered a beauty I once knew in your town. She lived in Subura, in a small apartment bristling with flowerpots but redolent with the smell of the crumbling paperbacks the place was stuffed with. They were everywhere, but mostly on shelves reaching the ceiling (the ceiling, admittedly, was low). Most of them were not hers but belonged to her neighbor across the hall, about whom I heard a lot but whom I never met. The neighbor was an old woman, a widow, who was born and spent her entire life in Libya, in Leptis Magna. She was Italian but of Jewish extraction—or maybe it was her husband who was Jewish. At any rate, when he died and when things began to heat up in Libya, the old lady sold her house, packed up her stuff, and came to Rome. Her apartment was apparently even smaller than my tender companion's, and jammed with a lifetime's accretions. So the two women, the old and the young, struck a deal whereupon the latter's bedroom began to resemble a regular secondhand-book store. What jarred with this impression wasn't so much the bed as the large, heavily framed mirror leaning somewhat precariously against a rickety bookshelf right across from the bed, and at such an angle that whenever I or my tender companion wanted to imitate you, we had to strain and crane our necks rather desperately. Otherwise the mirror would frame only more paperbacks. In the early hours it could give one an eerie feeling of being transparent.
All that happened ages ago, though something nudges me to mutter, centuries ago. In an emotional sense, that would be valid. In fact, the distance between that place in Subura and my present precincts psychologically is larger than the one between you and me. Which is to say that in neither case are "millennia" inapplicable. Or to say that, to me, your reality is practically greater than that of my private memory. Besides, the name of Leptis Magna interferes with both. I've always wanted to visit there; in fact, it became a sort of obsession with me once I began to frequent your town and Mediterranean shores in general. Well, partly because one of the floor mosaics in some bath there contains the only surviving likeness of Virgil, and a likeness done in his lifetime, at that! Or so I was told; but maybe it's in Tunisia. In Africa, anyway. When one is cold, one remembers Africa. And when it's hot, also.
Ah, what I wouldn't give to know what the four of you looked like! To put a face to the lyric, not to mention the epic. I would settle for a mosaic, though I'd prefer a fresco. Worse comes to worse, I would resign myself to the marbles, except that the marbles are too generic—everybody gets blond in marble—and too questionable. Somehow, you are the least of my concerns, i.e., you are the easiest to picture. If what Suetonius tells us about your appearance is indeed true— at least something in his account must be true!—and you were short and portly, then you most likely looked like Eu- genio Montale or Charlie Chaplin in the King in New York period. The one I can't picture for the life of me is Ovid. Even Propertius is easier: skinny, sickly, obsessed with his equally skinny and sickly redhead, he is imaginable. Say, a cross behveen William Powell and Zbigniew Cybulski. But not Ovid, though he lasted longer than all of you. Alas, not in those parts where they carved likenesses. Or laid mosaics. Or bothered with frescoes. And if anything of the sort was done before your beloved Augustus kicked him out ofRome, then it was no doubt destroyed. So as not to offend high sensibilities. And afterward—well, afterward any slab of marble would do. As we used to say in northern Scythia— Hyperborea to you—paper can endure anything, and in your day marble was a kind of paper.
You think I am rambling, but I am just trying to reproduce the train of thought that took me late last night to an unusually graphic destination. It meandered a bit, for sure; but not that much. For, one way or another, I've always been thinking about you four, especially about Ovid. About Pub- lius Ovidius Naso. And not for reasons of some particular affinity. No matter how similar my circumstances may now and then appear to his in the eyes of some beholder, I won't produce any Metamorphoses. Besides, twenty-two years in these parts won't rival ten in Sarmatia. Not to mention that I saw my Terza Roma crumble. I have my vanity, but it has its limits. Now that they are drawn by age, they are more palpable than before. But even as a young pup, kicked out of my home to the Polar Circle, I never fancied myself playing his double. Though then my empire looked indeed eternal, and one could roam on the ice of our many deltas all winter long.
No, I never could conjure Naso's face. Sometimes I see him played by James Mason—a hazel eye soggy with grief and mischief; at other times, though, it's Paul Newman's winter-gray stare. But, then, Naso was a very protean fellow, with Janus no doubt presiding over his lares. Did you two get along, or was the age difference too big to bother? Twenty-two years, after all. You must have known him, at least through Maecenas. Or did you just think him too frivolous, saw it coming? Was there bad blood between you? He must have thought you ridiculously loyal, true blue in a sort of quaint, self-made man's kind of way. And to you he was just a punk, an aristo, privileged from the cradle, etc. Not like you and Anthony Perkins's Virgil, practically working- class boys, only five years' difference. Or is this too much Karl Marx reading and moviegoing, Horace? Perhaps. But wait, there is more. There is Dr. Freud coming into this, too, for what sort of interpretation of dreams is it, if it's not filtered through good old Ziggy? For it was my good old subconscious the train of thought I just mentioned was taking me to, late last night, and at some speed.
Anyhow, Naso was greater than both of you—well, at least as far as I'm concerned. Metrically, of course, more monotonous; but so is Virgil. And so is Propertius, for all his emotional intensity. In any case, my Latin stinks; that's why I read you all in Russian. It copes with your asclepiadic verse in a far more convincing way than the language I am writing this in, for all the familiarity of the latter's alphabet. The latter just can't handle dactyls. Which were your forte. More exactly, Latin's forte. And your Carmina is, of course, their showcase. So I am reduced to judging the stuff by the quality of imagination. (Here's your defense, if you need one.) And on that score Naso beats you all.
All the same, I can't conjure up your faces, his especially; not even in a dream. Funny, isn't it, not to have any idea how those whom you think you know most intimately looked? For nothing is more revealing than one's use ofiambs and trochees. And, by the same token, those who don't use meters are always a closed book, even if you know them physically, inside out. How did John Clare put it? "Even those whom I knew best I Are strange, nay! stranger than the rest." At any rate, metrically, Flaccus, you were the most diverse among them. Small wonder that this huffing and puffing train took you for its engineer as it was leaving its own millennium and heading for yours, unaccustomed as it may have been to electricity. Hence I was traveling in the dark.
Few things are more boring than other people's dreams, unless they are nightmares or highly carnal. This one, Flac- cus, was of the latter denomination. I was in some very sparsely furnished bedroom, in a bed sitting next to the sea- serpent-like, though extremely dusty, radiator. The walls were absolutely naked, but I was convinced I was in Rome. In fact, I was sure I was in Subura, in the apartment of that pretty friend of mine from days of yore. Except that she wasn't there. Neither were the paperbacks, nor the mirror. But the brown flowerpots stood absolutely intact, emitting not so much the aroma of their plants as the tint of their own clay: the whole scene was done in terra-cotta-cum-sepia tones. That's how I knew I was in Rome.
Everything was terra-cotta-cum-sepia-shaded. Even the crumpled bedsheets. Even the bodice of my affections' target. Even those looming parts of her anatomy that wouldn't have benefited from a suntan, I imagine, in your day either. Thewhole thing was positively monochrome; I felt that, had I been able to see myself, I would be in sepia, too. Still, there was no mirror. Imagine those Greek vases with their mul- tifigured design running around, and you'll get the texture.
This was the most vigorous session of its kind I've ever taken part in, whether in real life or in my imagination. Such distinctions, however, should have been dispensed with already, given the character of this letter. Which is to say, I was as much impressed by my stamina as by my concupiscence. Given my age, not to mention my cardiovascular predicament, this distinction is worth sustaining, dream or no dream. Admittedly, the target of my affections—a target long since reached—was markedly younger than I, but not by a huge margin. The body in question seemed in its late thirties, bony, yet supple and of great elasticity. Still, its most exacting aspect was its tremendous agility, wholly devoted to the single purpose of escaping the banality of bed. To condense the entire endeavor into one cameo, my target's upper torso would be plunged into the narrow, one-foot- wide trough between the bed and the radiator, with the tan less rump and me atop it floating at the mattress's brink. The bodice's laced hem would do as foam.
Throughout all this I didn't see her face. For the above- implied reasons. All I knew about her was that she was from Leptis Magna, although I have no idea how I learned this. There was no sound track to this session, nor do I believe we exchanged two words. If we did, that was before I became cognizant of the process, and the words must have been in Latin: I have a faint sense of some obstacle regarding our communication. Still, all along I seem to have known, or else managed to surmise in advance, that there was something of Ingrid Thulin in the bone structure of her face. Perhaps I espied this when, submerged as she was under the bed, her right hand now and then, in an awkward backward motion, groped for the warm coils of that dusty radiator.
When I woke up the next—i.e., this—morning, my bedroom was dreadfully cold. A mealy, revolting daylight was arriving through both windows like some kind ofdust. Perhaps dust is indeed daylight's leftover; well, this shouldn't be ruled out. Momentarily, I shut my eyes; but the room in Su- bura was gone. Its only evidence lingered in the dark under my blanket where daylight couldn't reach, but clearly not for long. Next to me, opened in the middle, was your book.
No doubt it's you whom I should thank for this dream, Flac- cus. Now, the hand jerkily trying to clutch the radiator could of course stand for the straining and craning in days of yore, as that pretty friend of mine or I tried to catch a glimpse of ourselves in that gilded mirror. But I rather doubt it—two torsos can't shrink into one limb; no subconscious is that economical. No, I believe that hand somehow echoed the general motion ofyour verse, its utter unpredictability and, with this, the inevitable stretching—nay, straining—of your syntax in translation. As a result, practically every line of yours is surprising. This is not a compliment, though; just an observation. In our line of work, tricks, naturally, are de rigiieiir. And the standard ratio is something like one little miracle per stanza. If a poet is exceptionally good, he may come up with a couple. With you, practically each line is an adventure; sometimes there are several in one line. Of course, some of this has to do with having you in translation. But I suspect that in your native Latin, too, your readers seldom knew what the next word was going to be. It's like constantly walking on broken glass or something: on the mental—oral?—version of broken glass, limping and leaping. Or like that hand clutching the radiator: there was something distinctly logaoedic about its bursts and withdrawals. But, then, next to me I had your Carmina.
Had it been your Epodes or Epistles, not to mention Satires or, for that matter, Ars Poetica, the dream I am sure would have been different. That is, it would perhaps have been as carnal, but a good deal less memorable. For it's only in the Carmina that you are metrically enterprising, Flaccus. The rest is practically all done in couplets; the rest is bye- bye to asclepiads and Sapphics and hello to downright hexameters. The rest is not that twitching hand but the radiator itself, with its rhythmic coils like nothing more than elegiac couplets. Make this radiator stand on end and it will look like anything by Virgil. Or by Propertius. Or by Ovid. Or by you, save your Carmina.
It will look like any page of Latin poetry. It will look like—should I use the hateful word—text.
Well, I thought, what if it was Latin poetry? And what if that hand was simply trying to turn the page? And my efforts vis-a-vis that sepia-shaded body simply stood for my reading of a body of Latin poetry? If only because I still—even in a dream!—couldn't make out her face. As for that glimpse of her Ingrid Thulin features that I caught as she was straining to turn the page, it had most likely to do with the Virgil played in my mind by Tony Perkins. Because he and Ingrid Thulin have sort of similar cheekbones; also since Virgil is the one I've read most of all. Since he has penned more lines than anybody. Well, I've never counted, but it sure feels that way, thanks to the Aeneid. Though I, for one, by far prefer his Bucolics or Georgics to his epic.
I'll tell you why later. The truth ofthe matter, however, is that I honestly don't know whether I espied those cheekbones first and learned that my sepia-shaded target was from Leptis Magna second, or vice versa. For I'd seen a reproduction of that floor-mosaic likeness some time before. And I believed it was from Leptis Magna. I can't recall why or where. On the frontispiece of some Russian edition, perhaps? Or maybe it was a postcard. Main thing, it was from Leptis Magna and done in Virgil's lifetime, or shortly thereafter. So what I beheld in my dream was a somewhat familiar sight; the sensation itself wasn't so much that of beholding as that of recognition. Never mind the armpit muscle and the breast bustling in the bodice.
Or precisely because of that: because, in Latin, poetry is feminine. That's good for allegory, and what's good for allegory is good for the subconscious. And if the target of my affections stood—lay down, rather—for a body of Latin poetry, its high cheekbones could just as well resemble Virgil's, regardless ofhis own sexual preferences, ifonly because the body in my dream was from Leptis Magna. First, because Leptis Magna is a ruin, and every bedroom endeavor resembles a ruin, what with sheets, pillows, and the prone and jumbled limbs themselves. Second, because the very name "Leptis Magna" always struck me as being feminine, like Latin poetry, not to mention what I suppose it literally means. Which is, a great offering. Although my Latin stinks. But be that as it may, what is Latin poetry after all if not a great offering? Except that my reading, as you no doubt would charge, only ruins it. Well, hence this dream.
Let's avoid murky waters, Flaccus; let's not saddle ourselves with exploring whether dream can be reciprocal. Let me hope at least you won't proceed in a similar fashion about my own scribblings should you ever get acquainted with them. You won't pun about pen and penis, will you? And why shouldn't you get acquainted with my stuff quite apart from this letter. Reciprocity or no reciprocity, I see no reason why you, so capable of messing up my dreams, won't take the next step and interfere with my reality.
You do, as it is; if anything, my writing you this letter is the proof. But beyond that, you know full well that I've written to you, in a manner of speaking, before. Since everything I've written is, technically, addressed to you: you personally, as well as the rest of you. Because when one writes verse, one's most immediate audience is not one's own contemporaries, let alone posterity, but one's predecessors. Those who gave one a language, those who gave one forms. Frankly, you know that far better than I. Who wrote those asclepiadics, Sapphics, hexameters, and Alcaics, and who were their addressees? Caesar? Maecenas? Rufus? Varus? Lydias and Glycerias? Fat lot they knew about or cared for trochees and dactyls! And you were not aiming at me, either. No, you were appealing to Asclepiades, to Alcaeus and Sappho, to Homer himself. You wanted to be appreciated by them, first of all. For where is Caesar? Obviously in his palace or smiting the Scythians. And Maecenas is in his villa. Ditto Rufus and Varus. And Lydia is with a client and Gly- ceria is out of town. Whereas your beloved Greeks are right here, in your head, or should I say in your heart, for you no doubt knew them by heart. They were your best audience, since you could summon them at any moment. It's they you were trying to impress most of all. Never mind the foreign language. In fact, it's easier to impress them in Latin: in Greek, you wouldn't have the mother tongue's latitude. And they were talking back to you. Theywere saying, Yeah, we're impressed. That's why your lines are so twisted with en- jambments and qualifiers, that's whyyour argument is always so unpredictable. That's why you advise your grief-stricken pal to praise Augustus' triumphs.
So if you could do this to them, why can't I do that to you? The language difference at least is here; so one condition is being met. One way or the other, I've been responding to you, especially when I use iambic trimeters. And now I am following this up with a letter. Who knows, I may yet summon you here, you may yet materialize in the end even more than you've done already in my verses. For all I know, logaoedics with dactyls beat any old seance as a means of conjuring. In our line ofwork, this sort ofthing is called pastiche. Once the beat ofa classic enters one's system, its spirit moves in, too. And you are a classic, Flaccus, aren't you, in more ways than one, which alone would be complex enough.
And ultimately who else is there in this world one can talk to without revulsion, especially if one is ofa misanthropic disposition by nurture. It is for this reason, not vanity, that I hope you get acquainted with my iambs and trochees in some netherworldly manner. Stranger things have happened, and my pen at least has done its bit to that end. I'd much rather, of course, talk to Naso or Propertius, but with you I have more in common metrically. They stuck to elegiac couplets and hexameters; I seldom use those. So it's between you and me here, presumptuous as this may sound to everybody. But not to you. "All the literati keep I An imaginary friend," says Auden. Why should I be an exception?
At the very least, I can sit myself down in front of my mirror and talk to it. That would be fairly close, although I don't believe that you looked like me. But when it comes to the human appearance, nature, in the final analysis, doesn't have that many options. What are they? A pair of eyes, a mouth, a nose, an oval. For all their diversity, in two thousand years nature is bound to repeat itself. Even a God will. So I could easily claim that that face in the mirror is ultimately yours, that you are me. Who is there to check, and in what way? As conjuring tricks go, this might do. But I am afraid I am going too far: I'll never write myself a letter. Even ifl were truly your look-alike. So stay faceless, Flaccus, stay unconjured. This way, you may last for two millennia more. Otherwise, each time I mount a woman she might think that she is dealing with Horace. Well, in a sense she is, dream or no dream. Nowhere does time collapse as easily as in one's mind. That's why we so much like thinking about history, don't we? Ifl am right about nature's options, history is like surrounding oneself with mirrors, like living in a bordello.
Two thousand years—of what? By whose count, Flaccus? Certainly not in terms of metrics. Tetrameters are tetrameters, no matter when and no matter where. Be they in Greek, Latin, Russian, English. So are dactyls, and so are anapests. Et cetera. So two thousand years in what sense? When it comes to collapsing time, our trade, I am afraid, beats history, and smells, rather sharply, ofgeography. What Euterpe and Urania have in common is that both are Clio's seniors. You start talking your Rufus Valgius out of his protracted grieving by evoking the waves of Mare Caspium; even they, you write, do not remain rough forever. This means that you knew about that mare two thousand years ago—from some Greek author, no doubt, as your own people didn't cast their quills that wide. Herein, I suppose, lay this mare's first attraction for you as a Roman poet. An exotic name and, on top of that, one connoting the farthest point of your Pax Romana, if not of the known world itself. Also, a Greek one (actually, perhaps even Persian, but you could bump into it only in Greek). The main thing, though, about "Caspium" is that this word is dactylic. That's why it sits at the second line's end, where every poem's meter gets established. And you are consoling Rufus in an asclepiad.
Whereas 1—1 crossed that Caspium once or twice. When I was either eighteen or nineteen, or maybe twenty. When—1 am tempted to say—you were in Athens, learning your Greek. In those days, the distance between Caspium and Hellas, not to mention Rome, was in a sense even greater than it was two thousand years ago; it was, frankly, insurmountable. So we didn't meet. The mare itself was smooth and shiny, near its western shores especially. Thanks not so much to the propitious proximity to civilization as to vast oil spills, perennial in those parts. (I could say this was the real case of pouring oil upon troubled waters, but I am afraid you wouldn't catch the reference.) I was lying flat on the hot upper deck of a dirty steamer, hungry and penniless, but happy all the same, because I was participating in geography. When you are going by boat you always do. Had I read by that time your piece to Rufus, I would have realized that I was also participating in poetry. In a dactyl rather than in a sharpening horizon.
But in those days I wasn't that much of a reader. In those days I was working in Asia: mountain climbing and desert trekking. Prospecting for uranium, basically. You don't know what that stufl' is, and I won't bore you with an explanation, Flaccus. Although "uranium" is another dactylic word. What does it feel like to learn a word you cannot use? Especially —for you—a Greek one? Awful, I suppose; like, for me, your Latin. Perhaps ifl were able to operate in it confidently, I could indeed conjure you up. On the other hand, perhaps not: I'd become for you just another Latin author, and that is a recipe for hiatus.
In any case, in those days I'd read none of you, except—if my memory doesn't play tricks on me—Virgil, i.e., his epic. I remember that I didn't care for it much, partly because against that backdrop of mountains and deserts few things managed to make sense; mainly because of the epic's rather sharp smell of commission. In those days, one's nostrils were very keen for that sort of thing. Besides, I simply couldn't make out 99 percent of his exempla, which were getting in the way rather frequently. What do you expect from an eighteen-year-old from Hyperborea? I am better with this sort of thing now, but it's taken a lifetime. On the whole, it seems to me that you all were overdoing it a bit with the references; they often strike one as filler. Although euphonically of course they—the Greek ones especially— do marvels for the texture.
What rattled me perhaps most in the Aeneid was that retroactive prophecy of Anchises, when the old man predicts what has already taken place. Here, I thought, your friend went a bit too far. I don't mind the conceit, but the dead should be allowed to be more imaginative. They ought to know more than just Augustus' pedigree; after all, they are not oracles. What a waste of that stunning, mind-boggling idea about souls being entitled to a second corporeality and lapping from the river Lethe to cleanse themselves of their previous memories! To reduce them to paving the road for the reign of the current master! Why, they could become Christians, Charlemagnes, Diderots, Communists, Hegels, us! Those who will come after, mongrels and mutants, and in more ways than one! That would be a real prophecy, a real flight of fancy. Instead, he rehashes the official record and serves it as hot news. The dead are free of causality, to begin with. The knowledge available to them is that about time—all time. That much he could have learned from Lucretius; your friend was a learned man. More than that, he had a terrific metaphysical instinct, a real nose for things' spiritual lining: his souls are far less physical than Dante's. True manes: gaseous and unpalpable. One is tempted to say his scholasticism here is practically medieval. But that would be a put-down. Because metaphysically your future turned out to be far less imaginative than your Greek past. For what is life eternal to a soul compared with a second corporeality? What is Paradise to it after the Pythagorean promise of another body? Just unemployment. Still, whatever his sources were—Pythagoras, Plato's Phaedrus, his own fancy—he blows it all for the sake of Caesar's lineage.
Well, the epic was his; he had the right to do with it what he liked. But I find it, frankly, unforgivable. It's failures of imagination like these that paved the road to the triumph of monotheism. The one, I guess, is always more graspable than the many; and after that gigantic Greek-and-homemade stew of gods and heroes, this sort of longing for something more graspable, more coherent, was practically inevitable. In other words, for all his expansive gestures, your friend, my dear Flaccus, was just craving metaphysical security. And that, I am afraid, is a contradiction in terms; perhaps the chief attraction of polytheism is that it would have none of that. But I suppose the place was getting too populous to indulge in insecurity of any kind. That's why your friend pins this whole thing, metaphysics and all, on his beloved Caesar in the first place. Civil wars, I should say, do wonders for one's spiritual orientation.
But it's no use talking to you like that. You all loved Augustus, didn't you? Even Naso, although he apparently was more curious about Caesar's sentimental property, beyond suspicion as it habitually was, than about his territorial conquests. But then, unlike your friend, Naso was a womanizer. Among other things, that's what makes it so difficult to picture his appearance, that's why I oscillate between Paul Newman and James Mason. A womanizer is an everyman: not that it means he should be trusted any more than a pedophile. And yet his account of what transpired between Dido and Aeneas sounds a bit more convincing than that of your friend. Naso's Dido claims that Aeneas is abandoning her and Carthage in such a hurry—remember, there was a storm looming and 'Aeneas must have had it with storms by then, what with being tossed on the high seas for seven years— not because he heeded the call of his divine mother but because Dido was pregnant with his child. And that's why she commits suicide: because her reputation is ruined. She is a queen, after all. Naso makes his Dido even question whether Venus was indeed the mother of Aeneas, for she was the goddess of love, and departure is an odd (though not unprecedented) way to manifest this sentiment. No doubt Naso spoofs your friend here. No doubt this depiction of Aeneas is unflattering and, given the fact that the legend of Rome's Trojan origins was the official historical orthodoxy from the third century B.C. onward, downright unpatriotic. Equally doubtless is that Virgil never read Naso's Heroides; otherwise, the former's treatment of Dido in the netherworld would be less reprehensible. For he simply stashes her away, together with Sychaeus, her former husband, in some remote nook of Elysium, where the two forgive and console each other. A retired couple in an old people's home. Out of our hero's way. To spare him agony, to provide him with a prophecy. Because the latter makes better copy. Anyhow, no second corporeality for Dido's soul.
You will argue that I am applying to him the standards that took two millennia to emerge. You are a good friend, Flaccus, but it's nonsense. I am judging him by his own standards, more evident actually in the Bucolics and the Georgics than in his epic. Don't play the innocent: you all had a minimum of seven centuries of poetry behind you. Five in Greek and two in your own Latin. Remember Euripides, remember his Alcestis: the wedding scene's scandal of King Admetus with his parents beats anything in Dostoevsky hands down —though you may not catch the reference. Which means it beats any psychological novel. Which is something we excelled at in Hyperborea a hundred years ago. Out there, you see, we are big on agony. Prophecy is a different matter. Which is to say, two thousand years were not in vain.
No, the standards are his, by way ofthe Georgics. Based on Lucretius and on Hesiod. In this line of work, Flaccus, there are no big secrets. Only small and guilty ones. Herein, I must add, lies their beauty. And the small and guilty secret of the Georgics is that their author, unlike Lucretius—and, for that matter, Hesiod—had no overriding philosophy. To say the least, he was no atomist, no epicurean. At best, I imagine, he hoped that the sum total of his lines would add up to a worldview, if he cared about such a thing in the first place. For he was a sponge, and a melancholic one at that. For him, the best—if not the only—way to understand the world was to list its contents, and if he missed anything in his Bucolics or in the Georgics, he caught up with that in his epic. He was an epic poet, indeed; an epic realist, if you will, since, speaking numerically, reality itself is quite epic. The cumulative effect ofhis output upon my reflective faculty has always been the sensation that this man has itemized the world, and in a rather meticulous fashion. Whether he talks of plants or planets, soils or souls, the deeds and/or destinies of the men of Rome, his close-ups are both blinding and binding; but so are things themselves, dear Flaccus, aren't they? No, your friend was no atomist, no epicurean; nor was he a stoic. If he believed in any principle, it was life's regeneration, and his Georgics' bees are no better than those souls chalked up for second corporeality in the Aeneid.
But perhaps they are better, and not so much because they don't end up buzzing "Caesar, Caesar" as because of the Georgics' tonality of utter detachment. Perhaps it's those days of yore I spent roaming the mountains and deserts of Central Asia that make this tonality most appealing. Back then, I suppose, it was the impersonality of the landscape I'd find myself in that impressed itself on the cortex. Now, a lifetime later, I might blame this taste for monotony on the human vista. Underneath either one lies, of course, an inkling that detachment is the final product of many intense attachments. Or else the modern predilection for a neutral voice, so characteristic of didactic genres in your times. Or both, which is more likely still. And even if the Georgics' impersonal drone is nothing but a Lucretian pastiche—as I strongly suspect it is—it is still appealing. Because of its implicit objectivity and explicit similarity to the monotonous clamor of days and years; to the sound time makes as it passes. The very absence of story, the absence of characters in the Georgics echo, as it were, time's own perspective on any existential predicament. I even remember myself thinking back then that should time have a pen of its own and decide to compose a poem, its lines would include leaves, grass, earth, wind, sheep, horses, trees, cows, bees. But not us. Maximum, our souls.
So the standards are indeed his. And the epic, for all its splendors, as well as because of them, is a letdown as regards those standards. Plain and simple, he had a story to tell. And a story is bound to have us in it. Which is to say, those whom time dismisses. On top of that, the story wasn't his own. No, give me the Georgics any day. Or, should I say, any night, considering my present reading habits. Although I must confess that even in those days of yore, when the sperm count was much higher, hexameter would have left my dreams dry and uneventful. Logaoedics apparently are much more potent.
Two thousand years this, two thousand years that! Just imagine, Flaccus, if I'd had company last night. And imagine an—er—translation of this dream into reality. Well, half of humanity must be conceived that way, no? Wouldn't you be responsible, at least in part? Where would those two thousand years be; and wouldn't I have to call the offspring Horace? So, consider this letter a soiled sheet, if not your own by-blow.