After Apple-picking

I was drawn to a particular poem last month after watching a documentary film about Robert Frost. This is the poem:

AFTER APPLE-PICKING

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree 
Toward heaven still, 
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill 
Beside it, and there may be two or three 
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. 
But I am done with apple-picking now. 
Essence of winter sleep is on the night, 
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. 
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass 
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough 
And held against the world of hoary grass. 
It melted, and I let it fall and break. 
But I was well 
Upon my way to sleep before it fell, 
And I could tell 
What form my dreaming was about to take. 
Magnified apples appear and disappear, 
Stem end and blossom end, 
And every fleck of russet showing clear. 
My instep arch not only keeps the ache, 
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. 
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. 
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin 
The rumbling sound 
Of load on load of apples coming in. 
For I have had too much 
Of apple-picking: I am overtired 
Of the great harvest I myself desired. 
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, 
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. 
For all
That struck the earth, 
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, 
Went surely to the cider-apple heap 
As of no worth. 
One can see what will trouble 
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. 
Were he not gone, 
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his 
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, 
Or just some human sleep. 

I heard Frost recite this poem in the documentary in his dry, unemphatic way, and saw Richard Wilbur and Seamus Heaney discussing it. Heaney called it "Frost's Ode to Autumn. In fact it's the one place where he surrenders to the wood." The woods appear and reappear in several of Frost's poems; the best-known are probably "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Come in".

Certain that I'd encountered the poem before many years ago (when I read it much less attentively), reading it again was like reading it for the first time. It measures up to what Frost wrote in the introduction to his Collected Poems: "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride all its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went."(1)

Right away, I could see that the poem was not one of Frost's easier poems. There are two Robert Frosts, and the difference between them goes much deeper than poetic success or failure. It must have been deliberate, since he noticed that some of his poems got a great deal more attention from readers than others, and who better than Frost knew that they were not always his most important poems. In his 1963 essay on Frost, "A Momentary Stay," Irving Howe addresses this:

"It might be convenient, but is also a dangerous simplification, to draw a sharp line between his popular and superior poems. The two have a way of shading into one another ... in his small number of distinguished lyrics ... the archness and sentimentalism have been ruthlessly purged; he is writing for sheer life. To read these poems, as they confront basic human troubles and obliquely notice the special dislocations of our time, can be unnerving—for they offer neither security nor solace. They are the work of a poet who, without the mediation of formal thought or religious sentiments, gives close and hard battle to his own experience. They seek to capture those moments when we confront experience in its bareness, observing some natural event or place with a pure sense of the dynamics of reception. They set out to record such tremors of being in their purity and isolation: as if through a critical encounter with the physical world one could move beyond the weariness of selfhood and into the repose of matter. But Frost, now supremely hard on himself, also knows that the very intensity with which these amounts are felt makes certain their rapid dissolution, and that what then remains is the familiar self, once again its own prisoner. Approaching a pure state of being, these lyrics return with the necessity of shaped meaning. And in their somewhat rueful turning back to the discipline of consciousness, the effect is both painful and final: they conclude with the reflection that the central quandary of selfhood, that it must forever spiral back to its own starting point, cannot be dissolved."

"After Apple-picking" is a very odd Frost poem, one that is so ambiguous as to invite different conclusions about its meaning. Only recall what Amy Lowell wrote when the Frost collection North of Boston was published in America in 1915: "The charming idyll 'After Apple-picking,' is dusted over with something uncanny." That "something" is not easily identified. On its smooth surface, with a lilting cadence and rhyme, the poem describes how very late in the year, the speaker has finished picking nearly every available apple from his apple trees. He is so weary from his labors that he wonders if he might sleep the whole winter, like the woodchuck (who is already hibernating in his hole). But he was already tired, he says, when he began picking in the morning. Like the world around him, he is winding down toward something more than simply "human sleep." The grass is hoary with frost. The snow will come soon.

If "After Apple-picking" is Frost's Ode to Autumn, it doesn't fall easily in line with an idyll like John Clare's "To Autumn":

Come, pensive Autumn, with thy clouds and storms
And falling leaves and pastures lost to flowers;
A luscious charm hangs on thy faded forms,
More sweet than Summer in her loveliest hours,
Who in her blooming uniform of green
Delights with samely and continued joy:
But give me, Autumn, where thy hand hath been,
For there is wildness that can never cloy –
The russet hue of fields left bare, and all
The tints of leaves and blossoms ere they fall.
In thy dull days of clouds a pleasure comes,
Wild music softens in thy hollow winds;
And in thy fading woods a beauty blooms
That’s more than dear to melancholy minds.

A mind must be melancholy to prefer Autumn to Summer. At the close of "After Apple-picking," does the speaker, as Seamus Heaney claims, "surrender to the wood"? I have written before about two other poems by Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Come in," in which the speaker is momentarily beguiled by a presence in a wood. "In many of Frost's poems," I wrote a year ago on this blog, "the voices of nature can be heard addressing him directly. But the things they tell him aren't at all what one might expect - like the thrush calling him to 'come in' to the woods at dusk or the beguiling beauty of a snowy woods that he stops to admire, until his horse pulls at his harness to remind him of his promises." The weariness of which the apple-picker speaks isn't simply physical. The sleep to which he is leaning, and the dreams he predicts will visit him, speak of a long year (a long life) coming to its close. It would be going too far, in this case, to say that what the speaker is going to is death. As Heaney says, it would rob the poem of all of its sensuous life.


(1) Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes."

Christchurch

America is such a relatively new place, especially the farther west you go, that you can often find yourself living in a community, or a part of a community, that is barely as old as you are. They have the strange feel of transient places, and the people who live there are itinerant, having moved there for a job or to start their lives afresh with a new family. I have lived in a few such communities, in Colorado and Alaska.

In New England, an old part of America, there are old places where people have been living for centuries. But because such places are in rural parts of the country, remote from large cities, or because they are poor communities in inner cities like Boston, parts of them are abandoned and fall to ruin. Robert Frost was a New Englander, though he was born in San Francisco. His poetry has strong associations with New England, and Amy Lowell, a member of a very old New England family, wrote about New Englanders in her review of Frost's second book of poems, North of Boston:

"What is there in the hard, vigorous climate of these states which plants the seeds of degeneration? Is the violence and ugliness of their religious belief the cause of these twisted and tortured lives? Have the sane, full-blooded men all been drafted away to the cities, or the West, leaving behind only feeble remainders of a once fine stock? The question again demands an answer after the reading of Mr. Frost's book... Mr. Frost has reproduced both people and scenery with a vividness which is extraordinary. Here are the huge hills, undraped by any sympathetic legend, felt as things hard and unyielding, almost sinister, not exactly feared, but regarded as in some sort influences nevertheless. Here are great stretches of blueberry pasture lying in the sun; and again, autumn orchards cracking with fruit which it is almost too much trouble to gather. Heavy thunderstorms drench the lonely roads and spatter on the walls of farm-houses rotting in abandonment; and the modern New England town, with narrow frame houses, visited by drummers alone, is painted in all its ugliness. For Mr. Frost's is not the kindly New England of Whittier, nor the humorous and sensible one of Lowell; it is a latter-day New England, where a civlization is decaying to give place to another and very different one... His people are left-overs of the old stock, morbid, pursued by phantoms, slowly sinking to insanity."

In his last great, flawed, poem, "Directive," from his 1947 collection Steeple Bush, Frost described what his world had come to:

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.


Since last Friday, when news of the mass shooting in New Zealand broke, I've been watching the images of the mourners and the flowers left at the places in Christchurch where the victims had fallen. Such killing sprees are a routine occurrence in America, but now they seem to be spreading, along with the racist doctrine that inspires them. But New Zealand is reacting to their mass shooting differently. Cearly, something extreme needs to be done in response. And it's getting done. It's a marvel, really, to watch how a society based on some of the same principles as our own, with even some of the same liberties, is dealing with an atrocity that is the "new normal" in the USA. America is a new place but New Zealand, which became an independent nation in 1907, has something it can teach us.

In his book, New Hampshire, Frost included poems that seem to follow me wherever I go. I returned to one of those poems over the weekend:

IN A DISUSED GRAVEYARD

The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never any more the dead.

The verses in it say and say:
'The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.'

So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?

It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.

A Szechuan Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Day 1991. I was living in Fallon, Nevada, a small town about an hour's drive east of Reno on U.S. Highway 50, known as The Loneliest Road in America. (I was stationed there in the Navy, so it wasn't my idea.) I had been living in a trailer on an old woman's guest ranch on the western outskirts of town since May of '89, at first with a roommate. But between one thing and another, he moved out after a year, leaving me to my own devices.

The Nevada high desert - so called because of the altitude - is a desert of alcalai, not sand. The climate is spectacular - the extremely dry air, the sky a great cupola of blue all year round, quite literally nothing in all directions for miles and miles. I was 33 and I was loving it, despite some personal - and professional - rough patches. The evenings were my element; the sunsets that seemed to go on for hours in the summer, the quiet disturbed only by the lowing cattle, an occasional coyote in the distance, the unobstructed desert wind that sometimes howled around my trailer, and the music I played on an old Victrola to which I jerry-rigged a cd player. And rum. Drinking for me was still at the fun stage.

I made no plans for Thanksgiving. I got no invitations that year to eat with someone else's family. My own family was in South Carolina - too far to go, I felt, for Thanksgiving dinner. So, sometime around 2 in the afternoon, I got in my car, a '76 Honda Civic, and drove into town, expecting to get a pizza. The map of Fallon in my memory is dotted with landmarks that are probably, in the real Fallon of 2018, no longer there or no longer recognizable. 27 years is a long time, even for a small town. I drove up a winding dirt road to Rice Road, turned left (west), left again on an access road, and finally reached the highway. I don't remember, but it was probably a cold day. (My AccuWeather app tells me that the weather in Fallon today is clear, in the 50s.) When I passed a Burger King, I noticed that it was closed. So was the Supermarket. Then I remembered how, on prior excursions on Thanksgiving Day when I was with my family, nothing was open. The first time, in Columbia, South Carolina, my parents announced that we were going to the NCO Club on Fort Jackson for dinner. We had done it before, but on Christmas Day, not on Thanksgiving Day. The NCO Club was closed. With nothing at home to eat, we began a pilgrimage across Columbia to find something - anything - to eat. At last we, the five of us, sat down to eat at the Marriott Hotel. My sister, Bibbit, made a scene when she sent her order back to the kitchen twice.

The second time my family made the mistake of trying to eat out on Thanksgiving, we were living in Denver. After driving all the way downtown looking in vain for somewhere to eat, we finally found a restaurant open for business - Josephina's in Larimer Square (now shuttered). The meal was expensive and delicious. (My sister wasn't with us on that occasion.)

Driving east on Lincoln Highway in Fallon that day was an equally desperate search. The pizza place was closed. So no pizza. I thought about a casino restaurant, but I wanted a take-home meal. Just when I thought I might go hungry on Thanksgiving Day, I found Szechuan Express was open. I also found that I wasn't alone in my search for something to eat that day. The place was packed. So, after standing in line for several minutes, I ordered enough for two people, collected my food, and drove home the same way I came.

Later, having consumed my crab rangoons and egg rolls, and started on my sesame chicken, I stepped out of my glass doors, sat down on the wooden steps, and looked out on my world - the view from my trailer that I'd gazed at for two and a half years. There was a broad pasture in front, surrounded by barbed wire. Beyond it some trees, with nothing else obstructing my view to the west. In four months I would be gone, bound for my next duty station, but those days and nights in the high desert, alone most of the time, took up a residence in my heart, and they remain there all these years later. It turned out to be a memorable Thanksgiving after all.

Robert Frost wrote about his own "Desert Places,"

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Loneliness is what he's talking about - the loneliness of the natural world in which we have no proper place. But it didn't scare me then, looking out on an eventless horizon. And it doesn't scare me now.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Keeping Watch

As I watch, from the other side of the world, the disaster in the Carolinas wrought by Hurricane Florence, I have very mixed feelings. I am amazed at the overwhelming response to the event - the number of people either appointed to provide support or volunteers who just want to help the people who live in the path of the storm, who have to endure the high winds, the heavy rains and the floods. But also the media coverage: CNN sent all its top reporters (Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon) to provide 24/7 coverage of what they are calling the "storm of a lifetime."

I find myself bemused by the sheer scale of the disaster response in the States, but not especially surprised. The reason is simply that response to disasters  here in the Philippines where I am living is nonexistent or simply too little, too late. As I write this, a category 5 Super Typhoon named Mangkhut in Asia (but named Ompong in the Philippines for utterly inexplicable reasons) has moved across the northern tip of the main island of Luzon with probable but, as of yet, unreported deaths and damage. There was another typhoon, at least as powerful, that passed close by my location in November 2013. It was named Haiyan to everyone else, but Yolanda to Filipinos, which has led to predictable confusion whenever the storm is mentioned to anyone outside fhe country.

Here are some things you won't see in the wake of Hurricane Florence that happened here after Typhoon Haiyan: police positioned to protect property, like Malls, abandoning their posts and going to help their helpless families; armed gangs going door to door robbing households of everything of value (and raping girls and women there); mass looting - entire malls stripped of their merchandise, grocery stores of their food; fishermen bringing drowned people up in their nets; hundreds of dead bodies interred in mass graves before they are even identified because morgues run out of space and there is no power (for almost 6 weeks); misappropriation of millions of dollars in international relief (the governor on my island detoured rice shipments and sold it all on the black market - I saw it happen); ordinary people setting up makeshift stores to sell the food they looted at exorbitant prices; price gouging of gasoline and other necessities. Plus a death toll at around 8,000 because people's grass huts and wood shacks were blown apart. No warnings, no evacuations, no rescues. No cellphone signal for 10 days, no internet connection for two weeks, no power for almost 6 weeks, no Anderson Cooper, no Chris Cuomo, no Don Lemon providing 24/7 coverage. Nobody cared. 

These massive storms are likely the consequence of climate change, or what they used fo call global warming. I am bemused, but again not exactly surprised, at the American inaction in the face of irrefutable evidence of what is happening and what is probably coming if something isn't done. Watching the news coverage of Hurricane Florence, which has stationed reporters on the shores of the Carolinas, I found myself looking up a poem by Robert Frost called "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep":

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be---
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

It was published in 1936 as part of the collection A Further Range, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. The collection also contains "Desert Places," "Design," and "Provide, Provide." It isn't among Frost's best known or most popular poems, both because of its qualities as a poem, which are great, and because it is tacitly critical of his readers, humanity, that can't seem to find its way to looking farther or deeper into the universe. It can't even look at what is in front of its face the things that could spare it a multitude of problems - like climate change.

The poem's broader implications, which can't get much broader than they are, have been discussed to death since its publication. Still, the poem stands apart, unassailably itself. The best commentary on the poem I have read is in Randall Jarrell's book, Poetry and the Age. Jarrell was one of Frost's champions, who argued both against the superficial popular image of Frost as a Farmer's Almanac poet of homespun wisdom and the academic (wilful) ignorance of his occasional greatness, in poems like "Home Burial," "An Old Man's Winter Night," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Acquainted with the Night," and "Directive." Here is Jarrell's commentary:

First of all, of course, the poem is simply there, in indifferent unchanging actuality; but our thought about it, what we are made to make of it, is there too, made to be there. When we choose between land and sea, the human and the inhuman, the finite and the infinite, the sea has to be the infinite that floods in over us endlessly, the hypnotic monotony of the universe that is incommensurable with us—everything into which we look neither very far nor very deep, but look, look just the same. And yet Frost doesn't say so—it is the geometry of this very geometrical poem, its inescapable structure, that says so. There is the deepest tact and restraint in the symbolism; it is like Housman's

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.

The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault:
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt.

But Frost's poem is flatter, greyer, and at once tenderer and more terrible, without even the consolations of rhetoric and exaggeration - there is no "primal fault" in Frost's poem, but only the faint Biblical memories of "any watch they keep." What we do know we don't care about; what we do care about we don't know: we can't look out very far, or in very deep; and when did that ever bother us? It would be hard to find anything more unpleasant to say about people than that last stanza; but Frost doesn't say it unpleasantly—he says it with flat ease, takes everything with something harder than contempt, more passive than acceptance. And isn't there something heroic about the whole business, too - something touching about our absurdity? If the fool persisted in his folly he would become a wise man, Blake said, and we have persisted.

The tone of the last lines—or, rather, their careful suspension between several tones, as a piece of iron can be held in the air between powerful enough magnets—allows for this too. This recognition of the essential limitations of man, without denial or protest or rhetoric or palliation, is very rare and very valuable, and rather usual in Frost's best poetry. One is reminded of Empson's thoughtful and truthful comment on Gray's "Elegy": "Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem … And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society would prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy."(1)

Standing on the beach in the middle of a hurricane might seem like insanity, instead of when you're a reporter and a cameraman revealing what is in store for so many of us if we're not more careful. We must go on keeping watch, heedless of our native limitations.

(1) from Poetry and the Age (Knopf, 1953). 

A House for Mr. Naipaul

Patricia and V. S. Naipaul

I feel obliged to write a few passing words on the passing of V. S. Naipaul, who died on Saturday. I had known about him and knew some of his writing, though I am somewhat ashamed I hadn't read him much at all. I also knew Paul Theroux, American traveller and travel writer (though he writes novels, too, like The Mosquito Coast). When I checked out one of his books from my local (Des Moines) library, 1999's In Vidia's Shadow, I wasn't aware that Vidia was V. S. Naipaul's first name or that the book was the story of Theroux's long friendship with Naipaul. I don't imagine the friendship survived the book. I was astonished that Theroux had gone to such lengths to present to the reader such a negative account of a fellow writer, whom Theroux freely admits writes much better than he did. 

But upon finishing the book, I realized that it wasn't exactly Theroux who had lived in Naipaul's shadow. It was Naipaul's first wife, Patricia, "Pat," who had, for the 41 years of their marriage. She is the real subject of Theroux's book. Naipaul carried on an affair for 25 years quite openly with Margaret Gooding, and admitted in an interview that he frequented prostitutes. Patricia's health declined in the 90s, and after her death from cancer (Naipaul even complained about having to take her to the hospital because it took him away from his writing), he married a Pakistani jounalist just six days after Patricia was cremated.  In the authorized biography of Naipaul by Patrick French, Naipaul even admits that his cruelty may have killed her. "She suffered," he told French. "It could be said that I killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way." Of his mistress, he told French, "“I feel that in all of this Margaret was badly treated. I feel this very much. But you know there is nothing I can do.... I stayed with Margaret until she became middle-aged, almost an old lady."

Naipaul was an unsurpassed master of English prose, as his great novel, dedicated to his father, A House for Mr. Biswas, makes movingly and abundantly clear. What is unclear, however, to so many of the admirers of his writing is how such beauty could've been produced by such an overpoweringly ugly man. Biography is now so pervasive, so inescapable, that it is virtually impossible for a writer to achieve fame without everyone knowing some embarrassing details about his life. And social media paving a broad avenue straight through everyone's privacy is making it far worse. We know the lurid and irrelevant details about the private lives of so many writers by now that it might persuade the more privately-inclined to hide behind a scrupulously defended pseudonym or not to write at all.  Robert Frost, one of the greatest and most beloved American poets, had to endure the first two volumes of a three-volume biography that tried - and failed - to destroy his reputation. As Clive James wrote in a review of a collection of Frost's letters: "Luckily not even America—still a puritan culture in which an artist’s integrity must be sufficiently unblemished to impress Oprah Winfrey—has proved entirely devoid of critics and academics who can handle the proposition that the creator of perfect art might be a less than perfect person."(1)

Well, Naipaul was, as everyone has been saying over the weekend, an appalling man. The man is gone. Will his personal nastiness affect how people in 50 or 100 years will read his novels? I hope not. Does that mean that biography is separate from an artist's work? I hope so. I never met Naipaul except in The Enigma of Arrival, The Middle Passage, and A Way in the World. What does it matter - what can it matter - to me what kind of a person he was?


(1) Clive James, "The Sound of Sense," Prospect Magazine, January 23 2014. 

Six Poets: Philip Larkin

The qualities that distinguish the poetry of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) - accessibility both formal and syntactical, traditional meter and rhyme - practically guaranteed two things: popularity with a public, most of whom never liked poetry (or never read it), and a difficult relationship with literary critics and scholars, many of whom equate accessibility with a lack of discipline and rigor. The facility with which the average reader can enter a Larkin poem in no way makes it easy to maneuver within the poem and find everything of value there. It is precisely the kind of problem faced by Robert Frost and by those who find greatness in some of his poetry. Frost was long thought to be an unofficial Poet Laureate. Larkin was actually offered the post when John Betjeman died, but turned it down.

Most great poets restrict themselves to certain subjects that become their métier. With Larkin they were solitude and non-conformity (both as sources of sorrow and strength), life as ultimately disappointing, the unfair tradeoff of youth for wisdom, the inability to find fulfillment in women or in love. I think of "Reasons for Attendance":

The trumpet's voice, loud and authoritative,
Draws me a moment to the lighted glass
To watch the dancers - all under twenty-five -
Shifting intently, face to flushed face,
Solemnly on the beat of happiness.

- Or so I fancy, sensing the smoke and sweat,
The wonderful feel of girls. Why be out here?
But then, why be in there? Sex, yes, but what
Is sex? Surely, to think the lion's share
Of happiness is found by couples' sheer

Inaccuracy, as far as I'm concerned.
What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell
(Art, if you like) whose individual sound
Insists I too am individual.
It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well,

But not for me, nor I for them; and so
With happiness. Therefore I stay outside,
Believing this; and they maul to and fro,
Believing that; and both are satisfied,
If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied.

30 December 1953


But Larkin occasionally tackled subjects that were otherwise outside his purview, like the long tour de force, "Show Saturday," "Faith Healing," or poems that are uncharacteristic of him, like "The Trees," "First Sight" the late poem "The Mower," or "An Arundel Tomb," with its most incongruous (for Larkin) last line, "What will survive of us is love." Really? Many another Larkin poem would beg to differ.

I think most would agree on what I think are his best poems, "Church Going," "The Whitsun Weddings," "Dockery and Son," "The Old Fools," and "Aubade."

Larkin simply wasn't difficult - or difficult enough - to impress the "new" critics who happened along in the Sixties just when he was hitting his stride. His problem was similar to Frost's, although Larkin didn't live long enough to become a parody of himself. As Randall Jarrell said of the late Frost collection, Steeple Bush: 

"Steeple Bush" is no book to convert intellectuals to Frost. Yet the ordinary "highbrow" reader is making a far greater mistake when he neglects Frost as commonplace, than the academic reader makes when he apotheosizes him, often on the basis of his most complacent or sentimental poems.

After Larkin's death, a one time friend, Andrew Motion, published a biography of Larkin that made his detractors hate him even more and gave them a completely unjustified sense of vindication: it turned out that Larkin was a frightful Tory, held racist and sexist views, and had a definite taste for bondage pornography. No wonder his poetry was liked by so many! 

What made matters worse was how succinctly and beautifully Larkin defended his own poetic practice:

"It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance; the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing. If the second stage has not been well done, the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while. And if there is no third stage, no successful reading, the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all."

The most remarkable thing about Larkin today is that, though it has been 33 years since his death, and his Collected Poems has been compiled and published, new poems continue to be discovered and authenticated. One such, called "Unfinished Poem," was left in typescript at his death:

I squeezed up the last stair to the room in the roof
And lay on the bed there with my jacket off.
Seeds of light were sown on the failure of evening.
The dew came down. I lay in the quiet, smoking.

That was a way to live—newspaper for sheets,
A candle and spirit stove, and a trouble of shouts
From below somewhere, a town smudgy with traffic!
That was a place to go, that emaciate attic!

For (as you will guess) it was death I had in mind,
Who covets our breath, who seeks and will always find;
To keep out of his thought was my whole care,
Yet down among the sunlit courts, yes, he was there,

Taking his rents; yes, I had only to look
To see the shape of his head and the shine of his book,
And the creep of the world under his sparrow-trap sky,
To know how little slips his immortal memory.

So it was stale time then, day in, day out,
Blue fug in the room, nothing to do but wait
The start of his feet on the stair, that sad sound
Climbing to cut me from his restless mind

With a sign that the air should stick in my nose like bread,
The light swell up and turn black—so I shammed dead,
Still as a stuck pig, hoping he'd keep concerned
With boys who were making the fig when his back was turned;

And the sun and the stove and the mice and the gnawed paper
Made up the days and nights when I missed supper,
Paring my nails, looking over the farbelow street
Of tramways and bells. But one night I heard the feet.

Step after step they mounted with confidence.
Time shrank. They paused at the top. There was no defence.
I sprawled to my knees. Now they came straight at my door.
This, then, the famous eclipse? The crack in the floor

Widening for one long plunge? In a sharp trice,
The world, lifted and wrung, dipped with remorse.
The fact of breathing tightened into a shroud.
Light cringed. The door swung inwards. Over the threshold

Nothing like death stepped, nothing like death paused,
Nothing like death has such hair, arms so raised.
Why are your feet bare? Was not death to come?
Why is he not here? What summer have you broken from?


I'm not sure why this was left unfinished or called "Unifinished Poem." It reads as a complete poetic statement. Perhaps Finis (The End) was intended?

Six Poets: Wallace Stevens

Since the 19th century, has anyone made a good living writing poetry? Thomas Hardy, who was one of the most prolific poets of his time, had to make a living writing novels. Robert Graves once told an interviewer that he only earned enough money from his poetry to "keep me in cigarettes."

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a double life. How does one reconcile the fact that, while he quietly created a growing body of some of the most critically acclaimed poetry of his time, his day job was a lawyer for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company? Frank Kermode found "vulgarity" in this question, but I find it fascinating. "Stevens did not find that he must choose between the careers of insurance lawyer and poet. The fork in the road where he took the wrong turning is a critic's invention, and there is no point in dawdling there." But even Kermode recognized that Stevens erected a very high and impregnable wall between the two pursuits. It was as if he took up his career as insurance lawyer to satisfy someone else's requirements of him and of his life, but he saved his true self for his poetry. But we have no way of knowing this. Who knows but that Wallace Stevens was at his best behind his insurance desk. We are too used to the Marxist alienated worker who is truly alive only in his off hours. It's tempting to think of Stevens as the one true alienated man, whose life was divided perfectly into two compartments, neither of which had any effect on nor ever touched the other. But we should resist such a temptation, since only one part of Stevens's life matters to us. His poetry has lasted until now, continues to surprise us and delight us.

But Stevens is spread a little thinly, I think, over more than four decades as a dedicated poet. There are differences in temperament, in intensity, and in focus. Consequently, most of his work contributes to the greater body of work rather than standing out as exemplars. As formidable as that body of work is, it is difficult to locate a single poem, or even a handful of poems, that define Stevens. Some of them are beautifully expressed ideas. "Sunday Morning," an early poem, is his most famous, but it can hardly be said to be representative of his poetry. As much as I admire his last poems, including those in The Rock, they lack some of the qualities and the ambitions found in his earlier poems. For instance, concerning his atheism, I find "Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit" more beautiful and more moving than "Sunday Morning." I find in its insistence that, if we must, we should afford god a separateness from us, like light, that has no kinship with us, something like Cézanne's modest approaches to the seen world - not to supplant it with his love but to respect it so deeply and completely that all that remains of our work is a clear and honest image of the world and not what is imposed on it by our love or our intelligence.

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost

Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.


Unfortunately, as fine as he occasionally is, Stevens is the victim of some intense overpraise, and what is best characterized as critical logorrhea: 'It’s hard to think of a more vivid illustration of T. S. Eliot’s principle of the separation between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” [For the life of me, I can't think of a more inapposite description of Stevens. The man who suffers, after all, lived a luxe life in Hartford.] For most of his life, Stevens was an elaborately defended introvert in a three-piece suit, working as a Hartford insurance executive. He came slowly to a mastery of language, form, and style that revealed a mind like a solar system, with abstract ideas orbiting a radiant lyricism.'(1) Harold Bloom, who is given to gushing over writers he likes, has had his gush on Stevens.

Like all great poets, Stevens wrote a high number of mightily banal poems. Like most modernist poets, calling him a "stylist" is treacherous at the very least. His best poems cohere under the intense strain of a centrifugal formlessness. It's difficult to explain precisely how, but they cohere. His best poems succeed at being poetry through the cumulative effect of metaphoric invention, not through individual lines or words. In 1951 he was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for The Auroras of Autumn. But there are no two American poets, Stevens and Frost, who are more dissimilar. According to legend, during one of their arguments, Stevens told Frost, "The trouble with you Robert, is that you write about subjects." And Frost responded, "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac." It's obvious why there is so much more academic writing about Stevens than about Frost. On the Poetry Foundation website's introduction to Stevens, the last paragraph concludes that "In the years since his death Stevens's reputation has remained formidable. The obscurity and abstraction of his poetry has proven particularly appealing among students and academicians and has consequently generated extensive criticism." Clearly, something has gone wrong with a poem that requires the intervention of interpreters (like Helen Vendler) between the poet and the reader. An industry has sprung up that tries to convince squeamish readers that George Herbert, for example, is "obscure" and requires extensive interpretation. It is bullshit. It is one of the reasons why readers have turned away from poetry. Any reasonably intelligent reader should have no great trouble finding his own way to the heart of George Herbert and even of Wallace Stevens. If he cannot, it's the poet's, not the reader's, fault.

Stevens has written many memorable poems that are hard to quote from memory. But, like almost every other great poet, he is marvelously, succinctly  clear. I have quoted some of his poems before, like "The World As Meditation," and "Seventy Years Later." They are both from his last, astonishing collection, The Rock. The truth is that after page upon page of pure rhetoric, the reader of Stevens's poetry longs for - and eventually finds - something of substance. When he was a student at Harvard in 1897-1900, Stevens was introduced to the American philosopher George Santayana, with whom he exchanged poems and corresponded throughout their lives. When he learned in 1950-51 that Santayana had taken up his final residence in a charitable institution for the aged in Rome, he was moved to write "To an Old Philosopher in Rome."


On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement
Of men growing small in the distances of space,
Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound,
Unintelligible absolution and an end --

The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome
Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind.
It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.

How easily the blown banners change to wings . . .
Things dark on the horizons of perception,
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,

The human end in the spirit's greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme
Of the unknown. The newsboys' muttering
Becomes another murmuring; the smell
Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled . . .

The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,
And these beneath the shadow of a shape

In a confusion on bed and books, a portent
On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,
A light on the candle tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that of which

Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.
Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.
Be orator but with an accurate tongue
And without eloquence, O, half-asleep,
Of the pity that is the memorial of this room,

So that we feel, in this illumined large,
The veritable small, so that each of us
Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice
In yours, master and commiserable man,
Intent on your particles of nether-do,

Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,
In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive
Yet living in two worlds, impenitent
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,
Impatient for the grandeur that you need

In so much misery; and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead,
As in the last drop of the deepest blood,
As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen,

Even as the blood of an empire, it might be,
For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.
It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.

And you - it is you that speak it, without speech,
The loftiest syllables among loftiest things,
The one invulnerable man among
Crude captains, the naked majesty, if you like,
Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained-vaults.

The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered.
The life of the city never lets go, nor do you
Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room.
Its domes are the architecture of your bed.
The bells keep on repeating solemn names

In choruses and choirs of choruses,
Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery
Of silence, that any solitude of sense
Should give you more than their peculiar chords
And reverberations clinging to whisper still.

It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,
The immensest theatre, the pillared porch,
The book and candle in your ambered room,

Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.

Isn't it extraordinary that, in this poem written past his 70th year, Stevens, who was for so long such a personal - i.e., self-referential - poet, was moved to write in tribute of an old friend?


(1) Peter Schjeldahl, "Insurance Man: The Life and Art of Wallace Stevens," The New Yorker, May 2, 2016.