ARS POETICA: A PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
Richard Jackson


If you want to see the "danse macabre" in Hrastovlje, the sleepy little Slovene village on the Istrian peninsula southeast of Trieste, you have to walk into the village below the 12th century church to find the woman who has the key. The tiny church itself, not much bigger than a classroom, lies within the walls of a small 15 century fort at the top of a small hill surrounded by a vineyard that produces the soft red wine of the region. Most of the frescoes, done in the late 15th century by Janez of Kastva, deal with biblical themes, but it is the famous dance of death that is the highlight. The woman is as business-like and somber as the painting. It is amazingly democratic work: every walk of life, from kings and queens and bishops, down through tradesmen, cripples, and even a child just emerging from its cradle, are each holding hands with a skeleton who personifies their individual dance with death and who leads them to the master skeleton, Death himself, who in his turn helpfully holds the lid to the grave open. Death's smiling face remains essentially the same throughout, though its hand gestures and poses vary a bit: this constant visual rhythm enforces the democratic vision. No one can escape death, of course, but more, no one can escape the important questions the fresco asks: what we are doing here, and where we are going, and why, and perhaps most importantly, if the life we live, this pilgrimage, as the medieval commonplace metaphor has it, can be made more meaningful.

What I am doing here is taking my own place in this dance, beginning a month long journey, a sort of pilgrimage through Slovenia, parts of Italy and Vienna. When I was ten my father was in the Army reserves and brought home a batch of practice maps they used for exercises. I can't remember how long I poured over them, but it wasn't long before I could imagine the terrain the contour lines and road and other feature markers suggested. I would sit down and look at a map and then describe to my startled father what was there suggesting things that he had forgotten. It's an odd little talent that stands by me even today and probably accounts for the fact that I can't ever seem to get lost, even in a strange place. That takes some of the fun and surprise out of wandering, I suppose, but also frees you up to notice more detail. And it helps when you are stuck, say, in Hungary or Poland, and can't even ask directions. An it makes you a sort of pilgrim, always with a destination.

A pilgrim has an aim, then, and mine is to think about what I'm doing with my own writing, what I like and why, in terms of the things I see and read along the way. A pilgrim by definition is looking for hope, for reasons to continue, and is trying to escape whatever despair confronts him. I left Chattanooga just a few days ago, stuffing a few books, as usual, into my bags. I always read when I travel for the same reason I write: to create another world, as Dickinson and Thoreau said a century ago, a world of discovery, but also a world where we can be safe, familiar with the surroundings we've created.

As it happened I borrowed one extra book from a friend literally as I was walking out the door--Goethe's THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER -- which I hadn't looked at in years. The narrator is a young artist who finds himself isolated in a strange city and composes a series of diary letters to be sent back home. His pilgrimage is to discover excellence in the world, but what he constantly confronts is a world far less excellent than his ideals. Early on he writes: "What I told you recently concerning painting is doubtless also true of poetry: what counts is that one perceives excellence and dares to give it expression, which sounds little but is in fact a great deal. Today I witnessed a scene which, if written down plainly and exactly, would be the loveliest idyll the world has ever seen; but why trouble with poetry and scenes and idylls? Must we go tinkering about with Nature before we can enjoy it?" The rapid shift here, from a devotion to art and poetry as a means of perceiving excellence to a questioning of the purpose of art, is typical for this fragile and unstable hero who ends up killing himself because the real world of class struggle, emtotional stress and pain, cannot match his ideal vision. Indeed, after going on to describe his idyllic scene in which a woman he never sees is praised by her lover, he concludes: "I shall now try to see her too as soon as possible, or rather, on second thoughts, I shall avoid doing so. it is better for me to see her with the eyes of her lover; perhaps she would not appear to my own eyes as she does now, and why should I ruin the beautiful image I have?"

What lies behind Young Werther's quandry is one of Romanticism's chief notions: art, poetry, should not merely reflect the world, should not be a mirror, but should be a lamp, illuminating something beyond the everyday, however idyllic that everyday might seem on the surface. The poem has to bring us to a new vision. For Longinus, the 3rd century Roman critic, the essence of poetry is "metaphor," a word that comes from the Greek, metaphorika, a sort of cart to carry people around, a means of transportation. The poem has to transport us, then. The end of the poem should leave us in a different emotional state than the one the poem began with. We can see that kind of movement with the danse macabre when we notice first the kings and queens, perhaps with a little relish, and then slowly realize as we make our way back down the social ladder, that it includes us to. Each expression of the pilgrims is different: puzzled, naively eager, resigned, downcast. And while the grave echoes the cradle, a well known motif, what is curious is the tools at the side of the grave that the last skeleton escort points towards: it is we who dig our own grave from the very beginning, something the participants in this dance don't seem to be aware of. How we get to that discovery at the end, the movement, the timing of the small revelations along the way, the pacing of how we understand-- that's rhythm in its larger, and more important sense than mere metrics.

A little before Janez' work here, Petrach had written his canzone 323. It, too, is a sort of dance, a parade of visions the poet watches from his window: a beast, a ship, a fountain, a laurel tree, a phoenix and a lady, each described in terms of almost Platonic beauty, is suddenly, in the space of half a line each, destroyed. For Petrach, the movement is towards an understanding of what has happened to his Laurel, the addressee of the poems, who died in the plague, as the images move closer and closer towards describing her essence. He saw her at church in Avignon and wrote about 400 poems to her. If only it were that easy to create a real life, then young Werther wouldn't have been so despairing. Poetically he might rejoice, but realistically Petrach despaired. While these six images reflect the main images in the sequence, they also, structured in this way in Petrach's poem, show a progression towards discovering that the woman also participates in the being of the lower forms-- no one escapes, as in the danse macabre. It's a discovery he tries to gloss over at the end by asking the poem itself what he's learned; he's evading the issue.

So I suppose my first principle would be that the poem is a metaphor, a means of transport. It has to take us someplace. The end of the poem has to leave us in a different state -- emotionally or intellectually-- than we were at the beginning. That means each line or phrase ideally adds to our discovery. That doesn't mean that a series of different images will do the job: they also have to differ in the emotional value they add-- they have to each do different work. When you look at lists, say, in Whitman's "Song Of Myself," each new item brings in a whole world, an attitude, a frame of reference that alters the overall effect. The poem itself is the ultimate pilgrimage as the speaker traverses both the entire country and the interior landscape of his heart to discover, in essence, who he is, and more, who we all are. Here's a little passage from section 45 of the first edition:

My lovers suffocate me!
Crowding my lips, and thick in the pores of my skin,
Jostling me through streets and public halls....coming naked to me at night,
Crying by day ahoy from the rocks of the river....swinging and chirping over my head,
Calling my name from flowerbeds or vines or tangled underbrush,
Or while I swim in the bath....or drink from the pump at the corner....or the curtain is down at the opera....or I glimpse a woman's face in the railroad car;
Lighting on every moment of my life;
Bussing my body with soft and balsamic busses,
Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine.

Look how the passage moves from the idea of suffocation, ranging from the level of the skin and pores, to the social level of crowds, to sounds, to the intimacy of the bath. And just at that most intimate point the perspective is reversed-- he glimpses a face on the train, becomes the intruder. At the same time the images have taken us outward-- from skin to railroads, from the mere self to an instant before travel begins. At that point the suffocation becomes a "lighting" as, say, an insect might light down, delicate, sensual as the balsamic image from the next line suggests, a gift of the heart, the self, that he gladly accepts, as the last line suggests. This is an incredible movement, from a sense of suffocation to an acceptance of gifts. In less than ten lines we've travelled from one side of the dance floor to its opposite: I don't think the passage could take us much further.

But going further is what the pilgrim always wants. There's always some hope around the corner, some image or relic to take us further away from the problems of the real. And so a few days later I find myself in Rome, in the little French Church near the pantheon, and not by accident. In the last chapel up on the left I put my 500 lire into the box and the chapel lights up: three stupendous paintings by Caravaggio cover the three sides. My favorite is "The Calling of Saint Matthew." It helps to know that Caravaggio was a rogue, exiled for murder, probably a highwayman who used the sometimes agonized, always expressive faces of his victims in his paintings. But he's just the sort of person Whitman would embrace: " It is for the wicked just the same as for the righteous....I make appointments with all, / I will not have a single person slighted or left away,... / There shall be no difference between them and all the rest." Of course, Whitman was never politically correct, nor was Caravaggio-- they were interested in making great art, not being on the right side.

So here's this fabulous painting. The subject is ostensibly Christ calling Matthew to be an apostle, and we can see the wide shaft of light extending from above Christ to shine directly upon Matthew. The future apostle points to himself, bewildered, as if to ask, "Why me?" Yet what I love so much about Caravaggio is not the ostensible subject, but the artistic one, the art itself that almost subverts the meaning of the picture. If the theme is about a calling out, the singling out of an individual, an act, in a sense of exclusion towards the others, the painter counters that by giving even more attention to the other characters, and by hiding Christ, the most important figure, off to the right behind a few other people-- he's one of the last figures we notice. Who we notice first is the young boy in the middle who directs us back towards Christ, who in turn, echoing the gesture of Michleangelo's God in the Sistine chapel, points us back towards Matthew. For a moment we are as puzzled and confused as the characters, looking both ways at once, and that is part of the artist's point: the drama includes everyone. It is a vision as democratic as Janez' danse macabre or as Whitman's "Song of Myself."

And so I suppose I've come to a second principle: inclusiveness. Whitman is certainly an example, here. And so is Blake who says in "Auguries of Innocence"-- "The dog Starv'd at the master's gate / Predicts the ruin of the state," suggesting how it is not just the major things like the state we have to pay attention to but the minor details. In fact, Blake begins the poem:

To see a World in a Grain of sand
And heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

One of the champions today of the kind of vision Caravaggio represents is Phil Levine whose poems have created a mythology of the everyday , the commonplace and the downtrodden. In "Sweet Will" he describes working at Detroit Transmission. At one point in the poem a character falls down dead drunk and everyone waits for him to rise 'at his own sweet will." When he does he is puzzled, but then goes straight to work, calling out to the others:

"Nigger, Kite, Hunky, River rat,"
but he gave it a tune, an old tune,
like "America the Beautiful." And he danced
a little two-step and smiled showing
the four stained teeth left in the front
and took another suck of cherry brandy.

Of course, a lot of poetry workshops today would object to the use of the politically incorrect epithets, but Levine is interested in art, that is to say truth, and that demands he include everything he can-- the inclusiveness principle. And more, as he goes on to describe the way the people die in terms of the way the cadillacs die, and seems to level the two. But he also includes himself, not above but among them, and it is this vision of humility, democratic, inclusive, that allows him to transport us, as well as himself, to a final vision of triumph, a triumph of the ordinary, the everyday:

And in truth I'm not worth a thing
what with my feet and my two bad eyes
and my one long nose and my breath
of old lies and my sad tales of men
who let the earth break them back,
each one, to dirty blood or bloody dirt.

Not worth a thing! Just like it was said
at my magic birth when the stars
collided and fire fell from great space
into great space, and people rose one
by one from cold beds to tend a world
that runs on and on at its own sweet will.

This is a dance of death that ends not at the grave but beyond, with a surprise and discovery hardly anticipated at the beginning. We have been transported. And in the act of being transported we have absorbed a number of attitudes and perspectives towards others, made them all, in some way, part of the final vision-- the act of transport has ben an act of inclusiveness. It's at attitude really: "I'm not worth a thing," says Levine, and the point of view in the poem shows that by making itself equal to all the others, to ours. "I make appointments with all," wrote Whitman,

When you travel and you have limited time, appointments are everything. You can't see everything, but you want, like the poem, to see enough and the right things that will suggest that sense of inclusiveness. Byron's "Childe Harold IV" is a long poem that is actually a travelogue, and each stanza seems to bring a new idea or perception, some sudden change in the course of the observations. The result is a sense that the poem isn't just about a trip down through Europe ending in Rome but, well, everything. His poem "Beppo" is ostensibly a poem about the Venetian wife of a pirate who takes a "vice-husband" when he fails to return, then must reconcile when he finally return. That comic plot covers about a dozen of the 99 stanzas: the rest is witty digression on food, women, the carnival at Venice, language, politics, gondalas, art, clothing, places, morals, and even poetry itself. The subject is finally the entire world, the way we live it. The poem is so very self-conscious and the voice gives us such a sense that the poem is only a small cut from the narrator's immense knowledge of the world which somehow we are allowed share in through his intimate voice that we experience a sort of inclusivness through metonymy.

So it was this poem that held me through Venice, visiting the several palaces Byron stayed in, and continuing my own yearly pilgrimmage to see as many paintings by Tintoretto, Venice's favorite son. What is so amazing about the poem, like the town, like Tintoretto's work, is its energy. Where does it come from? In Tintoretto it comes from his incredibly fast brush strokes, the way each character--as in Caravaggio-- is given individual attention, the sense of bustle and activity that seems to want to burst through the edges of the paintings. Sir Philip Sydney called this quality "energia" in his "Defense of Poetry" about 400 years ago. It designates a quality of language that is filled with metaphors and other figures of speech, tensions between syntax and line breaks, shifts in perspective, tone, argument, perception, in short a language that conveys excitement, interest and the great care the author has taken with the art.

Tintoretto's "The Wedding in Canae" is housed in the sacristy of Basilica della Salute, just opposite the grand canal from St. Mark's Square. You can take a little gondola across or walk down to the next bridge then back up the other side through charming streets and campos which is what we did. The custom is buy a candle to light for some wish or prayer for about a dollar, then to enter. The great ceiling paintings by Titian from the Old Testament, and his St. Sebastain alone would have made this worthwhile, but for this pilgrim the object was the "Wedding." The painting leads us in a circle, up the table from the serving woman towards the diminutive Christ, then to all that activity on the right -- arguments, discussions, the business with the water and wine-- then around again on the outside band to the windows at the left and in the rear where we are led out towards a cloud-filled sky. Now we have to reenter, but the sight is along the busy ceiling, the walls, then back down to the urns of wine and up the table again. The painting moves us along fast, but also, because of its incredible busyness, forces us to want to slow down: there's just too much to take in an any reasonable amount of time. The more you look the more you see. As with Caravaggio, the main figure of the story is only a minor one in the art: the hierachal subject is subverted by the democatic art that transports us, includes more than we thought possible, and does it in such an energetic way we feel both exhausted and exhilarated after a looking for a few minutes.

It's like when you finish reading Byron's Beppo, or his Vision of Judgement, or Don Juan. If you are going to write a poem that transports us to some new realm, and has a generous sense of inclusiveness, then the language has to have "energia." In fact, we could argue that energia, vibrant language, is the base, the most important element to consider, the building blocks, the quality of paint. When the tired visions of the Victorians no longer seemed exciting, remember, it was not so much the vision but the language that the imagists and the surrealists went about changing. Changes in vision always follow and are built upon changes in language.

Some of the best examples of energia in language, besides Sydney's own poems, come from Blake. here is his "Mad Song"--

The wild winds weep,
And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs infold:
But, lo! the morning peeps
Over the eastern steeps,
And the rustling birds of dawn
The earth do scorn.

Lo! To the vault
Of paved heaven
With sorrow fraught
My notes are driven:
They strike the ear of night,
Make weep the eyes of day;
The make mad the roaring winds,
And with tempests play.

Like a fiend in a cloud,
With howling woe,
After night I do croud,
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east,
From whence comforts have increas'd;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain.

Notice all the rhythmic changes. After the almost parodic sing songishness of the opening quatrain, the rhythm is dramatically interrupted in the second quatrain: lines five and seven are enjambed, there is the exclamation point and break in line five, the lines average slightly longer, and the "morn," "dawn," "scorn" echoes bring a more somber tone. In the second stanza things pick up briefly with four quick two-beat lines, but can't return to the opening lightness, and besides it seems a limited history to send sorrow, like prayer, heavenward. Then in the second quatrain of the second stanza there is another violent shift: the rhythm is suddenly more insistent-- the tone is authoritative, ominous, two of the lines straining with four beats. As with the first stanza, the last line falls off, being far shorter than the previous line, almost like a sigh. At this point in the poem there have been so many rhythmic and tone changes in such a short space we are made almost dizzy, certainly somewhat confused emotionally, as in Tintoretto's painting, by all this activity in such a short space.

So when we get to the last stanza we find the quick and insistent rhythm of the first quatrain, opening with its anpestic "Like a fiend in a cloud," and continuing with two more anapests in the next three lines, and using relatively unimportant words to start the lines -- we find all this a kind of relief, despite what the lines are saying. For the speaker the relief comes in a sense of giving up. Finally he gives us the last quatrain with its turning away, and its incredibly slow last two lines-- six major words among the nine there, all but one monosyllabic, a proportion that forces us to read as slowly and as tortured as the speaker.

This is, then, an incredible poem, one that has included a range of emotions, that has transported us from night to dawn, earth to the heavens, joy to madness, from a sing song and driving rhythm to a "frantic" and tight-lipped stop. It is the langauge that has done all this, energia, --the shifts, turns, rhythms, sounds--and which I guess is now my third major principle. It's a principle you can easily see at work in Emily Dickinson's poems with their dashes, shifts in tone and rhythm, varying levels of diction, disjointed syntax, and in John Berryman's work. Berryman's energia is first seen in his 1953 Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Here, for example, is stanza 3:

thy eyes look to me mild. Out of maize & air
your body's made, and moves. I summon, see,
from the centuries it.
I think you won't stay. How do we
linger, diminished, in our lover's air,
implausibly visible, to whom, a year,
years, over interims: or not;
to a long stranger; or not; shimmer and disappear.

It's not just that he's trying to mimic the language of Bradstreet's time; instead, the very shimmering of the language here, to borrow his own word, captures the doubts, hesitations, and emphases of the actual mind at work, a technique he will go on to develop in The Dream Songs. I don't mean to suggest that this is the only sort of language available, for poets as melodious as Wallace Stevens, as operatic as Muriel Rukeyser, as quiet as William Meredith, all have an essential energy in their language, sometimes from a sense of restraint as in Meredith, sometimes as in the strain against the conversational as in Stevens, and even Berryman in his later poems was exploring the use of a more musical phraseology.

The middle Berryman, though, like Blake and Dickinson, is a perfect read for Venice with its surprises around the corners of its narrow streets and hidden in its sudden campos. Admittedly, it is also a confusing trip, emotionally and geographically. If you stop later, as I do, in the Etruscan town of Orvietto, everything has slowed down. It is a walled town built on a high cliff overlloking the highway to Rome. The streets blend lazily into each other, yet there's also a kind of urgency here, as if the town's history were ready to burst forth: it was the seat of Popes in times of trouble during the medieval ages. The duomo here, begun in 1290 after a miracle on the spot, is amazing. It's bright mosaic facade and magnificent stone carvings halt me in the square for nearly an hour. It is so complex it seems to combine the energy of Tintoretto and the inclusiveness of Caravaggio, and their attention to the basic, human condition. And it takes the images one step further-- towards metamorphosis as the vehicle to transport us. For example on the four pillars, carved by anonymous artists in the 14th century, suggest how the images of one story lead naturally to the images of the next. Metamorphosis, as in Ovid, is not seen as something supernatural, but the logical structure of an artistic world where energy and abundance prevail. Most incredible is the carving of the Last Judgement which is arranged in a sequence that echoes the Danse Macabre: here the faces of the dead gradually turn into the faces of the devils that torment them until, at the bottom levels of hell, all are equal. It is a frightening vision.

But I have come to Orvietto mainly to see the great frescoes of Signorelli in the chapel of the Madonna of St, Britius tucked up in the right side of the church. These continue the metamorphic play of the carvings. On the left wall of the chapel, for instance, is The Resurrection of the Body. Here the dead struggle, literally out of the earth to be reborn, skeletons gradually take on full bodied appearances if we follow the narrative. It is the opposite of the danse macabre, and already some characters, if you look carefully at the original, seem to be enveloped in a wisp of cloud suggesting the spiritual life that will follow. Everything is possibility, as it must have seemed to the medieval folk here looking out from the high perches of their walls over the Umbrian countryside. It is this possibility, in the metamorphic nature of the visions here, that brings me my fourth principle. I think first of all about the Hungarian poet Radnoti Miklos. Facing despair in the early forties as a Jew in Nazi occupied territory, he writes "Clouded Sky" in which he seems for a moment to blend into the depressing landscape like one of Ovid's metamorphoses characters:

I stop at the foot of a tree.
Its leaves cry with anger.
A branch reaches down. Is it strangling me?
I am not a coward. I am not weak, I am

tired. And silent. And the branch
is also mute and afraid as it enters my hair.
I should forget it, but I
forget nothing.

Around him the year has "howled" and "winter waits with its dull pain," but here he suddenly feels a "warm silence.../ just as it was before my birth" and he himself is transformed from a peripheral observer to the center of the scene. This explains the sudden reversal where in one stanza the tree seems to cry out angrily and tries to strangle him, and in the next stanza the branch is "mute and afraid as it enters my hair." With this sudden reversal the poet becomes like nature the repository of memory and symbol: "I / forget nothing," he says. It is in this tentative way, part of two worlds, that he lives. The metamorphic vision allows him a larger perspective and gives him the courage to continue.

This is an obvious metamorphic vision, but it operates also on the level of images. Cesare Pavese, for example, has this notion of the image story: the structure of the images, as a sort of undercurrent, provide by their metamorphoses and blendings one into the other, a story in its own right, and for the poet, the main story of the poem rather than the ostensible subject. It all comes back to language and style again. In his poem "Summer," for instance, an entire poetic world is gradually constructed out of and parallel to the real world -- which is in a sense Pavese's way of solving young Werther's problem of the way reality destroys our visions, but tragically Pavese too committed suicide in a town north of here a few decades ago. Here is the poem:

A garden between low walls, bright,
made of dry grass and a light that slowly bakes
the ground below. The light smells of sea.
You breathe that grass. You touch your hair
and shake out the memory of grass.

I have seen ripe
fruit dropping thickly on remembered grass with a soft
thudding. So too the pulsing of the blood
surprises even you. You move your head
as though a miracle of air had happened around you,
and the miracle is you. Your eyes have a savor
like the heat of memory.

You listen.
You listen to the words, but they barely graze you.
Your face has a radiance of thought that shines
around your shoulders, like light from the sea. The silence
in your face touches the heart with a soft
thud, exuding drop by drop,
like fruit that fell here years ago,
an old pain, still.

The images of brightness and light become associated with smells -- "The light smells of sea" he says at one early point-- and then the smell is associated with memory, with the woman and her hair, with grass that moves like a sea, with the thud of apples of the grass, which in turn leads to the pulse of the blood. Then for a moment the poet circles back to the air that is filled with light and smell, sees it circling the woman whose eyes -- we are back with the image of light now--"have a savor / like the heat of memory," savor bringing us back to taste and smell. Everything is quiet, the words become like the fruit-- "they barely graze you." The woman's face reflects the sea that was the dominant smell of the opening, and now the silent heart becomes the thud, and the thud drops like the fruit of years ago, like memory. In the end, to say any one image is to evoke the others, so integrated is the poem. In the original the last line is even more intensely ironic and emphasizes the blending of images more: "an old pain / like the sweetness of fruit that fell back then."

What the image story creates is similar to what we talked about earlier with painters like Caravaggio and Tintoretto for whom the main subject is not the surface, editorial subject, but the artistic putting together of the language and gestures of the poem. For Pavese a poem would never be about abuse, or a death or lost love or whatever, but about he language and imges that structure the experience: in a poem, the language and art come first. Think even of Dante who in his La Vita Nouva describes his spiritual love for Beatrice. Most of the time when those poems are presented they are taken out of the book whose prose memoirs of the poems that are intersperesed between each poem describe the artistry, usually the structure of each piece: we miss Dante's emphasis not on the love, the subject, but on the art, the technique. This is something most novice poets, in their drive to say the really important and sensitive things they think must be said, seem nearly always to miss.

Keats is one of our most metamorphic poets. He arrived in Rome just a few months before he died of tuberculosis and took a flat next to the Spanish steps in what is now a museum. I'm here for the second time, but the feeling is as eerie as ever-- you can almost cry, sensing his presence in the room he hardly left for 4 months. After he died they burned most of the contents: his own letters from Fanny, his lost love, he took with him to the grave. You almost feel he should have been able to transform time as he did in his poem, "To Autumn," on of the great odes, but like Werther, he failed. The poem opens, "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," and we can tell immediately we are facing one of the most sensual languages around, laden as it is with all the s,m,f and l sounds here, and all the vowel sounds throughout. Indeed it is a scene and a langauge of excess, almost baroque, appropriate for a time where "Summer has o'er brimmed their clammy cells." Even as the season ends it ends with "last oozings hours by hours." It is in the third and final stanza, though, where the real metamorphosis takes place. He describes the season's end:

While barred clouds bloom the soft dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
hedge crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red breast whistles from a garden croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The transformation here is accomplished by an ambiguity of language. Though he is supposed to be describing the end of things as autumn and evening turn to winter, he seems to also be describing spring and its new beginnings, a dawn. For example, though the day is dying the evening clouds are said to "bloom," and "rosy hue" is right out of Homer's description of the dawn, the gnats are "borne aloft" as well as "sinking," and the wind not only "dies" but "lives." "Full grown lambs" is, of course, an impossibility, but does suggest the blurring of times, and the hedge crickets and birds seem to be calling things to rise, while the last line mentions a "gathering" instead of the expected dispersal. The language of the poem, then, gains its energy by suggesting opposite things at once, and by breaking expectations: there is a tension in this mellifluous music.

As I leave Rome and head back up towards Florence I think of one other poem by a poetic descendent of Keats, W.S. Merwin. It's one of the first poems I fell in love with years ago, a perfect poem for travel, at least for leaving--"When You Go Away," by W.S. Merwin:

When you go away the wind clicks around to the north
The painters work all day but at sundown the paint falls
Showing the black walls
The clock goes back to striking the same hour
That has no place in the years

And at night wrapped in the bed of ashes
In one breath I wake
It is the time when the beards of the dead get their growth
I remember that I am falling
That I am the reason
And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one armed boy


The poem combines Pavese's sense of the image narrative with Keats' intensity. The clicking of the wind is picked up by the clock and then by the notion of time; sundown, black walls, ashes make another sequence, as do wind, breath and words. In fact, the poem is filled with interconnected images that refine each other's meanings and relationships, and it ends with that startling couplet which echoes the idea of a lost hour "That has no place in the years." And more, there is this driving intensity, this sense that the language, however strong, will never supplement the loss. The images, both specific and symbolic at once as many surreal images are, suggests an inclusiveness, too: it is a poem that takes us from the stunning moment of loss to a deeper understanding of just how painful and personal that loss is, and it is done by the metamorphic interrelationships among the images in this, energetic highly charged language.

As it turns out, thinking about this sort of intensity is just right, for in Florence, where I am coming for the 6th time, I am out to see mainly Michaelangelo's work, especially his sequence called "The Slaves." In Rome I had seen the magnificent Moses that was supposed to be the main figure for a pope's tomb that would also include these four statues of slaves (two more, finished, are in Paris), but the pope died, and Michaelangelo was left holding the bag. Some people suspect that's why he's made his Moses scorn across the centuries, and it may be true. But the slaves, they are another matter. They are only partially formed, still trapped in their blocks of granite. One version has it that he just abandoned them when the commission for the tomb went out, but I want to think of the work as a masterstroke of genius-- they capture the very metamorphic quality of art as it is produced. And they reveal an incredible intensity in their struggle to emerge from the stone. The four are called the Young Slave who seems to try to hold an arm to cover his shame, the Bearded Slave who seems almost despairing, the Atlas Slave whose head has not been carved and who seems to want to push up the whole earth represented by the uncut marble, and the Awakening Slave, my favorite, barely emerging from the stone with one leg crossed as if to push the away from his entrapment in the earth. What these figures suggest is the relationship between the material, what is there, and the hidden possibilities, with the idea beyond the work, a quality I call resonance, and which I take as my fifth principle. In a sense it is like transcendence, and it is borne of an intensity of language, a sense of that metamorphic vision I just discussed.

Perhaps the best commentary on the sort of resonance and intensity comes in William Carlos Williams' poem, "The Yellow Flower,' which makes use of Michaelangelo's work. The poem begins with an apology: "What shall I say, because talk I must?" Essentially the poem is about the need to talk, to include everything, even this uneventful flower which, compared, as he says, with a "cure for the sick," meaningless. But this "obscure" and "deformed" flower becomes a symbol for art, for the process of writing, and its very obscurity measured against the weight it must bear becomes begins to drain the poet himself. It is as if the flower, the subject, poetry, art, has chosen him, given him the burden. So internalized is this vision that the flower can stand for anything. As the poem progresses he will compare the "tortured body" of the flower to those of the slaves, achieving a kind of metamorphosis. he sets this up with the following lines about his own tortured pilgrimmage in writing:

But why the torture
and the escape through
the flower? It is
As if Michaelangelo
had conceived the subject
of his Slaves from this
--or might have done so.
And did he not make
the marble bloom? I
am sad
as he was sad
in his heroic mood.

By the end of this little passage the idea of the flower, any insignificant object, as a source for art, has placed such a burden on the imagination that the poet sees the sculptor himself as heroic as his slaves, and the poet too, as an artist, sharing in that heroism. As the poem has progressed the qualities of each object begin to be assigned to others, and to the characters.

More than a metamorphosis, the technique draws attention to the resonant quality of each object and image, each word. The object or word is always more than the object or word in a poem: it has a history both in itself and through the ways people have related to it; it fits into various contexts; it is redefined by other objects, words and images in the poem; it has certain uses; it exists perhaps over a longer span than we do-- in other words it transcends its own objectness just as Michaelangelo's work does. Perhaps in our own tradition the best example we have is Emily Dickinson, at least she is the poet I seem to be carrying around these last few days, reading her poems about loss, and about the desire to escape from the texture of the world like the Slaves while yet sensing its power like Williams does. Here is her poem #501:

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond--
Invisible, as Music--
But positive, as Sound--
It beckons, and it baffles--
Philosophy -- don't know--
And through a Riddle, at the last--
Sagacity, must go--
To guess it, puzzles scholars--
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of generations
And Crucifixion, shown--
Faith slips -- and laughs, and rallies--
Blushes, if any see--
Plucks at a twig of Evidence--
And asks a Vane the way--
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit--
Strong hallelujahs, roll--
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul--

The energia in the poem is immediately apparent with the dashes; the lines which except in the case of four have strong caesuras in the middle splitting them apart; the harsh sounds; the hesitant, doubtful movement of the lines reflecting the doubt and despair in the questioning of faith; the telegraphic or short-hand style -- all these sorts of things we have seen before in Berryman and Blake. And the poem transports us through a very inclusive range of emotions, for there is a hope in addition to the despair here, a serious philosophical questioning as well as ironic satire directed against the gestures from pulpits. The resounding couplet at the end brings us to a very sensual understanding of spirituality as opposed to the more abstract images near the beginning. Ironically, in bringing us beyond mere "Conclusion" and towards the spiritual, the poem transports us into the world of the senses, of objects, and things-- weathervanes, twigs, teeth, narcotics. But now these images resonate with the spiritual realm that has been interrogated all along. The poem is not only about the transcendent, but allows us to experience it in our own, human terms.

Florence itself seems a town predicated on this principle: everything seems infused with history, or an otherworldliness. It is a town that the somber and downtrodden, the despairing and broken hearted find oddly supportive, what with its long history of famous exiles and great art that divert even the worst cases. In back of our pensione is Dante's house, and the church where he first saw Beatrice. This afternoon a quartet is practicing in the church for a concert that night and we slip in to listen. It's Vivaldi and Bach. The whole church seems to resonate. Such passion. Such a sense of loss. A little earlier this afternoon we were exploring the other side of the river from the main sights, and came across the wonderful Brancacci chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine, the Carmelite nun's church. The Masaccio frescoes are the real highlight here. Done in 1424-25 they revolutionized frescoe painting, for here are not the typical late gothic and stylized works common at the time, but incredibly impassioned individuals. His "Adam and Eve Chased From Paradise" reveals the incredible pain on the part of the characters, especially Eve. The close-up of her face suggests a remorseful pain that transcends the mere human, that stands, as it is supposed to, for the failures of all mankind. In that sense it also suggests the sort of inclusiveness we discussed earlier. An with the energy of its brush strokes, often blurring the details for impassioned effects; the deepening sense of despair we feel the more we transport ourselves into the scene-- I begin to think of this as a culminating image. And it has something else we should mention, a sense of incredible drama. Something singular and momentous has happened.

But this last principle, the dramatic sense of the poem, is also apparent in the way the work speaks to us, to what degree it draws us in and to what degree it keeps us at an awed distance. A poem is a person speaking to people, to paraphrase Wordsworth in his Preface to The Lyrical Ballads, and that means that there is always a sense of an addressee: the same principle works here. We all know the Adam and Eve story, but few if any have imaged such pain and terror, such inconsolable remorse, such a sense of transcendent fear and despair. The painting, then, tells us something we didn't already know. Poems, too, have this obligation: they are acts of discovery. So if the poem has a real or implied addressee it should not simply re-state what that addressee, ourselves as readers or a dramatic other, probably already knows. The other acts as a kind of editor, telling us what to put in and what to leave out, and it reminds us that we are speaking on a human, that is, passionate and intense level.

Every poem is, in a sense, a dramatic dialogue with all of humanity. It is a calling out to others, the way Rilke calls out to his angels in the first Duino elegy. The seas-side castle where he began writing these is visible from the autostrada near the Italian-Slovene border:" "Who would hear me if I called out," he asks. What poetry does, what the rest of his ten elegies do, is try to answer that question in the most inclusive, intense way possible. It crosses boundaries, and strives for the universal, not the politically correct and narrow interests some would have it serve today. It's essence is is always beyond, transcendent, in a sense beyond language. "Poetry is what survives translation, not what's lost in it," Uros Zupan, a poet from Slovenia offers one night after I slip back across the border into Slovenia.


We might take a look at one of Ann Akhmatova's Northern Elegies, the second one entitled, "About the 1910's," to suggest this sense of the dramatic. The poem begins in medias res, in the middle of an ongoing argument or dialogue: "And there was no rosy childhood...." She describes her life as not even belonging to herself:

I myself, from the very beginning,
Seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium,
or a reflection in someone else's mirror,
Without flesh, without meaning, without a name.

Already knowing, she says, the crimes she would commit in her life, and "wandering like a somnambulist," she "Stepped into life and startled it." This sudden action is the dramatic turning point where she steps out of dream and fantasy into reality. But that reality has its own fantasies for this act brings her praise and respect, but countered to that is the underlying sense of despair and unworthiness. The poem is locked in a dialectic struggle with a fear which provides the dramatic script, and it is spoken in a sort of confessional manner, implying an intimate addressee. The poem ends with a doubleness that suggests a dual point of view, as well as an acknowledgement of the reader's role as an admirer that she is trying to correct:

And the more they praised me,
The more people admired me,
The more frightful it was to live in the world,
And the more I yearned to awaken,
For I knew that I would pay dearly
In prison, in the grave, in the madhouse,
Wherever someone like me must awaken--
But the torture dragged on as good fortune.

In a way, she has provided an answer to young Werther: you have to enter into a dramatic dialogue, a quarrel with the world, for that is ultimately what a poem is, to paraphrase Robert Frost, a collision of our dreams against the failures.

Another fine example of this, of course, would be Horace, especially his satires which are themselves dialogues with interlocutors, or his and other poets epistles which are directed towards particular people. In a sense all poems are dramatic monologues and the addressee, real or implied, can be gauged by how the narrator speaks. In Akhmatova's poem we, like the addressee, are put in the position of admirers that the poem struggles against-- that is why she includes all the exceptions, qualifications and excuses to argue down our case. Like Masaccio's Eve, she walks despairingly out of the garden, knowing how fragile the "good fortune" of the world will be.

I began this thinking I'd include a lot more of the art, of the history, and how that affects my reading. I began by thinking to include Ashbery, Bell, Matthews, C.D. Wright, Lynne Emanuel and other contemporoary writers, and Horace and a whole slew of the classics. But one has to be selective, which is I suppose another principle. The more one travels and thinks and reads the longer the list grows. I've taken a number of ideas and condensed them to six. Six principles, then: first, the poem as a metaphor or means of transport whose structure takes us to a different level or context through the course of the poem, and with each phrase and word; second, the poem as being as inclusive as possible, either actually or by implication-- that is, it reflects the complexity of the world; third, energia, the language, which is striking, unusual, brilliant, tense, filled with energy; fourth, the images and language are constantly in the process of revision, for the poem is not static but always in the process of metamorphosing, discovering new realms; fifth, it resonates, transcends the objects and language within it; and finally, it is a dramatic piece, a drama of our all too human emotions, passions, ideas.

The point is, finally, to keep travelling, in and out of books. It's our way of transforming ourselves and our own writing. Tomorrow, they'll be another addition to my list of what I like and why I like it, maybe a whole new list. But this will do for now, and it seems to fit neatly into my poetic knapsack. In a sense all pilgrims return to where they started from, the real, and then start over again: it is an endless process, but the only one by which we can define ourselves and our art. I begin to feel again like that ten year old mapreader discovering another world, a secret place behind all those contour lines and boundary markers on my father's army maps. "If your daily life seems poor," writes Rilke in his Letters To A Young Poet, "do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place."