Poetry: The Living Moment
By Jeffrey Hart | Monday, May 5, 2008
Editor’s Note: In honor of poetry month, this past April, The Dartmouth Review presents the following two articles.
“An odd secret excitement, a strange need,
To be there when the heartbeat happened.”
That was what the poet Mark Van Doren wrote about the experience of writing poetry, the words reflecting something not entirely rational, perhaps even physical in its impact.
It’s important for us to consider what happens when we think. We do not think as a logician does, or like the geometer Euclid. Our thoughts combine reason with desire, intention, unwarranted assumptions, and often unconscious elements. In the poem “Lucy,” William Wordsworth considers the surprise, the force with which the word “dead” hits you as you finish the poem:
Strange fits of passion have I known:
And I will dare to tell,
But in the lover’s ear alone,
What once to me befell.
When she I loved look’d every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening moon.
Upon the moon I fix’d my eye,
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.
And now we reach’d the orchard-plot;
And, as we climb’d the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot
Came near and nearer still.
In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature’s gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.
My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopp’d:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropp’d.
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a lover’s head—
“O mercy!” to myself I cried,
“If Lucy should be dead!”
Dead. We are surprised. The man is shocked. The simplicity and regularity of the verse set us up for the surprise. Neither we nor he know where that thought came from or why. Perhaps he brings to consciousness his worst fear. Wordsworth understood the power of the unconscious in human experience. A few years earlier in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke was exploring the importance of the unconscious in human behavior. Much of what we do is accomplished by habit, and social institutions are the habits of society. The Age of Reason was dead.
Wordsworth’s poem appeared in his Lyrical Ballads (1798), seen as a revolution in poetry.
Emily Dickinson is “except for Shakespeare,” Harold Bloom judges, the poet with “more cognitive originality than any Western poet since Dante.” To support this claim he cited her “Number 761” (circa 1863):
From Blank to Blank—
A Threadless Way
I pushed Mechanic feet—
To stop—or perish—or advance—
Alike indifferent—
If end I gained
It ends beyond
Indefinite disclosed—
I shut my eyes—and groped as well
‘Twas lighter to be blind.
Dickinson was a complete original. The concentration of her verse reminds us of such seventeenth century poets as Donne. In forty-one words she begins with Theseus’ thread that guides him out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth, but, ungrateful, abandons Ariadne who gave him the thread. Dickinson alludes to Milton’s “universal blank” that nature presented to his blindness. Dickinson “pushed Mechanic feet” not knowing where she goes, dread resulting in hopelessness and indifference. Why is it “lighter” to be blind? Because, we infer, the person who sees may imagine that there is a way out of the labyrinth.
Harold Bloom is right, I think, in judging Dickinson a great poet indeed, and part of his Western Canon, though she lived all her life in relative isolation in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Onward to the twentieth century: in 1917 Ezra Pound persuaded—forced? —editor Harriet Monroe to publish T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in her magazine Poetry even though she didn’t understand it. Another revolution was at hand. “Prufrock” begins:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.
Those two beautiful—romantic—opening lines issue in the unexpected thud of “Like a patient etherized upon a table.” We might be reminded of the word “dead” at the end of Wordsworth’s poem. And, again, we are in the vicinity of the unconscious. Evidently Prufrock is a divided soul. He wants to go –somewhere – but at the same time doesn’t want to go. The philosopher and Dartmouth professor Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy said that “speech is the body of spirit.” He could have been talking about poetry, or serious prose. Poetry, however, because of its formal elements, can usually achieve this is a more concentrated and powerful way.
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