Jack Gilbert the Sirens Again Analysis
Trying to Get God's Attending
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May 15, 1994
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A SILENCE OPENS Poems. By Amy Clampitt. 96 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $20. THE Bully FIRES Poems 1982-1992. By Jack Gilbert. xc pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $xx. EARTHLY MEASURES Poems. By Edward Hirsch. 93 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $xx.
Poesy has always laid claim to the spirit. And information technology probably should be no surprise that a secular guild like ours conceals plenty of religious ache. Even so the assumption of a secular consciousness in American cultural life is so strong that when gimmicky American poets not merely accost God directly just arrive clear that the search for God lies at the core of their enterprise, it tin come as a jolt.
In three striking new collections, Amy Clampitt, Jack Gilbert and especially Edward Hirsch enjoin the ancient allegiance -- and struggle -- with the sacred, in language that is by turns freshly urgent, intimate and wonderfully pliant. Theirs is the God of absences and distance -- on the border of disappearance, but all the more alluring for that.
In "A Silence Opens," Amy Clampitt -- similar the diva in her get-go verse form, "Syrinx," whose voice sings past words to pure audio -- goes to the extreme edge of the sayable, and "rises / past maxim anything, whatever / more than than the wind in / the trees, waves breaking." This edge-of-language position is exactly where religious experience begins.
Ms. Clampitt, for all her refined, sometimes dizzily elevated language, is a poet of history and politics, not simply of sensibility. The poems of the outset section -- especially "Matoaka," a long elegy or homage to Pocahontas, and "Brought From Across" -- affect on the peculiar problem of finding what is holy in a land divested of its native spirits past its invaders:
O magpie, O bowerbird,
O Marco Polo and Coronado, where do
these things, these
fabrications, come up from -- the holy places,
ark and altarpiece, the aureoles,
the seraphim -- and underneath it all
the howling?
Across "the howling" in that location is the sheer richness of the observed earth: the "mazily hexagonal lopsided falling things" that are snowflakes, the "topheavily crested and cravatted kingfisher," "not to speak of an April brownish down under."
Ms. Clampitt's feature savour of descriptive precision does not overlay "the howling" with mere loveliness, however. In "Thinking Ruddy" (one of a series of color poems), she turns to a physicist for instruction about her fascination with the textile world:
Mind stuff, he tells u.s.: concrete
reality is mind stuff. In creatures
that puzzle over what information technology is, he says, the universe begins to know itself.
In the cute memoir poem "Manhattan," she evokes in three sections the city of dreams and the classic American flight from provincial youth to Greenwich Village and "the West Side Highway's nightlong silken seethe." Finally, looking dorsum on that onetime maverick life from the Staten Island Ferry, "the mind gropes toward its own recessional."
This preoccupation with death provides "that glimpsed inkling of things / beyond systems, windborne, oblivious," that is the hallmark of spiritual experience. This poet is not looking just for religious consolation. Rather, she says in "Matrix," a verse form near a Madonna and Child portrait in Italy:
the thing I hankered afterward was no
rite but a foundation, the bedrock
that survives, the banded strata,
hurled reliquary of the drowned,
remnant of uncountable transformings.
In "A Silence," the final poem of the volume, when "a silence opens" it proceeds from "a limitless interiority" that is "past parentage or gender / beyond sung vocables / the slipped-betwixt / the so infinitesimal / error line." It is a silence across all images, therefore beyond poetry. And indeed, Ms. Clampitt'due south lines, usually rippling with modifiers to achieve the exactness of her meaning, get eloquently spare equally she considers the names available for this visitation ("revelation / kif nirvana / syncope").
The poems refuse to ascension to a merely literary transcendence. Ms. Clampitt is well aware of the problems at the heart of revelation, the "gift unasked"; for revelation is beautiful -- and terrible, as Rilke said of angels. Such an awakening "gives nativity to / torrents / fixities." Still, even the "founder-charlatans" of religion discover in silence "the space / dear of God." In this great silence, even they accept "great openings." Silence is an entrance to poetry, not its absence. And hither, at the swivel of silence and vocal, Ms. Clampitt ends her quest, having gone as far equally language can go.
Jack Gilbert's God refuses to be so silent. Sometimes He is as voluble as the God of the Psalms. In "Going Wrong," the start poem in "The Great Fires," a human lone fixing his dinner has thought idly of the fish he is cleaning equally "soft machinery of the dark." Clearly poet talk, and the Lord is having none of it: " 'What can you know of my machinery!' demands the Lord." "Sure, the man says quietly," and keeps on cooking, as if God were a familiar nag all-time left to rage on His own.
The Lord accuses the man of vanity and stubbornness for being alone, for choosing a hard and rocky life and landscape. The man keeps frying his dinner in the hot olive oil, calculation lemon and peppers and tomatoes. He's a conscientious, attentive cook. "I am not stubborn," he says, as he lays all of the food out for himself in the early on lord's day, the "shadows of swallows flying on the food. Not stubborn, just greedy." The homo -- the poet with his impulse to name the machinery of creation -- gets the last discussion. If he'south going to sin, information technology'southward going to exist his sin, not God's. God can name the "machinery." The human being will know the flesh, the food.
This countdown poem -- modest, even funny in its stoicism -- signals the primal preoccupation and much of the poignancy of this collection of mostly brief, pristine lyrics from 1982 to 1992. The death of the poet'due south wife is the occasion for many of the poems, or is the occasion for much of the isolation that informs the retrospective vocalism. In this book of passions recounted over a lifetime of loves and romantic upheavals, even expiry is not simply loss but an opportunity for "the real." In "Measuring the Tyger," Mr. Gilbert says: "I want to get back to that time afterward Michiko's decease / when I cried every day amidst the trees. To the real. / To the magnitude of pain, of existence that much live." The grit of death has the taste of life. And in "Tear It Downwards," desire must exist an absolute insistence "while there is all the same time. We must / eat through the wildness of her sweet trunk already / in our bed to reach the body within that body." Life and death are non opposites in this conception of things; they partake of each other. Together, they are the spirit.
This is a book of farewells and leave-takings, yet information technology conveys a rare serenity, or a stoicism and then fully accomplished it passes for serenity. Mr. Gilbert'due south enormous enjoy for the concrete world and his immaculate diction are almost nothing less than "searching for a base line of the Lord." He makes a swell distinction between "spirit" and "soul":
The spirit dances, comes and goes. But the soul
is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged
under the ribs. What lasted is what the soul ate.
All the desires of a life -- especially sexual love, but also the passion for solitude, for poetry itself, for the accuracy of broken vignettes of memory -- are understood at last as a single great hunger: "I tried to gnaw my fashion into the Lord." In these stately however urgent poems, "the Lord" is the accumulated joys and griefs (and grievances) of a lifetime.
What emerges is divine, whether it is in the Pittsburgh of babyhood, nether the departer sun of the Mediterranean or in the dark Japan of his wife's death. Finally, "God has put off his panoply and is at home with us. / We are returned to what lay beneath the beauty." "Below the beauty" are the fullness of life and its culmination, which is non simply loss but death.
Edward Hirsch asks in one of three linked poems about the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "What has happened to the eternal presences?" The absenteeism of God and the abundant presence of human desire reign over his volume and class a passionately important inquiry into the nature of worship. As if to admit that all absence and vacancy is crying out for presence, "Earthly Measures" is lighted with fire, that perfect paradigm for what is consumed by its very beingness. Burning is not only cleansing; it is as well, in the presence of the burning dominicus, "a constancy in the sky." Only for all this sizzling and shining, "God is non manifest in this dusky light / and humiliated flesh: He is non among u.s.."
THE poet becomes "an eternal connoisseur of absences." Only even greater than God's absence is the poet's want to "contemplate the humility of kneeling." This is a remarkable and most unusual recognition, one Mr. Hirsch honors powerfully in his close study of Simone Weil in "Away From Dogma." In the department on Weil'south extraordinary conversion (if that is what it was) to Roman Catholicism in Assisi, he notes that "she disliked the Miracles in the Gospels. / She never believed in the mystery of contact."
The "comfort" of religion is non what is sought, or mourned, either past Simone Weil or by Mr. Hirsch. He understands perfectly that she was not really about the business organization of worrying the existence of God, any more than he is. Rather, "something she neither believed nor disbelieved . . . forced her to her knees."
This "something" ignites the innate capacity to admire. Mr. Hirsch's grasp of this core instinct to worship -- never mind the "presences" -- charges his poems with a luminous ability. Whether he writes of the burned-out mill towns of the Midwest, the luscious south of Europe, the pilgrimages of his various heroes -- Henry James, Weil, Hofmannsthal and Orpheus -- or near his own love, the poems are actually almost the mystery of the instinct to sing. For singing, the poet'south task, is a gesture as unbidden equally falling to one'south knees.
How does Orpheus know where he is going in the underworld? someone asks in "Orpheus: The Descent." The respond is "My dear: by the ache in his left side, / by the echo of sirens pulsing in the altitude." Orpheus understands not past seeing, not by being given proof of his management, but past the faultless compass of his eye filled with desire.
These are poems of immense wonder and rigor. To say they are religious poems is only to recognize their grandeur and generosity, and their heartbreaking longing.
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