100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 14
The firstborn daughter returns every night and yet, despite her loyalty, her father cannot respond or acknowledge her. The change in tense from the past to the present in the last two lines is revealing: “And even though I was his firstborn daughter / Not one word of love can he speak to me.” Her father’s silence is painful and seems withholding, though it will never be broken. It’s especially pointed to say that he cannot reassure her with a single word of love—and here she uses the auxiliary verb can—because, in fact, he is unable to speak at all. His silence is shattering, unnatural, permanent, and as a result her love will forever go unreciprocated. All of this has a quasi-logical and hallucinatory quality that befits the language of trauma.
In a perceptive psychoanalytically oriented book on Ravikovitch and the poetics of trauma, the scholar Ilana Szobel suggests that a more revealing translation of that last line would be “I always knew, I was forever beholden”—a statement that embodies Ravikovitch’s personal experiences and poetic commitments, a declaration “that may be read as a poetic articulation of the nature of her trauma.” Ravikovitch was a searing feminist, a stirring love poet, and a political activist, but she was also always a poet of unresolved mourning, forever beholden.
Her unnamed early poem, the portal to her work, is devastatingly sad because it enacts mourning without resolution, grief without end.
Jorge Luis Borges
* * *
“Poem of the Gifts”
(1960)
Jorge Luis Borges is mostly known for his mind-bending metaphysical parables that cross the boundaries between the short story and the essay. But Borges always identified himself first as a reader, then as a poet. He found the borders between genres permeable and lived in an imaginary world created by books. “If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library,” he said in 1970. “In fact, sometimes I think I have never strayed outside that library.”
Borges suffered from hereditary weak eyesight and eventually became the sixth generation of his family to go blind. This was an especially unfortunate fate for the reader and writer who in 1955 became the director of Argentina’s National Library. He served for eighteen years, possibly the happiest years of his life, though the external world gradually faded to a gray fog. It was as if he was coming home again to his father’s library, though now with greater resources and riches. But then his blindness deprived him of the freedom of reading. He said, “Little by little I grew to understand the strange irony of events. I had always imagined Paradise under the aspect of a library . . . And there was I, in some way the center of 900,000 volumes in various languages. I discovered that I could hardly make out the title pages or the spines. I then wrote ‘Poem of the Gifts.’”
Here is “Poema de los dones,” which was initially dedicated to Borges’s friend and collaborator, the prose writer María Esther Vázquez:
Poem of the Gifts
No one should read self-pity or reproach
into this statement of the majesty
of God, who with such splendid irony
granted me books and blindness at one touch.
* * *
Care of this city of books he handed over
to sightless eyes, which now can do no more
than read in libraries of dream the poor
and senseless paragraphs that dawns deliver
* * *
to wishful scrutiny. In vain the day
squanders on these same eyes its infinite tomes,
as distant as the inaccessible volumes
that perished once in Alexandria.
* * *
From hunger and from thirst (in the Greek story),
a king lies dying among gardens and fountains.
Aimlessly, endlessly, I trace the confines,
high and profound, of this blind library.
* * *
Cultures of East and West, the entire atlas,
encyclopedias, centuries, dynasties,
symbols, the cosmos, and cosmogonies
are offered from the walls, all to no purpose.
* * *
In shadow, with a tentative stick, I try
the hollow twilight, slow and imprecise—
I, who had always thought of Paradise
in form and image as a library.
* * *
Something, which certainly is not defined
by the word fate, arranges all these things;
another man was given, on other evenings
now gone, these many books. He too was blind.
* * *
Wandering through the gradual galleries,
I often feel with vague and holy dread
I am that other dead one, who attempted
the same uncertain steps on similar days.
* * *
Which of the two is setting down this poem—
a single sightless self, a plural I?
What can it matter, then, the name that names me,
given our curse is common and the same?
* * *
Groussac or Borges, now I look upon
this dear world losing shape, fading away
into a pale uncertain ashy-gray
that feels like sleep, or else oblivion.
(Translated by Alastair Reid)
Borges wrote poetry throughout the 1920s, mostly under the aegis of a vanguard Imagist sect called the Ultraists, but then it mysteriously deserted him as he went on to create a new kind of narrative prose in such books as Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia,1935), The Garden of Forking Paths (El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan,1941), and Ficciones (1944). The fabulist returned to poetry in 1950s with a more direct and straightforward style, a beguiling and deceptive simplicity, and dictated his poems to classical meters.
Borges’s book The Maker (El hacedor, 1960) is divided into two parts. The first half consists entirely of prose parables. The second half commences with “Poem of the Gifts” and continues with a group of lineated poems. There is no discord between the pieces in prose and the lyrics in verse. And yet in the prologue to his book In Praise of Darkness (Elogio de la sombra,1969), Borges also makes a point about emotion in the lyric: “Beyond its rhythm, the typographical layout of free verse is there to inform the reader that what awaits him is not facts or reasoning, but poetic emotion.”
There might be some justification then in thinking that the pressure of feeling determined the lineated form of “Poem of the Gifts.” That feeling is intense, but it is also quiet and restrained. Borges also confesses, “After many years I realize (not without a bit of sadness) that in all my efforts in free verse I just went from one classical meter to another.” “Poem of the Gifts” looks like free verse, but it mostly unfolds in Spanish as a series of twelve-syllable lines, or alexandrines. Borges was indebted to John Milton’s Petrarchan sonnet on his blindness. He might have recalled that Robert Bridges called his own alexandrines “neo-Miltonics.” The regular quatrains also give the poem a feeling of orderliness and symmetry.
Borges said that he wanted the first lines of the poem to sound “calm, like a prayer.” It’s the sort of prayer one might recite to oneself while moving through a labyrinth of books in a quiet building. The speaker treats the central irony of the poem without self-pity or rage but with a kind of wistfulness. The gift he has been given is complicated. Borges uses the plural to refer to “libraries of dreams” (“los sueños”), but Reid translates it as singular, “libraries of dream.” After all, the books outside of his office are now just as distant to him as the books that perished in the fire at Alexandria. Borges always linked blindness to books, to reading and learning. He evokes the Greek story of King Tantalus, who was punished by Zeus to eternal thirst and hunger in Hades despite being placed in a pool of water and almost within reach of a fruit tree. Tantalus’s name became the origin of the verb tantalize.
The speaker projects his own condition onto the place—“this blind library.�
� It’s as if the bookshelves, the walls themselves, hold the key to the mysteries of the universe (“symbols, the cosmos, and cosmogonies”), but he cannot use this key to open the tantalizingly close door—it’s “all to no purpose.” The fiction writer Leonard Michaels called Borges “a master of controlled estrangement,” an apt term for the image of the blind custodian tentatively making his way through the library:
In shadow, with a tentative stick, I try
the hollow twilight, slow and imprecise—
I, who had always thought of Paradise
in form and image as a library.
Moving forward, the speaker invokes his double, a man no longer alive, whom he identifies as himself. “I am that other dead one, who attempted / the same uncertain steps on similar days,” he confesses, and then wonders: “Which of the two is setting down this poem— / a single sightless self, a plural I?” This seems like a metaphysical ploy, as in many of Borges’s short stories, but here it also turns out to have a literal meaning. At the end of the poem, Borges evokes Paul Groussac (1845–1929), a French intellectual and naturalized Argentine whom he greatly admired. Groussac was the second blind director of the National Library, after José Marmol, who directed the library from 1858 to 1871. Groussac lived on the first floor of the Biblioteca Nacional de Argentina, where he served for forty-four years, and eventually also went blind. Borges’s double is also his predecessor, and the poet seems to speak for either or both as he faces an ash-gray world. Finally, like Alfonsina Storni in her last poem, “I’m Going to Sleep,” Borges invokes the ancient connection between sleep and death. He suggests that this precious world is “losing shape, fading away” into a grayness that feels like sleep, which is temporary, or else oblivion, which is permanent.
Gwen Harwood
* * *
“In the Park”
(1961)
The Australian poet Gwen Harwood deserves to be better known in the United States. She published her early poem “In the Park” in the magazine The Bulletin in 1961 under the pseudonym Walter Lehmann. She liked “masques, masquerades, wigs and beards,” and this was the first of the thirteen pseudonyms that she would employ over the course of her career. Two years later, she claimed the poem under her own name in her first book, Poems (1963).
It was especially difficult for a woman poet, particularly one who was writing about domestic life, to make her way in Australia in the 1950s. As the Australian writer Susan Sheridan puts it, “In 1959, in Tasmania, an unknown poet called Gwen Harwood started a guerilla war on incompetent literary editors by sending out her poems under male pseudonyms.” Harwood’s suspicions about sexism were verified and suddenly her poems were readily accepted. Her outrage grew. In 1961, she submitted two sonnets on the lovers Abelard and Eloisa to The Bulletin under her first male nom de guerre. After they were published, it was revealed that the two poems read acrostically, “So Long Bulletin, Fuck All Editors.”
Here is “In the Park”:
In the Park
She sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date.
Two children whine and bicker, tug her skirt.
A third draws aimless patterns in the dirt.
Someone she loved once passes by—too late
* * *
to feign indifference to that casual nod.
“How nice,” et cetera. “Time holds great surprises.”
From his neat head unquestionably rises
a small balloon . . . “but for the grace of God . . .”
* * *
They stand a while in flickering light, rehearsing
the children’s names and birthdays. “It’s so sweet
to hear their chatter, watch them grow and thrive,”
she says to his departing smile. Then, nursing
the youngest child, sits staring at her feet.
To the wind she says, “They have eaten me alive.”
“In the Park,” or as Elizabeth Lawson aptly dubbed it, “In the Dreaded Park,” is a carefully crafted and explosive Petrarchan sonnet. The rhythm is a steady iambic pentameter, the rhyme scheme is exact:abba cddc efg efg. An unnamed woman sits in the park with her three children and encounters a man whom “she loved once.” The poem has the drama of a short story—it is presented from a third-person center of consciousness—and the concision of a lyric poem. Despite the original male signature, it takes a female point of view. Harwood gleefully told an interviewer that someone once said to her, “Only a man could have written that poem with the necessary self-detachment.”
The poet Eavan Boland recalls that she “began to write in an Ireland where the word ‘woman’ and the word ‘poet’ seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other.” The situation was the same in Australia. Harwood was afraid of being typecast as a housewife and excluded from the rank of poets; she also had a husband and four children, and she wanted or needed the cover of a male pseudonym. She mined domestic life for subject matter, but she was also troubled when critics identified her with the protagonist of her suburban poems.
Harwood’s interviews are filled with disclaimers. She said, “I am horrified at the tendency of people to identify the I with the author . . . I keep saying that the I of the poems is not the I making jams jellies pickles and chutneys.” She insisted on what W. B. Yeats called “a phantasmagoria,” the gap between the poet who creates and “the bundle of accidents and incoherence that sits down to breakfast,” though in Harwood’s case she probably also made that breakfast for her family. She distanced herself from the domestic rounds and said, “The I of my poems is an entirely operatic I.” When one interviewer told her that she saw “an impulse of self-expression” in “In the Park,” Harwood retorted, “But it says she sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date. Mine are never out of date.” She explained that the poem originated when she “saw that woman and felt [her] way into what she was thinking.”
Yet there was obviously some part of Harwood that recognized the domestic claustrophobia described in “In the Park.” She understood the experience and created a powerfully gendered scene. Notice how the poem starts with short stabbing declarative sentences and three carefully end-stopped lines.
She sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date.
Two children whine and bicker, tug her skirt.
A third draws aimless patterns in the dirt.
There is a long pause at the end of the first quatrain: “Someone she loved once passes by—too late . . .” The rhymes are strategically deployed: the words “skirt” and “dirt” are clenched together while “date” is held off and then paired with the word “late.” The drama of the poem is triggered by an unexpected meeting.
There is a telegraphic use of dialogue in the second quatrain. An entire polite conversation can be inferred from it: “ ‘How nice,’ et cetera. ‘Time holds great surprises.’” The sheer rote boredom of that “et cetera” lands with a heavy weight, like the multisyllabic word “unquestionably.” The rhyming links “surprises” to “rises” and ironically pairs “nod” with “God.” There’s a surreal or postmodernist moment at the end of the stanza, where the narrator describes “a small balloon” rising over the man’s head, like a dialogue bubble from a comic strip, to project or exteriorize his thought: “but for the grace of God . . .” The idea trails off, but the woman is certain of his secret relief, which shames her.
The Petrarchan sonnet turns in the last six lines. It is as if a camera now looks down on two people standing in the flickering light, making polite conversation, that awkward chatter between former lovers who were once extremely close but no longer know each other. The woman gives the conventional assurances about the sweetness of motherhood. But then the man leaves, and the woman is left to her own devices, nursing her child, staring down at her feet. “To the wind she says, ‘They have eaten me alive.’”
This last line is a small bomb detonating in a carefully constructed domestic scene. For the female character, the idea of being eaten alive se
ems especially bitter after her conversational assurances about how sweet it is to see the children “grow and thrive.” The final rhyme, “thrive” and “alive,” is brutally pointed. The woman may speak to the wind, as in a visionary poem—think of how often in Romantic poetry, speaking to the wind is a sign of poetic inspiration, a creative and destructive inspiriting force (“Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!” D. H. Lawrence declares in “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through”)—though here it is not at all a sign of prophetic power. Rather, the image speaks to the woman’s loneliness and isolation. She looks down, as if in defeat, and addresses the wind because there is no one she can really talk to, no one she can tell the truth to.
This poem has an air of postnatal depression, the feeling of being devoured by life, a sense of inescapable confinement. It’s not a matter of whether the woman loves her children or not. It’s a question of how life seems to be closing in around her. Gwen Harwood had the wherewithal to capture that anguished experience in a furious formal poem, a fiercely controlled and vehement sonnet.