100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 15
Robert Hayden
* * *
“The Whipping”
(1962)
I once saw a documentary about Robert Hayden that showed him moving through his old neighborhood on Detroit’s east side, talking about his past and pointing out the familiar landmarks of his childhood. The trouble was that few of those landmarks remained. A warehouse had replaced the house where he was born, and across the street, a parking lot and power plant stood in place of the house where he was raised. As Hayden paused there—gentle, nearsighted, bundled up against the January cold—it was easy to understand why displacement was one of his main poetic subjects.
The old, poor neighborhood where he had grown up, the main Black section of the city, which was called “Black Bottom” because it rested on fertile farmland, no longer existed. Hayden explained that an entire neighborhood “which had been fairly cohesive had been destroyed.” The cultural center of that neighborhood was called “Paradise Valley.” Many of Hayden’s most personal poems are a rescue operation for that troubled paradise. The poet Michael Harper recalled that at one time Hayden wanted to collect all his poems about Paradise Valley as a special gift for friends. The collection would have included “Elegies for Paradise Valley,” “Free Fantasia: Tiger Flowers,” “Homage to the Empress of the Blues,” “The Rabbi,” “Summertime and the Living . . . ,” “The Whipping,” and “Those Winter Sundays.”
Hayden could be nostalgic about his neighborhood, but he also knew that he came from a dysfunctional home. He was born Asa Sheffey, but his parents soon separated and left him with their neighbors, William and Sue Ellen Hayden, who raised him as their son and renamed him Robert Earl Hayden. He learned years later that they never formally adopted him. He was bound to his childhood as the foster son of poor, working-class people and remained committed to what he liked to call “folk” people: poor, uneducated, dignified, all those who quietly fulfilled what he called “love’s austere and lonely offices” (“Those Winter Sundays”). But he also refused to sentimentalize his past—as a child growing up his primary desire was to escape the world that surrounded him—and he determined to remember it accurately.
Here is his poem “The Whipping” from A Ballad of Remembrance (1962):
The Whipping
The old woman across the way
is whipping the boy again
and shouting to the neighborhood
her goodness and his wrongs.
* * *
Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,
pleads in dusty zinnias,
while she in spite of crippling fat
pursues and corners him.
* * *
She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling
boy till the stick breaks
in her hand. His tears are rainy weather
to woundlike memories:
* * *
My head gripped in bony vise
of knees, the writhing struggle
to wrench free, the blows, the fear
worse than blows that hateful
* * *
Words could bring, the face that I
no longer knew or loved. . . .
Well, it is over now, it is over,
and the boy sobs in his room,
* * *
And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged—
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear.
Hayden told an interviewer that this poem was motivated by his need to recall the past and rid himself of the pain of so much of it. “I was often abused and often hurt physically,” he confessed. His foster parents simply “didn’t know how to handle children.” Yet, here as elsewhere in Hayden’s work, there is a certain detachment, a formal distancing and reticence. This is true of even his most personal poems. Experience has been transposed into art. Here, this is evident in the six elastic, carefully crafted quatrains, which indent the second and fourth lines; in the way the poet balances the enjambments and isolates phrases for emphasis; in the way he rhythmically drives the poem forward. He capitalizes the first letter of each stanza, a quiet formality, and divides the poem neatly in half.
“The Whipping” begins in the present, turns to the past, and then returns to the present with a new awareness and knowledge. It’s the formula that Wordsworth created in “Tintern Abbey.” The poem thus takes the form of a crisis lyric—it enacts a mental transport. The central memory is triggered as the speaker watches an old woman—“The old woman”—across the way who is whipping a boy—“the boy”—yet again. Neither the woman nor the boy is identified by name. If the scene didn’t make such a visceral impression, they’d almost seem like allegorical figures. This whipping is something that obviously happens periodically. The old woman doesn’t hide the fact, either. The fourth line knowingly isolates and balances the phrase “her goodness and his wrongs.” The boy dramatically crashes through the plants, struggling to escape, pleading in the flowers where he is trying to hide, while the woman, despite her “crippling” weight, “pursues and corners him.”
The scene is violent. Notice the hissing s and shsounds that enact it: “She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling / boy till the stick breaks . . .” The violence breaks the boy into tears and breaks the speaker too. Suddenly he is catapulted back into his own past, into the experience of being bludgeoned and screamed at by a loved one disfigured by rage. This is a dark, troubled instance of what Proust deemed “involuntary memory.”
“The Whipping” is an action-packed poem, but one notices the slightly stiff and removed diction of “His tears are rainy weather / to woundlike memories.” It’s as if the speaker is distancing himself from what he is about to remember and face. The meaning then cleverly turns on a colon placed precisely midway through the poem. That colon splits open the poem and marks a calculated turn from the third to the first person. Memory explodes. The next six lines enact a transformation. Look at how strategically the lines unfold:
My head gripped in bony vise
of knees, the writhing struggle
to wrench free, the blows, the fear
worse than blows that hateful
* * *
Words could bring, the face that I
no longer knew or loved. . . .
These lines depict the speaker’s futile struggle to break free. Notice the repetition of the letter w, which weaves together the words “writhing,” “wrench,” “worse,” and “Words.” There’s also a wrenching line and stanza break, which creates a sort of double emphasis, between “hateful” and “Words.” The ellipsis marks the end of a sentence; a beating has trailed off. It also signals a memory that is too much to bear. When the speaker returns to the present tense (“Well, it is over now, it is over”), he is talking both about the boy in his room and about himself as a child.
Hayden complicates the moral resonance at the end of the poem by suggesting that the woman (the neighbor in the present and, by implication, the adult in his own past) has been avenging a lifetime of secret hurts. There is a pun on the word “hidings.” “I got a few hidings like that,” Hayden remembered, referring to the way he was beaten. But here the word also refers to what this poor, heavyset, pain-ridden woman had been forced to conceal for her entire life. The woman’s secret hurts don’t justify or excuse her abusive behavior, but they do help to explain it. She has been “purged” and “avenged,” though only “in part.” Hayden understands the way that violence has been passed down from generation to generation. It was a brutal cycle that needed to be broken.
Robert Hayden could come to such a large understanding only through the writing of the poem itself. “The Whipping” is an acutely observant poem, a reckoning, and testimonial. As Gwendolyn Brooks said, “Life is right there, in the finished piece.”
Robert Lowell
* * *
“Night Sweat”
(1963)
Night Sweat” appeared as the penultima
te poem in For the Union Dead (1964), which Robert Lowell wrote during a period when he was espe-cially worn out from his bipolar disorder, which caused regular bouts of depression and mania. It was still a few years before he started taking lithium, which offered him a lifeline. He said about the book:
Depression’s no gift from the Muse. At worst, I do nothing. But often I’ve written, and wrote one whole book—For the Union Dead—about witheredness. It wasn’t acute depression, and I felt quite able to work for hours, write and rewrite. Most of the best poems, the most personal, are gathered crumbs. I had better moods, but the book is lemony, soured, and dry, the drouth I had touched with my own hands. That, too, may be poetry—on sufferance.
Lowell was able to make something lasting out of his depression in “Night Sweat,” a crisis poem with a lyrical flair and a certain rhetorical grandiloquence that is rare for a poem dampened by such a dark spirit.
Night Sweat
Work-table, litter, books and standing lamp,
plain things, my stalled equipment, the old broom—
but I am lying in a tidied room,
for ten nights now I’ve felt the creeping damp
float over my pajamas’ wilted white . . .
Sweet salt embalms me and my head is wet,
everything streams and tells me this is right;
life’s fever is soaking in night sweat—
one life, one writing! But the downward glide
and bias of existing wrings us dry—
always inside me is the child who died,
always inside me is his wish to die—
one universe, one body . . . in this urn
the animal night sweats of the spirit burn.
* * *
Behind me! You! Again I feel the light
lighten my leaded eyelids, while the gray
skulled horses whinny for the soot of night.
I dabble in the dapple of the day.
A heap of wet clothes, seamy, shivering,
I see my flesh and bedding washed with light,
my child exploding into dynamite,
my wife . . . your lightness alters everything,
and tears the black web from the spider’s sack,
as your heart hops and flutters like a hare.
Poor turtle, tortoise, if I cannot clear
the surface of these troubled waters here,
absolve me, help me, Dear Heart, as you bear
this world’s dead weight and cycle on your back.
The poet Elizabeth Bishop especially loved this poem. In a letter to Lowell in 1963, she called it “very beautiful, musical, spontaneous,” and said that it was “a wonderful, perfectly natural poem—very sympathetic.” The words “spontaneous” and “perfectly natural” jump out because the poem does have a feeling of spontaneity and naturalness, though that feeling is hard-won, since the poem is crafted as a double sonnet. The first stanza is a Shakespearean sonnet, which consists of three four-line units and a summarizing couplet. The rhyme scheme is tight: abbacdcdefefgg. Indeed, Lowell lifted this section and reprinted it as a part of a sequence of five poems called “April’s End” in his book of improvisational sonnets, Notebook 1967–1968. The second half of the poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, which consists of two parts, an octave and a sestet. The rhyme scheme is different: ababcaacdeffed. The change in format from one kind of a sonnet to another also signals a change in feeling.
“Night Sweat” begins with a sense of spiritual torpor. The speaker reveals his artistic incapacity through images of sexual impotence: “plain things, my stalled equipment, the old broom . . .” The night sweat itself becomes a sign of spiritual anguish: “Sweet salt embalms me and my head is wet.” Steven Axelrod and others have argued that the trope of night sweat is indebted to the so-called terrible sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins, especially “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.” There’s a Hopkinsian echo in the consonance of “wilted white” followed by “Sweet salt.” For Lowell, as for Hopkins, there’s a kind of confusion between sexual energy and writing. The speaker explicitly links “one life, one writing” to “one universe, one body.” He feels himself being wrung dry and emptied out by life.
When Lowell reprinted “Night Sweat” in his Selected Poems (1976), he decided to jam it together as one section in twenty-eight continuous lines. He had always felt that the second section was weaker than the first and thought the difference dissolved when it was printed as one unit. But I am following Lowell’s friend and editor Frank Bidart in keeping the division. As Bidart explains in his preface to Lowell’s Collected Poems, the reader needs to feel the break between these two balanced units of equal length. Each is formally different. The first stanza closes: “one universe, one body . . . in this urn / the animal night sweats of the spirit burn.” As Bidart explains: “The heavy sense of closure embodied by this final rhymed couplet reflects a closed system. In an earlier line, ‘always inside me is the child who died.’ The spirit cannot escape the body which, one with the universe, is an urn in which the sweating spirit is encased and burns.”
The second section turns with a sudden exclamation: “Behind me! You!” Another person, a sudden lightness, enters the room. It made greater formal sense for Lowell to mark this volta with a stanza break. The reader experiences the dramatic change. The night turns into day and the spirit lightens as “Night Sweat” turns from a sense of cold defeat to one of warm domestic connection—a crying baby, a rescuing wife. It is now directed to Elizabeth Hardwick, Lowell’s loyal, long-suffering wife and friend. The liquid sounds enact the change (“Again I feelthe light / lighten my leaded eyelids”). There is even a desultory Hopkinsian moment, or parody, as “Glory be to God for dappled things” turns into “I dabble in the dapple of the day.” The word “light” recurs and morphs into “your lightness alters everything.” This self-portrait of the artist becomes a semi-humorous quasi-love poem, a longed-for connection.
The husband notices that his wife’s “heart hops and flutters like a hare.” All those h sounds hop along. He addresses his love directly as “Poor turtle, tortoise,” which shows a rueful self-awareness of what he has put her through. In this race, she is both the tortoise and the hare. He knows the dead weight of the world the turtle bears on her back. He also knows that on his own he cannot “clear / the surface of these troubled waters,” and calls on his love to absolve and help him, addressing her directly as “Dear Heart.” In a sympathetic and authoritative study of Lowell’s manic depression, Kay Jamison calls the ending “a tribute and supplication—from husband to wife, and drowning man to lifeline.”
There is a modified or partial “spiritual recovery” in the second half of the poem. Bidart characterizes the qualified release in the final eight lines in this way: “The poet’s optimism (‘your lightness alters everything’) is partly reinforced but partly denied by the cyclical final rhymes (abccba). Transformation is not decisively closed off by a rhymed final couplet, but the agent of transformation still must bear ‘this world’s dead weight,’ the cycle that will return, that cannot be shaken off.”
“Night Sweat” is the work of a committed artist—one life with only one writing—seeking to bear “the downward glide / and bias of existing.” It is also a poem of partial liberation, a recognition of interdependence. At the end it turns to the beloved in a wry tribute to the rescuing power of love.
Anne Sexton
* * *
“Wanting to Die”
(1964)
Anne Wilder, a friend and psychotherapist, wrote this to Anne Sexton early in 1964: “I love living and the things and objects that are available here on Earth. Like blades of grass, for example.” She asked Sexton about her inexplicable attraction to suicide. It didn’t take long before she got a reply in the form of a poem:
Wanting to Die
Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnamable lust returns.<
br />
* * *
Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.
* * *
But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
* * *
Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.
* * *
In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.
* * *
I did not think of my body at needle point.