100 Poems to Break Your Heart Read online

  Philip Levine

  * * *

  “They Feed They Lion”

  (1969)

  They Feed They Lion” is a magisterial celebration of rage. The poem is so rhetorically charged, so rhythmically driven, that it is, in a stylistic sense, a verbal machine unlike any other in Philip Levine’s work. But in another thematic sense, it is the culmination of Levine’s early work, which begins in silence and failure (the desperate hush of “Silent in America”; the failure of poets who don’t write in “My Poets”). Levine’s first books—from On the Edge (1963) to They Feed They Lion (1972)—obsessively return to the subject of the voicelessness of the oppressed. As his work developed, he increasingly insisted on defiantly transforming blankness into language, refusing to be quieted. The theme of the necessity of violently breaking silence peaks in a poem that celebrates the racial rebellion and social insurrection of the Detroit riots of 1967. The oppressed speak through wildly destructive action.

  They Feed They Lion

  Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,

  Out of black bean and wet slate bread,

  Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,

  Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,

  They Lion grow.

  Out of the gray hills

  Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,

  West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,

  Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,

  Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,

  They Lion grow.

  Earth is eating trees, fence posts,

  Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,

  “Come home, come home!” From pig balls,

  From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,

  From the furred ear and the full jowl come

  The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose

  They Lion grow.

  From the sweet glues of the trotters

  Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower

  Of the hams the thorax of caves,

  From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”

  Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,

  The grained arm that pulls the hands,

  They Lion grow.

  From my five arms and all my hands,

  From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,

  From my car passing under the stars,

  They Lion, from my children inherit,

  From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,

  From they sack and they belly opened

  And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth

  They feed they Lion and he comes.

  Levine noted that he wrote “They Feed They Lion” when he returned to Detroit just after the riots to see what had happened to his hometown. He was scared by what he found, especially because the riots took place in the neighborhood where he had grown up. He was now both an insider and an outsider. The poem refers to driving around the city, which is its actual backdrop—a white man passing through Black neighborhoods (“From all my white sins forgiven, they feed, / From my car passing under the stars”). He registers it all with shock, a roiling mix of emotions.

  Here is his story of how he came up with the title, a startling linguistic formula:

  I was working alongside a guy in Detroit—a black guy named Eugene—when I was probably about twenty-four. He was a somewhat older guy, and we were sorting universal joints, which are part of the drive-shaft of a car. The guy who owned the place had bought used ones, and we were supposed to sort the ones that could be rebuilt and made into usable replacement parts from the ones that were too badly damaged. So we spread them out on the concrete floor, and we were looking at them carefully, because we were the guys who’d then do the job of rebuilding them. We had two sacks that we were putting them in—burlap sacks—and at one point Eugene held up a sack, and on it were the words “Detroit Municipal Zoo.” And he laughed and said, “They feed they lion they meal in they sacks.”

  This memory also jumpstarts the action. The poet takes the joke—using the detritus of junked autos as food for the wild animals of Detroit—and transforms it into the metaphor that drives the poem. As you reread the first stanza, note too the anaphoric repetition of the phrase “Out of,” the deliberate rhythmic balance—a caesura neatly divides each of the first five lines—and growing musical drive. The repetition of the letter b in the first two lines threads together the words, and so does the d in the next two lines.

  Out of burlap sacks, || out of bearing butter,

  Out of black bean || and wet slate bread,

  Out of the acids of rage, || the candor of tar,

  Out of creosote, gasoline, || drive shafts, wooden dollies,

  They Lion grow.

  Everything is incendiary and combustible here. Levine uses “acids,” a word related to chemistry, to characterize the intense emotional state “of rage”; he takes the quality of “candor,” or frankness, and applies it to “tar,” a sticky black liquid made from thick oil. “Creosote,” an extremely flammable byproduct of wood combustion, also consists mainly of tar, a highly flammable viscous liquid, and so it’s obvious what will happen if you place it next to gasoline.

  The word “Lion” leaps out of the fifth line. In this poem, Levine uses this word, which is always capitalized, as both noun (as in “the Lion”) and verb (as in “to Lion”). “They” becomes both subject (as in “They Feed”) and possessive pronoun (as in “They Lion,” meaning “Their Lion”). This sinuous syntactical energy and ambiguity give the poem a sweeping musical and rhetorical authority, a sense of a city about to burn, a psychological understanding of what motivates people to move from “Bow Down” to “Rise Up.”

  Levine marshals the Black vernacular to summon up the Great Migration, the movement of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the industrializing North. Detroit, among other cities, was completely transformed from about 1900 to 1940, when the population of Wayne County, Michigan, grew from around 350,000 to more than two million. By 1967, African Americans represented more than 40 percent of Detroit’s overall population. In Levine’s dramatic condensed version, the journey north mixes with the growth of a rough beast, a mythical Lion, slouching not toward Bethlehem, as in W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” but toward a gritty Midwestern city, which would suffer its own apocalypse. The poem rides the vernacular, and yet the long lines—and the rhetorical repetition of the phrase “Out of”—move the language beyond everyday speech into the realm of prophecy:

  Out of the gray hills

  Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,

  West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,

  Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,

  Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,

  They Lion grow.

  Levine compresses the long bus ride by citing two locations, “from West Virginia to Kiss My Ass,” as if “Kiss My Ass,” that familiar colloquialism, was actually the name of a city or state. In other words, he uses an insult to identify a place, a state of mind, and the pissed-off attitude that could be found in the urban Midwest. He recognizes that what is growing emerges from the people who have come before, out of “buried aunties”; out of the hard work of women, “Mothers hardening like pounded stumps”; and out of the failed land, “out of stumps.” It’s as if an animal is coming together out of the land and the people: “Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch.”

  In the next section, Levine recognizes the importance of the pig to Black culture, especially Black Southern culture, and he uses this most despised of animals to create movement toward a furious sacrifice, a near-sacred reckoning. The riots began when the police raided an after-hours bar, or “blind pig.” Formally, the lengthening stanzas enact the feeling that something violent is ominously building:
a Lion (that most majestic of African creatures) is growing. The poet Paul Zweig once noted that this Lion “is a mockery of St. Mark’s biblical lion,” a winged, roaring, triumphant symbol of Christian salvation, because when this lion comes “man and earth will be devoured by one hunger.” The words “Out of” are now replaced by phrases beginning with the word “From.” Something is growing that cannot be stopped.

  Earth is eating trees, fence posts,

  Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,

  “Come home, come home!” From pig balls,

  From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,

  From the furred ear and the full jowl come

  The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose

  They Lion grow.

  From the sweet glues of the trotters

  Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower

  Of the hams the thorax of caves,

  From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”

  Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,

  The grained arm that pulls the hands,

  They Lion grow.

  Levine fuses a host of influences into a daring new whole in “They Feed They Lion.” The splendid twists and turns of colloquial Black speech marry the incantatory rhythms of the biblical prophets, and the influence of earlier poets can also be felt, as in the anaphora of Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno”:

  For a man speaks HIMSELF from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet.

  For a LION roars HIMSELF complete from head to tail.

  Likewise Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” creates the stylistic model for moving from

  Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

  Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,

  Out of the Ninth-month midnight . . .

  to

  From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,

  From your memories, sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,

  From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears . . .

  So too in his memoir-essay “The Poet in New York in Detroit,” Levine acknowledges his debt to Federico García Lorca, especially the sequence Poet in New York, and stated that he could never have written the opening lines of “They Feed They Lion” if he hadn’t discovered the furious confrontation of images in “The King of Harlem.” Levine also learned something from the wildly inventive mixed-diction language of John Berryman and Dylan Thomas. For example, the phrase “From my five arms and all my hands” comes right out of Thomas’s playbook. Here Levine exaggerates the image of arms and hands to give the feeling of something monstrous continuing to grow.

  Levine cryptically employs a host of religious echoes and allusions as this thirty-three-line poem builds to its final apocalyptic conclusion:

  From my five arms and all my hands,

  From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,

  From my car passing under the stars,

  They Lion, from my children inherit,

  From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,

  From they sack and they belly opened

  And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth

  They feed they Lion and he comes.

  The sacrifice has been laid out. The rebellion has come, the meek have inherited the earth, or whatever is left of it in the industrial Midwest. This is Detroit, the Motor City, where Nature has come to its dead end—the oak turned to a wall—and the oil-stained earth is burning. All hell has been loosed and an overdue reckoning has come to America.

  Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

  * * *

  “The Small Square”

  (1972)

  The Portuguese poet Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen said that poetry requires “unflagging intransigence.” She believed that a poem “speaks not of ideal life but of actual life: the angle of a window; the reverberation of streets, cities, rooms; shadows along a wall; the appearance of faces; the silence, distance and shine of stars; the breathing of night; the perfume of the linden-flower and oregano.” Andresen’s sensuous and textured depiction of “actual life,” her feeling for the physicality of the world, is what she brings to “The Small Square,” which is also powered by something eerie and unseen: the mysterious presence of death, the ruthless passage of time.

  The Small Square

  My life had taken the shape of the small square

  That autumn when your death was meticulously getting ready

  I clung to the square because you loved

  The humble and nostalgic humanity of its small shops

  Where clerks fold and unfold ribbons and cloth

  I tried to become you for you were going to die

  And all life there would cease being mine

  I tried to smile the way you smiled

  At the newsagent at the tobacconist

  And at the woman without legs selling violets

  I asked the woman without legs to pray for you

  I lit candles before all the altars

  Of the churches located on one side of this square

  For as soon as I opened my eyes I saw I read

  The vocation of eternity written on your face

  I summoned the streets the places the people

  That had been witnesses of your face

  In hopes they would call you in hopes they would unravel

  The fabric that death was weaving in you

  The speaker of “The Small Square” (“A pequena praça”) remembers a time when her life itself had narrowed to the shape or form of a little square, “the small square,” the only one that had come to matter. The poem is an autumnal reminiscence and takes place in the past tense. It will prove to be an elegy. Just as Anna Akhmatova addresses Mikhail Bulgakov in her elegy “In Memory of M. B.,” so too does Andresen speak directly to her beloved: “That autumn when your death was meticulously getting ready.” That season—and fall is the season of dying things—Death operated as a very scrupulous, active, and tireless agent, who overlooked nothing.

  “The Small Square” mourns an actual (and not an ideal) life, a real person. It does not internally identify the “you” who is being addressed. But the speaker’s intimate knowledge of the person’s daily schedule and domestic routine, life lived at the most granular level, as well as her comfortableness in the town plaza, suggests that she is probably talking about her mother, perhaps even taking her mother’s place.

  Andresen was born and raised in Porto, Portugal, and the geography of the square itself suggests that she is describing Praça dos Leōes in central Porto, where two churches share a single corner. This is the rambling square where her mother lived much of her life. This appears to be an autobiographical poem about the poet’s mother, which is how the various translators of the poem understand it. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that the speaker is so intimate and familiar with the person she is talking to, so involved in the recollection of trying to intervene in this person’s rapidly approaching death, that she doesn’t think to identify her (or him) for the reader. Our recognition that a mother is being evoked is the sort of leap explained by ethnomethodology. The sociologist Harvey Sacks, for example, gives the remarkable example of a two-year-old who says, “The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.” Almost everyone automatically assumes that the mommy is the mother of that baby, though this is not linguistically clear. A form of social intelligibility is operating, a way to make sense of the world.

  There is a bit of magical thinking going on here—it’s as if by returning to her mother’s provincial square, the speaker can somehow forestall her mother’s death: “I clung to the square because you loved / The humble and nostalgic humanity of its small shops.” Through an act of projection, we get a sense of the humble, nostalgic humanity of the mother from her feeling for the shops themselves. The speaker tries to reinhabit the little place that her mother most loved—and thus stand in her stead. This is pow
erfully evoked in the line that joins the “you” and the “I,” mother and daughter—“I tried to become you for you were going to die”—which is so haunting, it takes a moment to realize that this thought runs over into the next line, connected by the conjunction “And”: “And all life there would cease being mine.” The daughter will have no claim on the life of the square once her mother dies. It doesn’t belong to her.

  The lines of this poem are stately and mostly end-stopped—each begins with a capital letter and makes its own emphatic gesture—though the entire poem pushes forward without any punctuation, as if to emphasize the relentlessness of time. Nothing stops until the end. The heightened feeling—an accelerating gloom, a kind of mourning in advance—gives a special sheen to the description of the little square. The speaker goes through the motions of trying to become her mother as she makes her mother’s daily rounds and reenacts her encounters with the locals: “I tried to smile the way you smiled / At the newsagent at the tobacconist / And at the woman without legs selling violets.” But the poem turns when she encounters the woman without legs, an emblematic figure. One moment the speaker is smiling at her, the next she is asking her to pray for her mother.

  It is implied that the mother is religious—she once lit candles at the churches crowded on one side, or, more specifically, on one corner of the square. There is a logic, an argument being developed here. The speaker recalls how she herself lit candles before every altar because “as soon as I opened my eyes I saw I read / The vocation of eternity written on your face.” The beautiful phrase “vocation of eternity” suggests a kind of call or summons to a world beyond time. She could see as well as read the dedication that was now being inscribed on her mother’s face.