"die!live"
Spring Poetry Special
The Feckless Bellelettrist is proud to present our second guest essay. This one comes from Jessie Kindig, senior editor for the humanities at Yale University Press, and it does something remarkable: The essay freshens our perceptions of our immediate natural world through readings of some fairly or formerly canonical modern English and American poets, and does this in ways that simultaneously renew and refresh our experience of their poems. Some of these are poems many of us know, or think we know, or believe we no longer have to read or read again, but Jessie's essay dispels the cloud of knowingness that clings to so much public discussion of this kind of literature. In this sense, it is also a kind of "spring cleaning," a joyous whisking out of the dust, cobwebs, and clutter that make it so hard to notice what's around us, whether outside, on the page, or in the mind.
Rooted in experience, smart because it's not trying too hard to be smart, engaged with a tradition without needing to be scholarly—although it contains at least one scholarly discovery— joining hands with the poems but not melodramatic, "professionally performative," or aggressively attention-seeking, this kind of criticism has become another orphaned child of our moment.
This is the sort of piece a “famous” poet might be able to publish in one of those permanently “little” magazines dedicated to various cults of status and the burnishing of credentials. Yet it’s just the kind of thinking any passionate, reasonably well-read and engaged mind is capable of (the author doesn’t have a degree in English Literature or an MFA in Poetry.). Jessie’s essay also avoids the mumblecore, moral earnestness of so much trendy arts criticism, while finding its own way to be serious and playful.
To really figure out why you will find this kind of writing almost nowhere else, however, would need a much longer post about the fate of so-called "Practical Criticism," and why, despite recent renewed interest in reviving this now century-old practice of relating art to experience and vice versa, conditions that reward it remain mostly unfavorable. But let's not get bogged down.
The onions left in the basket too long have begun sprouting green arms and legs, and I have grown curious, conceptually speaking, about how this does and does not change my understanding of what they are: onion. Onions are roots, round pungent things, and when they begin to sprout, I think: this onion is no longer useful. I have also just pulled the shoebox of last year’s daffodil bulbs out of the pantry where they were over-wintering. The bulbs look akin to purple garlic, or perhaps a rounder kind of shallot, and some have started to grow pale green slips, little vegetal clits, and these are the ones I shall plant first.
The onion and the narcissus are kissing cousins. And yet, there is a conceptual distance between them, one so vast as to make them irreconcilable because the injunction to grow spoils one of them, and the failure to grow spoils the other. Yet both are growing in common because it is spring.
Spring! The most jarring of the seasons, when the tension between death and life is so strained that metaphors abound and also fall apart. Spring is the season given the most impossible task: turn snow into flower. Spring cedes easily to summer, and summer dries into autumn, and autumn dies unto winter, but spring’s task—from closed to open, stasis to movement, small death to large life—is the most strenuous. In the depths of winter nothing will ever flower again. Then everything flowers, and we live through the moment of change. How do we reconcile the strain of it, every year? How does the trunk of the year not break in two?
I decide to see what the poets have to say about spring—or as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, “What is all this juice and all this joy?”
Mostly, they find it beautiful yet uncomfortable, a study in dramatic opposites that unsettles and alienates. DH Lawrence, writing in 1916, feels lost in “this spring, this conflagration” with its “bonfires green” and “wild gyration,” for it makes of Lawrence “a shadow buffeted in the throng / Of flames.” Five years later, Edna St. Vincent Millay, recovering from a break-up and feeling the heat of the sun on her neck in a world ravaged by the Great War, calls bullshit on the seasonal claim that there is no death, for “the spikes of crocus” grow from the maggot-eaten brains of the dead. Spring is stupid with lies, she says: “April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.”
Give a poet a spring bouquet, it seems, and they will see death. In the spring of 1865 as the lilacs blossom, Walt Whitman breaks a branch to adorn Lincoln’s coffin, carried through city and country and alongside orchards with “apple-tree blows of white and pink.” Each spring thereafter, Whitman knows, he will grieve. And in 1946, Robert Friend is at pains to remind us that in the spring, suicides “are faithful as an almanac.”
Most famous of all spring verse is TS Eliot’s 1922 poem “The Waste Land,” which begins:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Imagine Eliot’s nasal, affected voice intoning this! Nothing is as nasty to think of when you’re faced with an exuberantly blooming cherry tree in the middle of April. (Not to mention, the poor heart-leafed lilac, which Eliot hates almost as much as he hated his wife.) It’s enough to make you wonder why Eliot is a writer at all, if he’d prefer to be so closed to feeling.
Until then you realize that Eliot is indeed feeling deeply his hatred of feeling things, and writing poetry about it. This is the grief the poem turns on, because it attempts to undo everything it proclaims, trying to reassemble from the fragments of hard dirt a blooming land, coherent and whole. Eliot cannot do so, for the symbols and markers of his ravaged and sterile modern world have become unmoored, floating obscurely through the mind, fragments stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. Monstrous, the poem evokes the fullness of what was lost, which is to say, yesterday’s lilacs.
Here is the insight: Nothing is connected to nothing, and so nonetheless, a connection is made. Eliot becomes Tiresias—“I, Tiresias”—hero of the violet hour between dawn and dusk, the mythical figure who is both man and woman, dead and living, blind but with the vision of a prophet. Tiresias is the uncomfort who appears exactly at the poem’s middle point and becomes the poem’s hinge. Spring, Eliot-as-Tiresias discovers, is the painful season of the hinge, the moment of both/and. The hyacinth girl, fresh with arms of flowers, becomes by the poem’s end the brown-hooded haunt. She is life and she is death and Tiresias in the spring sees both. The holding of both at once will break Eliot and all of us into ruin, and risk the coherency of the poem itself. And yet here it is, the fully published poem on the page. This is spring.
Philip Larkin, writing in the seasonal-allegory tradition of English poetry, changed his position over time: in 1938, spring was a herald for the fresh cheek of youth—a polished well-worn allegory, nicely middlebrow. 1941 finds May “awkward” though, and unpracticed, and by 1950, she is “earth’s most multiple, excited daughter,” forcing a feeling of “indigestible sterility” onto those “who have no use for her,” white-skirted youth dancing away from a lecherous but impotent voyeur.
By 1967, Larkin’s exploration has deepened into his seasonal masterwork, “The Trees”:
Here is Eliot’s hinge, now softened and smoothed, no longer a single wrenching violence but the ironic knowledge of the yearly compulsion toward the new. Here is the both/and, brought to you in a lilting, walkable cadence with a nice rhyme, making of the painful injunction a kind of comfort. Beginning afresh, for Larkin, is always to do the work of living through the losses each year has accrued. Afresh is to thresh the new so it might then accrue to the old. Spring is the season of the threshold, and Larkin the poet who waits perpetually at the garden gate.
I find this poetic tradition of spring comforting because I feel less alone in my problem of onions and daffodils. Everyone, or rather, a bunch of modernist poets writing in English, feel the union of opposites to be a spring project, although a daunting one. Yet they commit themselves to it. The poems themselves are records of the poet’s struggle to bring opposites into relation. And what this teaches me is that the only way to bring things into relation is to write them out. On the page they are brought into connection; on the page they are joined and made whole.
ee cummings sings this lesson with great exuberance, for he was liberated from fear of opposites when he liberated himself from capital letters (though not, alas, fear of communists). In his 1952 poem “spring!may –” the opposites are the delight that drives the poem forward:
The words in the poem are pushed together like excited lovers, their hinge of connection not a devastation but an exclamation. This is Tiresias the joyous rather than the tragic betwixt-and-between.
It is John Ashbery, poet-collagist, who brings to this question of the hinge not cummings’s goofy yawp but a steadying grace. “Spring Day” (1967) is a poem built stanza by stanza on irreconcilable contradictions. In each stanza, the hinge is presented as a natural force but also an untenable lie. To begin:
“The paper city! It’s Eliot’s “Unreal City,” a friend, former student of Harold Bloom, pointed out: brown-fogged London undone by death, the setting for “The Waste Land.” Yes, of course—and Ashbery is rewriting Eliot, for his paper city is no wasteland, and his metaphor much kinder. This is no city of the alienated and the near-dead, but a paper diorama of a city crafted so we might see the movements of our days, like the studio-apartment-sized New York City model you can visit at the Queens Museum, with its tiny flying airplanes and blinking streetlights. Imagine the breath of hope rustling cut-out paper dolls to life—and then the suck of doubt that pulls them back to the ground, each day/night, day/night, day/night.... How much movement comes from just this image, “paper city”; from just this breath of the daily hinge?
And on we roll in this poem of enjambed quatrains, animated by the tidal force of moving from opposite to opposite, from each hinge point to the next, of thing next to irreconcilable thing, asleep/awake, laugh/sob: “The giant body relaxed as though beside a stream,”
The sweetness of gestation found only through its tearing from the womb; the once-pastoral stream meets a slant-rhymed “heaves,” and then two stanzas later, rages into metaphor: “Now we break forth like a river breaking through a dam.” All is mirrored, all is cast out. It’s whiplash: as Ashbery asks, “Wha—what happened?”
Until we come to the end:
And the stopping place, the rest amid the hinge-points becomes, simply, that which we attend to. It’s easy to misread that last line as “all our attention” but it’s not subjective. This isn’t about what’s inside your nut-skull—it’s the world that’s forced to stop: “all out attention.” All out, flat out, fall down, full stop. (First published in The Paris Review in 1967, this line would change upon the poem’s being collected in Ashbery’s 1970 Double Dream of Spring to the more conventional “all our attention,” losing, I think, some of its weird force. Try to look it up and you’ll toggle between “out” and “our,” its own kind of hinge.)
Ashbery is not forcing the opposites to make sense or trying to bring them into relation. They are in relation already because that is what the natural world is. He has no need to slide up and down the dialectic like a blinkered phenomenologist, working overtime to theorize what the tides and the sunrise tell us already. If the swinging hinge is, for Eliot, an open creaking wound rusting his heart, and for Larkin a place to halt, hand on the gate and piqued by pain—for Ashbery, the hinge of spring slowly comes to a natural stop, undone by beauty. Do not worry the hinge so, Ashbery says. There is no need. For:
On the street trees of Brooklyn, heavy-lashed flowers bloom delicate against the dun-colored brick buildings and the neon of the corner bodega, like the teenagers strutting down the street with lash extensions. Walking around town is made by beauty into a processional and you are made by your presence into a celebrant. The boughs of the trees bend for you like arms so that when you walk, you walk through a blooming gate. Spring’s collision of opposites shakes flowers from the boughs to rain on your upturned face. Look!— in wonder that any of this could happen at all.
—Jessie Kindig
