Poembuster

Analyses of the masters and their works

Reconciliation for Whitman

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Here we are as a country, about to swear in the first black President of the United States. The first non-white President too, but of course the fact that he is black brings a huge significance in the history of the country. Just watch Jesse Jackson on election night, or listen to the black man who while being interviewed said "The dream has come, the dream is real."

That Obama is also non-white is significant in the present time as well. (My wife, who is half White and half Asian Indian, affectionately calls Obama a half-breed, and talks about him as one of "us"! But I digress...) We are in an intangible and yet very real war with Islamic extremists, and that is why his being non-white is so important right now; Whitman lived in a war as well, and although slavery was not officially a reason to fight against our own countrymen, no one can deny the importance of the issue during that time.

Obama was elected as a uniter of our own country, and within this context, a forgiver as well.

Thus, I can think of no better tribute to the country, the new President, and the poets, than to analyze Whitman's "Reconciliation".

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its acts of carnage must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin -- I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was God. God also begins this poem, and lives in the beautiful, vast sky. God is beautiful, and is also a reflection of what lies beneath, even if it is war. But lines two and three is telling us that war and everything evil that comes with it must be forgotten ("utterly lost") and forgiven ("softly washed again, and ever again"), including the cold slow lonely nights. The world is not just physically soiled of dead bodies, it is emotionally soiled. People are mad, angry, tired, beaten, exhausted.

But then the poem turns, and narrows the war to two men, the killer and the killed. The killer looks at the dead man's face and remembers that this is war, only war; remove war and you have two normal loving countrymen. This enemy is only an ideological enemy, not a personal one (and if he were, would it matter?). He forgives the man he fought -- and loves him too.

This poem is a poem of love and hope, not hate and despair; it is written by the father of American poetry, who loved humanity in all its faults. I have a feeling this love for humanity is not lost on the 44th President of the United States.

Labels: Reconciliation, Whitman

Pound Po City of Choan

Sunday, January 11, 2009

I am not a fan of Ezra Pound, at least not yet. His elusiveness is something I haven't "gotten". However, his translations are something else entirely. "City of Choan" is such a poem. But to understand his genius here, you have to compare him to other translators of the same original poem. I have also read "On Climbing in Nan-King to the Terrace of Pheonixes" by W.H. Bynner and "Climbing Pheonix Terrace at Chin-Ling", both are perfectly good further translations of the original poem by Li Po.

Briefly, Li Po (Li Bai) was a poet of the highest degree in ancient China. He served under the emperor before resigning his post and becoming a wanderer. This poem was written after a kind of homecoming of sorts. One night while drunk, he saw the moon's reflection in a pond, bent down to embrace it, and drowned.

I do not know a lot about Ezra Pound, but I can say he understood poetry is a language of showing. He starts the poem out with a dramatic display of opposites, from the first line to the second.

"The phoenix are at play on their terrace./The phoenix are gone,..."

Pheonix are at first plentiful and playful, and the next thing we know, what happened?

Compare these lines with Bynner's:

"Pheonixes that played here once, so that the place was named for them,/have abandoned it now..."

It reads like prose, and it's because of the title that we know where "here" is. (This is a perfectly fine and legal poetric technique, but again, I am reading prose, aren't I?)

Again, compare the second half of the second line:

"...the river flows on alone" versus "to this desolate river". A desolate river is likeable and very poetic, but I can "see" a river flowing on alone. And why is it "alone"? Because the pheonix are gone. Why is the river desolate? Good question.

Pounds third, fourth, and fifth lines are very interesting to read and take in:

"Flowers and grass/Cover over the dark path/where lay the dynastic house of the Go." (The fifth line is indented.)

"Flowers and grass" is on one short line by itself so that we can see them and not get distracted by whatever comes next. The longer fifth line provides the feeling of climbing along a path. Lee writes, all on one line, "Flourishing flowers of Wu Palace are buried beneath dark trails." There are several things I can say about this line, but critiquing the comparison poems is beyond the scope of my efforts here; I will mention that I like the flourishing flowers imagery, but I don't believe it fits within this poem.

However, the next two lines close the stanza and echo the the last three:

The brights cloths and bright caps of Shin Are now the base of old hills.

In the first line of the next stanza we see the cloths and caps by themselves without any distractions, and in the second he puts them into context for us -- they blanket the bottom of the hills, almost like litter or trash -- remains of a populated place.

And the second stanza starts off with mountains, but what about the mountains?

"Like this green horizon halving Three Peaks" (Bynner)
"The three-peaked mountain half visible under the blue sky," (Lee)

Both these lines provide a snapshot, that is out of focus at best. How does a horizon halve three peaks? What part of the mountains are visible (I mean after all, the sky is blue)? You still don't know what to make of it after reading the lines. Oh wait, maybe Pound can give us some answers.

"The three mountains fall through the far heaven"

Ah, yes. Action (mountains falling) and we now have video in perfect focus.

And what about the island?

"The Isle of White Herron/splits the two streams apart." (Pound)
This is a lot cleaner and easier to see than:
"The two-forked stream separated by White-egret Isle" (Lee).

"A cloud has arisen between the Light Heaven and me" (Bynner) -- too fancy
"It's always the clouds that block the sun" (Lee) -- okay, but a little boring
"Now the high clouds cover the sun" (Pound) -- the clouds are "high" and they "cover" the sun, plain like Lee, but with more imagery so we can see it.

But first, let's read how the other poets end their works. Why would I want a cloud "to hide his city from my melancholy heart" (Bynner) or know that "I do not see Ch'ang -an and I grieve"? I know intellectually about these things (grieving, melancholy), but I want it to be immediate, and tangible.

"And I can not see Chan afar/and I am sad."

Labels: Chinese Poet, City of Choan, Li Po, Pound

Shell for Adair

Sunday, January 04, 2009

Virginia Hamilton Adair wrote poetry all her life, and published in a few journals early in her career, but did not publish again until her first book of poetry at the age of eighty-three, called Ants on the Melon.

"The Shell" epitomizes Adair's writing style like few of her poems do. Adair enjoyed rhyme schemes, but refused to stick to them for the sole purpose of the rhyme's formality; however, she also refused to drift too far off from the scheme in question.

The end words in "The Shell" are as follows:

stanza one: land, sea, sand, moss
stanza two: toss, swell, gloss, shell
stanza three: fault, dispair, salt, sea
stanza four: air, hand, sand, rare

As you can see, and if you take each stanza separately, the rhyme schemes are:

stanza one: abax
stanza two: abab
stanza three: abax
stanza four: abba

One can see where Adair employed a general rhyme, but there is no pattern. The first and third stanzas are alike, but the second and fourth are not. One expects the same rhyme pattern in each quatrain of a poem, or alternating patterns at best. Neither is true here, but she refuses to give up on the rhyme; it helps control the poem.

If you look at the rhyme scheme in the poem as a whole however, it becomes far more textured and interesting, unpatterned and yet very connected:

abaccdcdefebfggf

One reads the poem with such familiarity of sounds the broken scheme is completely lost; indeed, the pattern as a whole is so rich and powerful the poem both demands its attention and never calls attention to it.

However, Adair isn't done. She uses internal rhymes, word repitition, and other techniques within the lines themselves, it makes the reader think Adair was drunk with sounds. I count twenty words in the poem that drip with an "l" sound, not all alliteration.

But the alliteration in the first stanza alone must be brought to attention -- living, land, land, lying, littered, [c]lotted.

Stanza One:
On the desolate border between the living land
and the land entombed under the sea
the littered and soaking sand
strewn with wrecked wood and clotted moss

She alliterates throughout her poem (eg. "strangely spiraled" in stanza two) but there are other nuggets, such as her word repetition of toss/toss that begins stanza two:

which the waves continually toss,
toss, and then regather into the foam and swell

Notice we have gone a full stanza and a half without knowing fully what she is referring to. One sentence spans two stanzas, and the subject and verb of the sentence does not come until line three of the third stanza, the direct object comes at the end of the stanza:

I saw, shapely and thin, with delicate gloss
and strangely spiraled, a wan shell.

It reminds me of some languages where the sentence structure is something other than subject-->verb-->direct object, such as Hindi, and yet, the poem is not awkward to the English-speaking ear, it is suspenseful.

And so now that we know what the poet is speaking about, it is time to zero in on the subject with vivid description in stanza three:

A shell delicate and turned without fault

(notice the shell//a shell word repetition!)

pale, icy, thin as dispair
washed in the dead bitterness of salt

and here comes an internal rhyme, just like the second "toss" adds another internal rhyme to "gloss" in the previous stanza, and ties the stanza with stanza four:

It was born in the sea//torn from the sea into the air

The wan shell is not a dull subject, either. It is not only "strangely spiraled", not only "delicate and turned without fault/pale, icy, thin as dispair", but the final three lines of the poem ends with the epiphany that it is a superior object:

Some other may lift it from the sand;
I do not dare. Never have these hot hands
held a substance so desolate and so rare.

So, with all this going on, you may want to watch -- or listen -- to me recite this poem. The audio is off by a second or so, so you may prefer to close your eyes and listen. I don't do anything dramatic with my facial expressions anyway. There is a reason why I don't read my poetry at poetry readings!