|
Page 2 of 4
This isn’t irony. This isn’t affirming the frightening truth that the wooden horse European civilization planted on the plains of Troy as a gift to Asia and celebrated in its founding poetic epics, had sprouted Pegassian wings and came home to roost. This is terrified, but sincere word-dodgery yearning to dismiss life and the world’s complexity, and for a rebturn to the four-square walls of classroom and conference adulation, or to the tedious four-line stanzas of Eavan Boland’s sincere and interminable poems, tidy as table settings.
Irony implies a coded and resistant sub-text–the Greek eiron a slave prohibited from speaking frankly of her ambition, resentment or desire–and sincerity presumes a miraculous spiritual and worldly freedom from these things, and the supple, eloquent, well-conditioned acknowledgment that one’s self is the transient, transparent fragment of a sub-text of an omniscient, immediately visible, cosmically invisible, mystery. Maintaining faith with one’s most vulnerable and tender experiences as a reader, must be an exercise of modesty and honesty, and it is faulty, insufficient, if not downright folly to detatch this spiritual work from the practice of poetry.
Where cedar leaf divides the sky,
I heard the sea–
In sapphire arenas of the hills
I was promised an improved infancy.
–Hart Crane
Inevitably a meditation on emotional purity in poetry–what Pablo Neruda implored fellow poets to pursue in his sometimes rambling exhortation, “Sweetness, Always”–entangles us, less like Laocoon than the Virgin Mary, Mater Dolorosa, in the conceit of childhood, which long before Wordsworth began the relentless, sentimental process of poetically milking the inexhaustible well of it dry by wandering lonely as a cloud until his eyes got gratifyingly gilded by daffodils and so forth, that angelic madman John Clare constructed a temple for poetry upon a childhood’s Shiloh:
There is nothing but poetry about the existence of childhood, real, simple-soul moving poetry, the laughter and joy of poetry and not its philosophy and there is nothing of poetry about manhood but the reflection and the remembrance of what has been. Nothing more.
Yet even John Clare was wise enough to know that childhood innocence, as an emotional dynamic for generating and sustaining rhetorical sincerity, was not simple:
Nature like a bird in its shell came into the world with errors and propensitys to do wrong mantled round her as garments and tho not belonging to her substance are so fastned round her person by the intricate puzzles of temptation that wisdom has not the power or the skill to unloose her nott that fastens them.
Thus we fly on our winged horses, glistening with the amniotic mucous of a symbolic broken egg and the jeweled chunks of its shell, Cinderellas dressed for the ball:
—how many men have copied dew
For buttons, how many women have covered themselves
With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads
Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.
One grows to hate these things except on the dump.
–Wallace Stevens
|
