Tangled Rope

D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930) is a poet that I had neglected out of the prejudice that writers best known as novelists are best known as novelists (rather than as poets). But since I’ve begun to read him fairly deeply this month these prejudices have been dispelled. What most immediately struck me is that Lawrence’s poems are in many ways related to (and in fact may be impossible without) Whitman’s verse, and yet Lawrence clings to an individualist, peculiar, almost confessional nature that seems a stark departure for Whitman’s blanketing mantle of democracy and fraternity.

I’ve also been surprised at how fast these longish poems read. They flow swiftly, from image to image, circling through thoughts and ideas as he brings the poem to a culmination.

I begin with the sensuous poem Medlars and Sorb-Apples, which seems to delight in pleasures that might make Baudelaire blush. But though Lawrence begins with the fruit’s sexual connotations and declarations of its “Delicious rottenness” we may suspect that Lawrences has not finished turning things on its head. Indeed, the poet circles the reader around and back again, until we end up shadowing the Hell-side path of Orpheus as he returns a broken and lonely man. The speaker’s obsession with the fruits then takes on a new meaning in its potential for shameless and despairing inebriation.

Medlars and Sorb-Apples

I love you, rotten,
Delicious rottenness.

I love to suck you out from your skins
So brown and soft and coming suave,
So morbid, as the Italians say.

What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour
Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay:
Stream within stream.

Something of the same flavour as Syracusan Muscat wine
Or vulgar Marsala.

Though even the word Marsala will smack of preciosity
Soon in the pussyfoot West.

What is it?
What is it, in the grape turning raisin,
In the medlar, in the sorb-apple,

Wineskins of brown morbidity,
Autumnal exrementa;
What is it that reminds us of white gods?

Gods nude as blanched nut-kernels,
Strangely, half sinisterly flesh-fragrant
As if with sweat,
And drenched with mystery.

Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns.
I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences,
Orphic, delicate
Dionysos of the Underworld.

A kiss, and a spasm of farewell, a moment's orgasm of rupture
Then a long the damp road alone, till the next turning,
And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain,
A new gasp of further isolation,
A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold leaves.

Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone,
The fibres of the heart parting one after the other
And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more vividly embodied
Like a flame blown whiter and whiter
In a deeper and deeper darkness
Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation.

So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples
The distilled essence of hell.
The exquisite odour of leave-taking.
     Jamque vale!
Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of hell.

Each soul departing with its own isolation,
Strangest of all strange companions,
And best.

Medlars, sorb-apples
More than sweet
Flux of autumn
Sucked out of your empty bladders
And sipped down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala
So that the rambling, sky-dropped grape can add its savour to yours,
Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell
And the ego sum of Dionysos
The sono io of perfect drunkenness
Intoxication of final loneliness.

Medlars and sorb-apples are fruits best eaten when bletted, but apples are a different story. A bruised apple is the one you avoid; a rotten apple, of course, can spoil the whole barrel. I love how Lawrence leads the reader into a long cognitive trek in The Ship of Death with falling, bruising apples.

The Ship of Death

I

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.

The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one's own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.

II

Have you built your ship of death, O have you?
O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall
thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.

And death is on the air like a smell of ashes!
Ah! can't you smell it?
And in the bruised body, the frightened soul
finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold
that blows upon it through the orifices.

III

And can a man his own quietus make
with a bare bodkin?

With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make
a bruise or break of exit for his life;
but is that a quietus, O tell me, is it quietus?

Surely not so! for how could murder, even self-murder
ever a quietus make?

IV

O let us talk of quiet that we know,
that we can know, the deep and lovely quiet
of a strong heart at peace!

How can we this, our own quietus, make?

V

Build then the ship of death, for you must take
the longest journey, to oblivion.

And die the death, the long and painful death
that lies between the old self and the new.

Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised,
already our souls are oozing through the exit
of the cruel bruise.

Already the dark and endless ocean of the end
is washing in through the breaches of our wounds,
Already the flood is upon us.

Oh build your ship of death, your little ark
and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine
for the dark flight down oblivion.

VI

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul
has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying
and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us
and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world.

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying
and our strength leaves us,
and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood,
cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

VII

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do
is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship
of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.

A little ship, with oars and food
and little dishes, and all accoutrements
fitting and ready for the departing soul.

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,
upon the flood's black waste
upon the waters of the end
upon the sea of death, where still we sail
darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.

There is no port, there is nowhere to go
only the deepening blackness darkening still
blacker upon the soundless, ungurgling flood
darkness at one with darkness, up and down
and sideways utterly dark, so there is no direction any more
and the little ship is there; yet she is gone.
She is not seen, for there is nothing to see her by.
She is gone! gone! and yet
somewhere she is there.
Nowhere!

VIII

And everything is gone, the body is gone
completely under, gone, entirely gone.
The upper darkness is heavy as the lower,
between them the little ship
is gone

It is the end, it is oblivion.

IX

And yet out of eternity a thread
separates itself on the blackness,
a horizontal thread
that fumes a little with pallor upon the dark.

Is it illusion? or does the pallor fume
A little higher?
Ah wait, wait, for there's the dawn
the cruel dawn of coming back to life
out of oblivion

Wait, wait, the little ship
drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey
of a flood-dawn.

Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow
and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.

A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.

X

The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell
emerges strange and lovely.
And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing
on the pink flood,
and the frail soul steps out, into the house again
filling the heart with peace.

Swings the heart renewed with peace
even of oblivion.

Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it!
for you will need it.
For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

At the risk of sounding like Billy Bob Thornton rambling towards an obscure pittance of irony, I want to start by mentioning that I test-drove a truck yesterday. I’ve never owned a truck, and am not the sort of guy you’d expect would want to own a truck. That’s another story.

This truck was on the discount lot of my local repair shop, and it looked as if it would smell thoroughly of cigarettes, for I could see through the locked door windows that the upholstery was marred and speckled with black ash burns. Once I got the key from the owner, I found it smelled like dog. In fact, it smelled like my dog, Deckard (RIP 2008). Deckard suffered from a skin disease the last few years of his life, and it caused him to reek. The smell of this truck cab was of a similar tone, and every bit as nauseating; it was somewhere between a sinus infection and drowned earthworms, with that unmistakable canine bouquet. Part of me wanted to roll the windows down. Part of me wanted to remember. By the time I got on the highway, the practical part of me left the windows up so I could better listen to the workings of the car.

On the surface this has almost nothing to do with Stephen Dunn’s poem “Dog Weather”. And I admit Mr. Dunn is not a favorite poet of mine, though I find his works extremely accessible, and the general mood of many of his poems matches my own. Perhaps too closely. Perhaps that is why he is not a favorite poet of mine.

Dog Weather
by Stephen Dunn
From Different Ones, 2000

Earlier, everyone was in knee boots, collars up.
The paper boy's papers came apart
in the wind.

Now, nothing human moving.
Just a black squirrel fidgeting like Bogart
in The Caine Mutiny.

My breath chalks the window
gives me away to myself.

I like the intelligibility of old songs
I prefer yesterday.

Cars pass, the asphalt's on its back
smudged with skid. It's potholed
and cracked: it's no damn good.

Anyone out without the excuse of a dog
should be handcuffed
and searched for loneliness.

My hair is thinning.
I feel like tossing the wind a stick.

The promised snow has arrived,
heavy, wet.
I remember the blizzard of...
People I don't want to be
speak like that.

I close my eyes and one
of my many unborn sons
makes a snowball
and lofts it at an unborn friend.

They've sent me an AARP card.
I'm on their list.

I can be discounted now almost anywhere.

So this poem is cleanly written, fairly clever, though perhaps a bit shallow, a little oto confessional for some readers taste. Yes, the form and style is the sort of “denatured” prose-as-poetry that Joan Houlihan complains about, and the punch line is no great epiphany (Growing Old Is Universal, No Good).

But I thought of this poem when I sat in the cab of that old, foul-smelling truck, perhaps merely through a simple association of the title with dog. It was buoyed in my mind as I struggled with the truck’s broken parking brake lever and I remembered doing the same to my grandfather’s old truck when I lived and worked with him in California as an adolescent. This took me to another summer job I held, working at a video rental shop that specialized in classic American cinema, which took me full circle to The Caine Mutiny, a film that I took home from the sane video shop eighteen years ago. This is a movie that revealed a very different Bogey from the two-dimensional hero of Casablanca, and was one of the first films I watched that summer that tindered my persistent obsession with classic American cinema.

“Dog Weather”, or rather, this occurrence, forced me to conclude that though my reasoning mind may refute a poem’s quality based on philosophy or a theory of aesthetics, I will allow–no, I will not deny that a significant testimonial for a poem’s success is retention in the reader’s mind. In this case I’d read Dunn’s “Dog Weather” just once, and probably years ago. I may have been amused by it, but it had not struck me as a poetic treasure, and so I imagine it sinking even then deep into the sucking gumbo swamp of my memory. But to have it rise up, washed in the rain of nostalgia, glinting somewhat in the sunshine of a much later, much different day gave me something like hope in being alive, and something like faith in reading poetry.

Watch Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny

“I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else.”
–Franz Kafka, Diary

Last week I deleted my old blog (partially an accident) so I can’t recall if I actually began to write about poetry as parables or not. Perhaps that was in response to Chris Lott’s blog. No matter. I continue anyway.

Here are a couple of favorite poems by former US poet laureate Mark Strand (1934 – ). Not only do these poems delight me, fulfill my own criteria of poetic excellence, these illustrate a newness and continuance of parable, an allegorical narrative from which instructive meaning may be l gleaned. I use this term “parable” out of convenience, and because I believe it deserves a renaissance, but perhaps I should use apologue instead, for these two poems are more akin to Kafka’s tricky and sometimes paradoxical aphorisms than to the Biblical allegories to which many of us are most familiar.

That is to say these poems are not religiously didactic; instead, these poem-parables cling to the hope of being instructive, if only internally. Indeed, we may be living in an age of such reason–conflicted with exposure to a diversity of sometimes confoundingly disparate cultural norms–that nothing can be genuinely instructive, though we hope at least to end up turned in the right direction.

Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyes roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

This poem delights me with its rhythm, its meteoric imagery, and it’s subject and meaning (no surprise to anyone who knows me. The prescriptive subtext here might be that the poem-reader is a loner, an unknown element delighting slavishly in pleasures that are nearly as incomprehensible to the readers as they are to others (insert W. G. Sebald quote here, if I could find it). Further, strand shows the poem-reader–engorged by the consumption–is unpredictable, his antics incomprehensible even to the library who make her home amongst the empowering words.

Because the poem-reader is a loner, the poem-reader can not, despite his joy, expect or demand that others appreciate the joy s/he finds in the poem. It reminds me, no, it assures me that even as antisocial as poem-reading may be, it is still a immeasurable value. Good poetry can rejuvenate. It can transform.

What better theme for us to dwell on as we pass through Easter, spring, and a reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses?

Nostalgia
by Mark Strand

The professors of English have taken their gowns
to the laundry, have taken themselves to the fields.
Dreams of motion circle the Persian rug in a room you were in.
On the beach the sadness of gramophones
deepens the ocean's folding and falling.
It is yesterday. It is still yesterday.

The parable nature here is less obvious. In fact, if I were writing an argument, not a blog post, I would not use this as an example. So I will not stretch the limits of the poem by imbuing it with my own subjective interpretation; instead let me point out how this poem reaches into a recent history, in fact, just a sliver of history familiar to only a few, but made concrete by Strand’s imagery. When Strand summons the image of the Persian rug and the gramophone I am propelled backwards into a place of being which I tasted, yearned for, but could never have. “It is yesterday. It is still yesterday.” Strand explains in a final, sighing refrain.

Is it? Or is that merely where our minds insist to dwell?