Poetry

Auden’s ‘Thank You, Fog’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain,” quipped W.H. Auden. Indeed, by the age of 60, Auden’s face looked like the most-read library book in the most popular library; it exhausted any adjectives thrown at it—it was its own adjective. His friend Hannah Arendt said he looked “as if life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape to make manifest the ‘heart’s invisible furies.'”
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‘Hearing’ ‘Voices’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The poet and critic John Greening sums up the career of James Merrill, who conversed with the inhabitants of other planes of reality, in a 2010 essay, “Ouija”:

James Merrill made a point of breaking all the rules, of remaining recklessly formal when all about him were casting off their chains, of being incorrigibly discursive and elitist, shunning the rhythms of speech for something more refinedly musical, and unswerving in his determination to squeeze every last pun out of a line.—John Greening, “Ouija,” The Dark Horse, Summer 2010

Merrill was a rebel in his adherence to rules in a rule-breaking era. He wrote dazzling, perfect poems, and he employed almost every verse form available to him, as an actor might use accents. Greening quotes George Bradley: “Reading James Merrill is enough to make the rest of us suspect we’re not smart enough to write poetry.” Even at his smartest, he is engaging and not impenetrable. His pleasure in the sounds of words and the poetic effects he creates and his many puns are always evident. He compliments his readers in his implied assumption that we must know what he is writing about at least as well as he does.
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‘We must be still and still moving …’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich


     Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
 
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.—T.S. Eliot, the conclusion of “East Coker”

Just a few weeks ago, he and I were talking about his daughter, my girlfriend. I do not remember every syllable of the conversation, and I wish I did remember each syllable right now, but I declared, “All I know is that it took me an awful long time to find The One for me, and I’m lucky I waited for someone so …”

“Passionate.” He finished the sentence. He chose that word. “She’s full of life,” he added. It was a happy surprise to hear Jen’s father say it himself. He was smiling.
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