Winter Kept Us Warm (Part Two!)

Last night I screwed up and instead of considering poetry, I ended up considering some Corona Extra and Kate Bush, and being accused of living my life in accordance with the principles of The Secret. Not the best of times, but yet the epoch of incredulity. I have rebounded and am before you here to tell you the other two of my current Top Four Poems and expound on them, all in celebration of National Poetry Month.

Incidentally, The Millions Blog has announced what is news to me, that there is a National Poem in Your Pocket Day coming up (Thursday the 17th) which should be fun, and The Nation has an interesting article by Ange Mlinko (who is less enthusiastic about Poem in Your Pocket Day) about the status of poetry and its month, stacking the monthlong celebration against other pure products of America.

Anyway, the next poem is “Caliban Upon Setebos” by Robert Browning. In my chauvinistically pro-narrative days, I thought that one of the few ways in which poetry could be as effective as a novel or short story was to function like a joke – to have some delayed “aha!” punchline moment, and my idea of this par excellence was Browning’s “My Last Duchess”. (I thought the same thing about painting, especially Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” which, it turns out, made a good poem). Dumb, dumb. “Caliban Upon Setebos” is a poem that has no narrative, no punchlines, and works very well at something valuable that prose won’t do. This is Caliban, of The Tempest fame, holding forth on the god, Setebos, whom he and his mother Sycorax worship. Incidentally, he is also apparently so scared of Setebos hearing his ideas that he refers to himself in the third person, to throw off the omniscient. Throughout, he uses a sort of self-critique to analogize how Setebos must operate. Here is at one point:

Himself peeped late, eyed as Prosper at his books
Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle:
Vexed, ‘stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped,
Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words,
Has peeled a wand and calls it by a name

Like Wordsworth discussed previously, Caliban has slowed down to think in a uniquely poetic way (this poem, “Lines”, and “Leda and the Swan” discussed below, are all good foster children of silence and slow time). I find this poem additionally striking in its ability to tap into a narrative (the Tempest) and perform the good psychology of the play or novel at the tranquilly restored pace of the poem: airlifting the plot of the Tempest into the roomy space of Caliban’s printed thought can help us (me anyway) to slow similarly down.

Yeats is a huge fan of the plot airlift himself, especially keen on tapping into the legends surrounding Troy. My fourth poem on my current Top Four Poems is “Leda and the Swan”. It is a much shorter poem than any of the preceding, and it combines the slowness of Wordsworth and Browning’s Caliban with a compact quality that crops up often in Yeats and the Modernists with whom he crewed. Here’s the end of “Leda and the Swan”:

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Leaving aside the insight this affords into Zeus’s questionable sexual politics, we look at this as a model for reading (what else?). This is, once again, thought slowed to a crawl; and to boot, what is probably the most important event in Western letters is put into two and a half lines. That shudder in the loins becomes perhaps the act most larded over with meaning that one can imagine. And if poems can continue to, every once in a while, stack so much meaning into so few lines, the opposition mentioned in Mlinko’s article will remain ones that, if not baseless, can at least be countered. There is nothing “bland or morally ‘positive’” in this poem. After stunningly putting the Trojan War, and one of its most unwitting causes (Helen’s conception) into two and a half lines, Yeats ends the poem with a question of epistemology. Not the kind of question you’d answer, but it is the kind of thing that demands to be thought about. Poetry has an almost unique ability to pressurize language until its meaning explodes back out in readerly activity. Good poetry doesn’t just teach you how to think at a different pace; it demands it. And it is anything but cooked meat. And, it is the poem with which, on a 3x5 card, I will proudly stroll down Thursday, in my pocket.