Joe among the poets

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, November 8, 2020. Posted Wednesday morning, November 9.

Thomas Hardy's desk in his study at Max Gate, the cottage he designed and had built in Dorchester, England.

All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,
No matter what.

---from “The Cure at Troy” by Seamus Heaney, quoted by Joe Biden in his victory address, Saturday night, November 7, 2020.

Lots of quoting of those lines from Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy” blowing through social media these last few days. I wonder how many people doing the quoting know they’re quoting from a play and not a poem---the equivalent of quoting “Tomorrow, and tomorrow” or “All the World’s a stage…” without considering their place in “Macbeth” or “As You LIke It”. Biden probably knows where those lines are from. They’re his signature quote. Of course we intellectual and literary types are happy to have a president who reads and reads poetry. People not poetically inclined but know and respect the value of words are almost certainly as glad, if only because they won’t have to listen to Trump speaking in advertising slogans and brand mottos anymore. There’s no poetry in Trump. No music either unless you count jingles. Trump is obsessive in comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln. There are so many ways Trump is not like Lincoln, here’s one of my favorites: Lincoln loved poetry. Lincoln wrote poetry. He was a poet. The Gettysburg Address and The Second Inaugural are poems.

Happy as I am about Joe’s affection for Heaney, though, I took this bit from Carlos Lozada’s book “What Were We Thinking” as an admonishment to keep things in perspective. Lozada, you probably know, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for the Washington Post and “What Were We Thinking” is a collection of his essay-length reviews of books about Trump and the political climate in which he sprouted and has come to fruit:

Critics scoff at the president’s literary indifference, often comparing it to his predecessor’s reverence for the written word; Barack Obama receives rapturous coverage every time he promotes a new list of titles purchased from the local indie shop. To the extent Trump relies on books at all, it is to confirm his instincts rather than to challenge his assumptions; to ratify, not edify...Yes, I would be delighted if our president read more books, even more so if they were good one. But of the many concerns I have about Trump, a thin [To Be Read] pile is not one of them. I’d settle for him reading his briefing material. Or the Constitution.

But the reason I’m taken this morning with this poem by Heaney is only coincidentally to do with Lincoln, Biden, or Trump. I did go looking through my copies of “Field Work” and “Station Island” for a poem that would be appropriate to the moment and just to be different.

I’ve been struggling through “The Return of the Native” for over a year now. I started on Melville’s hundredth birthday when I got the idea that in the matter of writing about sex Hardy could be seen as Melville’s successor. Hardy was as realistic and cynical on the subject as Melville was hysterical. Didn’t get very far, either with the idea or reading the book. Picked it up again--the book, not the idea---last month, when I started Adam Nicolson’s, “The Making of Poetry”, Nicolson’s meditation on Wordsworth and Coleridge’s youthful friendship and how they inspired each other in their days living and writing and walking and talking in the Lake District with Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy and, sometimes, Coleridge’s put-upon wife Sara, and I got another idea: that in their day wandering not at all as lonely as clouds in the north of England they were wandering through Thomas Hardy’s territory in the southwest, literarily and thematically if not geographically. Their letters, journals, and poems were filled with scenes that could have been taken from Hardy’s novels or, rather, that Hardy could have taken for scenes in his novels, Hardy not having published his first story until years after they were both dead, after all. Sara Coleridge, for her part, was living out a Hardy story.

At any rate, you can imagine how pleasantly surprised I was when I picked up "Station Island" and came across Heaney’s “The Birthplace” and read Heaney’s account of his attempts to puzzle out “Return of the Native” while I’m trying to puzzle it out myself, at a different time of life, of course. But Heaney’s description of Hardy’s “deal table where he wrote” reminded me of the small wooden table in my bedroom in the house on Bloomington where I lived my first year in the Workshop:

I

The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain,
the single bed a dream of discipline.
And a flagged kitchen downstairs, its mote-slants
of thick light: the unperturbed, reliable
ghost-life he carried, with no need to invent.
And high trees around the house, breathed upon
day and night by winds as slow as a cart
coming late from market or the stir
a fiddle could make in his reluctant heart.

II

That day, we were like one
of his troubled pairs, speechless
until he spoke for them,

haunters of silence at noon
in a deep lane that was sexual
with ferns and butterflies,

scared at our hurt,
throat-sick, heat-struck, driven
into the damp-floored wood

where we made an episode
of ourselves, unforgettable,
unmentionable,

and broke out again like cattle
through bushes, wet and raised,
only yards from the house.

III

Everywhere being nowhere,
who can prove
one place more than another?

So we go back emptied,
to nourish and resist
the words of coming to rest:

birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash,
flagstone, hearth,
like unstacked iron weights

afloat among galaxies.
Still, was it thirty years ago
I read until first light

for the first time, to finish
The Return of the Native?
The corncrake in the aftergrass

verified himself, and I heard
roosters and dogs, the very same
as if he had written them.

There were dogs to be heard in the neighborhood when I wrote at that table. No roosters that I recall, although on some quiet nights the quacking of ducks as they settled down for the night carried up from the river. (By the way, the picture up top is of Hardy’s desk in his study at Max Gate, the brick “cottage” he designed and built in Dorchester after he’d made some money as an architect.) And Nicolson’s depictions of Coleridge and Wordsworth on their hikes reminded me of you and me taking our hikes around Iowa City, yakking and yakking about anything and everything, including poetry. And the Mets and Red Sox, naturally. I wish we could get together for a walk, and yak.

Editor's note: Tuesday, December 1, 2020: I corrected a typo in the caption on the photo up top, thanks to the keen eye of reader Charles Sperling. See the comments.

Comments

[Charles Sperling]

You have the name of the Hardy residence correct at the end of your piece and wrong at the start. It is "Max Gate," not "Mar Gate." (Which recalls Jay Finley Christ's poem about untold Sherlock Holmes cases, "The Old Tin Box," with its allusion to "the powderless Margate job.")

*The Return of the Native* was the first Hardy novel I read and I retain a great fondness for it, even if I prefer *Tess of the d'Urbervilles* and *Jude the Obscure.* The view of sex in both is, to use your adjectives, "realistic and cynical."

Hardy's "Christmas: 1924" is one of the few poems I can quote by heart:

" Peace upon earth!" was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We've got as far as poison-gas.

[Lance Mannion]

Charles, thanks for the reminder about Hardy's own poetry and for catching the typo in the caption to the photo. If it was a typo and not an unconscious allusion to Mar-a-lago. I hate it when you know who gets into my head when I'm thinking about something else. I corrected it.