“Write a poem about a birth,” says the culture to the poet; and what the poet writes (speaking in the person of a newborn baby) may shock the reader:
My mother groaned, my father wept —
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my father’s hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother’s breast.
Precisely because our culture does not usually say that a baby resembles “a fiend hid in a cloud,” we find the poem arresting. It makes us stop and think. Now let us look at the next phase of life, childhood.
The child’s first day of school is an event marked by conventional behavior (new clothes, an apple for the teacher, says the cliché). Louise Glück has written a poem about how a mother feels seeing her child go off into the power of a new authority, who may or may not be kind to the child:
The children go forward with their little satchels.
And all morning the mothers have labored
to gather the late apples, red and gold,
like words of another language.
And on the other shore
are those who wait behind great desks
to receive these offerings.
How orderly they are — the nails
on which the children hang
their overcoats of blue or yellow wool.
And the teachers shall instruct them in silence
and the mothers shall scour the orchards for a way out,
drawing to themselves the gray limbs of the fruit trees
bearing so little ammunition.
The new clothes and the apples for the teacher are here, but they have been made strangely sinister. Once again, the reader is made to stop and think. What is so disturbing about this poem?
Next, the child comes to the apparently quiet period between infancy and puberty, a period psychologists call “latency” because sexuality seems dormant. At this time, intense same-sex friendships form; the child is never seen without his or her “best friend,” so much so that Eddie and Bill become a single noun: “Have you seen EddieandBill?” But gradually hormones change Eddie and Bill into adolescents, and the pagan god of sex (whom E. E. Cummings here identifies with goat-footed Pan, the god of all) makes his appearance. We know that in heterosexual development the twosomes “eddieandbill” and “bettyandisbel,” so inseparable, will soon, with real anguish and yet with painful anticipation of sexual joy, split up, leave their childish games, and re-form into the new twosomes “eddieandbetty” and “billandisbel”:
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistlesfarand wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
farandwee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonManwhistles
far
and
wee
The reader senses something threatening and seductive in the balloonman and knows that this is not merely a simple poem about spring hop-scotch and jump-rope. Also, the typographic arrangement is puzzling. What is Cummings up to?
In Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” we see an adult man (whom we identify with Hayden himself) remembering winter Sunday mornings when he would have to go to church. With painful recognition, he recalls the actions of his father on those mornings: He would get up before the rest of the family and get the furnace (its fire banked for the night) going again. Only then, when the house was warm, would he call his son, who would rise and dress without ever thanking his father for making the rooms warm or for polishing his “good shoes” for church. The poem ends in adult self-reproach for the boy’s indifference to his father’s actions.
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
As adolescents take their first step into adult emotional relations, they learn what it is to be troubled in love, even forsaken. This is a love poem by Walt Whitman to a male lover who has deserted him, but it soon turns into a poem for everyone who has been deserted:
Hours continuing long, sore and heavy hearted,
Hours of the dusk, when I withdraw to a lonesome and unfrequented spot, seating myself, leaning my face in my hands;
Hours sleepless, deep in the night, when I go forth, speeding swiftly the country roads, or through the city streets, or pacing miles and miles, stifling plaintive cries;
Hours discouraged, distracted — for the one I cannot content myself without, soon I saw him content himself without me;
Hours when I am forgotten (O weeks and months are passing, but I believe I am never to forget!)
Sullen and suffering hours! (I am ashamed — but it is useless — I am what I am);
Hours of my torment — I wonder if other men ever have the like, out of the like feelings?
Is there even one other like me — distracted — his friend, his lover, lost to him?
Is he too as I am now? Does he still rise in the morning, dejected, thinking who is lost to him? and at night, awaking, think who is lost?
Does he too harbor his friendship silent and endless? harbor his anguish and passion?
Does some stray reminder, or the casual mention of a name, bring the fit back upon him, taciturn and deprest?
Does he see himself reflected in me? In these hours, does he see the face of his hours reflected?
The phases of life succeed one another, and we could go on to give examples of poems about parenting, maturity, loss, and old age. Poems, in short, trace the general and special phases of life down to its end in death, and, in religious poems, even to an afterlife. Each of these phases can provoke many different responses — joy, bitterness, bravery, stoicism. Here, for instance, is a twentieth-century poem about the last phase of autumnal life by a writer who, to his grief, sees that all his youthful hopes and imaginings have become old, dilapidated, and sullied. Yet, he feels, he would have missed something had he not had to encounter this final bleakness and to muster the effort of will that it calls from him — to find a new fortitude, a new self-knowledge.
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.
This poem of a late phase of life shows the poet feeling cold, sad, inert — and yet rising to the challenge of seeing this phase truly, as a necessary part of experience. Although many of the feelings of loss that Stevens expresses are conventional in descriptions of old age, he succeeds in making them fresh.
These poems of the private life are all meant to be said by anyone, by everyone. We will come later, in a chapter about place and history, to poems that are more personally specific than these — poems that could be said only by a person belonging to a particular subgroup in society.