Some public poems commemorate communal celebration — Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July or Christmas. (What can a poet do to write a new kind of Christmas poem? Well, he can stage his poem a day early and write “The Night before Christmas,” as Clement Moore did.) Public poems often concern crucial single public events. Here is a poem joining two events in the history of American blacks — the blowing-up of an Alabama church in which four young black girls were killed and an imagined episode in the slave trade at the time of the American Revolution (the phrase “middle passage” refers to the route that slave ships once took from Africa to the South):
For John Callahan
Those four black girls blown up
in that Alabama church
remind me of five hundred
middle passage blacks,
in a net, under water
in Charleston harbor
so redcoats wouldn’t find them.
Can’t find what you can’t see
can you?
“History” rarely ends with a question mark, but Harper’s cynical question replicates the cynicism of the slave dealers.
Other public poems are written about the state of common life, shared by some population in a certain time and place. We might tend to think of such poems as written about violent wrongs such as genocide or slavery, but Charles Simic’s “Old Couple” is about the plight of a hidden group of victims — the urban poor in old age, for whom all possible scenarios — eviction, murder, illness, death from malnutrition — are equally frightening:
They’re waiting to be murdered,
Or evicted. Soon
They expect to have nothing to eat.
As far as I know, they never go out.
A vicious pain’s coming, they think.
It will start in the head
And spread down to the bowels.
They’ll be carried off on stretchers, howling.
In the meantime, they watch the street
From their fifth floor window.
It has rained, and now it looks
Like it’s going to snow a little.
I see him get up to lower the shades.
If their window stays dark,
I know that his hand has reached hers
Just as she was about to turn on the lights.
Who is the watcher here? Does he share the life of the old couple, and if so, how?
Of course, the private life and the public life are not separate issues, and there are many poems in which the two are mirror images of each other. In Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” the decline of the inhabitants of the Maine town where the speaker lives mirrors his own decline into voyeurism and madness. Besides the public life and the private life, “Skunk Hour” invokes the life of nature, which has a sturdy strength (pictured in the dauntless invading “mother skunk with her column of kittens”) lacking in the public and private spheres:
For Elizabeth Bishop
Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she’s in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
The season’s ill —
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.
A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here —
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air —
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
What relations are implied here between the town’s public life and the speaker’s private life, between his private life and the life of nature?