As we turn from the private to the public life, we come to this very brief poem by Michael S. Harper — which nonetheless has the comprehensive title “American History.” It consists of two parts. The first is a personal statement (“Those . . . girls . . . remind me of five hundred . . . blacks”), and the second is the sardonic quip following it, spoken by someone who seems to be giving us a knowing wink: “Can’t find what you can’t see / can you?”
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?
The “invisibility” of blacks in American culture has been a persistent theme of black authors; Ralph Ellison called his famous autobiographical novel Invisible Man. A few blacks more or less, in racist contexts, would scarcely be noticed. The furor caused by the death of four young black girls when a bomb exploded in a black church was one of the signs of the rising civil rights movement; yet those who placed the bomb didn’t care how many blacks they killed. Harper’s anecdote of American ship-captains drowning slaves so they would not be stolen, as items of value, by British troops suggests the perennial “invisibility” of blacks throughout American history, from the very beginning. The wry quip at the end of the poem makes even more horrible the “success” of hiding — by murder — the valuable slaves to keep them from the redcoats.
By calling his poem “American History,” Harper suggests that the episodes he recounts represent, better than textbooks bearing that name, the real narrative of American events. The real American history remains to be written, the poem implies. So we must see, between these two markers — the invisibility of drowned blacks in the Revolution, the invisibility of bombed blacks in the twentieth century — a whole silent procession of comparable incidents, decade by decade, from the seventeenth century till today. In this way, by evoking the shape “normally” belonging to the title “American History” (a long textbook full of patriotic self-glorification), Harper makes us see his little shape as one that could be extended into a very big one.
We come to another marginalized group in public life, Charles Simic’s aged poor:
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.
If we quickly sum up the subject of each of the four stanzas of Simic’s “Old Couple,” we might come up with something like this:
A quick summary of this sort at least shows that the horrors die down, by stanza 3, to the brief and fragile peace of the interim moment at the end; this decline in horror is one overall shape of the poem. But it leaves out the presence of the person watching the old couple. It is this person who speaks the poem, and we identify him, since this is not a dramatic monologue, with the author of the poem. He knows, in stanza 1, what the old people are thinking. He comments on their behavior (“As far as I know, they never go out”). He watches them compulsively (“I see him get up to lower the shades”). He even invents what they do when he cannot observe them (“I know that his hand has reached hers”).
If the shape of the old people’s lives is a downhill dread of continual terror, what is the shape of the watcher’s life? The poet asks us to imagine the passing days of a watcher in a nearby building. At some point in the past, he noticed the old couple across the way; perhaps at that point they were still going out for walks or to the store. That seems to have stopped. But when they were still visible in the neighborhood, the watcher noted their mutual devotion, which causes him now to imagine the old man reaching for his wife’s hand. The watcher is so conscious of the few things the old couple can look at that he has reduced his own consciousness to the tenuousness of theirs: “It has rained, and now it looks / Like it’s going to snow a little” — an observation of no real importance, except to people who have nothing else but the weather to observe (but it also suggests worsening weather, one more threat). The old couple have become so real to the watcher that he has absorbed their terrors into his own mind. He knows that one of these days he will either see them taken out on stretchers, howling in pain, or see their possessions on the sidewalk as they are evicted with no place to go, or he will hear that they have been murdered, or that someone has found them dead of malnutrition in their apartment. There are simply no other possible futures to imagine for them; the watcher knows this.
As soon as we see the watcher/speaker as the principal consciousness in the poem, we read the work as a protest-poem against the conditions of modern urban life. The neglect by society of its most helpless members means that anyone in a modern city becomes necessarily a watcher of cases like this. Nobody can be free of horror and guilt, as the probable future seeps from the victims to their neighbors.
The two interlocking shapes — the heading-for-disaster life-shape of the old couple, the ongoing and speculative life-shape of the watcher — make up the figure of the poem. Spatially, we are given two rooms — the implied room of the watcher, the room of the old couple across the street; temporally, we are presented with the several envisaged plots of the old couple meeting their end, each plot as terrifying as the other. The plots exhaust all possibilities. The old couple have no one to rescue them — they will end in a public hospital ward for the indigent, in a shelter for the homeless, out on the street after being evicted, in the morgue after being murdered, or in their bed, starved.
Many poems have two or more interlocking shapes. We have seen such shapes in “Infant Sorrow” (the baby as mind and body; the baby as dependent on parents; the baby as part human, part supernatural; the baby as a doing creature and a feeling creature), and again in “Old Couple” (the successive shapes of the couple’s envisaged horrifying futures; the watcher’s steady-state speculative shape). When several overlapping and interlocking shapes are present at once in a poem, it becomes potentially more interesting — because it is more complex, as life is — than poems that have only one shape. The ideal poem would have a temporal shape, a spatial shape, a rhythmic shape, a phonetic shape, a grammatical shape, a syntactic shape, and so on — each one beautifully worked out, each one graphically presenting in formal terms an aspect of the emotional and intellectual import of the poem. One way we distinguish more accomplished poems from less accomplished ones is the control of the artist over a number of shapes at once. Other things being equal, the more shapes that are being evoked, the more pleasure one derives from the poem because more of its inner life has been thought through, analyzed, and made visible in form by its creator.
The manuscript drafts of Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” show that it originally began in the way that a traditional lyric might — “One dark night,” etc. The present stanza 5 was the beginning of the poem:
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.
Lowell brackets his “lyric center” — stanzas 5 and 6 — with a set of “characters” fore and a set of animals aft. This three-part shape is instantly visible:
Each of the three parts has an inner shape of its own. In the first part, the native “hermit heiress” owns two stanzas, while the lesser summer millionaire and “fairy decorator,” transients both, own only one stanza each. (The manuscript suggests that all of these are figures for the poet himself. Whereas the final version says “There is no money in his work, / he’d rather marry” about the “fairy decorator,” in the draft the poet says this about himself: “There is no money in this work, / I’d rather marry.”) Lowell inherited his house in Castine, Maine, from his aunt who lived there, but he only went there summers, like the “summer millionaire.” No longer living in one of the roles proper to his Brahmin lineage — hermit, or bishop, or landowner — the speaker has declined into the unvirile role of an artist, comparable to that of the man whom the town contemptuously terms the “fairy decorator.”
After presenting these disguised figures for himself in the first part of the poem, the speaker shows us himself in the second part as a voyeur, aware of his own madness as he spies on lovers in cars. The gradually intensifying shape of this middle part is one of mortified self-watching: “My Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull,” not “I drove up the hill.” And it is one of psychological self-judging: “My mind’s not right.” And it is one of medical self-diagnosis: “I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell.” Finally, it is one of ethical self-damnation: “I myself am hell.” After the disengaged tone of detached social commentary that dominates the first part of the poem, describing Castine, these damning first-person sentences chill the blood.
Then come the skunks. Nature takes over from the decadent culture of Castine. The skunks invade the town. The mother is the general; her offspring are her military “column.” We are watching the barbarians (disciplined, vital, fiery-eyed) take over Rome (declining, degenerate, chalk-dry). The vivid verbs used of the skunks energize the exhaustions and distresses of the poem: the skunks search, and march; the mother skunk swills the garbage pail, jabs her head into the cup, drops her tail, will not scare. The speaker is (almost) glad to resign his inherited world to the skunks; certainly he is in no shape to govern it, or even to live in it, anymore. It is a poem of total abdication from rule by the originally ruling, now depleted, Brahmin class. It was Lowell’s revenge on his own heritage, which he always regarded with mixed admiration and contempt. And it shows his heritage gradually disappearing back into nature, as all cultures eventually do.