Write short sentences: the old voice of authority, enjoining young people who are about to take exams. Write short poems: the still small voice that came to Samuel Menashe when young, heeded still in this, the year in which he turns eighty. His still small voice carries. It carries weight. The poems, in the terms of precise praise with which Dr. Samuel Johnson honored a seventeenth-century master who is now neglected (Sir John Denham), “convey much meaning in few words, and exhibit the sentiment with more weight than bulk.” The poems have a way of pondering weight.
more than the black
which it displaces—
Upon any fine day
I jump these traces
A pure Menashen poem, not least in its doing so much with what is in the least. Characteristic—in so many re-spectfulnesses—of the art of the man. Courage in age.
The poem is characteristic, first, in the imaginative aptness with which it arrives at the first of its endings: “White hair does not weigh” is positioned with the end there, as though suspended weightlessly, or all-but-weightlessly, in the face of space. Characteristic, secondly, in its moving so lightly in and out of rhyme. There is the strong germane chime of displaces / traces, with the later word displacing the earlier one (even while preserving the traces of it). And then there is the ensuing assonance encompassing day as at once a rhyming and unrhyming word. Unrhyming if the poem were to be a quatrain, but rhyming as soon as, at its head, “White hair does not weigh” is seen to weigh as a line of the poem: weigh / day. (With black alone left then unrhyming—darkly?)
Yet although the poem is characteristic in being so succinct (tucked up like a garment, girded, the better to move with style and grace, girt for jumping traces, say), this is a poem at the same time freshly untypical. For elsewhere Menashe seldom avails himself of this particular turn by which a run of words that had at first been offered as a title is then found to convert itself—to divert itself—into becoming the first line of a poem proper. The title can be felt to flow on (white hair can flow, you know) into the first line, so is that then the second line? We weigh the likelihoods.
And then there are the other respects in which the poem is its own man. I think of the firm tact with which the matter of weight then jockeys honorably for position: “does not weigh more” canters through to the equestrian “I jump these traces,” whereupon traces tucks up into itself (traces within itself) the thought of races. Some such combination of the bodily and the buoyant is just what a rider needs to weigh up. The happy levity is there in the way in which the phrase “jump the traces”—though not at all violent, unlike kicking over the traces—exults in a sudden release from restraint, from discipline. Yet within the poem, nothing could be less like jumping the traces: Menashe’s lines are firmly in place, supple in their leatherliness, lithely together.
The discipline is characteristically loving (as discipline does well to be in horsemanship), and—as often in Menashe’s sense of life—the love is to be felt in the way in which what might have been a dark or even malign thought is redeemed into a bright benign one. One fine day: how often this phrase harbors no good, refuses to glow but glowers instead in a vengeful resentment (“often used derisively with reference to the occurrence of some unlooked for event,” warns the dictionary). One fine day he’ll learn his lesson. Menashe’s “any fine day” will not have any of this. His lessons amount to much more.
He remains, in his own way, weighty at eighty, but time and again (a phrase that brings to him, and thereby to us, pleasure), there is this teasing of levity against gravity. One of the many aspects in which the poems are entirely without snobbery is their delighting in commonplaces. Within these personable poems, a rueful resilience attends upon clichés. In one poem, your level best can be the opposite of a falling short—given their equanimity, the words can be a way of leveling with others and with yourself. Do you find yourself saddled with something?—but this is just what a rider sits in need of. What is overlooked may be being graciously surveyed, far from ignored. To come to grief may, on occasion, be a means of coming to one’s senses, to a salutary sense of life’s sad dignity. The living end may be a shouldering, not a shuddering. Up in arms is just what a baby should be. And save your breath may inspire a warmth of feeling that is far from the usual curt admonition, even while the frosty sensation is acknowledged as all too often the case. Menashe can make even I told you so an unexpected benison. Bless me.
Life is brought to the poems, and then brought back from the poems (regularly, not routinely), by courtesy of these phrases that could so easily have been left for dead. All those casualnesses that have become reduced to casualties: just think of them. (Instead of employing them unthinkingly.) For the poet can rescue these daily domestic servants from servility and from servitude. A. E. Housman, another poet whose poems are of the simplest and of the most mysterious, once remarked how difficult it is to write poems in praise of Liberty:
There is a lack of detail about Liberty, and she has indeed no positive quality at all. Liberty consists in the absence of obstructions; it is merely a preliminary to activities whose character it does not determine; and to write poems about Liberty is very much as if one should write an Ode to Elbow-room or a panegyric on space of three dimensions.
(“Swinburne,” 1910)
It was left to Samuel Menashe to write, well, not an Ode to Elbow-room, but a hymn to it. “Windows: Old Widow” opens with a setting and a settling:
There is a pillow
On the window sill—
Her elbow room—
It is Donald Davie who has understood this poem for us most exquisitely: see, above, “The Poets on Samuel Menashe.”
An Ode to Elbow-room? Come to that, Menashe is not above writing a panegyric on space of three dimensions. The space would be diminutive, the dimensions capacious.
Perhaps the most pleasing, the most endearing, of these affectionate roundings upon the commonplace is Menashe’s play with as you please, which ceases to be the usual reluctant concession that is coldly calculated to bring a conversation to an end. Within Menashe, “as you please” is both in whatever way pleases you, and given that you do so please the rest of us. Or there is his related pleasure in “to whom I please”:
I left my seed in a grove so deep
The sun does not reach through the trees
Now I am wed to the wood and lord of all leaves
And I can give the green blessing to whom I please
True, the world will sometimes stand in need of a very different impulse, an impulse that is not from a vernal wood (for there is a time to bless and a time to curse), but how lovely that there can still be poems of such entirety, giving no more and no less than their green blessing. What could easily have been the wrong kind of lordliness (the “lord of all leaves” lording it over all and sundry) finds itself blessed instead with a tone of well-grounded rights: “to whom I please,” a turn of phrase that perfectly balances one’s pleasing oneself and one’s pleasing others. For “to whom I choose” would have offered quite other choices.
The poem’s peace of mind is further to be felt in the way in which a particular kind of rhyme is rescued from its propensity to skewer askew: the para-rhyme, the rotatory rhyme that for Wilfred Owen, there in the “Strange Meeting” that was the Great War, can be heard to realize the stations of his military cross. For Owen’s para-rhymes trek from progress, escaped to scooped, then groined to ground, then bestirred to stared, then eyes to bless (no green blessing there), then hall to Hell. . . . What a relief it is to meet, in the peaceful world of Menashe, “Now I am wed to the wood.” For here is a rotation that is not despair turning away but is hope turning to. No longer is the para-rhyme para-military. Elsewhere in Menashe the device again breathes peace, in the moment when hill turns lovingly to holy, or heels to hills, or—at one point—stored to star.
All of which still leaves the critical questions about this poet as the manifest unmisgiving ones. What kind of poems are these? What, if anything, protects them from lapsing from the laconic into the perfunctory? What, if anything, makes it possible for them to achieve so many things, such a sense of being at one and the same time centripetally singular and centrifugally plural? If the poems never do feel exclusive in their appeal (their appeal to readers and to all the other powers that be), how do the actively imaginative principles of exclusion allow the poems to be at once sharply focused and rangingly speculative, so pared and all?
What kind of poems? Well (well and good), short poems. Agreed. These are short poems that are not—the critics have rightly insisted—epigrams exactly, or (rather) are exactly not epigrams. A different kind of wit is at work. Or aphorisms, really. A different kind of wisdom is at work. Yet these are poems that do belong within wisdom literature, that of the Psalms, say, or of Blake’s shorter poems (Menashe often offering moreover not Proverbs of Hell but Proverbs of Heaven). Apophthegms, I’d say. Menashe, who relishes the shorter forms of things (including words), would be likely to prefer the form apothegm. Here is one such, one of Menashe’s best and best-known:
A pot poured out
Fulfills its spout
Child’s play? Just try it. A minimalist’s maxim, the poem fulfills itself, just so. How perfectly the verb “fulfills” fulfills the promise of the generous thought. A promise, a mission, an obligation, a nature: these are the kinds of things that it is possible and desirable to fulfill. This is an author who is in awe of “the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom.”
But where exactly does it emanate from, this sense that the poem, too, is no less full for being so happy to give itself entirely away?
At which point, one might extend Donald Davie’s magnanimous sequence of thought. When attending to Menashe’s poems, Davie found himself descending the scale of units, from verse-line to word to foot to syllable . . . Why not then to the very letter? For Menashe has something of Lucretius’s cosmic comic pleasure in the thought that the atoms that constitute all that is physical are also the letters that constitute all that is verbal: elementa. Menashe’s art pours together the elementary and the elemental. See how the word pot pours itself out into “poured out.” See how, fulfilled but not done with, the word is poured forth again: pot living again within “spout.” But these are not the only fulfillments: how fluidly “out” is taken up, without damage or distortion, effortlessly, within “spout.” Not just le mot juste but la lettre juste. For Menashe (mindful that he is grateful to Britain for first publishing a book of his, as it had done for Robert Frost) has pointed out that his is precisely an American poem. British English, in adopting the spelling “fulfils,” would forfeit the full acknowledgment of the word “fills” that American English proffers so calmly in “fulfills.”
The poem is one of those kindly riddles that is so good as to let you in on the answer without delay. “What great poetry is not dramatic?” asked T. S. Eliot—or rather a speaker within a dialogue by T. S. Eliot. What great poetry is not riddling, might I ask?
Sometimes the riddling is more sly.
I walk outside the stone wall
Looking into the park at night
As armed trees frisk a windfall
Down paths that lampposts light
Among the many things to be looked into in this poem there is this one: a riddle to which one law-abiding answer might be copse.
Or take (for it is generously offered) another such poem, one that the British critic P. N. Furbank offered in a 1961 review as brilliant, and that Barry Ahearn in 1996 unfolded in a sympathetically acute analysis of measure and movement, right down to the rightness of the syllable lengths. The poem has its sound effects, sound as trustworthy and as evoking the quiet sound in both senses of that word.
A flock of little boats
Tethered to the shore
Drifts in still water
Prows dip, nibbling
The sketch has something of the comical levity-cum-gravity of a Dufy, a seascape that then in this case enjoys the further pleasure of teasingly forgoing, as Dufy does not, all glamour of color. Simplicity, itself. And yet there is so much that flocks into it, now that the little boats are glimpsed, clearly, for this tender moment as a flock of sheep. Altogether pacific.
The effect is all the happier because of the various traditional thinkings that gather within such a figure of speech. For instance, that (culturally or agriculturally) there are elsewhere such things as fields of foam, or (more muscularly) that one can plough the waves. Or that the sea itself has been unforgettably imagined as at once the force that grazes and what it grazes upon: “It is the unpastured sea hungering for calm” (the greatest line that Shelley ever wrote?). Or that the water is so fluid while the boats are so distinct (these flowings being alive within the sequence “Tethered to the shore,” the tethered letters as crystals that dissolve). And, drifting there, in the immediate vicinity and not needing to be spelt out, there is a particular little word: flotilla. “A flock of little boats”: f l o t i l l a, all undulating slightly, mildly jumbled, there to be nibbled at. A flotilla, a floating flock, fleetingly a fleet.
Prows dip, nibbling
The sheep dip. This, not only as inclining their heads to nibble, but as the sheep dip: the preparation that healthily washes them down. The sheep dip and are dipped, cleanlily, by the still water.
A countryman in George Eliot’s Middlemarch was bantered for his pronunciation: “But he says, ‘A ship’s in the garden’ instead of ‘a sheep,’ said Letty.” A flock, a flotilla: Menashe’s poem is altogether sheep-shape. And how precise of him to have come to eschew in revision the slackly-suggestive ellipsis that, in an earlier version of the poem, had taken an easier way out:
Drifts in still water . . .
Prows dip, nibbling
For what was waiting truly to be released was not stepping-stones:
Drifts in still water . . .
—but space:
Drifts in still water
Prows dip, nibbling
Menashe is an unquenchable reviser, albeit one who is committed to quenching all such effects as he has come to find too palpable. His lines are there to be read between. Which means that above all they must not be underlined. And the ellipsis there in “Drifts in still water . . .” was a kind of underlining.
Menashe revises away.
My mother was brought up on traditional poetry. Most of the poems she still knew by heart were much longer than mine. If I told her that I had revised a poem since my last visit, she would ask, “How much shorter is it?”
Whereas Whitman is forever expanding (“I shall be good health to you nevertheless”), Menashe contracts with us differently. He will be good health to us evertheless.
Nothing, then, is too small to matter. What difference might it make, for instance, to have a small word be no longer in italics? Once upon a time, a poem called “Inklings” ran like this:
Inklings sans ink
Cling to the dry
Point of the pen
Whose stem I mouth
Not knowing when
The truth will out
Now, in the present edition, the poem opens like this, at last, so that a slightly different truth will out:
Inklings sans ink
The difference is in the respect in which (and with which) there is welcomed a strange eventful line from As You Like It. As You Please. A great many of Menashe’s poems might be understood as As I Like It: in the way that I do, and given that I do, and (sotto voce) as I trust you will.
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
(As You Like It, II.vii)
The earlier rendering in Menashe (“Inklings sans ink”) might have left the impression—given the unmistakable allusion to Shakespeare (Shakespeare’s teeth into Menashe’s mouth)—that the playwright has the word “sans.” He doesn’t. He has “sans,” there being in his time an English word that was perfectly happy to coexist as a French word. Times have changed, and with them, languages. The English language is now sans “sans.” Menashe’s line, so recently revised, registers the force of this recognition, this brief pang, that we are now without one good old way of saying without.
The effect is momentary, as so often in Menashe, but then again it is in touch with some cognate understandings: that though we have the momentaneous sense of “moment,” we do have, too, the momentous one, and we are always within reach of yet another one that knows what momentum is. Menashe’s poems are minute, and they may seem to last only a minute, but they have different kinds of moment. He comprehends not only “Spur of the Moment” but “The Moment of Your Death.”
“Second childishness”? These poems are not afraid to be found childlike. For even while alive with tiny filaments, they have their sheer simplicity. This, while they are distinctly aware of all the things that threaten simplicity, or that simplicity may all too easily be demeaned into. In favor of simplicity as we often are, we need to be all the more vigilant that we not mistake for simplicity what is only simplistic, or simplified, or simple-minded, or (in the distinction invoked by Matthew Arnold) simplesse:
When a genius essentially subtle, or a genius which, from whatever cause, is in its essence not truly and broadly simple, determines to be perfectly plain, determines not to admit a shade of subtlety or curiosity into its expression, it cannot even then attain real simplicity; it can only attain a semblance of simplicity. French criticism, richer in its vocabulary than ours, has invented a useful word to distinguish this semblance (often very beautiful and valuable) from the real quality. The real quality it calls simplicité, the semblance simplesse.
(On Translating Homer, “Last Words,” 1861)
For the real quality needs to know what it is up against. In the words of Arnold’s reluctant heir, T. S. Eliot:
Great simplicity is only won by an intense moment or by years of intelligent effort, or by both. It represents one of the most arduous conquests of the human spirit: the triumph of feeling and thought over the natural sin of language.
(The Athenaeum, 11 April 1919)
The natural sin of language: something that is distinguishable from but not distinct from the original sin that infects even language.
The lapsed Protestant Samuel Beckett may have remembered the words of T. S. Eliot in 1919 (“It represents one of the most arduous conquests of the human spirit”) in his 1931 book on Proust (“It represents a false movement of the spirit”) when, in the very next paragraph, Beckett declared:
The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of him and all his “socii malorum,” the sin of having been born.
“Pues el delito mayor
Del hombre es haber nacido.”
For man’s greatest offense is that he has been born. The words of Calderon became the words of Schopenhauer and then the words of Joseph Conrad (as epigraph to An Outcast of the Islands) and then the words of Beckett. Samuel Beckett, meet Samuel Menashe:
One weekend, walking with my father in Central Park, I said to him, “Your life seems like the expiation of a crime you do not even know you committed.” At once he replied, “For the crime of having been born.” My Catholic friends were pleased by this response. It proved—to them—the truth of the doctrine of original sin.
But then Menashe is not a “tragic figure,” and his poems are not tragic figures of speech. His is the courage of comedy, flanked by the respect of innocence.
As I lie on the rock
With my eyes closed
Absorbed by the sun
A creak of oarlocks
Comes into the cove
Not just absorbing the sun, absorbed by it. No crick in the neck. Instead, a creak for the old cove, there in the (unsounded) creek. Peace comes into its own.
Christopher Ricks
2005
The ten poems added to the second printing (all published since 2005) show anew Menashe’s incremental powers.
In “Leavetaking,” there is the usual distinctly unusual redemption by Menashe of a narrow-eyed and narrow-minded skepticism (to see through something), with the phrase this time altogether without knowingness. Rather, “More than we knew.” In “Now,” there is “Over and over again saying Amen,” rhyming internally and inwardly within the middle-most line of the poem, and this without any acquiescence in Amen’s natural but inordinate wish not just to have but to be the last word. For the poem finally takes the line of pouring out lucidity even while both saying and refusing to say “when”:
The eternal event is now, not when
No final punctuation, for although time must have a stop, eternity must not.
The re-creation in 2006 of the 1960 poem “Always” is, in effect and with great effect, the poem as supreme erratum slip: for found, read lost. The poems ask still not only to be heard, but to be listened to. “Autobiography” declines to avert its mind from procreativities’ pangs, from the facts of life and of a life. How simply yet immitigably different an only son is from only a son. So the poem brings itself to an end (as Coleridge would have wished) with the imagination “as a repetition in the finite mind of the infinite I AM.”
What I have not done
Made me who I am.
Following upon the words “an old man,” this salutary sobriety of Menashe’s is to be distinguished from what would have been sentimentality’s flourish, made me the man I am.
June 2008