1. Citations of Stevens are by page number from Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997).
2. James Merrill, Collected Poems, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 866.
3. Emily Dickinson, Poems, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 219–20.
4. George Herbert, Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 185.
5. Christopher Ricks, ed., The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 159. I have modernized Waller’s o’re to o’er and his Let’s to Lets.
6. John Donne, The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1985), 488–89. I have regularized the different spellings (“streights,” “straights,” “straits”) of this one word, and have departed from Patrides when manuscript variants noted by Patrides warrant it.
7. When I rewrite a line, for purposes of illustration, I enclose that alternative invented line in square brackets.
1. Wallace Stevens, Letters, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 953. Hereafter abbreviated as L. Further citations appear parenthetically in the text.
2. For the pool of pink water lilies and the beloved by the poet’s side, see the back glance in “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” XI; for the “turban,” see the “caftan” of the “Chieftain” (the large rooster) in “Bantams in Pine-Woods”; for Stevens’s passage beyond an aesthetic of greenhouse-cultivated flowers, see “Floral Decorations for Bananas”; for the chimney, see Stevens’s frequent later self-descriptions (for example, in “Local Objects”) as a spirit “without a foyer.” Stephen Burt, who has discovered the actual state of Elizabeth Park in Stevens’s late years, describes the decaying Pond House in “Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived,” ELH (forthcoming).
3. King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport.” Keats, on the musk rose: when blown, it becomes “the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.” See also Baudelaire’s “La Charogne.”
4. This conjecture does not affect the basic premise, or conduct, of the poem, nor what I say about its strategies.
5. In other long-lined poems by Stevens, the extended line serves different purposes—in “Prologues to What Is Possible” the motion of a boat borne forward over the sea; in “The World as Meditation” the waiting of Penelope for the reappearance of Ulysses.
1. Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper Perennial, 1981), 312. All future citations are identified parenthetically by page number in the text.
2. The disjecta membra of this poem will become those of Otto Plath in “The Colossus.”
3. The 7 lines (out of 126) of “Berck-Plage” in which the first person appears are the following:
How the sun’s poultice draws on my inflammation. . . .
I have two legs, and I move smilingly.
Why should I walk. . . .
I am not a nurse, white and attendant,
I am not a smile. . . .
And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults.
And I am dark-suited and still, a member of the party.
4. For Ted Hughes’s comments on the visit to Berck-Plage, and for information on the work sheets of “Berck-Plage” (remarking Plath’s omission, in the finished draft, of a section concerning the birth of her son, Nicholas), see Jack Folsom’s study “Death and Rebirth in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Berck-Plage,’” Temple University (www.sylviaplath.de/plath/jfolsom.html; accessed July 10, 2009). Folsom’s view of the poem is not mine. He writes, “‘Berck-Plage,’ [with its] seemingly unmitigated malaise and funereal gloom, stands in many readers’ estimation as one of her heaviest and least appealing works” (1). He claims, however, that “the speaker . . . has risen above the world’s tumult and has seen renewal after death . . . ; she has . . . transformed her grief . . . into a life-renewing vision” (9). He bases this view chiefly on the section on the birth of her son, Nicholas, which Plath excised from the poem; Folsom’s optimistic view of the final poem seems, in the light of the cut, indefensible.
5. Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 205.
6. The idea of reading a reflection as a “nether world” may have come from Wordsworth’s nocturne “Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake,” in which, after seeing the lake as a mirror reflecting the stars, Wordsworth drops into a darker speculation concerning Nature:
Is it a mirror?—or the nether Sphere
Opening to view the abyss in which she feeds
Her own calm fires?
1. Robert Lowell, Day by Day (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 114. Future references will be identified parenthetically in the text.
2. “Jean Stafford, a Letter,” “For John Berryman,” “In the Ward,” and “The Spell,” respectively.
3. Michael Hofmann, “His Own Prophet,” London Review of Books, September 11, 2003, 3, 5–8.
4. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 645.
1. See the volume Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox, misnamed in its subtitle Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, ed. Alice Quinn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 158. The word “uncollected” means “not published by the author in book form, but published singly somewhere else, as in a journal.” Bishop chose never to publish these drafts of poems at all. “Breakfast Song” was not found among her manuscripts at her death; it had been covertly transcribed from one of her notebooks by Lloyd Schwartz, who released it for publication only after Bishop’s death.
2. Page references, here and hereafter given parenthetically, refer to Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983).
3. There is a similar reversal of octave and sestet in Coleridge’s “Work without Hope,” but the poem retains the pentameter of the traditional sonnet.
4. Bishop is remembering here Shelley’s lines in the “Ode on Intellectual Beauty,” “Life, like a dome of many-colour’d glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity,” remembered also in Frost’s ice-storm in “Birches,” as the ice-bound branches turn “many-colored” when the ice begins to crack in the sun, shedding so many pieces of glassy ice “You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.”
5. “Daisies pied” is quoted from Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, “incandescent” from Moore’s description of Eden in “Marriage”: “Below the incandescent stars / below the incandescent fruit, / the strange experience of beauty.”
6. In stanza 1, a trimeter substitutes for one of the pentameters; in stanza 5, there is a tetrameter substitution. Neither disturbs the contrast between the first four lines of the stanza and the closing hexameter.
7. The compositional history for Bishop’s published poems is not yet available. Bishop sometimes waited for years to publish a poem composed long before. It is possible that “Night City” is such a poem; it sounds earlier in style than many other poems in Geography III (although the drafts at Vassar are dated 1972). Even if composition had begun earlier, Bishop chose to publish “Night City” in the context of several other poems envisaging the end of life.
1. All references, here and hereafter in parentheses, are to James Merrill’s Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2001).
2. For the complete text of “Christmas Tree,” see chapter 1. The poem was published posthumously in 1995 and can be found in Merrill’s Collected Poems, 866. One printing of the poem, I have been told, did miss the point, centering each line on the page so as to make a symmetrical tree. In writing “Christmas Tree,” Merrill may have been remembering another poem about a missing half of oneself, Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Gentleman of Shalott.” Bishop’s male version of the Lady of Shalott is half-real, half-mirrored reflection. The poem ends, “He wishes to be quoted as saying at present: ‘Half is enough.’” See Bishop, Complete Poems, 10.
3. “An Upward Look” shares these features with its semi-twin, “A Downward Look” (which opens A Scattering of Salts); it too is written in couplets, but its symmetry is broken not by a tercet but by one stanza of a single line alone. The asymmetry in each case suggests the imperfection—by excess or defect—of human life.
4. Oh, Hesperus! Thou bringest all good things—
Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer,
To the young bird the parent’s brooding wings,
The welcome stall to the o’erlabour’d steer;
Whate’er of peace about our hearthstone clings,
Whate’er our household gods protect of dear,
Are gather’d round us by thy look of rest;
Thou bring’st the child, too, to the mother’s breast.
Sappho’s poem reads, in a literal translation by Mary Barnard:
Hesperus, you herd
homeward whatever
Dawn’s light dispersed
You herd sheep—herd
goats—herd children
home to their mothers.
(Sappho: A New Translation [Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986], 16.)
5. Please refer to Merrill’s poem “Christmas Tree” in chapter 1.