The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry
It’s like a book, I think, this bloomin’ world. . . .
—Rudyard Kipling
1. Forms of Memory
I owe my existence to the Japanese Imperial Army. Not in the way you might be guessing—the incident I am about to relate happened a decade before I was born, and my mother was safely tucked away in a California college for women.
It happened to my father at twenty-four, a red-haired Naval Lieutenant on the bridge of a destroyer, the USS Terry, patrolling the waters off Iwo Jima. You know about the famous battle there, five weeks of the bloodiest conflict imaginable—unimaginable, in fact, the stories numbing a listener, the storytellers so physically or psychologically wounded that sometimes they can hardly bear their own survival. Compared to the Marines on the island, who often fought hand-to-hand against the Japanese, my father’s position at sea was, I suppose, relatively safe. He never spoke of this when I was growing up. Now in his seventies, he tells the story as if it can’t be suppressed any longer, as if he too can’t believe he survived.
In daytime the destroyers usually lay off the southeast shore of Iwo Jima, bombarding targets radioed to them by Marine spotters. On this particular night they were sent to protect supply ships moving away from the island. The crew, at battle stations all night, had evaded a torpedo dropped from one of the Japanese planes that scouted them. As dawn came, the destroyers were ordered back to their daytime stations. While the Captain and crew tried to sleep, my father, Officer of the Deck, took the ship down the northeast side of the island several miles from shore.
He couldn’t have known the enemy had hidden heavy artillery in caves on the island. These were British coastal guns captured at Singapore, mounted on rails so they could be wheeled out, fired, and wheeled back into their caves before invaders detected their location. Years later I listened to my father converse with a man who had been an artillery officer in the Canadian Army. This friend described the noise made by these big British guns, and my father said, “I know that noise. I’ve been shot at by them.”
The first shells fired from the island at the Terry exploded in a huge geyser just off the bow. My father ordered a zigzag course away from the island and wakened the Captain, who then took charge as my father ran to his post on the gun-director turret. He had hardly reached it when they were hit—WHAM—smack in the middle of the ship. All electrical circuits went out at once, and the five-inch guns were left to fire at the shore as best they could.
“Blood all over the place,” my father said. He was okay, but he felt stunned and helpless. Everywhere there were young boys killed or missing body parts. As if God had made a fist and brought it down amidships. A lot of boys had been alive, and suddenly they were in pieces. The dying or seriously wounded were more than the doctor and the one uninjured corpsman could handle. The engine rooms were flooded, and the Terry lay dead in the water until other ships came to take her in tow.
The memory of dead and wounded boys has never left my father; it may have contributed to his decision after the war to become a doctor. He could not talk about it for years. He mistrusted the words or the impact they might have on him or us if he tried to describe it all, especially his own questions about whether he had set the ship on the best course that morning. But the truth is that nobody had known about the hidden guns.
For the Terry the battle of Iwo Jima had ended. They were going home, which meant they would miss the dreaded invasion of Japan. Not all of them made it, however. My father’s Gunnery Officer friend received a transfer to another destroyer headed for Okinawa. He remembers the young man’s grief at the news; as his eyes filled with tears he had said, “I know I’ll never see my wife again.”
Whenever I hear that part of the story I think of the movies. You know what will happen next. The guy who takes out the photo of his wife or girlfriend is always the guy who gets killed in the next battle. We’ve watched it happen so often that we can hardly believe it any more. But life is sometimes full of clichés. You don’t have to believe in fate to say that so-and-so was fated to die in such and such a way. Even as I write this I wonder: Am I telling you the story or merely transcribing a version of some war story that has happened many times over? Do I give form to the tale, or do I uncover a form that is already there? Fated or not, this young officer was killed instantly by a kamikaze when it crashed into the bridge of his new ship.
My father and the Terry were spared the kamikazes. They limped home to the United States for a period of recovery. At a dance near San Francisco my father and mother met—so you can see how I owe my existence to the Japanese Imperial Army. If they had not captured the British guns at Singapore and shipped them to Iwo Jima with its ant farm of caves and opened fire on the USS Terry, my brothers and I would never have been born.
This story, it often seems to me, has an inherent form; the teller only uncovers it. We say that life is full of ironies, which we discover by looking back, even looking back only a moment or two. But do we live the plots of stories already told? Do the seasons and planets rhyme? Perhaps these are idle questions. Everyone knows that life is formless and that art is not. Even the most chaotic painting has a frame around it, but who are we to say that birth and death are the frame around our lives? We assume that life is chaos. Our usual metaphors are a wilderness, a wind-tossed sea, a jungle with or without sidewalks. And so it seems. We see through a glass, darkly. We call art, as Robert Frost called poetry, “a momentary stay against confusion.”
But to say that we do not always perceive a form is not proof that no form exists. Our greatest pleasures often derive from form—the feeling of connection, completion, touch. It seems that the mind naturally rejects formlessness. As John Frederick Nims has written, “The word form has a variety of meanings, some of them antipodal. For the philosophers forma can mean soul, the informing principle that animates whatever is alive and organizes whatever is not. But for most writers form is more likely to mean body than soul. . . .” Whether we create form or merely perceive its immanence in nature, or both, I cannot say. But I can at least explore some of those moments when life seems to have a shape, when it seems poetic, and compare them to the life of poetry, the routine devotion to its pleasures.
I have sometimes felt that I was part of a story, and that I had a sacred duty to transcribe as much of it as I could. My story has something to do with my father’s war. In 1974 I unloaded fishing boats for six months in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, which, as it happens, had been bombed by the Japanese in World War II. Dutch Harbor was still a little-known outpost not quite halfway out the Aleutian chain. When I lived there it was an empty place, ghostly, its weather usually dreary like a sodden blanket. The hills were utterly bare, like Hebridean moors, and one could see spent volcanos on the island of Unalaska. Everywhere there were empty buildings: Quonset huts and old wooden barracks weathered silver. There were broken concrete bunkers, rusty trucks half-buried on the beaches, miles of oxidized copper wire running through the weedy tundra. These were the ruins of a World War II military base. I have known several men who served there during the war. They shudder when they recall the horizontal rain, the steady boredom, the horror of Attu—a smaller Iwo Jima—and not one of them has ever expressed to me a desire to return to that place.
My own memories are not so hellish, and with good reason. In 1974 we had finished our latest war and had only Watergate to worry about. But I do remember the ruins: the old prison camp, the officers’ quarters. Dutch Harbor was a sort of garbage dump of World War II, a scavenger’s paradise. I thought of it as my essential landscape—the desolate home of all literal and figurative war babies, the off-center eye of history’s storm.
Derek Walcott, who grew up on another isolated island far to the south, has said that “The sigh of history rises over ruins, not over landscapes. . . .” That is not entirely true. Sometimes the landscape is the ruined temple. Sometimes it is the battlefield. In South Dakota, for example, you can still see the shallow ravine at Wounded Knee where the Seventh Cavalry slaughtered three hundred Sioux. There is a wooden sign on which the word “Battle” has been replaced by the word “Massacre.” There is a graveyard with a small monument. But the landscape is haunted too. The story lives in the grass and the lay of the land.
I felt that way about Dutch Harbor. Walking far from the ghost town of old barracks, I still felt the presence of history like some aboriginal songline. Unalaska’s Church of the Holy Ascension attests to the Russian conquerors and their God, but so does the distant, snowy volcano with its Russian name. It wasn’t only the buildings that told these stories. It was the hills, and the cold inhumanity, the luster and boredom of the sea.
2. The Old Philosophers
Theorists who hold life and art completely separate are killing the thing they supposedly love. The word “text” as it is used by many critics now fills me with anger, because it so often reduces history or literature to a system of arbitrary codes, interpretations rather than events. By contrast, even a philosophical poet like Wallace Stevens was clearly concerned with being in the world, noticing oranges and coffee as much as the poem about oranges and coffee. Yes, the poem about the orange is not the orange, but it influences our awareness of the orange. The sermon about death is not death, but the dead body is a fact beyond interpretation. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates waxes wise about the life after death, adding that “no reasonable man ought to insist that the facts are exactly as I have described them.” Then he drinks the hemlock and dies slowly from the feet up. We may be aware that accounts of the death are open to interpretation, just as the dialogues of Plato subvert their own assertions by offering more than one voice. But the body is a fact beyond interpretation. History may be composed of texts, but it is also composed of dead and living bodies. Our interpretation of events is not the events themselves, and truth matters even when we doubt our ability to know it.
For Stevens, who successfully navigated the world of business yet enjoyed meditative walks or quiet moments alone in a New York cathedral, human existence was a symbiosis of the real and the imagined. In his beautiful lecture “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” delivered at Princeton in wartime, he speaks of “the pressure of reality,” by which he particularly means the sort of catastrophic global events anyone could read about in the daily papers. The pressure was indeed great, as German, Italian, and Japanese nationalists advanced on all fronts. Stevens felt that, in our society, the imagination was also losing ground to this “pressure of reality.” The world of facts which he inhabited every day had little use for an imagined nobility.
Nobility, Stevens said, was a force, and imaginative activities like poetry were needed to keep it alive in the world:
It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from the violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us live our lives.
This most reticent and philosophical of poets actually declared that poetry helps us live our lives! It is more than a closed system of interpretations. It speaks to us and in us. Sometimes it even ennobles us. It is a way of being in the world.
Of course, poetry is only one of the arts and only one kind of imaginative organization. But these activities have indeed been helpful, preserving some part of us even as we preserve them. The classical scholar Bernard Knox recalls a moment in World War II when poetry and life intersected for him. A member of the OSS who saw plenty of action, he found himself in 1944 fighting the Germans alongside Italian partisans in the mountains south of Modena. At one point, huddled in a ruined house under fire from a German machine gun, he picked up a copy of Virgil in the debris, “one of a series of classical texts issued by the Royal Italian Academy to celebrate the greatness of ancient (and modern) Rome; the title page bore the improbable heading, in Latin, IUSSU BENEDICTI MUSSOLINI—‘By Order of Benito Mussolini.’” Knox tells this story in the introduction to his Essays Ancient and Modern by way of explaining his subsequent career as a scholar. Recalling that Virgil’s poems had once been thought prophetic, he opened the book to a passage from the first Georgic, which he translates as follows:
Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil. The plow is despised and rejected; the farmers marched off, the field untended. The curving sickles are beaten straight to make swords. On one side the East moves to war, on the other, Germany. Neighboring cities tear up their treaties and take to arms; the vicious war god rages the world over.
Knox’s meditation on these words and the moment of finding them strikes me as a beautiful example of the poetry of life and the life of poetry:
These lines, written thirty years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I know of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked, mine-infested fields, the shattered cities and the starving population of that Italy Virgil so loved, the misery of the whole world at war. And there was in fact a sort of prophecy in it. “On one side the East moves to war.” I did not know it yet, but the unit in which I served was to be selected for a role in the main Japanese landing, which was already in the planning stage. In this case, luckily for all of us, the Virgilian oracle was wrong.
It was time to move up. I tried to get the book into one of my pockets, but it was too big and I threw it down. But as we ran and crawled through the rubble I thought to myself: “If I ever get out of this, I’m going back to the classics and study them seriously.”
This full-time avocation, literature, has much to do with life as we live it, searching for our place in the narrative of humankind.
It may be that I am telling too many war stories here—especially for someone who, thankfully, has no experience of warfare. But these tales of extremity only confirm what I also feel about so-called ordinary life: that the world we imagine and the world we inhabit with our bodies are deeply related.
Now I recall the case of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the great English travel writer who lives in southern Greece. For a time I was his neighbor, my one-room hut sharing an Edenic bay with his more spacious villa. I remember sitting in my doorway on a summer night while Fermor’s opera recordings drifted to me over the olives and cypresses. The breeze off the mountains cooled me; the grating cicadas quit their racket when the sun went down. I had no electricity in that little house, so I read his books by lamplight, devouring everything he had written to impress him with my knowledge of it when we met. His prose was so rich that it made me hungry, and I actually had to eat bread and cheese while reading. His words increased my appetite for language and experience.
I was twenty-five years old; to me Fermor represented a literary ideal, the intellectual and physical life melded in one Byronic personality. Years later, while I plodded through graduate school, I frequently envied Fermor’s alternative to a college education—in the early 1930s he had walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (even the use of that name is fraught with historical significance). He was also legendary for his involvement with the Cretan resistance during World War II, having masterminded their kidnapping of Major-General Heinrich Kreipe, the commander of the German garrison. Fermor has never told the full story of these events, choosing instead to translate a Greek version by George Psychoundakis. But in A Time of Gifts, the first volume of his masterful travel memoir, Fermor relates a story not unlike that of Bernard Knox:
The hazards of war landed me among the crags of occupied Crete with a band of Cretan guerillas and a captive German general whom we had waylaid and carried off into the mountains three days before. The German garrison of the island were in hot, but luckily temporarily misdirected, chase. It was a time of anxiety and danger; and for our captive, of hardship and distress. During a lull in the pursuit, we woke up among the rocks just as a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida. We had been toiling over it, through snow and then rain, for the last two days. Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself:
Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte . . .
It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had left off:
nec iam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto,
and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine—and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.
I remember arguing with a friend about this scene.1 The friend thought it preposterous, declaring that a Hollywood cliché of noble aristocracy had found its way into Fermor’s memory, and then into his book. But I had ample opportunity to observe Fermor’s recall of verse in several languages. It was another aspect of his character I had admired and tried to imitate. I also knew that, despite the objections of cynics, people do remember poems or songs or key phrases at surprising moments in life, as if pressing back against the pressure of reality.
Another soldier, Field-Marshal A. P. Wavell, demonstrated his prodigious memory for verse by collecting a 400-page anthology from memory. Other Men’s Flowers, published in 1944, comprised only poems that Wavell had by heart. He acknowledged that his choices would seem old-fashioned to some, but the anthology does have its treasures, like the Kipling I quote at the beginning of this essay. My point about Wavell is that he was a practical man, a soldier whose 1916 wound cost him the sight in one eye, a masterful strategist whose 1941 book, Generals and Generalship, was read and reread by Erwin Rommel, and finally, he was one of the last Viceroys of India. Yet this man needed poetry and knew that others needed it. Other Men’s Flowers sold extremely well, and in his preface to the revised edition Wavell paid homage to one of his readers:
A tribute which I greatly valued came in the form of an annotated copy which a friend sent me. The annotations had been made by a soldier who read Other Men’s Flowers during the period of his final training for D-Day in Normandy. As he read each poem he put the date on which and sometimes the circumstances in which he had read it; and added his comments of enjoyment, indifference or dislike. He had finished the volume while crossing to Normandy and had fallen in the battle shortly afterwards. I often turn up that copy and read the comments, which reveal a fine, somewhat puritan, character and shrewd judgment. I am proud that my selection should have helped him in those days, and that it was on the whole to his taste. I hope I may have helped and entertained many such others.
This poetry was not intended to be patriotic propaganda gearing the soldier’s mind for war; it was intended to help and entertain. Though Wavell’s choices would surely not meet the approval of most academic critics now, I find his anthology strangely moving because it was made by a man who believed in poetry’s sustaining power. He knew that the best forms of expression are often those we want most to remember.
Life appears on occasion to have form, to borrow its form from poetry even as poetry borrows from life. I return to Wallace Stevens, this time his wartime poem, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”:
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And Sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.
Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.
They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,
Two parallels that meet if only in
The meeting of their shadows or that meet
In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.
Poetry needn’t always refer to the world in a straightforward manner, just as the world is frequently not straightforward with us. The spell of nonsense is as important as the elegy or prayer. We can hope poetry that matters is remembered, brought into our lives out of need or pleasure. The pleasure in a line may not be universal, the need may be weaker than our need for water, but poetry has proven tenacious in its survival.
3. The Impersonal Poet
When I read poetry in college, I was taught to be impersonal, always impersonal, as if to avoid contaminating what I read. Now it seems to me that the force of personality is every bit as important as the mastery of craft. Reading and writing are an invitation to a great untidy conversation that spans generations and cultures. The idea that we must be impersonal derives partly from T. S. Eliot, but did anyone ever really believe that Eliot was not present in his poems? That wan smile, the self so distanced from itself, that nearly Hindu monasticism and sly humor are all there. We have the Waste Land manuscript with Vivienne Eliot’s “WONDERFUL” scrawled next to what seems a weirdly confessional passage. And we have the two volumes of Lyndall Gordon’s critical biography, the fullest discussion yet of the interplay of life and art in Eliot’s career.
Eliot’s early denial of personality, especially in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” was rooted in his own psychological defenses, as well as in his talent for philosophical and religious abstraction. But this denial rapidly became doctrine, easily misinterpreted by droves of readers and writers. Eliot himself constantly revised his position on the matter, and his later work—especially Four Quartets and The Family Reunion—is decidedly confessional.
“Discoveries in art . . . ,” wrote Marianne Moore, “are personal before they are general.” There must be various levels of detachment in both life and art. The detachment of artists from their craft is a simple necessity, and Modernists were obsessed with craft, with remaking the forms of expression. When Eliot separates “the man who suffers and the mind which creates,” he may well be neurotic, but it is the defining neurosis of art. His desire to direct criticism to the poem and not the poet is also extremely helpful, leading to the technique of “close reading” in the classroom and in most academic criticism. Nowadays close reading bores me; I long to attach discussions of poetry to discussions of everything else. But close, even impersonal reading remains an essential skill for students to master, and we should acknowledge the useful legacy of Eliot’s ideas.
Once at a literary gathering a poet asked me whom I enjoyed reading—this was in about 1982. I harkened back to the early poems of Eliot, some of which I had memorized while in high school. When I mentioned this, the poet turned on one heel and marched away from me in righteous indignation. To admire Eliot was, in certain circles, tantamount to admiring an impersonal royalist snob. Worse, it was like admiring the desiccated corpse of the Western tradition. I can only say that most dismissals of Eliot appear to have been made by people who have not read the full range of his criticism. His arguments against a wholly secular society, for example, now seem prescient in some ways. He saw that the materialism of a consumer culture was insufficient to ensure our survival; in The Idea of a Christian Society his environmental position is nearly indistinguishable from that of the Sierra Club.
Eliot also modified his ideas about impersonality, especially in his 1940 essay on Yeats, where he explored “two forms of impersonality: that which is natural to the skilled craftsman, and that which is more and more achieved by the maturing artist.” Yeats, he said, began as the former but became the latter. In other words, it is possible for a poet to be passionately local yet convey “a general truth.” Universality is suspect in some quarters, I suppose, but I would submit that we cannot have great art without it. For better or worse, Eliot influenced writers all over the world: Montale, Seferis and Achebe come immediately to mind. Dante, Shakespeare, and Yeats have had similarly global influence, which suggests that the particularities of their art have not impeded their expressions of general truths. The argument against masterpieces of this magnitude is an argument for an exclusively local poetry, which would be severely limiting. Wallace Stevens’ friend, George Santayana, wrote that “The sole advantage in possessing great works of literature lies in what they can help us to become.” Perhaps this was what led Stevens to declare that poetry helps us live our lives. I do not think either man meant this simplistically. Poetry is not quite bread; it does not feed the refugees who feel the pressure of reality so intensely now. But it is an awareness, a verbal precision that offers flashes of lucidity.
One of the greatest modern commentators on the poetry of life and the life of poetry is W. H. Auden. Everyone remembers his declaration that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but few recall his modification of it, his insistence on poetry’s survival as “A way of happening, a mouth.” No modern poet was more acutely aware of the distance between political or religious experiences and their expression in poetry. As he said in New Year Letter:
Art in intention is mimesis
But, realized, the resemblance ceases;
Art is not life and cannot be
A midwife to society,
For art is a fait accompli.
Like Robert Frost, Auden called poetry a game and denied its practicality. But both poets understood its usefulness for our consciousness of being in the world. Like his literary godfather, Eliot, Auden spoke of impersonality in poetry, wrongly suggesting that his biography would reveal nothing of importance about his art. But The Dyer’s Hand makes it clear that Auden did not believe absolutely in the separation of life and art:
Speaking for myself, the questions which interest me most when reading a poem are two. The first is technical: “Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?” The second is, in the broadest sense, moral: “What kind of a guy inhabits this poem? What is his notion of the good life or the good place? His notion of the Evil One? What does he conceal from the reader? What does he conceal even from himself?”
Auden believed that the social nature of language precluded any absolutely private or solipsistic writing. “There are other social animals who have signal codes,” he wrote, “ . . . but only man has a language by means of which he can disclose himself to his neighbor, which he could not do and would not want to do if he did not first possess the capacity and need to disclose himself to himself.”
We may feel isolated from each other, from God, from any meaning we have desired, but the language of poetry can’t help being a kind of ceremony. It insists, sometimes against all reason, that we are not alone, that our most intimate or noble, trivial or terrible natures are already understood.
4. My Mother’s Secret
For a poet one possible ambition is to write something so beautiful, so precise, so true, that another person, preferably many people, would choose to remember it. We may never agree on some ultimate canon of literature, but the belief in masterpieces, in great books, is essential to cultural survival.
When I was in college I read Yeats. I did not understand him, even when I had read Richard Ellmann’s clarifications of his life and work, but I was besotted by the poetry. After college I refused to read Yeats for six years, fearing that his personality would completely overwhelm my own.
Language entered me through the ear; my mind lagged far behind in its development. When I was sixteen, I read the Benjy section of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury while driving a pea combine in the Skagit Valley. The combines were gigantic shucking cylinders hauled behind diesel tractors. We drove slowly in the summer heat, the dust and chaff flying thick about us. In a forty-acre field I could get a page or two read while inching down a single row of swathed pea vines. I did not understand a word I was reading, but the poetry of Faulkner’s voice entered and became part of my life. Benjy’s sad vulnerability and hyper-awareness of the natural world got under my skin. Later, Eugene O’Neill’s wretched family became mine, though it turns out that I was far luckier than O’Neill. Eliot’s “Preludes” made perfect sense, but only as mood, as tone—I had never seen gaslights or cab horses and knew nothing of his philosophy. I was moved by his vision of vulnerable people, and my teenage cynicism found confirmation in the poem’s abrupt closure: “The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots.”
In college I extolled difficult literature that I did not understand. I remember sitting at the family dinner table one vacation when my older brother insisted that I explain why Faulkner was a great writer. I could not, because I did not understand what my ear had taken in. My brother mocked me, and I left the table in tears.
Something else happened to me on one of those vacations. I attempted to write the following anecdote into a short story, which I showed to my favorite professor; he told me that the story was full of inaccuracies. People just didn’t behave the way I had them behave. “People don’t walk around quoting poetry,” he said. About most of the story he was surely right, but not that last remark. People do quote poetry, or refer to it—some do, anyway—and they connect it to their lives.
My parents had been divorced for years when this happened. I won’t go into the gory details, except to say that in hindsight their divorce has the inevitability of art. It too was set in motion by the war, or events long before the war. My mother had raised my brothers and me through hard times. Both of my parents endured hard times, but I am particularly concerned here with my mother. She was dating a man who had taught me to play chess years before, and who took an active interest in my love of reading. On one of my trips home from college I had brought my selected Yeats, and after dinner I sat in the living room with this man and my mother, talking about the Irish poet.
My mother was a psychology professor, and, though our house was full of books, I had never thought of her as someone who read poetry. She surprised me by saying there was a poem of Yeats she especially liked and asked to borrow my book. While she leafed through it, looking for the poem, I tried to show off my knowledge to her indulgent friend.
At last she found the poem. She did not read it aloud, but passed the book to me so I could see what she had indicated. Here is the poem I read silently that night:
Others because you did not keep
That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;
Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine,
Suddenly I meet your face.
Of course I did not understand it at the time. She was talking to me through Yeats, using the poem to explain her life to me. She wanted me to know that she still loved my father, despite all the hell they put each other through. Yeats’s voice speaks across time. It is specific to his life, his loves and prejudices. Yet it becomes one of our voices too, the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. The poetry of life and the life of poetry mean that reality alone is no place to live.
1. Fermor quotes Horace’s Odes (I. ix). Here is John Dryden’s 1685 version of the stanza:
Behold yon mountain’s hoary height,
Made higher with new mounts of snow;
Again, behold the winter’s weight
Oppress the laboring woods below;
And streams with icy fetters bound
Benumbed and cramped to solid ground.