[Clive Watkins]

Moths

They cannot please us.
We are irritated
by the frazzle of their ignition
against the heating-rod, weary
of sweeping their drab carcasses
from the battlefield.

If only they were butterflies –
how we would celebrate their doomed flight,
mourn each fabulous wing,
and then, being unable to bear too much beauty
without reaching for a mirror

how inevitably we would recall
that long-ago boy
plunging into nothingness,
waxen limbs thrashing at the air,
a look of astonishment in those vivid eyes.

Shekhar Aiyar

In several respects, this is an attractive poem. For instance, there are some effective details - “We are irritated / by the frazzle of their ignition / against the heating-rod” is one – but its most impressive feature is its management of syntax and rhythm to provide a satisfying sense of formal closure.

From the short declarative opening - “They cannot please us” – the poem unfolds through a longer sentence, one whose two predicates double the structure of what went before, and rises in a climax through the extended dynamics of the periodic sentence to its conclusion. This final sentence is built up in a series of dependent structures. After the opening conditional clause (“If only…”), we are offered, first, one possible fulfilment (“how we would celebrate…). With “and then”, we realize that a second main clause is to follow, one which will invite us to revise our view of the events so far described. The expected second clause is delayed for a moment, however, by an adjectival phrase (“being unable to bear”) before it develops, through two further descriptive phrases, towards the startling final image. It is worth noting that this doubling of main clauses mirrors the doubled predicates of the previous sentence. An overall syntactical logic binds these three sentences together.

What is more, the fact that the poem culminates in three parallel descriptive phrases – “plunging into nothingness, / waxen limbs thrashing at the air, / a look of astonishment in those vivid eyes” – itself creates a powerful sense of closure; for there is a tendency for such sequences of three to be subliminally satisfying. How many times, for instance, do we hear a speaker utter phrases in which a predicate has three components? (As it happens, I have just come across eight instances of this phenomenon in three pages of War and Peace, which I am reading again for the first time in twenty-five years.) It can become a mannerism, of course: a wary reader will wonder whether each of the elements is really saying something essential rather than just completing the rhetorical pattern. This is not an issue here, however.

A further effect reinforces this sense of closure. This is one of those non-metrical poems which hovers on the brink of metricality. Lines and fragments of lines, had they occurred in an openly metrical context, would have “read” as metrical. For instance, the first two lines form a perfect iambic pentameter, with a feminine ending: “They cannot please us. We are irritated”. Similarly, in an IP context “their drab carcasses from the battlefield” might well pass muster. There are many other examples, but the most rhetorically significant occurs in the last line: “a look of astonishment in those vivid eyes”. This is not, of course, a regular line of IP, but, again, it clearly has five beats (“look”, “~ston~”, “in”, “viv~” and “eyes”) and, in a suitable context, would also pass. This is the second complete line with this characteristic (the other is line 8). What is significant here is that it is the poem’s final line.

Why do I find this movement towards IP so effective in creating a sense of closure? It is just, I think, because of the centuries-long history of IP in our literatures. Whether the five-beat pulse of this line has woven itself into the texture of the language or whether the pattern is inherent in English, it is there, to be found both in prose and verse. Members will be able to find many instances of this for themselves. Here are some non-metrical poems, some of them perhaps unlikely ones, which close on such a five-beat pattern. Even though in some cases the line-ends cut across the pattern and so disguise it, it is still apparent, to my ear at least. To save space, I do not quote the lines in question: William Carlos Williams, “The Locust Tree in Flower” (in An Early Martyr); “The Loving Dexterity” and “The Parable of the Blind” (in Pictures from Brueghel), Elizabeth Bishop, “Giant Snail” (a prose poem); John Ashbery, “Foreboding” and “Märchenbilder” (in Self-Portrait with a Convex Mirror); James Wright, “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio” (in The Branch Will Not Break); Robert Hass, “The Beginning of September” (in Praise); Gary Snyder, “Above Pate Valley” (in Riprap).

Given the ghost-presence of metre, some might wonder whether Shekhar might have done better to write in full metre anyway, something I am sure, to judge by other poems, he could well have done. My reply would be that that would be to make it a different, but in this regard not necessarily a better, poem.

At the end of Shekhar’s poem, then, three processes converge: the complex suspended syntax of the third sentence, itself springing from the syntax of the previous two; within that, the triple rhythm of the closing descriptive phrases; and, finally, the underlying tendency to conform to a metrical paradigm concluding with a five-beat line. That all three patterns are resolved at the same point creates a strong feeling of stability, the sense that something has been resolved. I have no idea whether Shekhar managed these effects deliberately. I suspect it was largely done in an unconscious way, at least at first. Nor would I argue that readers need to be able to analyse such things objectively before they can feel the pull of syntax and rhythm towards a conclusion. These causes operate below the level of awareness.

Unfortunately, the satisfying sense that a conclusion has been reached is undermined by certain aspects of the imagery and argument of the poem.

In the first section, “carcasses” and “battlefield” introduce a range of possible meanings which are not supported by what follows. Is this, some might ask, a poem addressing a military topic? It may be this does not matter. I accepted it as a local detail. At this point at any rate, the poem does not seem to be built up on the basis of a single trope, as I felt was the case with another poem on which I commented on an adjacent thread recently. From a naturalistic point of view, the moths have been lured to their deaths by the light. They are not in any sense obvious to me attacking the light; and if, as warriors, they have an opponent, their opponent is the speaker. The military image is thus his and serves to express his combination of disgust (he wants to kill these insects), irritation at the distracting sound of their destruction and weariness at having constantly to clear away the dead bodies, even though this was the result he sought. That he strengthens his position by the use of the first person plural and thereby seeks to co-opt his readers into his camp is part of the effect.

It is in the final sentence, however, that the difficulties really begin.

The speaker imagines that, instead of moths, it was butterflies that were flying into the heating rod and considers what his thoughts and feelings would have been in that situation. What is the status of this fancy? It is introduced by the formulaic phrase “If only”, a locution we use to express a longing for something we realize is beyond reach. The emphatic construction in the two main clauses that follow, clauses given additional weight by the device of repetition with variation (“how we would…how inevitably we would…”), reinforce this sense. Are we to assume that the speaker actively wishes that it were butterflies, not moths, that were flying to their deaths? Consider how the sense would differ if, instead, the line ran “If they had been butterflies….”. It occurs to me to ask, therefore, why the speaker would want a situation in which insects he clearly finds beautiful and which he prefers to the “drab” moths could fly to their deaths in this way. There seems something wilful about this, as if he were prepared to have this sacrifice occur just for the sake of the mournful celebration it would provoke in him. Perhaps this is the point. It is an interesting one, though I think that what follows largely pushes it to one side.

In “being unable to bear too much beauty”, I found it hard not to hear an echo of Eliot’s much-quoted (much misquoted) “human kind Cannot bear very much reality” from the conclusion of Section 1 of “Burnt Norton”. I am not sure whether I am meant to hear this echo or whether I should set it aside. This is an issue I have raised on these boards before. There is no simple answer, but surely one of the skills poets need to acquire (and constantly refine) is a sixth sense for possible echoes so that, being aware of such echoes, they can consider whether to confirm them, to exclude them or simply to leave them in an unresolved condition. In this particular case, some of the resonance of the phrase “being unable to bear too much beauty” springs for me from this echo of Eliot’s famous poem. Having read “Moths” closely several times over several days, I remain uncertain about the status of the phrase.

Beyond this, I do not understand why contemplating the dead butterflies and “being unable to bear too much beauty”, we should want to reach for a mirror. This seems too compressed for clarity. Also, mirrors are highly symbolic objects. It is not clear to me what associations I should consider here.

The last section introduces what is clearly offered as the resolving image of the poem. The poem invites us to re-read it with the story of Icarus in mind, but I am unsure how the myth functions in this case. Its traditional application is as a warning against hubris, against reckless overreaching; but I can see nothing here to give this idea context and relevance. Two modern applications, Auden’s masterly “Musée des Beaux Arts” (first published in 1939) and William Carlos Williams’s pale parallel, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (in Pictures from Brueghel, 1962), take a distinctive line, but, if an original interpretation of the myth is intended, it does not come across clearly. Both real moths and imagined butterflies fly towards the bright light of the heating rod and are destroyed: drabness and beauty are indifferent as far as this event is concerned. While it is plausible that one might feel more regret, on admittedly shallow grounds, at the death of the butterfly than at the death of the moth, the Icarus story as traditionally conceived has no bearing on this distinction. Yet the whole drive of the poem’s narrative and syntax seems concerned to point it out.

The startling sharpness of the final image – “a look of astonishment in those vivid eyes” – compounds the problem. Suddenly – and it is a striking effect – we are invited to see the death of Icarus as reflected in his own face at the very moment at which he understands he is going to die. (Here “vivid” is a particularly apt adjective.) Inasmuch as we assume them capable of such feelings, both moths and butterflies would no doubt wear just such a look before their impending fates. If the point is that we should condemn our willingness to attribute such feelings to butterflies but deny them to moths, then we are obliged to read the final lines in an ironic mode. But that way of reading is not, it seems to me, supported by the story of Icarus, particularly as it is presented in this poem.

There are other inconsistencies, too. The poem refers us to the boy’s “waxen limbs”. In fact, in the customary version, the wings were made of feathers held together with wax and twine. The wings were then fitted to the boy’s shoulders. This may seem a small deviation, but, taken with a larger problem, I believe it is significant.

The larger problem concerns the fundamental congruence of poem and myth. The moths and the imagined butterflies die by being frazzled on the heating rod. Read against the Icarus story, the heating rod corresponds to the sun. But Icarus was not frazzled by the sun. The wax that bound the feathers of his wings melted in the sun’s heat as he flew higher, and he plunged to his death into the sea. The two narratives, that is, do not map on to one another well. In another thread one member commented that a reading I had made there was too literal; it may be that these last observations will seem to some to suffer in the same way. My own view is that this mismatch between vehicle and tenor in an image which is offered as resolving the whole poem betrays a distracting lack of focus. Surely, as poets we ought to be jealous of the literal: to be concerned about such things is not to exclude the richly suggestive dimensions of language.

As I have said, there is much to admire here in the management of the sentences and in the rhythmic patterning. They create a strong forward movement towards a feeling of resolution. Unfortunately, this effect is not matched by the organization of image and argument. The result is a poem which remains slightly blurred, not yet fully realized.

Clive Watkins

[RCL]

Clive, I especially enjoyed your explication of how the syntax functions. However, I took the "without reaching for a mirror" phrase as heavily (even heavy-handedly) ironic (as if we'd see true beauty in our own image), which, for me, alludes to Narcissus and carries over to the self-pride, hubris, of Icarus--who must have seen his own mirrored image when plunging toward the sea. I tend to read the whole as an ironic commentary on our perceptions/misperceptions of beauty. Let's see what others think.

Cheers,

------------------
Ralph

[This message has been edited by RCL (edited February 03, 2004).]

[peter richards]

I think the McLeish fellow was on about how a poem should 'not mean, but be'. That could be a pretty damned slack excuse for being meaningless, but that wasn't what he meant, of course, and it's not a charge to be levelled at Aiyar's poem either.

Nevertheless I feel that this dances around and avoids the directly rhetorical. I may be wrong.

Certainly the declarative They cannot please us. leaves us without doubt. After that though, or at least after the opening section has further established our total lack of either sympathy or empathy for these creatures that we kill so horribly (even when they're dead they're still a bloody nuisance and we have to sweep them up), with the - initially mysterious - 'battlefield', just a teeny weeny bit of the anthropomorphic can squeeze in.

And then they're butterflies. I'm not sure I'd eat in a restaurant that was frying Fritillaries and Red Admirals on its ultra-violet toaster.

I think the whole poem - the holistic, if you like - lies there in making us identify with the dying moths. Ultimately we're looking either through or directly into the eyes of the bird man, with whom we empathise very strongly. The rhetoric is not so heavy handed as to mention what (or whom) the moths might otherwise allegorise.

I'm mystified by the mirror though, except that it's an excellent narrative/dramatic device, making you bring yourself into the poem. Why a given amount of beauty should make one reach for a mirror is less clear. Seeking to understand ones place in it all?

In any case I think that Aiyar - as it were - 'gets away with it', because this is not staccato sturm/drang rhetoric, but rather the lacework kind.

Well, that's my reading. Your structural analysis, Clive, I must read another million times. Thanks.

p

[Tim Murphy]

This strikes me as the most remarkable comment on a poem I have ever seen at the Sphere. I hope all our members will benefit from Clive's generosity in thinking so deeply and writing so sensitively about Shekhar's poem.

[oliver murray]

Yes, a remarkable commentary ideed, and I have learned a lot from it. Thank you, Clive. If I were Skekhhar, though, I think I would appreciate a suggestion as to whether this poem is viable in its present form, and, if so, how it can be made to work better. I didn't altogether get the bridging mirror bit, but I think it should be possible to fudge the problem of melted wax/actual contact with the flames, and, after all, we are talking about a myth here, something which couldn't have been factual either way, and which most people would take as an example of the metaphor "flew too near the flames". I agree it is not the limbs that are waxen, but this is relatively easily fixed, I think.

It is interesting to speculate that Shekhar may have started with the image of butterflies, but then substituted moths in order to distance and make the butterflies hypothetical. Because of my own personal views, I don't make any distinction between moths and butterflies, in regard to either their destruction or their beauty, but this is not to say anything against the poem - the writer takes a different view and this is fine.

Regards,

Oliver.

[Robt_Ward]

Oliver,

Over on the Non-Met board where this poem was first posted, I did a critique that delved into some of the issues you just raised. It seems pertinent to me to repost that here. If anyone disagrees, then please some moderator remove the post: I won't be upset...

*********************
Posted Jan 14, 2004 in Non-Met:

I'd like to comment on this poem at a fundamental (i.e. mythopoeic) level. Because Shekhar has chosen to bring the Icarus myth into the poem, we are justified in considering that the myth is somewhat central to the message he's conveying.

As someone else remarked, the Icarus myth carries a lot of baggage. It's inescapable. All myths do, it's the nature of a myth. So when we slip an overt mythological reference into a poem, we are well-advised to be aware of these "inserted subtexts" and to be absolutely certain they reinforce the overall theme, rather than muddle it up.

So what is the Icarus myth about? In a word, hubris: the condition of overweening pride or self-confidence. Hubris is the central concept of the great Greek tragedies — the Gods always strike down those who dare aspire too greatly. There's also, in the myth, a subtext of the pitfalls of defying "parental authority": Daedalus aspires to a "higher law", the right of man to be free. Icarus, however, disregards his father's explicit proscriptions against pushing that freedom too far. And he pays dearly for it.

Now, ignoring for a moment the first two stanzas of Moths, but just thinking of the title itself and the Icarus reference, we can conceptualize a very intriguing poem: the analogy of moth/flame to Icarus/sun. There's a hell of a lot of anthropomorphism in that, because to be reasonable the analogy would require either that Icarus was driven by forces beyond his control or that the moths are conscious of their "desire" and seek to extend their "freedom" beyond reasonable limits, but never mind that for now. Never mind it because this is not what Shekhar's poem is "about".

Instead, Shekhar gives us two stanzas "about" moths and butterflies, essentially borrowing from the Beauty and the Beast myth. Upon this he layers a battlefield analogy. Finally, he brings in a mirror, introducing what I take to be a reference to one or both of the following mythical themes: Narcissus and Medusa. Narcissus fits the "beauty" layer, Medusa suits the "battlefield" layer.

So far, in two stanzas, a lot of compaction of layers and meaning into a rather small bit of poetic real estate. Then, pow!... Out of left field, with no foreshadowing at all, comes Icarus with his tremendously compelling, even overpowering, baggage.

At this point, I'm forced to re-evaluate everything I've read in the light of this sudden change-of-course. This is not a bad thing, mind you: it's a time-honored rhetorical device, and an extremely effective one if well-deployed. In any case, coming in as it does at the end of the poem, and involving as it does such a powerful mythopoeic archetype (and a human one, to boot), the Icarus reference completely takes over the poem, there's no question of that. In order to derive the "meaning" of the poem, we are required to work backwards from this Icarus reference and adjust what came before based upon its presence.

And this is where the problem arises: exactly how do we interpret S1 & S2 in the light of the Icarus myth? For me, this is very confusing. Off the top of my head, the best I can come up with is that in some way Shekhar wants us to see the "classification" of things into beautiful/not beautiful as hubris in and of itself. Further, he's apparently arguing that the moths, in seeking the flame, are seeking beauty: and that we, by not honoring their deaths because they are not (in our eyes) beautiful, are committing a vanity so great that it is, in itself, an example of hubris as well.

But this, I admit, is a stretch. That's making a LOT of assumptions regarding Shekhar's intentions. A simpler assumption would be that the Icarus myth has been brought into the poem carelessly, without a full examination of the effect it has on what precedes it. Therefore, the poem's (in my eyes) conceptually murky and ultimately, for all its beauty, it does not succeed.

However, it could succeed. It just needs for Shekhar to examine it ruthlessly and reshape it to accentuate precisely what he's after so we can follow him a little better.

(robt)

[Fred Longworth]

Shekhar, please forgive me if I err in interpretation. For me, the aura of meaning surrounding this poem appears fairly clear.

Moths

They cannot please us.
We are irritated
by the frazzle of their ignition
against the heating-rod, weary
of sweeping their drab carcasses
from the battlefield.

If only they were butterflies –
how we would celebrate their doomed flight,
mourn each fabulous wing,
and then, being unable to bear too much beauty
without reaching for a mirror

There seems to be a profound cynicism, bordering on fatalism in the above. In the contrast of moths and butterflies, we see no difference in outcome: they all die ("drab carcasses," "doomed flight"). What differs is style and aesthetic. Butterflies have style and beauty; moths do not.

how inevitably we would recall
that long-ago boy
plunging into nothingness,
waxen limbs thrashing at the air,
a look of astonishment in those vivid eyes.

But of course, this poem uses moths and butterflies to illustrate, to reveal, something distinctly human. "Drab carcasses" and "doomed flight" are cognates to the poem's final three lines, where we encounter a human condition, the "plunge," as it were of a boy into the time-line of his life -- and death.

Here, there are contrasts as well as alignments. They will all die ("trashing at the air") but the boy is conscious ("vivid eyes") of his predicament. Unlike the insects, he is thrust into an existential "moment" which moves through a continuum of somethingness into an ultimate and final nothingness.

Since S1 has six lines, and S2 five, a final stanza with six lines would not be structurally disproportionate. If the poem leaves me dissatisfied, I suspect that disturbance might be put to bed with an additional line toward the end of the final stanza. Perhaps something more about that nothingness toward which the boy plunges.

Or perhaps a return to the "message" in S1 and S2, that it is not the ultimate outcome that makes a rich and fulfilled life differ from a plain, banal and defeated one, but rather style and beauty. I am reminded of an image I heard about some thirty-five years ago (don't recall the allusion, only the woman Jean Becht who shared it with me) in which at birth we are tossed into a canyon of enormous depth. Throughout our lives we fall and fall -- and then go "splat." Given this, the challenge is to fall gracefully.

In any case, very much enjoyed.

Fred Longworth

[Tim Love]

There are suggestions/evasions towards the end ("mirror", "that long-ago boy", "those [rather than 'his'] vivid eyes", etc) that make viable the idea that the narrator is thinking about his own past. "plunging into nothingness, waxen limbs thrashing at the air, a look of astonishment in those vivid eyes" sounds much like a birth. This might introduce more problems than it solves, but it helps explain the waxen limbs, and adds a death-birth association. The contrast of the black/bad/night of stanza 1 with the bright/beauty of stanza 2 calls to mind the innocence of the time before the Fall.

[Margaret Moore]

S,
I'm happy to join the chorus of praise. Loved the rhythms - suggestive of circling insects - and the association between 'frazzle' and 'ignition'. My only glitch was 'inevitably'- but I can't come up with a constructive suggestion about rephrasing. Apologies if someone else has. Didn't permit myself time for a careful read of all comments, as I feel faintly guilty these days when I'm not critting on Non-Met!
Best wishes,
Margaret.

[Rose Kelleher]

I like the poem too, of course, but mostly want to say thanks for this thread. I'm trying to expand my horizons a bit and develop a deeper appreciation for the things that make free verse good, and this is helpful.