Thanks to this, I've been reading Mew again. She gets better and better. Here's a poem of quiet despair:


May 1915

Let us remember Spring will come again
To the scorched, blackened woods, where the wounded trees
Wait with their old wise patience for the heavenly rain,
Sure of the sky: sure of the sea to send its healing breeze,
Sure of the sun, and even as to these
Surely the Spring, when God shall please,
Will come again like a divine surprise
To those who sit today with their great Dead, hands in their hands, eyes in their eyes
At one with Love, at one with Grief: blind to the scattered things and changing skies.

Thanks Marybeth, Mary, Alicia, and Tim for pointing out the lack of variety in my choice of poets for discussion, and for beginning to remedy it. This was something that I was aware of, but thought--and rightly so, obviously!--that others could help me out with it. I was not even aware of Charlotte Mew, and found her poetry instantly engaging. I have always loved Emily Dickinson, and, as I mention in my interview, her poem "Much madness is divinest sense" was the first poem that I voluntarily memorized. And thank you, Alicia, for reminding me of that sonnet by Browning.

It is true that I have historically been drawn, more, to white, male poets, probably because I am one, but that certainly doesn't mean that this discussion should focus primarily on them. Furthermore, as Tim pointed out, Rhina Espaillat, who is a dear friend of mine--actually, I consider her my "poetry mother"--has such a breadth of style in her writing, that, like Richard Wilbur, she can write from the very joyful to the very brooding, and I love her work. And as Alicia pointed out, we are focusing on poems, not poets, of quiet despair.

All in all, I would say that this thread is off to a wonderful start. And Roger, I absolutely agree with you that the very act of putting words on paper is an act of reaching out, an act of "compassion" in the sense of connection that I am using the word, and at odds with pure, solitary despair.

Tim, I need to take a closer look at your take on "Fern Hill," as well as your individual poems. I have been caught up with family life since I last posted.

Cheers!

Charlotte Mew is an unjustly neglected and tragic figure. I was introduced to her work by a 98 year old gentleman in his house beside the Delaware. He had been a famous transvestite in the 'Thirties, had made a number of films with his friends which are now properly archived. And I sat at his feet and heard his reedy old voice reading Mew from his first edition. I think she has been unfairly criticized for being derivative of Hardy, and certainly she was of his era and milieu, but she is an absolute original. Here is a link to a Mastery Thread Mary initiated in 2007: http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showth...w%2C+Ma stery

I eventually learned that all my seniors in the art knew her very well and revered her memory.

The Dickinson poem that encapsulates this best for me is 443:

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl (443)
Emily Dickinson


I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
Life's little duties do—precisely—
As the very least
Were infinite—to me—

I put new Blossoms in the Glass—
And throw the old—away—
I push a petal from my gown
That anchored there—I weigh
The time 'twill be till six o'clock
I have so much to do—
And yet—Existence—some way back—
Stopped—struck—my ticking—through—
We cannot put Ourself away
As a completed Man
Or Woman—When the Errand's done
We came to Flesh—upon—
There may be—Miles on Miles of Nought—
Of Action—sicker far—
To simulate—is stinging work—
To cover what we are
From Science—and from Surgery—
Too Telescopic Eyes
To bear on us unshaded—
For their—sake—not for Ours—
Twould start them—
We—could tremble—
But since we got a Bomb—
And held it in our Bosom—
Nay—Hold it—it is calm—

Therefore—we do life's labor—
Though life's Reward—be done—
With scrupulous exactness—
To hold our Senses—on—

It's such an incredibly apt expression of the voluminous energy required to maintain a game-face, some outer appearance of functionality.

Consider the implication of I weigh – in line 8. The speaker is heaviness itself.

And the sense of simply going through the motions, so much (nothing) to do, because:
Existence—some way back—
Stopped—struck—my ticking—through—

And ultimately the overriding idea that one will explode if the (stifling) routine is not rigorously followed.
Blows me away this one, truly.
.

And more current, from Alice Oswald's Dart, a really marvelous book.

Dart is a long poem that features local speakers/characters along the river Dart – some living, some historical or mythical, some imagined – all interacting along the river’s path from source to sea. There are brief marginal notes to indicate where the voice changes; some bits are based on AO’s recordings of locals and provide an authentic element of oral history. I love this section – the finality, the reduction, the loss, the sounds coupled to the underlying and permanent (quiet) silence:

John Edmunds, washed away 1840:

all day my voice is being washed away
out of a lapse in my throat
like after rain
little trails of soil-creep
loosen into streams

if I shout out,
if I shout in,
I am only as wide
as a word’s aperture

but listen! if you listen
I will move you a few known sounds
in a constant irregular pattern:
flocks of foxgloves spectating slightly bending . . .

o I wish I was slammicking home
in wet clothes, shrammed with cold and bivvering but

this is my voice
under the spickety leaves,
under the knee-nappered trees
rustling in its cubby-holes

and rolling me round, like a container
upturned and sounded through

and the silence pouring into what’s left maybe eighty
seconds

.

Our definitions of quiet despair and compassion differ somewhat, I expect, and I'm glad for a chance to have others broaden my view. I was intending to post "To My Wife" by J.V. Cunningham, but thought of this one by John Heath-Stubbs:


A Butterfly in October

In this college room where I teach, the servant,
This cool morning in late October,
Has kindly lit the electric fire for me.
As I sit and wait for my pupils, I am aware
Of a soft, dry rattling at the window-pane.
I think at first it is rain, or else
Twigs and leaves that are blown against the glass.
But now I perceive it as a butterfly
Desperately beating its fragile, marbled wings
Against an invisible, illogical barrier,
Trying to get out. Poor fool, you must have come indoors
Intending to hibernate in a fold of the curtains,
But now the warmth has restored you. There’s nothing for you out there,
No late chrysanthemums or autumn crocus
To yield you nectar, and the sun’s beams are pale.
You’d die -- perhaps tonight -- numbed and stiffened
By thirst and cold, or else a bird would grab you.
And yet you go on straining towards the light.
I catch you in my cupped palm (you do not struggle).
The sash lifted, I launch you to the air --
Since that’s what you so desperately seem to want.
To want? Small bundle of impulses and instincts,
Can there be any central spark that reason
Here discerns, to suffer or to will?
And yet I cannot think of you as mere
Cartesian automaton, no more
Than I can think so of myself. What can I do?
What can we ever do -- the weft and warp
Of all existence being so utterly shot through
With innocent and irremediable suffering?
So I deliver you to the stark airs of death --
But you will die free. So farewell, butterfly.

I really like the Mew poem Mary posted, and it makes a good starting point for my thoughts on the poetry of quiet despair. I find namely that I can’t quite get a grip on it. Whereas it’s clear in Jeff’s excellent essay above, it’s suddenly so much harder to find my own examples of the “genre”. In the Mew poem, there’s actually a lot of hope (spring will come again) but what makes it different from a regular poem of hope is that the hope comes first and the real picture of despair comes at the end; it’s the last picture we’re left with.

Looking at one of Jeff’s example (the Kees) there isn’t much hope at all in it. One poem that comes to mind as being full of despair with no hope (unless you count the concluding anger as somehow alive and therefore hopeful in a sense) is Nemerov’s “Vacuum”:
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.or...ate=2004/06/25

Another poem that might fit the genre is Frost’s “Acquainted with the night”. I’m not a huge fan of Frost, but I really like that poem. To me, it has a very quiet (too quiet?) despair in it.
http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/6334-Robe...With-The-Night

Now, what about poems with the more conventional formula of presenting despair first and then a hint or message of hope at the end? Would they be included in the genre? Some of Mary Karr’s poems come to mind. The one I really love is very quiet in its despair, but I still think it’s there. It’s called “Etching of the Plague Years”:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch....html?id=26991

In another poem by Mary Karr, the despair is more palpable. The title is “Field of Skulls”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=171884

And in a third poem by her, the despair is even more evident, and this poem could probably be put in the confessionalist bracket. “Limbo: Altered States”:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=171887

I really like Karr’s poems. All of them, of course, have that little note of hope or lightening at the very end, so the question is whether they do fit the poetry of quiet despair.

It's very exciting to see so many posts on this thread! Petra, thank you for all of the links! And thanks, everyone, for posting complete poems; that is very helpful! Of course, the the category "poetry of quiet despair" is something that we are making up, so what fits, and what doesn't fit in it, is for all of us in this forum to decide.

Now, for something a little different. In planning this even, Tim and I sent each other three poems to comment on—these are early poems of his, apparently-- and, originally, I had planned on commenting on all three of his in one post. However, I am such a huge fan of “The Blind” that I want to go ahead and post the poem, and my thoughts on it.

The Blind

Gunners a decade dead
wing through my father's mind
as he limps out to the blind
bundled against the wind.

By some ancestral code
fathers and sons don't break,
we each carry a load
of which we cannot speak.

Here we commit our dead
to the unyielding land
where broken windmills creak
and stricken ganders cry.

Father, the dog and I
are learning how to die
with our feet stuck in the muck
and our eyes trained on the sky.

T rhyme scheme is very important in this poem: notice up front that both stanzas 1 and 4 have very strong leading rhyme schemes, stanza 2 has a more conventional rhyme scheme, and stanza 3, on the surface, has no rhymes, but on closer investigation, all of the words in this stanza rhyme, or slant rhyme, with words in other stanzas. Furthermore, the 1st and 4th stanzas both have one word that slant rhymes with a word outside of the stanza.

Stanza 1: Stanza 1 presents the father as an ex-military man burdened with ghosts who is “limp(ing) out to the blind,” the blind being, in this case, a structure of brush, or something similar, in which hunters conceal themselves.

Stanza 2: father and son are each carrying a load, as in rifles, other hunting gear, and not speaking, which is the obvious part of the “ancestral code,” but the son also feels the hidden pain, or quiet despair, within the father, and it is also crucial to the code to not speak of this.

In stanza 3, literally, the hunters “commit their dead,” or shoot down birds (I assume) to the “unyielding land” and in this way symbolically shoot at the gunners flying in the father’s mind. There is a wildness to this activity, a kind of insanity, and there appears to be a deliberate sense of wildness created by the lack of rhymes within the stanza. Granted, each word rhymes with another word outside of the stanza, but henceforth the rhymes within stanzas have been heavy, directing the reader, and suddenly the reader is adrift in an “unyielding land” where “broken windmills creep” and “stricken ganders cry,” with no strong rhymes to guide him.

In stanza 4, however, we come back to the strong leading rhymes, and there is the critical contrast between “our feet stuck in the muck/and our eyes trained on the sky.” Although the gunners that haunt the father have been dead a decade, the father has infected his child with his own trauma, so that the son is now, like the father, obsessed with death. To emphasize how far reaching this virus goes, Murphy adds the detail of the dog also learning how to die, as if any creature who stays close to the father will catch his illness. Also, perhaps, in the narrator telling the father that he is “learning how to die,” the narrator is, in a despairing way, asking for recognition from the father, as the father only appears to recognize the dead. We are left, ultimately, with the image of the son as a mirror image of the father, his “feet stuck in the muck” and “eyes trained on the sky,” and perceive that this is the only way that the son can bond with the father, in this exercise that the boy perceives as “learning to die.”

Finally, while this is obvious in its way, I have to point out that the title is wonderful in its suggestion of multiple meanings: the blind is, first of all, simply the place where hunters conceal themselves. Additionally, though, the “the blind” could refer to the father who is blind to his own son, and only focused on gunners that have lived only in his head for at least a decade. Furthermore, the narrator could be “the blind,” in that he is limited by his father’s vision, and thus “learning how to die.” Finally, the dead mentioned in the poem could also be “the blind.” Others may find more possibilities for meaning in the title—these are simply the ones that occurred to me.

Thanks for sharing this with me, Tim—I hope my exposition has done it some justice!

Jeff

Yes, I think Roger has it right: "Almost no poetry is thoroughly happy." That reminds me of the joke about the man who complained bitterly about the food at his boarding house, because "it's so bad, and there's so little of it." That contradiction is at the heart of a dissatisfaction with life that is unreasoning and pretty much universal: we agree that it's full of trouble, and wish there were more of it.

The longing for childhood--or youth, or lost loves, or you name it--is the "so little of it" part of the complaint, the eternal desire for what's still missing or already gone, like Paradise or mornings on "Fern Hill," not because of its perfection (which we don't really know anything about) but because of its goneness, which allows us to gild it in retrospect.

Thomas's trick to writing a good poem about this is not to believe all of what he's saying, even while the gilding is going on, so that the apparent nostalgia falls apart eventually and becomes the truth almost against its own wishes: "I sang (because I didn't know any better!) in my chains (which I've always worn) like the sea (which isn't free either)."

I'm sorry my post has appeared out of place: it should have preceded Jeff's wonderful commentary on Tim's poem, which happens to be one of my favorites too, and yes, it is a poem of despair that comforts by communicating a common sorrow.