Sara Teasdale
 

Another woman poet who should not be forgotten but who is sadly out of the anthologies and out of print, as far as I know, these days, is Sara Teasdale. From the little that I know of her biography, Teasdale suffered from depression much of her life and finally committed suicide in 1933. While Teasdale did not constantly write out despair, when she did do so, she wrote as one who knew the terrain well.

Here are two excerpts from "II. Interlude: Songs Out of Sorrow" from her "Love Songs" (1917):

I. Spirit's House

From naked stones of agony
I will build a house for me;
As a mason all alone
I will raise it, stone by stone,
And every stone where I have bled
Will show a sign of dusky red.
I have not gone the way in vain,
For I have good of all my pain;
My spirit's quiet house will be
Built of naked stones I trod
On roads where I lost sight of God.

IV. In a Burying Ground

This is the spot where I will lie
When life has had enough of me,
These are the grasses that will blow
Above me like a living sea.

These gay old lilies will not shrink
To draw their life from death of mine,
And I will give my body's fire
To make blue flowers on this vine.

"O Soul," I said, "have you no tears?
Was not the body dear to you?"
I heard my soul say carelessly,
"The myrtle flowers will grow more blue."

Thanks for the Larkin discussion, Jeff. I'm still hunting for another Larkin poem that I think is relevant background to "Home is So Sad"

Here's another very, very dark Larkin poem, which starts out with noisy complaint and decrescendos to plain hopelessness:

The Life with a Hole in It

When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
But you've always done what you want,
You always get your way
- A perfectly vile and foul
Inversion of all that's been.
What the old ratbags mean
Is I've never done what I don't.

So the shit in the shuttered chateau
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod
(Six kids, and the wife in pod,
And her parents coming to stay)...

Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you'll get. Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Of havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly. Years.

Unlike "Aubade" which has my sympathy even though I don't feel the same terror, I feel resistance toward "Life with a Hole in It." I find myself asking whether he really had the right to this hopelessness, or this much detestation of his lot. It's been true of the poems posted so far--for me, at least--that they pull me in because I'm in sympathy with the feeling expressed. This one does grab me, but in a kind of unwilling fascination.

Kevin, you can be in despair and fight back.


If We Must Die

BY CLAUDE MCKAY

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Jeff, that "Aubade" one is a good example of how I feel about this sort of poetry. I find it really quite disgusting. Especially lines like:

Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

I think this is an insult against life itself, wherever it came from. If that's all this man can think about, let him have his misery.

@ Mary - McKay's poem isn't the sort of despair I'm talking about. That is about being in a hopeless situation, not thinking the whole world is hopeless like Larkin.

Misery shared is misery halved, they say. I don't know what Larkin thought about, Kevin, but while he favored darker hues, the pitch black you object to wasn't the only color in his palette. Perhaps one reason he could write with such thoughts in his head was because he spoke his fear out loud; perhaps the reason someone else can stand up to it is because he spoke their fear out loud. "Aubade" is closer to the Slough of Despond than the Wood of Suicides, but I don't think he was mired there. If he had been, if he skulked around only wearing deepest black, moaning, it would be like the straight line of some joke, like Emmeline Grangerford in Huckleberry Finn.

Here's a poem where Larkin considers and skewers a writer's point of view, perhaps to some extent his own:

A Writer

'Interesting but futile,' said his diary,
Where day by day his movements were recorded
And nothing but his loves received inquiry;
He knew, of course, no actions were rewarded,
There were no prizes: though the eye could see
Wide beauty in a motion or a pause,
It need expect no lasting salary
Beyond the bowel's momentary applause.

He lived for years and never was surprised:
A member of his foolish, lying race
Explained away their vices: realised
It was a gift that he possessed alone:
To look the world directly in the face;
The face he did not see to be his own.



On another note, thank you for the poems by Sara Teasedale, Jeff. Here's another one, which may not be quite despairing enough for this thread:


Moon's Ending

Moon, worn thin to the width of a quill,
xxxIn the dawn clouds flying,
How good to go, light into light, and still
xxxGiving light, dying.

[quote=Kevin Corbett;155250]Jeff, that "Aubade" one is a good example of how I feel about this sort of poetry. I find it really quite disgusting. Especially lines like:

Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

I think this is an insult against life itself, wherever it came from. If that's all this man can think about, let him have his misery.]

For anyone who read my original reply to this post, please know that I am detracting it because I realized that I found myself defending Larkin, and this thread, which needs no defending.

I can reduce everything important that I had to say to a simple question:
Keven, if this is truly how you really feel, then why do you keep posting on this thread?

For me, this be the Larkin where quiet despair assumes, as it seems to in all the great poems of quiet despair (like Wordsworth's Intimations Ode), magnificence and momentous significance and infinite possibility, and shows how the dark night of the soul, which is how I'd define 'quiet despair' builds the courage to die, to give over, to let go. Paradoxically, when everything seems gone, everything seems there.

Love, We Must Part Now by Philip Larkin


Love, we must part now: do not let it be
Calamitous and bitter. In the past
There has been too much moonlight and self-pity:
Let us have done with it: for now at last
Never has sun more boldly paced the sky,
Never were hearts more eager to be free,
To kick down worlds, lash forests; you and I
No longer hold them; we are husks, that see
The grain going forward to a different use.

There is regret. Always, there is regret.
But it is better that our lives unloose,
As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,
Break from an estuary with their courses set,
And waving part, and waving drop from sight.


And bring out Josh Menhigan! One of my all-time faves:

Cold Turkey

They’re over now forever, the long dances.
Our woods are quiet. The god is gone tonight.
Our girls, good girls, have shaken off their trances.
They’re over now forever, the long dances.
Only the moonlight, sober and real, advances
over our hills to touch my head with white.
They’re over now forever, the long dances.
Our woods are quiet. The god is gone tonight.

Joshua Mehigan
 

Cally,

You just set up, perfectly, my last entry for this thread: that on one of my best friends, Josh Mehigan. I want to give a little background on how we met and what Josh has taught me as a poet, and then move into an analysis of his poem “The Abject Bed.”

13 years ago, at 26, I was sitting at a lunch table at the 3rd West Chester Poetry conference. Uncharacteristically, I was actually the center of attention for a few minutes, leading a discussion on various poets, some of them well known, others more obscure, and at some point I brought up Weldon Kees, a poet whom I had just discovered a few months before the conference. Suddenly the quiet, hunched figure who was dressed in all black, and looked to be about my age, spoke up. It became clear, within moments, that he knew far more about Weldon Kees than me or anyone else at the table. I instantly grew fascinated. After he said his piece about Kees, though, Josh said little else until the others cleared out.

When everyone else was gone, I looked at Josh, still not knowing his name, and, thinking back on how talkative I had been, offered “I hope you don’t think I’m some gregarious asshole or something.”

Josh replied amiably, “Oh, no, that’s okay. I’m just socially retarded.” We became friends on the spot, trading sheafs of poems and favorite poets, some of whom we had in common, such as Philip Larkin and Edwin Arlington Robinson, as well as others that were peculiar to one or the other of us, as was Thomas Lovell Beddoes in my case.

Josh was 27 when we met, but about to have a birthday, as he always has at West Chester. So, he was approximately a year and a half older than me in age. Reading his poetry, though, I felt that he could have been a decade older. He was, honestly, the first poet whom I ever met whom I thought, consciously “He should get a book published. Before me. He deserves it.” Many of the poems that were to appear in “The Optimist” were in that original sheaf that he gave me, in final form.

An important side note is that Josh and I both, independently, met Rhina Espaillat at that third conference in 1997. Both of us bought her first book, “Lapsing to Grace,” out of a box she had brought with her, and shared our amazement at how good she was. Little did we know how well the next 13 years would bear our judgment out…

When Tim Murphy started this thread, he had intended it to be a back and forth between Josh, Tim, and me, as he recognized a thread of “quiet despair” that ran through the work of Josh and me, as well as some of his own earlier work. I have to say, though, that while Josh and I have always shared an affinity for one another’s work, our writing styles are extremely different. The common thread between us, I think, as opposed to despair, is disillusionment. When I was enjoying many poems in “The Optimist” again in order to find a poem that well represented “quiet despair,” what I found, aside from “The Abject Bed,” were poems of disillusionment. I think, at a deep level, Josh and I share Weldon Kees’ sense in “Early Winter” that “What we have learned is not what we were told.”

I can’t possibly summarize everything that Josh has taught me over the last 13 years, but I do want to share three things that have become crucial to me as a publishing poet. The first is that Josh has been the most significant influence on me in teaching me what I think of as “close writing.” We’ve all heard of “close readings” of poems, but Josh, in his comments to me on poems, slowly taught me to weigh every single word I used in terms of whether or not it was the best word, and to be the “best word” it had to fit the best in terms of the meaning, the meter, the rhythm, the overall line, and the overall poem. This was not something likely to be accomplished in one task.

Which brings me to the second thing that Josh taught me: revise obsessively. As a writer, Josh embodies the notion that it is better to keep revising the same poem until it is as close to perfection as it can be than to write more poems. He was the first person ever to ask me “Have you ever continued revising poems after they have been published?” Since then, I have; before that, I wouldn’t have considered it.

Finally, Josh taught me, through example, what it was like to have a reader whom I could truly trust with my work. At the time I first started showing him my poems and asking for feedback, I was doing the same with several other people, and was often disappointed by the feedback, not because it was negative—it usually was a mixture of positive and negative—but because I didn’t know what to do with it. Josh was the first fellow poet my own age who read my poems and gave me feedback as if he were peering out from between the lines of the poems themselves. He truly understood them, and for that I owe him a great debt. Despite having the same fragile ego of any young writer, I never grew resentful at Josh over comments about my poems because I knew that he understood what I was trying to say. That was, and still is, invaluable.

And now, for his poem:

The Abject Bed

She couldn't do a thing, could only stare
As the white frocks carried her husband out,
Up from the abject bed at last. Nowhere
Were friends so kind, she heard herself declare
Before the costly funeral; though, throughout,
She couldn't do a thing, could only stare.

She mourned her proper year. But then despair
Was packed away so she could court self-doubt
As, up from bed at last, she found nowhere
Hired one for seeming proper or debonair,
And pay was nil for being the most devout.
She could do nothing! so, she'd sit and stare
At classifieds until her child was there,
Driving her to the store.

Years went that route,
From bed to store and back at last, nowhere
To go but round and round, no need to wear
More than a robe till life was carried out
And she could do her thing, could finally stare
Up from the abject bed, at last, nowhere.


The first thing to point out about this poem, which would be obvious if Josh had not used unconventional line breaks, is that it is a villanelle. If a reader doesn’t recognize this, the brilliant way that poet plays upon the repetends will be far more hidden, and these repetends themselves convey the quiet despair of the poem in themselves:

“She couldn’t do a thing, could only stare”

“Up from the abject bed at last. Nowhere”

Initially introduced, these lines refer to the shock of grief, which is emphasized by the end of line 3 and line 4: “Nowhere / Were friends so kind, she heard herself declare.” That she hears herself declare a platitude such as this reveals the depersonalization that is common in grief, when someone is simply going through the motions of living, and so far removed from the waves of grief inside herself that she is nearly outside of herself. And her internal paralysis is further emphasized by the repetend in line 6, in which the poet states, that, throughout the funeral, “She couldn't do a thing, could only stare.”

Lines 7 and 8 underscore the disillusionment, in the poet’s perspective, even with such a sensitive issue as grieving and the despair that accompanies it:

“She mourned her proper year. But then despair
Was packed away so she could court self-doubt”

This reader gets the sense, from the word “proper,” and from despair being “packed away,” that all of the elements of grieving, while not entirely inauthentic, were, in a sense, simply cultural practice. And when the woman is done with this, rather than entering something better, she enters into self-doubt, finding that what she has been taught was important is worthless, monetarily speaking.

Given that this is a brief analysis of the poem, I am going to skip ahead to the final three and a half lines of the poem. The lines pack the greatest punch, and, again, make a different, and unified use of the repetends, all of which to combine to make the poem, and the poem as a villanelle successful:

“no need to wear
More than a robe till life was carried out
And she could do her thing, could finally stare
Up from the abject bed, at last, nowhere.”

Now the situation is reversed from the beginning of the poem: the woman, rather than the husband, is dead, and thus her inability to do anything but stare is appropriate. And perhaps the most despairing note in the poem is the addition, immediately prior to “nowhere” in the final line, of “at last.” This two word phrase brings home the reality that this woman has been waiting for years simply to die, to be, at last, nowhere, as she simply has no place in the world anymore.


Note: This will most likely be my final entry in this thread, as I believe the thread ends tomorrow. I am happy to end it with a tribute to my long time friend Josh. If I said more about our friendship than the villanelle, it is only because 1) I got carried away with the first task, and 2) it is 11:00pm now. Consider my brief analysis an introduction to a poem that is well worth digging into further.

Cheers!
Jeff

Kevin’s comment on Larkin’s “Aubade” made me think on why I have never liked that poem either. I suppose it’s the whining narcissism of it that strikes me as fundamentally dull and disingenuous.

There is plenty of despair in Robinson Jeffers; in this famous poem of his, the source of the despair is the isolated Cartesian mind-world split, which is only implicit in the Larkin:

Science

Man, introverted man, having crossed
In passage and but a little with the nature of things this latter
century
Has begot giants; but being taken up
Like a maniac with self-love and inward conflicts cannot manage
his hybrids.
Being used to deal with edgeless dreams,
Now he's bred knives on nature turns them also inward: they
have thirsty points though.
His mind forebodes his own destruction;
Actaeon who saw the goddess naked among leaves and his hounds
tore him.
A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle,
A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infinitely
little too much?

Thanks, Jeff, for your reflections on Josh. And thanks to everyone who has participated in the eight (!) pages of this discussion. The last two summers we had Light Verse Bake-offs, and this was certainly a sobering antidote to those discussions. I'm particularly pleased by all the excellent poems posted here with which I was unfamiliar, as well as the deserved attention to old favorites.