[Alan Sullivan]

I don't think much of your proposed changes to the Francis poem, Caleb. I especially dislike "possibly dreaming." No, this is a perfect lyric as it stands. If it feels incomplete, that is because neither cattle nor poet have anything ultimate to offer. They simply exist.

Francis made frequent use of repetition, and I find very few instances where I would question him for it.

Richard, the directions south and west had special connotation in Chinese philosophy, in which Francis steeped himself during his later years. In the northern hemisphere these directions are naturally associated with warmth, light and the setting sun. I believe Francis intended these associations to hover in the background.

I have noticed that cattle do ordinarily tend to face the same way when it is windy.

Alan Sullivan

[Patti McCarty]

Just wanted to add that I read this when you first posted it, and keep coming back to it. Have put "Late Fire, Late Snow" on my Christmas list. Thanks for introducing me to Mr. Francis. I look forward to reading more of his work.

Patti

[Richard Wakefield]

Alan, I like the idea that the directions south and west have special significance, and I guess we don't even need Chinese philosophy to figure it out -- although it's not a big surprise that someone would have codified what nature hints: the directions that connote warmth and the movement of the sun. So in the poem we have cattle "naturally" enacting something that human beings need to be taught. If we take it that way, then it's even more important that the poem doesn't insist upon any meaning, including that one, because to do so would negate the theme.
Richard

[Caleb Murdock]

Well, nobody liked my changes. But Francis loses me at "Now they stand gazing, they stand gazing." He takes repetition one step too far at that point.

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited December 07, 2000).]

[Alan Sullivan]

Caleb, this is Robert Francis. Why do you keep saying Hope? I agree that in another poem, by another author, that line would probably be too much of a muchness. But I cannot deny it to Francis.

Alan

[Caleb Murdock]

Sorry, I was just getting my names confused. I'm new to both of them.

It's the new color scheme -- it makes my head spin.

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited December 07, 2000).]

[Len Krisak]

I like Francis, too.

But Lord how I do NOT like that "move not."

[Alan Sullivan]

That bothered me a little, Len, until I reflected that the poem as written by an old man about 1970. As late as 1960, when JFK said in his inaugural, "Ask not what your country can do for you..." that construction was considered acceptable. It does sound fusty now, but I wish it didn't. We have lost something.

Alan

[C.G. Macdonald]

Kudos to you, Mr. Sullivan, for posting two poems by Robert Francis under the mastery heading. I have some comments and quibbles (I think you may have been too judicious in your praise). And, if we non-commentators may be permitted, I’ve included a poem of his. When I cite a poem from Francis, I’ve included page numbers from his “Collected Poems,” because inexplicably it does not include an alphabetical listing of titles or first lines. But anyone who gives a rat’s rear about formalism and/or twentieth century poetry ought to get themselves a copy of it for Christmas, if they don’t already have one.

To begin with, I thought that was an excellent self-quote about Francis as a model for new formalists seeking a more relaxed use of form, and would be interested in reading the rest of the article, i.e. where can it be found? Francis not only had a relaxed and natural ear for meter, he also was winningly adventurous with form; “Silent Poem” (pg. 240) just one example of many. He always seems to innovate for the sake of the poem, rather than mere novelty.

I admire both of the poems you printed, but they seem to show Francis in his more subdued mode. Personally, I enjoy some of his more forceful or extravagant works—“Diver” (pg. 29), “The Two Uses” (pg. 37), “Waif” (pg. 41), “Dwight” (pg. 45), “If We Had Known” (pg. 137), “Boy Sleeping” (pg. 142), “White Sunday Morning” (pg.146), “What Has to Be” (pg. 160), “Swimmer” (pg. 184), “Waxwings” (pg.188), “Old Man’s Confession of Faith” (pg. 217), “Comedian Body” (pg. 245), and “Spell” (pg. 271). Though looking over my own list, I seem to have slighted his lovingly observant nature poetry.

Perhaps my biggest difference would concern your characterization of Francis’s work as uneven. Though that was my initial reaction on going through his work, I’ve found on subsequent rereading that many of what I took to be lesser poems would open up to me. I think there is little of his to jettison, though I generally skip over his single long poem, “Valhalla,” which seems lacking in narrative drive. Among his generation, directly following the Moderns, everyone seems to have been conscious of having been overshadowed. But of that generation, Hart Crane seems the only other poet to shoot out of the dimness with a stature commensurate to Francis. Certainly he is a far better poet than,say, e.e. cummings.

Francis’s one-hundredth birthday is next year, and isn’t it time for his publisher to fold Late Fires into the Collected Poems, as they are of a piece. Add an introduction by somebody of Wilburesque stature—maybe Paul Muldoon if they want a young lion. Muldoon includes a “Remind Me of Apples” (pg. 178) reference in his “The More a Man has the More a Man Wants,” and his extraordinary nonce sonnets owe an evident debt to Francis’s brilliant tweaking of the form. “Ritual” (pg. 199) is an especially fine one, and with it’s varying line lengths and extremely slanty rhymes it took me quite a number of revisits to realize I was reading a sonnet, though I always felt it was a subtly magnificent poem.

The poem of his I include is not one of his best. As far as I know, he did not include it in any of his books, perhaps because it is more conventional in style and sentiment that most of his work. I found it, as a Christmas postcard, tucked into a first edition of his first book, Stand With Me Here. It was originally published in the Christian Science Monitor, but I haven’t found it in the Collected Poems or elsewhere:

THAT LIGHT


The lights go out one after one
And others may be going soon,
But not the stars and not the sun
And not the little mirror-moon.

The light man makes man may put out
But there is light he cannot dim,
And in the midnight of his doubt
That light will still shine down on him.

Robert Francis Christmas 1940




[This message has been edited by C.G. Macdonald (edited December 14, 2000).]

[Alan Sullivan]

C.G., I'm glad there's yet another fellow enthusiast of Francis on the board. The essay from which I quoted has sat on my shelf the last two years, awaiting revision. I finally sent it out a couple of weeks ago. I fear it shall be some time before it appears. My essay on Wilbur is only now about to appear in The Sewanee Review, after sitting on their shelf for two years.

I find the unevenness of Francis to be most pronounced in his late middle age, when he tried responding to the ascendency of free verse by writing unpunctuated poems in three-word lines. In his final years he returned to the limpid style of his youth.

You might review "Valhalla," which to my mind compares well with the more conventional narratives of Frost. While it is true that this seventy-page work lacks "narrative drive," it has instead the quality of a mosaic, assembled from fragments that I call "lyric moments" because each one could just as well have been the germ of a short poem.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

Alan Sullivan