[Len Krisak]

Thanks for posting "That Light," which I find charming.
Now, since metricalistas tend to talk almost solely
about form,tone,rhyme, and other matters of technique,
would the group care to take some shots at possible
explication of this little text?

I'd be very curious to see the results.

[Richard Wakefield]

"That Light" is a lovely little poem, and one that must have been hard to get away with in the age when Modernist despair was in style. Even without the notation that it's intended as a Christmas poem, it seems to me, at least, unmistakably religious, but religious in a very restrained, uninsistent way. The metaphor of light for God's grace goes way back and doesn't need elaboration. This poem hints that in our pride -- or hubris -- at being able to make and extinguish light at our own will we've nearly blinded ourselves to some greater light. I think a religious theme works especially well in a formal poem because the form suggests an underlying order, and belief in an underlying order seems to me part of religious faith.
Richard

[Kate Benedict]

I did buy myself the Collected for Christmas and spent a shameful weekend in bed reading it once and some of it twice and some more than twice. Thank you, Alan, for introducing him to me. Now I note that a couple of Francis poems are featured in Carruth's well-known anthology, but they didn't lead me to ferret his work out (though one of those poems, "Juniper," is certainly fine).

I also prefer his earlier work, the quieter, darker poems, over the later humorous ones, though it is worth noting that in his Preface, RF expresses pleasure in his progressing from a serious young man to a frisky old one. He loosened up; it's a lesson.

Otherwise, though, my thought is that RF is not uneven at all; indeed, his very evenness may be a reason for his minor stature. He returned to the same subject matter again and again, over the decades, didn't he? Why, for example, after the fine early poem called "Juniper" did he bother to write, years later, the little ditty "Sing a Song of Juniper"? Or write an underwhelming poem about a toad when, years earlier, he had written a fine one about a frog? I also noted many echoes of Frost--at first, I wondered if Frost had stolen from Francis, but Frost is the older poet so I suppose not. According to Parini, the two were on friendly terms.

Still, so many riches! Let's hope Francis does get that centennial edition. Shall we sign a petition?

[Alan Sullivan]

Len and Richard, in the context of war's onset, that reference to lights going out is pithier than we might guess from our present vantage. Other work from that period indicates that Francis was gravely troubled about the state of the world.

Kate, I am very pleased that you have read Francis after seeing this discussion. It makes the whole project feel more worthwhile if even one poet discovers another she had not known before.

In his later years, as you note, Francis kept returning to the same themes, and his writing became increasingly thin. When he sought other themes, other effects, the results were unfortunate. At this stage of his life, hunger for notice had drawn Francis from his rural isolation. He even spent some months abroad. Writing of this period, I observed:

"Two more collections followed, in 1965 and 1972. Each incorporated a great deal of learned dross spun from the poet’s time in Europe. The Rome Prize had vaulted Francis into libraries and museums. They were not good places for him. Had such experiences befallen him in youth, he might have matured into a very different poet, more like Richard Wilbur, someone who has assimilated much of Western culture and woven it deftly into verse. Coming late to “Aphrodite as History” or “Picasso and Matisse,” Francis merely acquired a patina."

Francis is at his best evoking nature, reflecting on the human condition, and admiring young men, for whom he had an abiding but largely unsatisfied passion.

Alan Sullivan

[Richard Wakefield]

Alan, I like your observation about the historical context of putting out the lights. I can't remember who it was who said "The lights are going out all across Europe, and we'll not see them lighted again in our time," but I believe it's where Hemingway got the title for his first commercially published book. Of course, that historical allusion doesn't negate the possibility of a religious connotation as well. I have to go have another look at Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory" to see if he says anything about Francis.
Richard

[C.G. Macdonald]

I am glad folk had admiring words for “That Light.” I pooh-poohed it somewhat, largely to disguise my excessive pride in having stumbled upon a (for most intents and purposes) lost poem by someone I consider a major poet. Though it is close to probable that Francis had excised it from his Collected Poems, for whatever reason. Makes one wonder if there are many other uncollected poems out there. Have to straighten that out in time for the Centennial Edition (start circulating the petition).

I am, perhaps, even more pleased that Alan has set the time-frame for “late middle age” as falling between the ages of 64 and 72. Makes me feel like a young whippersnapper again. Just don’t let this slip out to those bean-counters at Social Security. And I will, under Alan’s recommendation, brave the pages of Francis’s “Valhalla” once more, though, from his description, it sounds more like WCW’s “Patterson” than anything I can think of by Frost.

I would also concur with Alan that Francis’s travel poems were not among his best work, but I want to generalize much more broadly. The, nowadays jet-borne, travel poem has become an all-too-common genre, and has become the literary equivalent of the dreaded and dreadful slide show. Don’t even get me started about East Coast writers who come out to California for a few weeks, and start dashing off odes to Redwood trees and the Golden Gate Bridge. Isn’t the best travel poem ever written “Sailing to Bysantium?” And I don’t think Yeats ever went there, much less in a sailboat. POET GO HOME!

And as Francis was an accomplished musician, had spent more time at Harvard than Frost, had traveled to Lebanon in his twenties, etc., to portray him as some New England Leonard Bast, crushed under a bookcase full of Foeder’s Travel Guides, seems a bit fanciful.

Open your Collected Poems to “Aphrodite in History” (pg.221), cited as an ebb point in Francis’s career. Above it is “Museum Vase,” anthologized in the recent Library of America Collection. Across the page from it is “Delicate the Toad,” included in the Longman Anthology. (Both of the poems are in the dissed three-word-line-in-three-line–stanzas form; work brilliantly, and do not seem anything like free-verse. “Delicate the Toad,” for example, can plausibly be scanned with two stresses per line, and is almost completely end-rhymed with subtle slants.) And the best poem visible, “Emergence,” was quoted lovingly in a recent issue of Potpourri (not by me, or anyone I know), and is one of Francis’s astonishingly observant nature poems. If this is a low tide in Francis’s writing, it is one revealing numerous tidepools and marvels.

I note you make a comparison of Francis to Wilbur. Isn’t Wilbur, incontestably, the most consistent, important Twentieth Century poet writing in English? His sort of consistency is not only atypical, it can also be somewhat problematic. Jarrell writes, too harshly I think, “Most of his poetry consents too easily to its own unnecessary limitations…Mr. Wilbur never goes too far, but he never goes far enough.” But if this is unfair to Wilbur, wanting him to be a kind of poet that he clearly isn’t, it is even more unjust to dismiss Francis’s formal and tonal variations as a sort of faddish lapse, a falling away from his true talents. Much that Francis learned during the writing of his “late middle age,” enriches the writing of, what we must concede, was his old age. Certainly he is a much more even poet in his sixties and seventies than Frost was, though he also never wrote anything quite as earthshaking as “Directive” or “The Most of It” in his extraordinarily productive later years.

Would like to respond to Len's request for an analysis of "That Light," but I have, perhaps, gone on too long, and am at any event being called away from Cyberspace be the necessities of the real world.




[This message has been edited by C.G. Macdonald (edited December 17, 2000).]

[Alan Sullivan]

C.G. thanks for taking the time to add these observations to a thread that has become, I think, the most interesting one yet on this board.

The anthologists pick from the weakest period. Go figure. But yes, in comparison with other work done under the same temporal and cultural stars, the chosen poems aren't bad. They just aren't up to the standard Francis set elsewhere.

I would join you in suspicion that Francis personally excluded "That Light" from the CCollected Poems. I surmise that his motivation would not be displeasure with the poem itself, but rather with the reactions of readers. I do not think the author intended the light to symbolize Christ. In his autobiography, <u>The Trouble with Francis</u>, the author discusses his alienation from Christianity at great length. If readers mistook his intent, that would have been reason enough for him to pull the poem.

Wilbur is, of course, very much a Christian poet. For that reason, and many others, I am more inclined to contrast than compare him with Francis. But he and Francis share one significant trait: retaining intimacy with the muse late in life. Considering how long he lived, and how well he wrote in his last years, it does not strike me as much of a stretch to call his seventh decade "late middle age."

Historians will probably call the Twentieth Century the Late Middle Ages.

Alan Sullivan

[Richard Wakefield]

Alan, it's possible that readers were (and are) too quick to equate Francis's "light" with Christ. I didn't intend anything that literal. Yet I am guilty of tending to read almost all formal poetry as an assertion, however subtle, of a belief in some underlying order to things. It's perfectly possible to be alienated from formal or traditional religion, as I was for a long while, yet retain a sense of transcendence, a strong suspicion that all is not random. I don't mean to claim any special knowledge about Francis, mind you; I know very little about his life and beliefs. But it doesn't seem to me that it pushes this poem very hard to take the light as a metaphor for spirit of some kind. Of course it's the natural, more or less eternal light of moon and stars, too. I think the very fact that we have to resort to biography to settle the question of what Francis "really" meant indicates that he was willing to leave it undetermined -- what's missing here isn't left out because he lacked the ability to put it in, had he so desired. Still, I can imagine a poet becoming frustrated with what seems like willful misreading, maybe even deciding to omit a perfectly good poem from his collected works rather than deal with it. I think I recall Frost taking a different tack with "The Road Not Taken": he pretty much let his careless readers interpret it as a paean to rugged individualism. Of course, he had the comfort of knowing that many readers knew better.
Richard

[Len Krisak]

Dear Alan and Richard,

yes, I think the almost Audenesque concern with
the approach of the war is clear, but I was also
looking for some other responses dealing with
perhaps the slightly more metaphysical (dare I
say theological) resonances.

Many thanks anyway!

[drchazan]

Originally posted by 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

I don't know - certainly if one is writing formal verse, or the subject matter calls for slightly arcane language, one can get away with "move not" even today, no?

Well, I hope so, but I'm being self-serving here. I've got a poem that uses that type of phrasing several times, the subject being Biblical. Tell you what, I'll put it up on the "Other Poetry" board and let you all decide for yourselves if it bothers you. I can't imagine how it would be changed.



------------------
One person's opinion.
Davida Chazan