Anne Sexton’s Early Poems

Reading Richard Wright’s complete poems last week, despite the hours it consumed, I was impressed with how good it felt to be immersed in his poetry, in his life. The experience empowered me to re-examine my own life, to discover my own symbols, and to re-discover the themes of my own life.

Unfortunately, reading Selected Poems of Anne Sexton did not produce the same feeling. At times I found it difficult just to continue reading. At times I felt exactly the way I used feel when listening to Alana Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Stop, before I slash my wrists!! Perhaps, though, it was more like taking pain pills. In small doses they provide blessed relief from pain; in large doses they result in hallucinogenic nightmares.

Simply put, I prefer Anne Sexton in small doses. Some of her poems, ones I’ve previously cited on this blog, for instance, are among my favorite poems. Other poems seem to offer genuine insight into mental illness and its causes. The best of her poems capture the religious doubts many of us have endured in our spiritual journey. Too many of the poems, though, seem overly melodramatic, overly depressing, or, worst of all, simply irrelevant to my life.

However, one theme I could consistently identify with in the earlier poems was the search for self-identity. Man or woman, this is a search we all have to make. Being a man, I suspect that this search may be even harder for women in our society because society has traditionally denied women the same freedom it gives to men:

Self in 1958

What is reality?

I am a plaster doll; I pose

with eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall

upon some shellacked and grinning person,

eyes that open, blue, steel, and close.

Am I approximately an I. Magnin transplant?

I have hair, black angel,

black angel-stuffing to comb,

nylon legs, luminous arms

and some advertised clothes.

I live in a doll’s house

with four chairs,

a counterfeit table, a flat roof

and a big front door.

Many have come to such a small crossroad.

There is an iron bed,

(Life enlarges, life takes aim)

a cardboard floor,

windows that flash open on someone’s city,

and little more.

Someone plays with me,

plants me in the all-electric kitchen,

Is this what Mrs. Rombauer said?

Someone pretends with me –

I am walled in solid by their noise –

or puts me upon their straight bed.

They think I am me!

Their warmth? Their warmth is not a friend!

They pry my mouth for their cups of gin

and their stale bread.

What is reality

to this synthetic doll

who should smile, who should shift gears,

should spring the doors open in a wholesome disorder,

and have no evidence of ruin or fears?

But I would cry,

rooted into the wall that

was once my mother,

if I could remember how

and if I had the tears.

Today we’re all very conscious of the Barbie Doll stereotype, so it should come as no surprise that Sexton felt pressured to become an eye-fluttering, smiling “plaster doll,” who dressed in the proper I Magnin clothes. Nor should it come as a surprise that she felt pressured to become a “homemaker” in the suburbs. Forced into these synthetic “roles,” is it surprising that she questions reality, or is it surprising that more women didn’t question it?

As an ex-high-school teacher, I am all too aware just how brutal this search for identity is when there is constant pressure to conform to an image that doesn’t fit you. Much to my consternation, I have had delightfully bright, attractive teenage girls reveal to me that they have never felt accepted in high school, that they don’t identify with their class or with their school, all because they felt too bright, because they didn’t fit the teenage ideal. As a parent, I resisted the pressure to treat my daughter differently than my son, reasoning that both would be confronted with similar life crises that demanded strength of character. Sometimes I still feel guilty about that, but I would probably do the same thing all over again.

This question of what is reality is carried another step further in “Her Kind,” where Sexton recognizes the different roles that she has played in her life, though none of them ultimately represent who she truly is:

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves;

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.

In all three stanzas, the narrator envisions herself as a “witch,” a symbol Sexton uses throughout her poetry to represent female alienation from society. The first stanza presents the traditional image of a witch flying over the rooftops dreaming of evil. But what person hasn’t roamed the night, lonely, dreaming of “evil,” or at least dreaming of “love.” In the second stanza the narrator imagines herself as a housewife, but as a housewife living in a cave who unhappily serves “worms and elves.” Finally, the witch is burned at the stake after being publicly embarrassed by being hauled “nude” through the village in cart. These seem to represent the narrator’s feeling that she is less than a woman, that she is misunderstood, and that she wants to die. Talking about herself in the third person like this, “her kind,” instead of “my kind,” also indicates that the narrator lacks a true sense of identity.

An even more dramatic statement of this alienation is found in “Consorting with Angels.”

Consorting with Angels

I was tired of being a woman,

tired of the spoons and the pots,

tired of my mouth and my breasts,

tired of the cosmetics and the silks.

There were still men who sat at my table,

circled around the bowl I offered up.

The bowl was filled with purple grapes

and the flies hovered in for the scent

and even my father came with his white bone.

But I was tired of the gender of things.

Last night I had a dream

and I said to it …

"You are the answer.

You will outlive my husband and my father."

In that dream there was a city made of chains

where Joan was put to death in man’s clothes

and the nature of the angels went unexplained,

no two made in the same species,

one with a nose, one with an ear in its hand,

one chewing a star and recording its orbit,

each one like a poem obeying itself,

performing God’s functions, a people apart.

"You are the answer,"

I said, and entered,

lying down on the gates of the city.

Then the chains were fastened around me

and I lost my common gender and my final aspect.

Adam was on the left of me

and Eve was on the right of me,

both thoroughly inconsistent with the world of reason.

We wove our arms together

and rode under the sun.

I was not a woman anymore,

not one thing or the other.

0 daughters of Jerusalem,

the king has brought me into his chamber.

I am black and I am beautiful.

I’ve been opened and undressed.

I have no arms or legs.

I’m all one skin like a fish.

I’m no more a woman

than Christ was a man.

Though the theme is similar to the one in “Self in 1958,” the images here are much more dramatic, dynamic, and confusing. Though the first stanza seems relatively traditional, the repetition of “tired” and the images that suggest sexism at its worst, particularly the reference to possible incest, make an effective introduction to the more radical images that follow. The dream in the second stanza where Joan of Arc is crucified for taking on a man’s role and where strange, unique angels appear transitions nicely to the third stanza where the narrator is “chained” between Adam and Eve (is this one of those “deep images”? that Sexton acquired through her friendship with Richard Wright?), and somehow is “not a woman” anymore, is both male and female, or neither. The poem climaxes with the narrator being transformed into a non-sexual “fish,” a traditional symbol Christ often found on the back of cars, and the heretical, at least when this poem was written, suggestion that Christ, God, was neither man nor a woman. Now I don’t find this too shocking because I doubt that the human “soul” has any sexual orientation, but it’s a daring metaphor, none the less.

Thank God most of us have not suffered the same degree of alienation described in these poems, but we have all suffered enough alienation to empathize with Sexton’s feelings and those of others who suffer the same feelings. At the very least, we should come away with an understanding of how our societal values, how our stereotyping, engender these feelings in others.

Anne Sexton Part I

We’re going to start the week with a review of Anne Sexton’s poetry by Diane McCormick who will be contributing to this blog regularly for awhile. Hopefully, I’ll post my review of more Sexton poems tomorrow, though I’m running a little late because of a follow-up surgery last week, a delightful grandson’s birthday, and the sheer amount of time it took to read Richard Wright’s book last week.

*********************

The Massachusetts born poet Anne Sexton, 1928-1974, could only briefly be described as the thwarted mother and housewife of the 1950s, stifled at home unable to make her creativity known to the outside world, because before she died she had won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a full professorship at Boston College.

It is true she never received a college degree, but Anne wrote her way into the acquaintance of lovers, critics, fellow poets, and psychiatrists.

The best sources of information about her life come from Anne Sexton: a Biography written by Diane Wood Middlebrook, professor of English, Stanford University, and the foreword to The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton, written by long-time friend and fellow poet Maxine Kumin. Two web sites offer additional background, the Diane Middlebrook site and A Brief Biography of the Life of Anne Sexton. There are other web sites that discuss Anne Sexton, but these two seem the best. There is also The Academy of American Poets.

To say Anne Sexton was complex, controversial, and confessional only begins the conversation about her. She appears to have begun her life as an indifferent student who married young and gave birth to a daughter at the age of 25. Her mental illness may have begun with post partum depression, but she has also been called schizophrenic. Alcoholism and drug addiction contributed to her problems. So far I have not seen a picture of her without a cigarette in her hand.

At the age of 29 she began to write poetry at the suggestion of her therapist, a treatment program she followed the rest of her life, but she was hardly the quiet patient, writing to calm her fears and anxieties. She sought attention, doing lectures accompanied by her own rock band, “Her Kind.” Audio samples of her readings are available on the net at the Diane Middlebrook site.

Her poems were often challenged as just too confessional. Readers need to make up their own minds now that we are beyond the 1950s and 60s. Pick up The Complete Poems. There is something there for everyone. A sample follows of some of her work.

I know Loren has already written about “Courage,” but I have to add my own words because it is a favorite of mine.

Courage

It is in the small things we see it.

The child’s first step,

as awesome as an earthquake.

The first time you rode a bike,

wallowing up the sidewalk.

The first spanking when your heart

went on a journey all alone.

When they called you crybaby

or poor or fatty or crazy

and made you into an alien,

you drank their acid

and concealed it.

Later,

if you faced the death of bombs and bullets

you did not do it with a banner,

you did it with only a hat to

cover your heart.

You did not fondle the weakness inside you

though it was there.

Your courage was a small coal

that you kept swallowing.

If your buddy saved you

and died himself in so doing,

then his courage was not courage,

it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,

if you have endured a great despair,

then you did it alone,

getting a transfusion from the fire,

picking the scabs off your heart,

then wringing it out like a sock.

Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,

you gave it a back rub

and then you covered it with a blanket

and after it had slept a while

it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,

when you face old age and its natural conclusion

your courage will still be shown in the little ways,

each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,

those you love will live in a fever of love,

and you’ll bargain with the calendar

and at the last moment

when death opens the back door

you’ll put on your carpet slippers

and stride out.

Those of us “sturdy for common things” as William Stafford wrote, can continue to feel rewarded in Anne Sexton’s “Courage.”

For it takes courage to do the common things we do at every time in our lives. Imagine the courage it took to make that first step, an event “as awesome as an earthquake.” Or the first time we ride a bike, “wallowing up the sidewalk.”

The stanza continues to portray our courage in more introspective, less physical ways–perhaps times when we needed courage most of all, when we were spanked, instantly separated from a parent who was supposed to only hug us, or when we were teased, called poor or f ¯atty or crazy. “You drank their acid and concealed it. Courage gave us strength to conceal the sting of words flung in our faces.

The next stanza refers to the courage soldiers exhibit on the battlefield, references brought to Sexton’s mind from the Korean War in which her husband was a participant. The men faced the “death of bombs and bullets” stoically, with only a hat to cover your heart.” Courage on the battlefield was a small coal swallowed to keep alive. Then if a buddy dies saving you, his courage is elevated to love as simple as “shaving soap.”

These metaphors and personifications are the life’s blood of Sexton’s poems, the words, “as awesome as an earthquake,” “wallowing up the sidewalk,” “heart went on a journey all alone,” “drank their acid,” “courage was a small coal,” “love as simple as shaving soap,” pull the reader into her mind. These are extraordinary images of ordinary things–taking a first step, riding a bike, receiving a spanking, being teased, fighting a war, saving a buddy.

The last two stanzas are just as rich. We ordinary folk show courage when we endure despair, get “a transfusion from the fire, picking the scabs off your heart, then wring it out like a sock.” The stanza ends with the extended metaphor of caring for an infant, powdering, rubbing its back, putting it to sleep to wake to the “wings of roses…transformed.”

At the end of life we are the most courageous of all. In the spring we will renew ourselves as long as we can, sharpening our swords, to fight for life; we will love even more and bargain with the calendar. Finally when we can’t hang on anymore, we will put on our “carpet slippers and stride [not limp or crawl or sneak but stride] out.”

The sharpness of the images, the originality are unique but exact. Few can duplicate her imagery, but we can read and appreciate her work.

“Courage” is found in her book of poems entitled, The Awful Rowing Toward God, the last book published during Sexton’s life. Sexton wrote nine books of poetry, the titles of which give some insight into the woman: To Bedlam and Part Way Back, All My Pretty Ones (Macduff’s line from Macbeth upon learning Macbeth has slaughtered his entire family); Live or Die, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967; Love Poems, Transformations, The Book of Folly,The Death Notebooks, which Sexton originally meant to be published posthumously; The Awful Rowing Toward God, and 45 Mercy Street which was published posthumously. There are more uncollected, unedited poems which her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, has included in her mother’s Complete Poems.

“Riding the Elevator into the Sky” is another from The Awful Rowing Toward God.

As the fireman said:

Don’t book a room over the fifth floor

in any hotel in New York.

They have ladders that will reach further

but no one will climb them.

As the New York Times said:

The elevator always seeks out

the floor of the fire

and automatically opens

and won’t shut.

These are the warnings

that you must forget

if you’re climbing out of yourself.

If you ’re going to smash into the sky.

Many times I’ve gone past

the fifth floor,

cranking upward,

but only once

have I gone all the way up.

Sixtieth floor:

small plants and swans bending

into their grave;

Floor two hundred:

mountains with the patience of a cat,

silence wearing its sneakers.

Floor five hundred:

messages and letters centuries old,

birds to drink,

a kitchen of clouds.

Floor six thousand;

the stars,

skeletons on fire,

their arms singing.

And a key,

a very large key,

that opens something–

some useful door–

somewhere–

up there.

The extended metaphor, the elevator ascending to heaven and, I think, self knowledge, appeals to me. One must not be warned away if she is to climb out of herself, if she is going to “smash into the sky,” burst into glory and achievement.

I can believe Sexton’s confession of her ascent as she goes beyond “the fifth floor, cranking upward,” past the “small plants and swans bending into their grave,” past the “mountains with the patience of a cat, silence wearing its sneakers,” beyond the “messages and letters centuries old,” “a kitchen of clouds,” “the stars, skeletons on fire,” to the “key…that opens something…somewhere–up there.” Such irony to reach the key that still offers no right or wrong answer, only more mystery– a key that opens something somewhere.

“Young” and “I Remember” are printed in her second book of poetry, All My Pretty Ones, 1962.

Young

A thousand doors ago

when I was a lonely kid

in a big house with four

garages and it was summer

as long as I could remember,

I lay on the lawn at night,

clover wrinkling under me,

the wise stars bedding over me,

my mother’s window a funnel

of yellow heat running out,

my father’s window, half shut,

an eye where sleepers pass,

and the boards of the house

were smooth and white as wax

and probably a million leaves

sailed on their strange stalks

as the crickets ticked together
and I, in my brand new body,

which was not a woman’s yet,

told the stars my questions

and thought God could really see

the heat and the painted light,

elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

As the title implies this is a remembrance of youth, a “thousand doors ago,” an adult remembering a summer home, lying out at night, looking up at the stars, mom and dad at home in the house. The house was a favorite, its boards smooth ad white as wax, surrounded by trees with a million leaves that hid the crickets. I hope everyone has such a house in her memory; for me it’s the old family farm house, to remember a time when we thought God could really see our dreams and our new formed bodies.

I Remember

By the first of August

the invisible beetles began

to snore and the grass was

as tough as hemp and was

no color–no more than

the sand was a color and

we had worn our bare feet

bare since the twentieth

of June and there were times

we forgot to wind up your

alarm clock and some nights

we took our gin warm and neat

from old jelly glasses while

the sun blew out of sight

like a red picture hat and

one day I tied my hair back

with a ribbon and you said

that I looked almost like

a puritan lady and what

I remember best is that

the door to your room was

the door to mine.

The child in “Young” is an adult now, drinking gin in jelly glasses, sharing a room with someone, a lover, I hope. There is a sweetness in these two poems that I don’t think is commented on enough in Sexton’s poetry. Her poems about “menstruation, abortion, masturbation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction” to quote her friend Maxine Kumin, draw much more attention. Of course, she wrote of sex, too. Read the very sensual “When a Man Enters a Woman” in The Awful Rowing Toward God and note the sadly ironic ending which could only be written by a woman of experience.

Sexton used nature as referenced in “Young” and “I Remember” and also in the next poem, “Snow.”

Snow

Snow,

blessed snow,

comes out of the sky

like bleached flies.

The ground is no longer naked.

The ground has on its clothes.

The trees poke out of sheets

and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.

There is hope É everywhere.

I bite it.

Someone once said:

Don’t bite till you know

if it’s bread or stone.

What I bit is all bread,

rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.

There is hope everywhere.

Today God gives milk

and I have the pail.

A master of the extended metaphor, isn’t she? Hope, like snow, is everywhere. At this moment in her life God gave her snow–hope like milk and she had a pail. According to her biographers, she didn’t feel this way often enough. Sexton committed suicide.

Finally here is what some critics call her signature poem, “Her Kind” found in To Bedlam and Part Way Back, 1960.

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain house, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.


All the roles of woman she has been by the grand age of 32–the bewitched woman, the housewife and mother, fixing supper for “worms and elves, whining, rearranging the disaligned.” She has been the survivor “learning the last bright routes.” Note the next to the last lines in each stanza for the ultimate clarity” “a woman like that is not a woman, quite…A woman like that is misunderstood…A woman like that is not ashamed to die.”

The signature of Anne Sexton

Diane McCormick

A Shameless Plug for Bill Moyer’s

Trading Democracy airing Tuesday February 5th at 10:00 on most PBS stations This program promises to show how “NAFTA’s secret tribunals have the power to put a price tag on environmental and health laws. And we pay the bill.”

Considering American businesses’ exploitation of the Third World, it seems truly ironic that the recent rise in concern over NAFTA, particularly Chapter 11, should be inspired by the Canadian company Methanex’s attempts to sue the State of California over the banning of MBTE as a gasoline additive, especially since Chapter 11 has been repeatedly used by American companies to fight environmental actions in Canada and Mexico.

As an avid environmentalists who’s equally worried about exploited Third World workers everywhere, I’m constantly bewildered by the complexities of world trade. Although I consider myself literate and fairly well educated, economics have been sadly neglected in my education.

NAFTA, has been particularly confusing to me because I have felt America has exploited Mexico so much in the past by relying on Mexican workers for cheap labor while neglecting to develop the Mexican economy itself. Thus, while I was worried about American and Canadian jobs being exported to Mexico, I saw NAFTA as a chance to help Mexico build their own economy.

At the same time, I have little trust of large business organizations, international or otherwise. I’m not blind to the environmental damage they have done to our environment. It’s frightening to imagine what they would do if the legal system was unfairly stacked on their side.

Moyer’s show Tuesday is definitely going to be must watch for me.

There’s a number of good background sources on the web if you want to be more informed before watching the show:

IISD net offers a summary of Chapter 11’s impacts on the environment.

Public Citizen offers background on a number of lawsuits filed on Chapter 11.

Melinda Steffen offers a legal opinion on the California lawsuit.

James Wright’s Last Poems

The poems in the last section of Wright’s Above the River were written while he was staying in Europe, particularly in Italy and, generally, they reflect the Mediterranean atmosphere. Now, personally, I’m not too fond of warm, sunny climates preferring the snow-covered mountains, or perhaps the wind-blown Scottish Highlands. But if you’re attracted to warm climes and the opulence identified with these areas, you may consider this section the best in Wright’s book.

Even in Italy, though, Wright is unable to entirely escape the dark vision that marks many of his best poems. When most people see a rainbow, they see it as a sign of hope:

A Rainbow on Garda

The storm crawls down,
Dissolving the distances
Of the mountain as though
The rain already
Hangs a gray shawl
In front of Bardolino.
The town is gone:
In the darkness of evening,
The darkness of high stone,
And a black swallow folding
Its face in one wing.
I too am ready
To fold my face.
I am used to night, the gray wall
Where swallows lie still.
But I am not ready for light
Where no light was,
Bardolino risen from the dead, blazing
A scarlet feather inside a wing.
Every fool in the world can see this thing,
And make no more
Of it than of Christ, frightened and dying
In the air, one wing broken, all alone.

This eloquent, and startling, poem, creates a haunting image. Wright’s statement that he is “used to night, the gray wall/ Where swallows lie still” seems like an admission of the despair that often dominates his life. In the midst of this despair suddenly appears an unexpected light, “Bardolino risen from the dead, blazing/ A scarlet feather inside a wing.” Most people would at least feel a sense of temporary elation at the sight of this light, a sign of hope in the midst of the darkest despair. But Wright reverses this expectation in the last stanza, producing a greater sense of despair than before, for this rainbow is seen as “frightened and dying” because there is only half a rainbow, “one wing broken.”

My favorite poem in the section is equally moody and seems almost seems out of place in Italy, reminding me more of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” the poem I posted January 1st this year. Considering Wright’s early love of Hardy, he, too, may have been remembering it.

A Finch Sitting Out a Windstorm

Solemnly irritated by the turn
The cold air steals,
He puffs out his most fragile feathers,
His breast down,
And refuses to move.
If I were he,
I would not clamp my claws so stubbornly around
The skinny branch.
I would not keep my tiny glitter
Fixed over my beak, or return
The glare of the wind.
Too many Maytime snowfalls have taught me
The wisdom of hopelessness.
But the damned fool
Squats there as if he owned
The earth, bought and paid for.
Oh, I could advise him plenty
About his wings.
Give up, drift,
Get out.
But his face is as battered
As Carmen Basilio’s.
He never listens
To me.

Despite the author’s advice that the finch should “give up” and “get out,” it’s obvious he admires the finch’s defiance of the storm, for unlike the narrator the finch has not learned the “wisdom of hopelessness.” Instead, the finch glares back at the wind, puffs up his chest feathers, and clamps onto a skinny branch in order to resist the wind. In a final compliment, the narrator compares the finch to the legendary Carmen Basilio, an Italian fighter known for his toughness.

Another poem I love seems equally out of place with the other poems in this section, though it does show Wright’s growing reconciliation with his world:

Beautiful Ohio

Those old Winnebago men
Knew what they were singing.
All summer long and all alone,
I had found a way
To sit on a railroad tie
Above the sewer main.
It spilled a shining waterfall out of a pipe
Somebody had gouged through the slanted earth.
Sixteen thousand and five hundred more or less people
In Martins Ferry, my home, my native country,
Quickened the river
With the speed of light.
And the light caught there
The solid speed of their lives
In the instant of that waterfall.
I know what we call it
Most of the time.
But I have my own song for it,
And sometimes, even today,
I call it beauty
.

If you love irony, and I do, you have to love this poem, particularly if you’ve read the complete book. Throughout most of the book, Wright has tried to escape the harshness of Ohio and condemned what it did to those who remained working there. Suddenly, he’s calling it “Beautiful” Ohio. Of course when you read the poem and first realize he’s praising the beauty of a sewer flowing into the Ohio River, you have to question whether or not he’s serious. But the lines “And the light caught there/ The solid speed of their lives/ In the instant of that waterfall” make you realize that he’s talking about a different kind of “beauty” here, the beauty of sixteen thousand people working and living their lives the best they can. It can’t help but remind you of Carl Sandburg’s powerful celebration of Chicago.

The poems that I have chosen so far, however, don’t accurately reflect the mood of the poems in this last section of Above the Bridge. Instead, they reflect my personal taste. This is, after all, my journal, my personal reaction to Wright’s poems that move me, not an objective review of Wright’s book. In reality, though, there are a number of very good poems that seem to reflect the lush, voluptuous side of life:

The First Days

Optima dies prima fugit

The first thing I saw in the morning
Was a huge golden bee ploughing
His burly right shoulder into the belly
Of a sleek yellow pear
Low on a bough.
Before he could find that sudden black honey
That squirms around in there
Inside the seed, the tree could not bear any more.
The pear fell to the ground,
With the bee still half alive
inside its body.
He would have died if I hadn’t knelt down
And sliced the pear gently
A little more open.
The bee shuddered, and returned.
Maybe I should have left him alone there,
Drowning in his own delight.
The best days are the first
To flee, sang the lovely
Musician born in this town
So like my own.
I let the bee go
Among the gasworks at the edge of Mantua.

Did you realize bees could have “burly” shoulders? Do you think it’s purely coincidental that the “sleek yellow pear” has a very sensual shape? It’s possible, but it seems likely that Wright is talking about the “birds and the bees” here, particularly because of lines like “Maybe I should have left him alone there,/Drowning in his own delight.” Does the phrase “the best days are the first to flee” somehow seem reminiscent of Andrew Marvell’s “time’s winged-chariots?”

This idea of sensual indulgence and acceptance of the world as it is also found in:

Leave Him Alone

The trouble with me is
I worry too much about things that should be
Left alone.
The rain-washed stone beside the Adige where
The lizard used to lie in the sun
Will warm him again
In its own time, whether time itself
Be good or bad.
I sit on a hill
Far from Verona, knowing the vanity
Of trying to steal unaware on the lizards in the evening.
No matter how quickly
I pounce
Or slowly creep among the low evergreens
At the bend of the water,
He will be there
Or not there, just as
The sunlight pleases him.
The last feather of light fallen lazily down
Floats across the Adige and rests a long moment
On his lifted face.

This sense of acceptance, of not worrying too much about the world and what will happen in the future, lies at the heart of this poem. No matter how much the poet may want to observe the lizard sunning itself, there is nothing he can do to ensure that he will find it there. Whether he’s quiet or noisy is irrelevant, for the lizard “will be there/Or not there, just as the sunlight pleases him.” The lizard, unlike the poet, accepts the world on its own terms, without worry.

I’m not quite sure where “The Journey” fits in with the rest of the poems in this section, but somehow it seems appropriate to end this discussion of Wright’s poems with:

The Journey

Anghiari is medieval, a sleeve sloping down
A steep hill, suddenly sweeping out
To the edge of a cliff, and dwindling.
But far up the mountain, behind the town,
We too were swept out, out by the wind,
Alone with the Tuscan grass.
Wind had been blowing across the hills
For days, and everything now was graying gold
With dust, everything we saw, even
Some small children scampering along a road,
Twittering Italian to a small caged bird.
We sat beside them to rest in some brushwood,
And I leaned down to rinse the dust from my face.
I found the spider web there, whose hinges
Reeled heavily and crazily with the dust,
Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging
And scattering shadows among shells and wings.
And then she stepped into the center of air
Slender and fastidious, the golden hair
Of daylight along her shoulders, she poised there,
While ruins crumbled on even, side of her.
Free of the dust, as though a moment before
She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself.
I gazed, close to her, till at last she stepped
Away in her own good time.
Many men
Have searched all over Tuscany and never found
What I found there, the heart of the light
Itself shelled and leaved, balancing
On filaments themselves falling. The secret
Of this journey is to let the wind
Blow its dust all over your body,
To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly
All the way through your ruins, and not to lose
Any sleep over the dead, who surely
Will bury their own, don’t worry.

Spiders appear throughout Wright’s poems. It’s obviously an important symbol to Wright, though, I must admit, it seems enigmatic to me. The book The Secret Language of Symbols states: “For the Celts, the spider’s web symbolized the web that held all life together. For Egyptians and Greeks it stood for fate. Christians believed the we to represent the snare of Satan.” Others emphasize the creative aspect of the spider, as exemplified by the spinning of its web. In another poem Wright describes the spider as “laying the foundation of community, she labors all alone,” saying “the air is forming itself into avenues, back alleys, boulevards, paths, gardens, paths, fields and one frail towpath shimmering as it leads away into the sky.

To me, the spider somehow seems to represent the artist who is able to create his own world, complete in itself, timeless. Art has the unique ability to transcend death, to stand outside of time, just as truth, itself, is eternal.